Larry came home from the war in 1945, having never left a supply depot in Hawaii. In early 1946 his father died. Larry inherited the machine shop and a small radio station in Elgin, Illinois, in the Fox River valley, which the elder Ray had picked up as a bargain in 1935. Both possessions were potential gold mines in the immediate postwar years. However, Maude, who had seized control of the inheritance before Larry’s return, was certain that the Depression would return and forbade expansion of either enterprise. As it was, the Neenans made a lot of money in the postwar years, but Maude doomed Larry’s dreams of becoming rich and famous.
“Just as well she kept him away from the money,” R. A. would later remark. “He’s a loser. He would have blown it all.”
How I hate her, Ray reflected as he paused in his review of his life. Hate, hate, hate. She damn near ruined my life. If she had left me alone, I would have had a normal adolescence. I would have learned more about women. I would never have married my first wife.
Maybe that’s unfair.
Then his thoughts turned to his second wife, Anna Maria. She was the kind of woman he would have married in his twenties if his mother had left him alone. His fantasies took over. He recalled the joy of undressing Anna Maria on their wedding night. His sexual hunger, seemingly extinguished by the crash experience, reasserted itself. He longed to caress her. Now. Banish all the fears the damn seraph had created within him.
He would have to wait.
Neenan was a popular student at St. George’s High School. His good looks, charm, and athletic ability won him many friends. He played first string on the frosh-soph basketball team and was sophomore class president. However, his mother was convinced that such accomplishments would interfere with his priestly vocation and she forbade him from engaging in sports or running for class office. For reasons that he never fully understood, he complied. His classmates still liked him, but they frequently dismissed him as a pushover for his mother. Neenan withdrew into himself and became a loner. He also gave up on sports until he moved to De Kalb. There he took up golf because he thought he could find financial backers at the country clubs in the Fox River and the Rock River valleys. Golf became his only hobby, if something played with such relentless passion could be considered a hobby.
After he graduated from St. George’s High School in 1960, Ray had joined the army to get his military service obligations out of the way and to make some money to pay for college. Since he still refused to consider the priesthood, Maude had decreed that he would have to pay for his education and not “live off your family.” Ray despised the military and hated his eighteen months in Alaska. Later he rejoiced that he had escaped the Vietnam War.
At the age of twenty he went to work as an advertising salesman for his father’s radio station, WRAN. Although the Chicago suburbs had expanded into the Fox River Valley, the station still served a farming audience with a mix of Glen Miller music, crop reports, commodity news, and advertising for agricultural products. Even within such limitations it was a moneymaker. Ray had no trouble selling time on the station from his apartment in De Kalb, where he attended Northern Illinois University, a safe distance from Maude’s pious domination.
After a year as a salesman, Ray knew that the potential of WRAN in the suburban markets was barely being touched. He persuaded Howard Carlisle, the owner of a small network of farm-oriented stations farther out in the Illinois hinterland, to make Larry an offer that Maude, still convinced of hard times, could not refuse and then to name Ray general manager of the new station.
“You’ll run it into the ground,” Larry had told Ray on one of the rare occasions they encountered one another. “Howie Carlisle is out of his mind.”
“You’ve been running it into the ground for fifteen years.”
He hated his father too, a passive-aggressive weakling, a pint-size ogre, who tried to make up for his surrender to Maude with constant ridicule of his son. Often Ray wanted to beat the mean little man into a pulp. He still wanted to do it.
He was clenching his fists again.
With a new mix of news, rock music, and talk radio—the latter two purchased from syndication—Ray tripled the profits from the station within a year. Carlisle was impressed. Ignoring the complaints of the disappointed farmers, he made Ray general manager of his five-station network. Once again Ray worked his magic and made the new suburban network a huge success. At twenty-five, with a degree from NIU in his pocket and, as he put it, a growing family, he was becoming a name to be reckoned with in the fast-growing radio world of northern Illinois.
His next step was to put together a syndicate of men he had met at the Fox River Valley Country Club who would buy out Carlisle and a minor station in Chicago itself. Carlisle resisted at first but yielded when certain shadowy figures in Chicago to whom he owed large gambling debts leaned on him.
Ray was now the president and general manager and part owner of Chicago Radio Enterprises, a company that the Chicago Tribune had called a cash cow. Personally, Ray, already a patron of the Chicago Lyric Opera, hated rock music, but he had known there was a fortune to be made in the youth market, and he made that fortune for himself and his stockholders by the time he was thirty in 1972. He had squeezed out the other owners, one way or another, just as he had dropped his father and Howie Carlisle. He had now become a wealthy and powerful man, but he did not have enough wealth or power yet. He had wanted more of both. He would always want more.
What a lonely time those years in De Kalb had been. Despite his success in business and with the women he had hunted with crafty charm, he felt empty most of the time. He married because he wanted to fill that emptiness, but Donna had only made it worse.
He recalled their wedding night with disgust. Anna Maria had been shy and embarrassed but generous and even playful. Donna, easy with her charms while they were courting, became a irritable prude in their hotel room. She resisted his kisses and caresses, refused to undress or let him undress her, turned out the lights, and snarled, “Let’s get this over with.”
