by Don Keith
"Okay. You've found me. What gives? Who is this?"
"Greta Polanski, Jimmy. I’m so sorry. We tried to get to you in Dallas, but you'd left. Then Clarice tried to reach you in New York all day yesterday, but we got the wrong number for a while, and then you were gone again last night."
A numbness began somewhere deep in his gut.
"It's your grandmother, Jimmy. They found her day before yesterday evening. She had been gone a day or so already, they think, sitting up so natural in front of her TV set. They say it was her heart. It just quit."
The numbness spread all over him. He had to concentrate hard to hold onto the phone. Cleo watched him, frightened by the expression on his chalky face, questioning him with her eyes.
"When is the funeral, Mrs. Polanski?"
"I’m so sorry. We couldn't get in touch with you, Jimmy. They had to bury her yesterday. In the cemetery down the Superhighway from the radio station. They couldn't wait any longer, you see. She had been gone so long already. I am so sorry, Jimmy, to have to bring you such sad news."
He had seen his grandmother once in the past year. He had actually talked with her three or four times on the telephone. Each time she ranted on so much about her health, convinced she had every disease that she saw being treated by Dr. Casey and Dr. Kildare each week. He sent her money for food and clothes but Mrs. Polanski and Mrs. George reported that she spent it on cigarettes and fan magazines, a new television set and an outside antenna. And then she had spent the money to put in the new cable television system so she could get ten channels instead of two. Since then, they saw even less of her.
She had never really understood what her grandson did for a living. Sure, she had listened to him on the radio a few times, pulling the FM signal in from Atlanta on the big upright Zenith, but she rarely went to the trouble because it took away precious time from her television watching.
When they did talk, she always asked Jimmy if he had run into Pat Boone or Ed Sullivan or Arthur Godfrey lately, or how Elvis Presley was doing. He did not try to explain anything to her, but told her yes, he had seen them all, and that they were all fine. And once, during one of their last telephone conversations, she announced casually that she had heard from his mother. That she and his father were doing very well and that they sent their love and would look forward to seeing him Christmas. He had humored her, thanked her for relaying the messages from the ghosts and hung up as abruptly as he had dared.
Now she was gone, too.
He carefully placed the telephone back down and walked to Cleo's huge picture window. He stood there before the rising sun as it painted pastel streaks in the eastern sky with a sure, broad brush. New leaves were still thin on the tall maples that surrounded the dew-covered lawn, and, even through the glass, he could hear a couple of mourning doves calling sadly to each other.
He did not mean to, he was not looking for it, but he could not help seeing it. In the misty distance, perched on a ridge overlooking the valley, there were the series of scarlet lights along the tall, straight tower that held way up high the antenna for his radio station. The beacons were blinking hypnotically in a soothing, comforting pattern, assuring him that all was still well with that one part of the world that really mattered most to him.
But then, as he watched the tower, the first shaft of sunlight peeked over the distant hills, struck a sensor along the spire's flank, and it tripped a relay just as it was supposed to do. The blinking lights died suddenly, causing the tower to become lost completely in the soupy morning haze.
The glass of the picture window was cool against his forehead but the single tear that suddenly cut a path down his cheek was hot and scalding.
Twenty-six
The idea was so obvious that Jimmy Gill could not believe he had not thought of it before. But one night, there it was, right in front of him, burning brighter than a bonfire in the corner of the living room. Jesus! Maybe he had been working too hard after all. Or all those radio frequency magnetic waves that had been swirling around his head the last twenty years might have caused some brain damage after all.
He and Cleo had gone to dinner, spent a wonderful, precious few minutes together at her place, and then kissed goodbye. Her tour bus pulled up in front of the mansion, the band members yelling and blowing the horn for her to climb on board so they could get started for God only knows where. He wandered back inside, not the least bit tired but lonesome for her already. Jimmy was still half-wired from some pills DeWayne George had given him. Something small and colorful to help keep him functioning through the final stages of launching the radio programming network. Trail blazing could be hard on a guy.
The television set kept a bright night light and a steady babble of noise going in the living room. That was good. He did not want to be alone yet. He stepped to Cleo’s kitchen and made another urn of coffee. Then he fished into his briefcase for a bundle of paperwork he had to finish reading before an early-morning breakfast meeting with some important, impatient people.
The past year had been a swirl of papers, lawyers, equipment, bankers, buildings, faces, problems...no, not problems...opportunities to succeed. That’s what he tried to call them now. Got to be positive. Got to keep moving forward or die.
In just over a year, Wizard Broadcasting had added to the chain with new radio stations in Houston and Louisville. Now, Jimmy Gill was on the verge of closing the sale on WROG in Birmingham and the new FM that the owners there had recently signed on the air.
They had paid too much money for WROG. Far more than the cash flow or the station’s shabby real estate would justify. He would admit that fact to anyone who might raise the point, if anyone dared. But there were other factors the bankers could not calculate and the accountants could not tally. The studios were still located in the same old cement block building, a few blocks from the cemetery where Rockin' Randy Mathews and Grandmama rested only a few yards from each other. The halls in that old building could definitely tell some tales.
