Rolling Thunder Read online

  Rolling Thunder

  A Novel

  William Simmons

  New York

  For Barbara Elizabeth Simmons

  1

  Just in case you aren’t one of Velez & Oldham’s legion of listeners and have wandered in here by mistake, let me begin by telling you that Velez & Oldham pretty much is FM rock morning radio here in New York City.

  We’ve been here at WRTR—Thunder Rock to you, of course, or ‘The Thunder’, as Velez prefers it—for eleven-and-a-half years now. Eleven-and-a-half years. We took over for one of the all-time rock radio icons. You know who I’m talking about: the guy who once ruled the rock airwaves, who borrowed ‘Rolling Thunder’ from Dylan back in the days before FM radio stations felt the need for nicknames and christened this place ‘Rolling Thunder Radio,’ who made himself a legend sucking up to the greats and anointing the comers, but whose epic drug proclivities gradually toasted him and one fine day—the day of the storied vomiting-on-the-air caper—became too untidy for the corporados to abide. You probably know every gory, dissolute detail by heart. Velez and I have discussed this on a number of occasions, and, for the record, our consciences are clear. If it hadn’t been us, it would have been somebody else—it was time.

  Yet thus it is said of our fabled predecessor with more and more reverence as time passes: his flameout marked the end of an era; with him went the pure sweet passion for rock. And I do not deny this because let’s face it: the music we play on the Velez & Oldham Show morning after morning, day after rainy, sunny, snowy, blustery, sweltering, asphyxiating day, is not the stuff of passion.

  My own credentials as a senior minister of the rock establishment owe entirely to my entrenchment at the right hand of Roberto Velez. In fact, I might as well confess right now, since things are bound to come out in the open here: I stumbled into rock by accident back in the old days, for motives that had plenty to do with passion but little to do with the music, so you can imagine how I feel about the remixed, remastered, regurgitated, market-tested, demographic-targeted, mind-numbingly derivative version we’re paid to shovel your way every morning here at the Thunder. Now, Velez—he is the authentic music maven. Can tell you the names of the session guys on records you’ve never even heard of.

  Shut up and pretend you like it, Velez tells me.

  Velez covers for me.

  I am in my day’s first shift. The first shift goes from a little before five in the morning—the time of day when the fallen angels were cast out of heaven—until two or three in the afternoon. Second shift starts around nine and stretches until, well … depends.

  Last night, for instance, I take in an early-season Rangers game at the surprise invitation of Sally Wallach, an invitation proffered with no evidence whatsoever of romantic intent. Sally is WRTR’s college intern, and figures, I fear, to play a role of substance in this tale. Sally is studying broadcasting at Cornell and I decide a Rangers game will be a good opportunity to talk her out of it. Broadcasting—not Cornell. I have nothing against Cornell; anyplace that can lure the likes of Sally Wallach must have some major things going for it.

  Sally is a nice kid. She’s bright. No, really—I don’t mean that to sound the way it did. You can see right away she deserves, and is no doubt ultimately in store for, a far loftier calling than rock radio. But in this, my first chance to exchange a little meaningful conversation with Sally Wallach, I see immediately that Sally has the disease.

  No sense, I tell myself, trying to reason with a twenty-year-old woman—oh, please: girl—a twenty-year-old girl who’s got the disease. There’s not all that much sense trying to be rational with a twenty-year-old girl—yes, but undeniably on the lubricious cusp of womanhood—about anything. In my experience.

  So I don’t try.

  Sally Wallach, who has selected an ensemble for this hockey contest that makes the Italian crooner at center ice forget the words to the Star Spangled Banner, is better positioned than the average nymphet to break into big-time radio—see how it trips so easily from my cynical tongue: big-time radio—because her father owns enough stock in WRTR’s parent company’s parent company that Sally Wallach could get Velez and me fired and herself installed as the morning man tomorrow if she wanted.

  Wait: false modesty will get us nowhere, will it? The cold, hard fact is that neither Sally Wallach nor anybody else below cabinet level could get Velez and me fired. We are a money machine. The corporados virtually soil themselves in our presence.