His powerful passion dismissed as “dirty,” he felt like beating her into submission. He restrained himself and never laid a violent hand on her. He told himself often in the early years of their marriage that she would eventually get over her aversion to sex. Then he realized that he was kidding himself.
He hated her too. His fists clenched again, until his nails dug into his palms. So much hatred in his life.
In 1975, Ryan Kane, the wealthy owner of a group of television stations in small Midwestern cities and an endangered cable network lured Ray to turn around his corporation, National Cable, with an offer of a large stock option. Ray did indeed turn around the operation by hiking fees for subscribers every year and cutting the number of free services to an absolute minimum. He also turned Kane out.
By the middle 1980s Ray had become a national figure in entertainment, not as big as Turner or Murdoch perhaps, but big enough to fight off all predators. He had earned his success by shrewdly judging markets, exploiting employees whenever he could, disposing of allies as though they were used paper napkins, and following his instincts each time a new risk appeared.
His father, Carlisle, and Kane all predicted that someday he would encounter someone who was bigger than he was and “would beat him into the ground,” as Kane had put it. Ray laughed at them. He had done to them no more than they would have done to him if they had been smart enough to go after him when he was vulnerable. He had merely been more ruthless and much smarter than they were.
“You’ve been a loser, Dad,” he had said to his father. “Always have been since the day you let Mom seduce you. You resent me because I was smart enough to get out of the house when I graduated from St. George’s and have been a winner ever since.”
At that time, the Wall Street Journal had written that he was a “reckless and ruthless—and very lucky—buccaneer.” He had told the Journal’s reporter that he was not lucky. He had merely been fortunate and his defeated adversaries had lacked �
��proper caution.”
At first he had been baffled by those who trusted him when there was no good reason why they should. Later he realized that all of them, his father alone excepted, had confused his genial Irish charm with honesty and integrity. They were all innocent of integrity themselves. They would have destroyed him if he had not beaten them to it. That’s the way the world was. In pursuing money, power, and women, there were no rules. You took what you could get any way you could.
Guilt? He swirled his vodka glass. Not till now. Why was he feeling guilt now?
The damn seraph was messing him up.
When he had succeeded as a film producer with several sentimental celebrations of the 1950s—an era that had been hellish for him—even the Journal treated him with respect, quoting one of his rivals who called him “a telecommunications genius.” Ray liked the compliment but was not fooled by it. He had seen enough high rollers in the industry go under when they began to believe their own press clippings.
“You’re happier than you were in those days when you had WRAN all to yourself?” Michael asked him as the plane circled in the clouds above Lake Michigan.
“What’s happiness?” Neenan replied. “I enjoyed that time only because I saw it as a way to something bigger. If I hadn’t swept aside all those jerks, starting with my father, someone else would have. None of them are starving. I made them all richer than they would have been if I didn’t take over their firms. I don’t care whether they like me. I don’t even care whether they’re grateful. I did them all a big favor. Beyond that I don’t give a damn.”
“Aren’t you afraid that you’ll overreach?”
“No way. It’s not an ego thing for me like for Murdoch or Turner. I want power, but not so badly that I’m going to risk myself by running up debt like Murdoch or getting involved with those crazies at Time … . Where are your wings?”
“Wings? Oh, you shouldn’t take that art seriously. It’s a metaphor for how fast we can move.”
“How fast can you move? Speed of light?”
“Faster than that. Not quite the speed of thought.”
“Really?”
“Yeah … . Your employees don’t particularly like you either.”
“Why should I care? If they do a good job, they get rewarded. If they don’t, they’re finished. You can’t let your emotions interfere with efficiency … . But, look, I’m not a dictator. I don’t micromanage. I let the companies and the stations make their own decisions. So long as they show profitability, I leave them alone.”
“And if they don’t show profitability?”
Neenan snapped his fingers. “They’re history.”
Why, he wondered, did he feel defensive? He was a businessman. That’s what businessmen did, wasn’t it?
“All of this makes you happy?”
“What’s happiness?”
“And when you die?”
“Then I’ll die … . What’s supposed to kill me?”
“A lot of this stuff is ‘need-to-know’ and we don’t need to know when or why you’re going to die.”
“And you don’t care?”
Was it the vodka or the fake crash or the ecstasy or the feelings of hatred that had followed the ecstasy that was tearing at Neenan’s insides? He felt he was coming apart like a house in a hurricane wind. Why had he begun to feel that his life was a waste? Why did it matter whether the angel liked him?
“Another vodka, Mr. Neenan?” the cabin attendant asked, still blushing.
“No, I don’t think so … . Well, all right, just a small one.”
“We’re not businessmen,” Michael replied. “We care about our clients. We even love them.”
“Even if they’re a pile of refuse?”
“Do you enjoy making that young woman blush?”
“She doesn’t seem to mind.”
“She senses you’re thinking what she’d be like in bed, and she’s both pleased and embarrassed. Later on she’ll figure out that you’re a tease and won’t like it.”
“Can’t I appreciate an attractive woman?”
“You can appreciate them without the touch of the leer in your charming smile.”
