Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  Sometimes, when Jimmy allowed himself the luxury of stopping to think, he felt as if he was drowning, floating face down in a swift current that swirled wildly about him. But he was always buoyed by the drive to do more and do it better than anybody else had ever done it before. To fulfill the craving, he was required to put on the best sounding radio stations he could, making audio magic.

  He often seemed on the verge of being pulled under by the demands on him and his time. Weighted down by his concern for the growing number of people who depended on him for their careers, their livelihood, and their creative inspiration. Smothered by the prospects of making a growing payroll every two weeks. But he was always saved by seeing the success that so many people enjoyed under his leadership.

  Winning made it all worthwhile; winning had become everything.

  Something eventually had to give, though. One morning during his show, he put his head down on the control board for a moment, only to collect his thoughts, to relieve the pounding of the lack-of-sleep-and-too-much-coffee headache that was making him half-blind. Before he knew it, he had fallen into a deep sleep. Ten minutes later he awoke with a start to find the turntable three tracks deep into the album from which he had been playing a song. And the number that was then being broadcast featured language not usually heard on the radio. A quick cross-fade to another turntable got him out of the mess, but his face burned with hot embarrassment. He felt intense shame but no one else could see. Only Jimmy Gill saw his reflection in the dark control room window.

  The wild eyes and scraggly hair stared back at him with hollow eyes, almost lost in a pasty, lined face, beneath a rat’s nest of uncombed hair.

  “You, Brother James, are a damned mess.”

  Even his own voice in his ears was tired and raspy. Burned and wasted.

  Jimmy made the decision he would reluctantly begin the search for his replacement as soon as the shift was over, if he lived that long. He had finally realized in that one sleepy, defining moment that he could not allow the on-air product of the stations to suffer due to his own inattention. Or keep at it merely to stroke his own ego and his compulsive need to be heard.

  The stations had to be the best. Brother James was no longer the best on-air talent there was. No one else was going to tell him that, of course. He would have to fire himself.

  He missed being on the air desperately even before that day’s shift was done.

  Suddenly, money was everywhere. Jimmy had never paid himself much of a salary. Instead, he had traded commercial time for groceries, clothes, apartments, gasoline, even the cars he and Detroit drove. He did not need much, he kept telling himself, and anything at all was certainly more than he was raised with.

  But then, because of his position, because of expectations from those he dealt with, it became necessary for him to drive bigger cars and wear nicer suits, to buy clients’ lunches and dinners in better restaurants than before, to have his hair styled at a salon instead of cut at whatever walk-in shop advertised on the station. Jerry Morrow had been the first to suggest that they needed their own airplane so they could quickly hop to Atlanta and Dallas and back to Nashville as quickly as possible. Jerry was a licensed pilot, so Jimmy told him to go look for a plane. He and Dee found one in two days and the deal was done. Then Jimmy was making plans to take flying lessons himself in his spare time. Detroit was flying like an experienced ace the first time he took the stick.

  On some level, Jimmy Gill knew that he missed Detroit Simmons. They saw each other in the hallway but only to speak. When Jimmy had a question, he had to get Sammie to dial Dee’s extension because he could not remember the number. When he saw Detroit’s girlfriend, Rachel, in the lobby one day, he could not recall her name. He could not even remember what brand or color of automobile his best friend was driving.

  Time was finite, and it seemed that their only chances to talk were limited to the essentials of getting their technical bases covered. Sometimes Detroit walked by Jimmy’s office, caught him off the phone for once, and dropped into a chair to touch bases. Invariably, they would just begin catching up, speaking of something besides business, and the damned telephone would rudely butt in. Or someone in the throes of a major crisis would burst into the office with waving arms and wild eyes. Eventually, after he sat waiting patiently, Detroit realized that he had some things which probably needed doing, and he wandered on back to his office.

  A few times, Detroit hit Jimmy broadside with his qualms about the way things were going. He always had doubts that they could actually pull everything off, afraid of the risks they had to take to give life to their dreams.

  "Jimmy, have you really thought this network thing all the way through?"

  "Of course I have, Dee," and Jimmy shot him a pained look over the tops of his new tinted reading glasses. It was an expression that questioned Dee’s sanity for even suggesting that James Gill could not do anything he set his mind to do.

  "I was just wondering. Think about this,” Detroit plunged on. “You get The River format on a hundred radio stations. Say that each station averages having five disk jockeys on their staffs before they start carrying our satellite programming. They’ll only need one man after they go on-line with us. That puts four hundred people on the dole right there. And that’s with just one format. You’re already talking about putting up three more formats. Don’t you see? We are going to be responsible for cutting lots of disk jockey's throats, Jimmy Gill."

  Jimmy grimaced, pulled off the glasses and spoke to Dee in a tone he might use with someone addled or simple-minded.

  "But the owners will love us! And remember, they are the ones who have the money and they are the ones who will write us those nice, big, fat checks every month. Not the deejays. What the satellite format programming is going to do is keep some of these operators from shutting the doors and pulling the big 'OFF' switch for good and turning the damned places into liquor stores and filling stations. At least we can keep the sales staffs working. Make the investors and the owners happy. Get them high ratings in the market with minimum cash outlay. And make us happy and rich at the same time, I might add."