Jimmy had already promised himself he would have to walk through the building one more time before they bulldozed it all and moved to new offices and studios in a marble monolith that hung precariously on the side of Red Mountain. Maybe, if he could find the time, Detroit Simmons might want to explore the building, too. Jimmy promised himself he would try to remember to mention it to him the next time he ran into him.
Maybe, Jimmy thought, he would take a minute and get by the cemetery, too. He thought he could still locate the spot in the shadow of the tower where Rockin’ Randy’s piano crate coffin had been lowered into the cold ground. Someone might be able to point out to him exactly where his grandmother’s grave was, too. He had tried to find it when he came down to take care of his grandmother's things, including the old Zenith radio.
The Wizard Networks were already going through dry runs on the air. What little he had heard sounded fine. They would be broadcasting from the new state-of-the-art studios Detroit had designed and wired together on the top floor of a high rise bank building in Nashville's Lower Broadway district. Jimmy already had several dozen signed contracts on his desk from client stations. They could not wait to begin carrying the music, news and commercials that would be beamed up to the satellite twenty-four hours a day, hurled to the sky from a huge dish on the bank building's roof.
Wizard Networks was making it possible for some of the stations to move to profitability, to even stay on the air. They would be able to run their stations on a shoe-string, pocketing the money that had gone to the on-air personalities before. And without living, breathing people, there would be no worries about labor unions, vacations, sick days, pregnant wives, and guys getting arrested or not showing up for an air shift.
But this particular night, Jimmy Gill was too restless to work anymore. He brought his steaming coffee mug into the living room, loosened his tie, kicked off his dress shoes, sank into Cleo’s plush couch and drank in the smell of her that still lingered in the room. He missed her badly any time she was
out of sight, longed for her soft touch, healing voice, wise words. She did so much to keep him on an even keel, to help stave off the insanity into which the break-neck pace was threatening to shove him head-foremost.
There was still a part of him, though, that resisted loving her so much. He knew what it was because he had admitted it to himself already. He wanted to keep her from getting too deep inside him so that he would not be totally destroyed when she eventually abandoned him. And he knew with firm certainty that no matter how much she loved him now, or how much he loved and needed her, she would leave him someday.
He picked up her Gibson guitar and held it close to him, strummed its strings and felt its wood vibrating against his chest. He had to do a better job of staying on guard. He could not let her get so close that her eventual leaving would kill him.
Just then, he thought of a question he had needed to ask Detroit Simmons earlier in the day. Something about another control tone he thought they might need to fire off yet another set of jingles at all their network affiliate stations. That was how his thoughts came these days. Zooming in out of the ozone like some kind of misaimed comet. And if he did not act on them immediately, they sometimes left him forever, burned up in the jumble of all that he had to think about.
Instinctively, he grabbed the telephone and had most of Detroit's number dialed before he realized it was, by then, probably after three o'clock in the morning. He and Dee had had a blow-up two or three days before about something so insignificant he could not even remember what it was. They had only spoken curtly with each other a time or two since.
Dammit, Detroit had become so stubborn, such a brick wall to all Jimmy was trying to do lately. Only when he was presented with some kind of impossible technical mountain to climb did he brighten and become the old Dee for a while. He still loved to lose himself in a mound of circuit boards and wiring harness. To produce some kind of complicated, blinking, beeping, black box that accomplished a task so convoluted that only he knew what it was doing and why.
Jimmy put the phone back down and sat alone in the darkness. Then, for an instant, he almost rose from the couch and went to his grandmother's old Zenith radio. It now sat in a prominent place in the corner of Cleo's living room after Jimmy had rescued it from the duplex. He brought it back carefully in the trunk of his Caddy to Nashville. Cleo insisted he bring it to her place. She loved the old box immediately.
She scrounged all over town for new tubes for the thing, finally having to get them from an antique radio dealer somewhere up north. She refinished and polished the wooden mahogany cabinet until it passed for new. Detroit replaced the dead filter capacitors in the power supply and had to build some of the other dying components from scratch because they were not available any longer.
When they got it working, Cleo wrapped it in a red ribbon and made it her gift to Jimmy, commemorating the second anniversary of their relationship. He had forgotten the significance of the day altogether, but when he got to the office he postponed an important conference long enough to instruct Sammie to order Cleo some flowers. Expensive flowers. And asked her to go to a department store and pick out something nice and frilly and sexy and have it sent over to her. To please fake his signature on the card.
Cleo loved the way the radio sounded, with its deep-toned, throaty, rumbling bass and the sparkling crispness of its high frequencies. She listened to it constantly when she was in town. Jimmy never had the time. He had not even listened to The River, his own station, for more than a few moments in the last several months. It seemed he was always on the telephone or in a meeting too big or too deep to interrupt to simply listen to music or waste time seeing what was happening on the radio.
He did not move from the couch, but only continued to sit there in the darkness. He would make a point of listening to the Zenith some other time. He was still wide awake. DeWayne’s medicine was doing its job too damn well.