  No, the only thing Velez and I have to fear is Velez and I ourselves.

  It takes Sally Wallach exactly half of the first period to recite for me everything she knows about radio, which she clearly thinks is a great deal. Sally is fairly pregnant with insight. She knows that ‘programming’ is the secret word that qualifies the utterer as a serious radio insider. Artistic integrity, syndication sellout, market share, digital media, alternative rock, where are the important new artists, blah blah, yaddayadda—these are also helpful phrases to remember if you want to ingratiate yourself with grizzled radio professionals, like Sally no doubt thinks I am. Let me let you in on a dirty little secret, Sally: from what I hear, the radio people in the sixties were just a bunch of horny pothead scammers doing it for the rush and the money and the easy-access babes. Just like Velez does.

  The Rangers and the other guys can’t keep track of the puck under the smoke-machine-quality steam rising from the humid Garden ice and so I sit and listen to Sally, partly because that is perhaps the thing I do best. Partly, too, because I suddenly have an ominous urge to know what’s on Sally Wallach’s mind.

  Yet, girding up now for my first shift of the final workday of this resplendent autumn week, I can report that the Rangers game led to nothing I need to feel small about. Sally will come in today, about halfway through the Velez & Oldham Show like she always does, with a new gleam of admiration for me in her dizzyingly beautiful eyes. Because after Rangers and pasta, you see, I take Sally to her East Eighties apartment that her old man probably owns; I scurry around the cab to open the door for her and—I swear to God—I kiss her hand goodnight.

  Velez is feeling chatty today. “Call us and tell us what you think of this new Pumpkins cut. We’ll take the fifth caller at random and give you …” Jesus, Velez, can we just shut up and let the music play itself? It’s too early for this. On the six-to-ten slot, it’s always too early.

  The problem is that I’ve got to be on my toes when Velez feels like chatting since I am, in addition to quasi-newsman, Velez’s all-purpose foil, and Velez will jump me in the middle of one of these exercises just to be a malicious prick. And then there are the phones, which our engineers have not quite mastered.

  Velez leaps without warning into a tale of drug use among the rich and famous. This is where I am supposed to leaven the show with stern editorial responsibility; on cue, I usually say something about how nobody of consequence in the music business fools around with drugs anymore. But today I’m more prepared than usual, because there’s a news tidbit in the paper this morning about the seizure of twelve hundred pounds of cocaine hidden in a banana truck slinking its way north from Baja California.

  “How would they …” I make the mistake of speculating out loud.

  “Easy, Coolie. They stick the cocaine in condoms, which, when they’re loaded, are about the size of guess what: bananas! ’Cept when I’m wearin’ ’em, of course. So they suck out the banana meat, slip in a condom of coke, an’ vamos, you’re on your way.”

  “Wonder how they caught the bad guys,” I ask, since I’ve waded in this deep already.

  “I bet it was the tarantulas,” ventures Velez.

  “The tarantulas?”

  “Yeah, Coolie, tarantulas love bananas. Them border guards, th
ey probably seen a buncha tarantulas cartwheelin’ around the back of that truck, sittin’ up on their fat fuzzy backsides doin’ the macareña, divin’ off the truck like Peter Pan singin’ ‘we can fly, we can fly, we can fly!’”

  We have this rhythm, Velez and I. In our rhythm I play the backbeat: I am the voice of moderation and responsible, aging-boomer sensibilities. Velez is the unrepentant rocker, the ageless child of glamorous adolescent decadence. We thus cancel each other out, a zero-sum glib frappé that has kept us at the top of FM New York since practically the day we parachuted in here.

  Velez, at five-fifty-five this morning while I’m trying my best not to pour coffee on anything electric until my first news recitation is over, wants to know how things went with Sally Wallach after the Rangers game.

  He knows better, of course. Like Velez himself, I wouldn’t shoot my mouth off even if anything newsworthy had transpired. I don’t kiss and tell, as I trust others not to do unto me. Velez accuses me of sparing myself the embarrassment of how little there is to tell. Nothing, I allow my righteous silence to insinuate, could be further from the truth.

