by Faricy, Mike
“Haskell, H-a-s-k-e-l-l,” I spelled it for him.
“Right,” he half chuckled.
“I’ll be here at nine forty-five tomorrow. Just keep a close eye out on your way home tonight and back in tomorrow. Let’s just have you guys keep a low profile, until we get things sorted out, okay.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
“See you tomorrow,” I said and left.
Chapter Three
I was buying another round at The Spot. I’d been buying all night. I was beyond the point of caring and was holding court on a bar stool dangerously close to two drunks throwing darts.
“One of your deadbeat clients finally pay up?” Jimmy asked as he filled the glasses with the next round.
“Even better, I got a job where I don’t have to work,” I laughed.
“So what’s new ‘bout that.”
“No, I mean, I just have to sit around. Someone pulled a joke on these clowns and they bought it. Hired me for protection,” I said, then washed it down with a healthy swallow.
“You for protection, that is a joke,” Jimmy laughed.
“Yeah? Well, you ever hear of a radio station called craze?”
“Craze, you mean like nuts, what is that some weird punk rock, kid thing?”
“No, K-R-A-Z, supposed to be something right with America thing or, I don’t know, I’ll take another, Jimmy,” I said and drained my glass.
“You driving?”
“Yeah, but not all that far, so relax.”
Over the course of the evening I asked around, no one in the bar had ever heard of KRAZ. The next thing I knew it was closing time, Jimmy locked the door, let me finish my beer, but wouldn’t give me another. I apparently made it home all right because I woke up on my couch at about six-thirty the following morning. I stumbled to the kitchen, put some coffee on and curled back up on the couch. When I next looked at the clock on my microwave it was nine twenty.
I threw a semi clean shirt on, gobbled some mints, raced out the door and over to KRAZ.
Farrell was sucking the last inch of life from his current cigarette when I bounced the office door off the front desk. I was still a little breathless and red in the face from rushing to make it modestly late.
“You guys ought to move that thing,” I said, nodding at the front desk.
He exhaled, sipped from his coffee mug, smiled, but didn’t say anything.
I saw Thompson through the doorway. He was standing next to the stacks of red and blue crates. It was the first time I’d seen him standing, at least I think he was standing. I put him at about five foot three, on a good day.
He glanced at his watch, raised an eyebrow then shook his head.
“I believe our agreement was nine-forty-five,” he called.
“It was, I got here early, strolled around the building and the parking lots checking some things, making myself familiar with the area. Nice to know what I’m dealing with, first line of defense is out there, not in here.” I had to admit that sounded so good even I half believed it.
Farrell looked surprised. Thompson looked like he wasn’t sure. I seized the opportunity.
“Anything seem out of the ordinary, another note, a phone call, someone following either of you?”
They both shook their heads.
“Okay, you’re on the air shortly?”
“Twelve minutes,” Farrell said, then lit up another cigarette.
“Mind if I watch?”
“Be my guest,” he exhaled.
By this time Thompson had returned to his lair.
Eleven minutes later I was standing behind Farrell in a converted closet. We had to hunch over because of the shelf that ran across the top. There was a bare light bulb in the ceiling with a string attached to turn it off and on. Fortunately someone had the foresight to remove the pole and clothes hangers.
Farrell wore a set of headphones. He was seated at a tiny desk at one end of the closet with a laptop in front of him. The dusty screen on the laptop displayed a digital readout ticking down the minutes before broadcast and then the last sixty seconds. The final ten seconds clicked past furiously in increments of a tenth of a second. With three seconds left Farrell slowly, deliberately raised his index finger and pushed the enter key on the laptop. Then he leaned back and listened for a moment before he removed his headphones.
“There you go, we’re on the air,” he said and pushed back his chair.
I had to back up, still hunched over, to exit the closet. Farrell took a final drag then fired up a fresh cancer stick and backed out.
“We record the word, as we like to call it, the night before. Then upload it and we’re set to go. We could set the download for any time, but I like to do the manual play, gets me into the groove if you know what I mean.”
Actually I didn’t, somehow Farrell ‘in the groove’ didn’t seem to compute.
“So that’s it until noon?”
“Well, we stand by, answer the phones, sign up volunteers, get people organized, that sort of thing.”
“Oh, so listeners call?”
“Well they could, I mean that’s what we’re hoping will happen, sometime, anyway.”
It didn’t happen.
The routine was the same at noon, three and five-thirty, only even more boring. I walked around the building and the parking lot a few times just to stay awake. At six I drifted into Thompson’s office, he was pounding away on the future of America, his electric typewriter.
“You feel comfortable with me leaving for the day?”
He stopped hammering the typewriter keys, squeaked his chair around and nodded with a determined look across his face.
“I’d say we sent out a pretty strong message today.”
“Your broadcast?”
“Broadcast? No, you, protection. We won’t be silenced. Matter of fact it’s provided me inspiration, freedom of speech,” he said and patted the one inch stack of paper on the desk. Just like yesterday it was face down.
“Tomorrow’s broadcast?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
“Farrell reads that for fifteen minutes and then you play it four times a day?”
“We do.”
“Ever think of maybe shortening it, I don’t know cutting it down to maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. Maybe play some music or something.”
“We’ve done that from time to time, or a version. We’ve had ‘America The Beautiful’ as a background accompaniment once in a while, some Sousa marches.”
“Yeah, I was thinking more like just music, maybe something popular, current, get your audience interested and…”
“Some drug culture thing, that it? You’ve been in the gutter too long, Haskell. We’re not trying to be popular, if that’s what your angle is. We’re here to tell the truth, something that often times is unpopular.” He placed some added emphasis to the un in unpopular.
“Well, I kind of like the gutter, to tell you the truth. But, I was thinking fifteen minutes is an awfully long time to listen to someone going on and on.”
“On and on, that’s what you think we do?”
“You know what I mean, I just wonder if you aren’t missing your mark a bit by trying to tell them too many things. You know the KISS acronym, Keep It Simple Stupid.”
“No, I guess I missed that one,” he said and squeaked around to face his typewriter, signaling the end of our conversation.
“Well, I don’t want to piss you off, but whatever you ran as your message, your word today didn’t seem to cut it. You played the thing four separate times. Fifteen minutes a crack, that’s an hour and unless you got a call center tucked away somewhere, I never heard a phone ring all day long, ever. Not trying to tell you how to run your business Thompson, that’s just my opinion.”
“That’s part of what’s gone wrong with this great nation, everything comes down to the ten second sound bite. Is that what freedom means to you, ten seconds?”
I waited for a moment, a long moment, maybe ten seconds
worth.
“Nine forty-five tomorrow, right?”
Don’t miss Bite Me. Dev thinks he’s landed his dream job, providing security for people who don’t need any, but things aren’t always as they appear. Circumstances quickly fly out of control and Dev finds himself under the police microscope, again. Not to mention his usual women problems, or should that be women’s usual Dev problems?
Take a moment and grab another one of my books and enjoy the read and many thanks.
Mike Faricy