“I didn’t know I was leering.”
The woman returned with the vodka.
“I don’t know how you manage to be so polite with this plane racketing around in the clouds,” Neenan told her.
This time she grinned and did not blush. “Thank you, Mr. Neenan.”
“Better,” Michael admitted.
“Is this part of the deal?”
“Reread the contract … . Now, about your wife …”
“Look, Donna threw me out. After eighteen years. She wanted to be her own person. Was fed up with being a decoration for me. Didn’t like the entertainment industry. Didn’t like the people I associated with. Should never have married me in the first place. She didn’t know I was fooling around and didn’t care either. She hated me and wanted to get rid of me. You can’t blame me for her.”
“I meant your present wife … but let’s talk about Donna first.”
“I don’t want to. She was right. We should have never married. She doled out sex like it was a cookie for a kid who had obeyed his mommy. She didn’t like it. Didn’t want to try to like it. Hated me for wanting it.”
“It was more complicated than that,” Michael observed.
“I married a woman just like my mother,” Neenan protested. “I should have known better.”
“I won’t argue the first point,” Michael sighed.
Neenan was experiencing a nightmare. The seemingly endless circles over Lake Michigan, the bizarre character who claimed to be an angel, the taste of the vodka, the imagined crash, the faint voices singing in the background, the ecstatic experience—all these were the stuff of nightmares. All his previous nightmares had ended. Presumably this one would too. He would play along with the phony seraph until Michael faded back into the murk of his unconscious.
The trouble with this interpretation was that the afterglow of ecstasy seemed all too real.
“You’re obsessed with women, aren’t you?” Michael said, continuing his cross-examination.
“I’m no Don Giovanni if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, no. You’re more careful, more discreet, more tasteful, more honest, less promiscuous, less cruel, less stupid.”
“I never forced a woman, I’ve never been charged with sexual harassment, I’ve never broken anyone’s heart, whatever that means.”
“You’ve always been a careful man,” Michael agreed. “Both in business and in love, if you want to call what you do love. But you cannot control and will not try to control your hunger for power or for women.”
“I have to stop that or I go to hell?”
“I told you that we don’t use that metaphor anymore … . Naturally you don’t have to abandon your appetites. You simply have to retrain them and focus them.”
“In a few months?”
“Better that than fighting against them for twenty more years.”
This was definitely a nightmare. “I’d rather try the twenty years.”
“Twenty years of resisting your quest for what you consider interesting women to seduce? Does this pursuit bring you any fulfillment? Once you’ve ravaged a woman, you grow weary of her and are doomed to seek another. Is there joy in that?”
“There sure is … . Besides, I don’t ravage them and I don’t drop them immediately—sometimes I don’t drop them at all.”
“Sometimes they even drop you.”
“That’s up to them.”
“You must also seek pardon from them for using them.”
“They don’t think there’s anything to pardon and they don’t think I’ve used them.”
“Are you sure of that?”
Neenan had been initiated into the mysteries of sex as a confused fourteen-year-old by an experienced young woman who was a sophomore in college. She was bored during her summer vacation and found the tall, husk
y young man, whom she’d encountered on a Lake Michigan beach, an amusing project. She had teased him and tormented him and then led him down the path to some of the outer swamps of pleasure. When she returned to college after dismissing him as a lover, Neenan thought he had learned two lessons: Sex, as he would later say, was a zero-sum game. There was always a winner and a loser. Moreover, women found him a sexually attractive challenge.
He made up his mind that he would never be a loser again and that he would pursue only women who seemed, for one reason or another, “interesting” and prepared for seduction, especially if it was gentle, tender, and respectful. There were, he reasoned, plenty of such women around.
He would make mistakes. His wife was neither interesting or sexually hungry. In that long relationship he was definitely the loser.
He carried on his search for sexual conquests with care and caution. He was, he told himself, too smart to put himself at risk.
Women became for him fascinating, maddening, delicious, intriguing, delectable prizes to be hunted with skill and wit and charm. His next conquest after the woman who found him on the beach was a friend of his mother’s, an attractive and restless matron in her early forties, all the more “interesting” because of his delight in deceiving his mother. Just having turned sixteen at the time, he pursued this woman with relentless wariness and finally overcame her resistance in his mother’s bedroom while the latter had gone off to the store to purchase cakes for her unexpected tea guest. As soon as she had left, the victim knew she was doomed; but she would not have dropped by the apartment for a surprise visit if she had not wanted to be doomed.
She was a superb prize, a lush taste of forbidden fruit that Neenan had enjoyed intermittently for several years.
This time he was the winner.
From her he had learned that the pursuit and capture of a woman was more fun than the actual possession. Nonetheless, intermittent possession had its rewards too, especially because it involved seduction all over again. He also learned that he had the skills to seduce and satisfy the kind of woman he selected to be a prize—not all the time perhaps, but often enough to make the game interesting. He never felt that he had “used” them as the alleged seraph claimed. They knew there was no long-term future in the relationship. They had enjoyed what there was as much as he had, they had reveled in being pursued as he did in pursuing, hadn’t they? What was wrong with that?
Contract with an Angel Page 2