  If I thought my words would have carried any weight, I would have counseled Sally Wallach in a direction other than rock radio. Except perhaps for professional football, there isn’t a business around that chews people up and spits them out like radio. Radio’s not as tough on the knees, I suppose. Except for the groupies, that shameless, delectable legion of rock bottomfeeders whose knees have been known to take a fearful thumping.

  By virtue of her wise selection of parents, though, Sally is hardly in the category of music-business fodder. Entry-level for Sally will be a station manager spot somewhere in a non-crucial market where the sun shines a lot and she can wear her bathing suit to work. Sally, in short, will be giving career-boosting oral gratification to nobody.

  A five-tune marathon. There is a God. See you in ten minutes, Velez.

  The 6-to-10 a.m. slot has its blessings. At the top of the list is that I rarely run into anybody else who works at this station. Even better, I virtually never have to lay eyes on the record promoters. Since we, Velez & Oldham, are the top-rated FM program in one of the two most important markets on this forlorn planet, we command lusty attention from promoters. Now I personally couldn’t be less relevant in the craven business of music promotion, you understand; but Velez and I are a package deal. I am nothing without Velez—his patronage, his social wake, and, oh yes, his friendship. Velez needs me no less, in ways that may become apparent as we progress through our adventure.

  You may be curious to know that for my labors at Thunder Rock, I am given a yearly compensation approximately equal to the purchase price of a shiny piece of Bavarian rolling stock. Velez make more. A whole lot more. Station managers, who consider me excess baggage that Velez keeps around to irritate them when he’s in the mood, and who wildly over-estimate my self-respect, have stooped to using Velez’s lavish compensation in attempts to make me quit. But facts are facts: Velez is worth more. If you paid us by the word, Velez would get about four times what I do. Which he does, and then some. If we got paid on the basis of enthusiasm, the differential would be off the chart. More to the point, I have no skills, much less one that somebody would pay me this kind of cash for.

  So this seventy-five thousand dollars per year, which is roughly what a certain discount electronics outfit will spend advertising on Velez & Oldham during our time together, is redistributed into the American economy thus: twenty-two thousand dollars in federal, state and city taxes; twenty thousand in rent; twenty-seven hundred in used-Volvo payments (plus fifteen hundred to park it); couple of hundred for food; zero for clothes; two or three thousand sundry gaming expenses, a grand or two for liquor. And twelve thousand dollars in child support.

  This leaves roughly fifteen thousand dollars unaccounted for, I see.

  I must call my accountant, who is due back from Nicaragua soon. Until then, I’m sorry; that’s the best I can do.

  How does such profligacy position me with Sally Wallach?

  The fact is that unless events take a drastically unforeseen turn, I’m going to be keeping my hands off Sally. I am a curiosity to the sweet girl right now; she’s thinking that beneath this melancholy mask lies a caring, sharing, sensitive man. My heart, however, has been calcified by the venom of female disillusion to which time and again I have bared my self-destructive veins in the past. I can’t take another one; not just now.

  Especially not Sally. We’d have dinner. She’d get me past the troglodyte cyclops faggot doorman at Nell’s. I’d get silly on champagne and ask her to try to think of me as the older brother she secretly desired to be incestuous with, and she’d be touched by my vulnerability and take me into her lilac-dappled embrace, and pretty soon … ah, you know how it goes.

  So I’m playing it safe with Sally. I’m determined.

  On the other hand, it would drive Velez, who no doubt has designs on fair Sally, nuts. Velez is in charge of the lion’s share of getting laid in this partnership. And not on merit. I dismiss the facts that Velez is semi-dangerously sly-looking and has every pussy-stalking move ever devised down to the level of surgical precision. He gets his women because he is a star. That’s all. If I wanted to prostitute my own celebrity, I could do just as well.

  10:30 a.m. The week’s time has been petrified on tape; we have, as usual, been marginally entertaining in fitful spurts. I troop behind Velez into the station manager’s office for a staff meeting. The fact that we are having a staff meeting today, or any day, testifies to the latest palace coup. Our new program manager is a woman named Arielle, and she is brimming with hard-charge.