  Detroit slapped his thigh hard.

  "Most of those idiots shouldn't be radio station owners in the first place, Jimmy. Bankers, doctors, lawyers, silent partners, investment trusts, mezzanine financiers, stock offerings...shit, these people don't even know what frequency their radio stations are transmitting on! What the format is! Most of them don't even listen to their own stations. Couldn’t find them on the radio dial if they tried. They just stop by on the way to the golf course to check out their precious bottom line or fly in every couple of months to hack away some more from the heart of the station. They take and take and don't put anything back into the station or the market. Excuse me! Town! Not market! Listeners! Not rating numbers! Radio stations are not like a damn shopping mall, Jimmy! All most of these bastards want to do is build up some cash flow by cutting overhead, throw some more money at quick promotions to spike the ratings, then sell the stations for umpteen times cash flow, take an obscene profit, and then let some other sucker take a bath when it all crashes after they’ve flown the coop. And then the next vulture swoops in and buys it cheap and the whole cycle starts over again. It takes heart and soul to own and operate a station the way it should be run. People like us who love it. Or like we used to be anyway. Jimmy, we can’t let money be the only thing that matters. Where did the magic go?"

  Detroit had stood and was pacing around the office by that time, flapping his arms in frustration. Jimmy had never heard Dee say so much at one time and with so much emotion. He must have been rehearsing that speech for a long time, waiting to get it all out of his craw. Why didn't the phone ring now?

  "Dee, why don't you go on back to your little shop, twist some pretty-colored wires together and make something nice that sparks and smokes," Jimmy said, abruptly cutting him off before he could get even more worked up and continue his sermon. "The radio business is the way it is a
nd we're going to be here to make money on it. Times are changing. Remember, if we don't do this, somebody else will. And we can do it a damn sight better than anybody else can because we do love the business of broadcasting. We’ll give them good programming. Let them do with it what they will. That’s not our concern."

  Then Detroit gave him that squint-eyed look of his, turned on his heels, and left the office, slapping the door facing angrily on the way out. He retired to his shop, turned the speaker on the back wall up high to drown out his own muttering, and stabbed the work bench with a screwdriver.

  Damn! Jimmy Gill could be so dense sometimes! It was as if he was not really interested in listening to what Dee had to say anymore. As if he was not listening at all to anybody. Even Cleo had mentioned to Dee that Jimmy seemed distracted, distant, as if his mind was far, far away, off somewhere in the ozone.

  Okay, he thought. I'll give it a day or so and hit him from another angle. I'll make him slow down and take stock before he crashes and burns.

  It would be at least two weeks before they said more than “good morning” to each other again.

  Cleo Michaels was, of course, far more than merely another distraction for Jimmy. Against his better judgment, and try as he might to fight it, he had fallen even more deeply in love with her. And she had fallen for him, too. At least she told him she had. But it was not an easy relationship to maintain for either of them.

  She still followed a dizzying tour schedule, crisscrossing the country for weeks at a time, playing bars, dance halls, state fairs, and early-morning television shows. But she called Jimmy every night without fail from her Silver Eagle bus, usually parked in some stump-water stop somewhere along the road or whisking past a mile-marker between exits on an interstate highway as it cut a swath through an endless prairie.

  She had given up trying to call him at home. Or trying to anticipate his erratic schedule. Since he was no longer on the air, she could not count on catching him on the hot-line, assured of his being trapped in the studio during those three hours. And if she depended on him to call her, to track her down at whatever truck stop parking lot she was hibernating in, then she knew they would rarely if ever talk with each other.

  She usually had the best luck by calling every fifteen minutes until she forced him to interrupt one of his crisis calls to talk with her. Or by dialing his private office number after eight or nine o'clock at night, when everyone else had gone home, finding him still at his desk, still neck-deep in toil, and answering the call because he assumed it was one of his station managers.

  When Cleo did get through to him, she fussed at him for working so hard, told him how much she missed him, how badly she wanted to see him and hold him and make love with him. Then, all that said, she listened patiently to his tales of carnage and bloodshed in the broadcast wars.

  He rarely thought to ask how things were with her. How the tour was going. But she did not seem to mind. It was just good to hear his voice, she always told him. And she knew it was good for him to hear hers, whether he remembered to tell her or not.

  When she found her way back home for a few days between shows, they stole precious time with each other, time squeezed from her studio recording sessions and songwriting, from his hours spent stomping out fires and constructing kingdoms. When they managed to converge, to finally shut out everything and everybody else, it was ultimately worth all the trouble.

  She was instantly renewed. He was completely revived. Their love was totally rekindled.

  It was one of those rare times for them, curled closely together on the thick, soft rug in front of her massive gray stone fireplace. They had spent most of the night involved in wonderful lovemaking, until the flames on the fireplace grate were only smoldering embers. There had been no time for conversation. It seemed, as usual, as if they had to get to know each other all over again, a step at a time. Somehow, and again as usual, their bodies were the first things that needed to be re-explored.