For some reason, the flickering of the television set in the corner caught his attention. He could not remember the last time he had watched an entire show on the thing. Maybe an appearance by Cleo and her band on The Tonight Show. Or half-watching the late news on occasion while he worked away at something else.
Now, some fat man in a flowered shirt and a tall chef's hat was demonstrating a set of steak knives on the tube. On an impulse, and since he always kept the phone nearby wherever he was, he dialed the number that was flashing insistently, begging at the bottom of the screen.
Busy signal.
Jimmy watched the man slice meat with one of the knives, then shrimp, an old automobile tire, a tin can, while the studio audience clapped and cheered as if he was accomplishing some magical illusion. He tried out the number on the telephone’s dial again.
Still busy. Damn.
Three more times over the next ten minutes he tried to dial the steak knife ordering number. It was continually busy. Almost three o’clock on Thursday morning and people were flooding a phone bank somewhere to buy silly steak knives!
Jimmy Gill fell to his knees in front of the television set and twisted the channel knob, dialing up the other stations that were still telecasting. The other two local network affiliates were off the air already. One only showed snow, the other a complicated test pattern with a squealing tone for sound. The movie channel on the cable was spinning an old black-and-white foreign picture with its English sub-titles almost lost in the blur at the bottom of the screen.
Those were all the choices at his disposal.
Twelve VHF and seventy-four UHF channels on the television set, a cable converter box that went all the way up to fifty more channels, and there was nothing on the air but a man peddling steak knives! The potential power, the latent reach, the room for creativity in this medium was massive! But the vacuum of programming was suffocating!
Something momentous clicked inside his brain. Something he could not believe he had overlooked thus far.
Jimmy dove back to the couch and twisted out Detroit Simmons’ number on the telephone’s rotary dial.
"Hello...yes?"
It was his girlfriend. What was her name? Rachel? Yes, Rachel. After ten rings. She was confused, still asleep.
"Rachel? Is Detroit there, please, honey?"
"Hmmm? Uh, yeah. Just a minute."
The phone clattered noisily to the floor where she dropped it. He could hear Detroit whispering questions and curses to her. He probably assumed the station was on fire. Or worse. Off the air.
"What is it, dammit?"
"How many channels can they send at the same time on a cable television wire?"
Jimmy could almost see Detroit, shaking the cobwebs from his head, deciding whether or not to even reply to this latest and silliest out-of-the-blue question. But then, Jimmy knew, he would be thinking about it despite himself, actually trying to pull the answer from a memory bank somewhere. There was only a five second pause while the wheels turned.
"I guess dozens, maybe fifty or more. The wire can carry plenty but they need the converter boxes to de-code the signals."
He could hear Rachel in the background, questioning Detroit about who it was and what the hell was going on. Detroit ignored her. He was awake already, involved, thinking, wondering already what Jimmy was up to now.
“Fifty, you say?”
"Jimmy, what are you thinking about now? What time is it, anyway?"
"Turn on your television right now and just look. There's nothing on the thing but lame, silly programming. Garbage they throw on there just to fill the time between the commercials. Just like radio was before FM took off. Look, cable TV’s going in everywhere, and people are going to want more choices than the networks and the few movie channels are giving them now. It's going to be niche programming, narrow-casting, boutique formats, just like radio's gone to already. Just like magazines have been for twenty years. No more Saturday Evening Post or Life or Look. Imagine it! Fifty, sixty channels, all different. Nothing needs to be mass appeal anymore. Give them something for
a specific demographic, deliver what the advertiser needs to reach his target, and they don’t give a shit about raw numbers at all. Deliver them an audience of left-handed midgets between eighteen and twenty-four years old if that’s who they need to reach. Narrowcasting! Targeting! It’s the logical extension of the television medium. Just like radio! Just like damned radio!"
As he talked, Jimmy unconsciously reached for the pill bottle that was resting on the coffee table. He shook out three of the capsules and downed them, chased with a swallow of the strong, cold coffee. He suddenly had another castle to build in his burgeoning empire and sleep would simply have to wait.
"Let me guess. You are going to supply the programming."
"We are, Dee. Wizard Cable is! Think about the possibilities, man! I can see a home shopping channel that costs next to nothing to run and the friends and neighbors out there in television-land keeping the telephone lines hot, tripping all over themselves to give us their credit card numbers and we take a cut of every damn thing that we sell. Oh, and how about this? A channel that does nothing but broadcast the news all day, and another one for just the weather, twenty-four hours a damn day! Shit, man, we could put the audio from the channels up on our radio networks, tie them all together, and get double duty out of everybody. Oh, and how about a preacher channel...just one damned religious show after another? And we sell the time to them, just like we used to do on Sunday mornings at WROG. Cash business. Pay in advance. Give them a receipt. Hustle to the bank. Beautiful! Damn beautiful!"
On the blinking screen in front of him, the man with the knives had made way for a sweating, stalking preacher who pounded his Bible and screamed at an auditorium full of writhing people. His telephone numbers for prayer and donations constantly scrolled across the bottom of the picture. The donation number was huge and outlined in rainbow colors. The prayer number was tiny and almost lost in the bottom of the screen.