  Arielle hit the beach a week ago, halfway through a Velez & Oldham Show, disembarking from the very same elevator car as Sally Wallach, of whom I have made recent mention. An engineer of ours, in his single salutary contribution to the morning’s broadcast, offered Arielle his seat. Velez, tipped off as usual to the change in regime, pretended to turn the soundbooth intercom off and yelled to me, “Who the fuck is the chick?” so Arielle would accidentally hear him. Later, Velez would feign profound embarrassment and invite Arielle to lunch, her treat. She is, after all, the boss. For now.

  Arielle—poor, misguided Arielle—tips her hand early by drooling about how much she has admired our work over the years and how privileged she feels to be heading our team. While sycophancy is the proper tack with most radio people, this preamble of hers merely qualifies Arielle as the new resident doormat.

  Velez and I make our customary bet: my hundred has her out of here by Christmas. This is Arielle’s first staff meeting. Velez insists we show up, and on time. I’m not sure what to make of this except the obvious: Velez is keeping his options open for the day when Arielle is no longer the quarterback of the Thunder. This strategy is laced with irony, since Arielle’s inevitable trampling will in all likelihood be Velez’s doing.

  Arielle, a woman who was once no doubt amiably petite but who now sports Nautilus shoulders and the cow-punching gait of pumped-iron thighs, has redecorated the program manager’s office—her office—which doubles as our conference room. Touching gesture, symbolizing the new WRTR team spirit. Her radar has not yet picked up the gale-force winds that gather just beyond her horizon even as she calls us to order.

  The turnout, at least, must encourage her: eleven on-air talent, which is more or less everybody, wait in polite silence. It is the nature of radio that most of us co-workers are virtual strangers to each other; only at station parties and promotional events do we do any meaningful mingling. So the very notion of togetherness that Arielle has confided to Velez to be her top priority here at the Thunder just betrays her for the ingénue she is.

  The meeting commences and the only piece of business on the agenda that in my book sounds potentially catastrophic is our new program manager’s announcement that we will be doing more remote broadcasts. This is where we leave the splendor of WRTR’s perfectly serviceable studio to set up impromptu shop at,
say, the Asbury Park boardwalk or some other place where a raucous teen crowd can be conned into thinking that Springsteen might show up. During remote shows we spend lots of time interviewing normal people, an exercise of interest only to the families and friends of the interviewees.

  We babble on about how happy and excited we are to be wherever we are, sitting at our rickety card table grappling with rotten equipment and a serpentarium of wires and wearing, Arielle now informs us, our new WRTR Thunder Rock sweaters, copies of which we’ll be selling this Christmas for charity, instead of being safe and sound up in our eighteenth-floor aerie surrounded by more sound equipment than anyone here can figure out what to do with, and with the world—at least the Sixth Avenue glitter-and-snarl portion of it—at our feet.

  Arielle has the salt of a post-feminist woman. Which is to say that she’s too young to have been in on any of the serious gunfire, and is now reaping the benefits of revolution in childlike ignorance of her political heritage. Lucky for her, she has chosen a field in which jealousy and career-garroting are so wanton that rationales for treachery—like the inherent incompetence of women, for example—are superfluous. She appears to assume that she’s wearing a bulls-eye on her back simply because everybody in radio does, without regard to race, creed, sexual persuasion or orientation. Good for her.

  And Arielle, to her further credit, is not tip-toeing: she’s letting us know that she’s here to take her best shot. Which she proceeds to do now by announcing that more of the station’s marketing budget will be going toward entertaining current and prospective advertisers.

  To the extent that I can still be stunned, this stuns me—only because I had assumed that one hundred percent of the station’s marketing money was already being spent caressing clients’ private parts.

  But, truth be told, I know about as little of the workings of radio as a business as anyone possibly could who’s been in it as long as I have. I might glance through the trades two or three times annually, usually trying to catch Velez in a lie. This gives me just enough grist to interject into meetings like these an occasional “All right!” or an “Ah, shit” at not altogether inappropriate moments.