  The first blush of a Tennessee dawn dusted them with precious soft light through the big windows of her living room. He was awake already, lying as still as he could. Although he tried not to, he could not help composing memos that needed to have been written a while ago. A couple of key management positions should have been filled yesterday and he kept running over the candidates in his mind.

  All the while, Cleo breathed softly, sleeping peacefully against his chest. It felt wonderful, but he needed to get up, make a few calls, wake some people up in Atlanta and get some tails moving before the competition’s day got started.

  But he simply could not move just then. He did not want to wake her. He did not want to move away from her warmth.

  Earlier that week, Jimmy had flown from brutal budget meetings in Dallas directly to New York City to talk with a syndicator about marketing the programming network. Held meetings with people from a representative firm who would sell commercials on the web for them. Took a pack of potential national sponsors to dinner at Four Seasons. Then, those tasks finished, he wrapped everything up several hours before he had anticipated, managed to commandeer a taxi in Mid-town Manhattan, bribed the cabbie with a fifty-buck tip to hurry like hell, and managed to get the last seat on the final flight out of LaGuardia that night. Sitting there in New York that day, arguing across the desk with the syndicator, he had suddenly missed Cleo Michaels so badly that it physically hurt, almost as painfully as the major ulcer he was culturing. That was when he decided to cut the deal with the bastard as it stood and run like hell, just on the off chance that he would be able to capture a few hours alone with her.

  They must have been on the same wavelength again. She had finished a leg of her tour the day before in St. Louis with an entire two days off before the next date in Louisville. But the band voted and, instead of spending one more night on the road than they absolutely had to, they instead pointed the Silver Eagle toward Nashville and home. She dropped the band off at each of their houses then drove the bus to her place herself, ready for a few hours of rest and some home cooking.

  She had not expected Jimmy back from New York for another day. She knew from experience that matching her schedule with his was like trying to catch mercury with tweezers.

  The look on her face when she met him at the door had made all the hustling worthwhile for Jimmy. So had the whole night spent making up for lost time. He could not imagine making love could be any better than it was with Cleo Michaels. He learned more about her every time, and he loved it all. Lying there with her soft breath warm on his skin, he vowed he would do better by her, give her the attention she deserved, the caring that he knew she needed.

  He grinned and softly kissed her forehead. Who the hell was he kidding? He was honest enough with himself to know he was only telling himself another lie. Maybe soon he could make it all up to her and start giving instead of taking.

  Jimmy tried to put work out of his mind for a few more minutes, to enjoy her closeness. He had almost drifted back to welcome sleep when the phone on the end table across the room rang like a coarse klaxon. Cleo jumped but acted as if she had no intention of getting up to answer the shrill bell. She only groaned and lay there and tried to ignore it as it continued to rudely splinter their dark peace and calm.

  Jimmy made a move to go after it himself, mostly out of habit. A ringing telephone usually meant some crisis was going unresolved. But Cleo had him pinned with an arm and a leg and he could not move to get it without dumping her. When the thing would not hush, though, she finally rose up on one elbow, her hair beautiful in its after-love tangle, and gave the phone a go-to-hell look. Even that, Jimmy noticed, was breathtakingly lovely in the soft pink light of dawn. She threw a throw pillow at the screeching instrument then fussed when she missed.

  “No, no, no, no, no! Shut up, you damned old telephone! Don’t bother us now. Go away! Git! Leave us be!”

  The she rolled over completely on top of him, straddled him, and settled down onto him. He marveled again at how well, how naturally, t
hey fit together. Thanks to her, Jimmy Gill was about to forget memos and hirings and firings and the screaming telephone, no matter that the damn thing refused to take a hint and stop ringing. He was quickly getting lost in her again and he knew everything else would be washed away for a precious little while.

  "Aw, shit! I better get it, Jimmy," she finally said through a kiss, and reluctantly pulled away from him. The room instantly became ice cold without her. "It’s usually something important when it rings this many times this loud this time of day. One of the guys or something."

  He tried to pull her back down but she pushed him away playfully and walked to where the phone threatened to jump off the table in its urgency. He wanted her back on the rug with him so badly it hurt.

  "Hmmm? Yes, he's here. Just a minute."

  She ignored Jimmy’s futile head-shaking and his fierce scowl and held out the telephone like a threat until he was forced to crawl off the rug, stand up and take it from her. He kissed her first. Let his hands wander. And he almost put the phone back on the hook without saying a word to whomever it was that had had the gall to interrupt something so special. But the look in her eyes finally made him place the damned thing next to his ear and speak.

  "Yeah?" he answered grumpily, hoping whoever had tracked him down would take the hint and leave them alone until he got to the office. Until he could fire them properly.

  "Jimmy? Detroit said we'd probably find you there. We tried to get hold of you in New York City but we missed you."

  Well, Detroit Simmons would have to answer for giving someone this number. That would be agenda item number one. Jimmy could not immediately recognize the female voice on the line. It was so low that it was almost lost in the long distance hum. But the odd lilt of its foreign accent was eerily familiar.