Charlie All Night Read online

  “2 Live Crew?” Allie sputtered. “You’re playing 2 Live Crew?”

  “Yes, Allie,” Charlie said patiently. “I’m playing 2 Live Crew. It’s my show. I do the playlist.”

  “I can’t believe it.” Allie smacked the hamburger down on the console. “And I thought you were an okay guy.”

  “I am an okay guy. I have testimonials.” Charlie leaned back to enjoy the argument, since for once it wasn’t about making him a star.

  Allie was visibly steaming. “2 Live Crew are sexist psychopaths and you give them airtime.”

  “Hey, it’s a free country. The first Amendment…”

  “The first Amendment doesn’t give men the right to sing about attacking women. It doesn’t give-”

  “Well, actually, it does.” Charlie said, and Allie turned bright red. “Hold it.” Charlie warded her off with his hand. “Just hold it. You’re saying I should censor what goes on the air?”

  “This is your show,” Allie steamed. “What you play reflects your tastes. You have a responsibility-”

  “I have a responsibility to play music that appeals to a lot of different people. 2 Live Crew may not be my favorite group, but…”

  “Oh. Right.” Allie was so mad her eyebrows fused over her nose. “A lot of different music? So when are you going to play Barry Manilow?”

  Charlie snorted. “I will die before I play Barry Manilow.”

  Allie leaned closer. “According to you, that’s censorship.”

  “No, it’s not,” Charlie said, trying not to be annoyed. “I don’t object to what he’s saying. It’s just lousy music.”

  “But you have a responsibility to play music that appeals to a lot of different people,” Allie pressed on. “You just said so.”

  “Not Barry Manilow.”

  “So you’ll play psychopathic music that advocates hurting women but you won’t play mediocre music that advocates loving them.”

  “Allie, don’t twist this-”

  Allie jerked back from him, glaring. “You know what you are? You’re just like Mark.”

  Charlie jerked his head back, outraged. “Hey, watch your mouth, woman.”

  “You have no respect for women. You’re amused by the woman’s movement and you think-”

  “I love women’s movements. Come on, Allie…”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Allie shouted. “I can’t believe you’re-”

  “Ah, Allie, have a heart,” Charlie said. “It’s no big deal.”

  “-such a yuppie scum dweeb,” Allie finished and stomped out of the room.

  He started to follow her and then realized he couldn’t leave the booth. “Allie, come back here.”

  Somebody moved toward the booth through the shadows of the production room, but it didn’t look anything like Allie.

  “Uh, Charlie.” Stewart, the night engineer, looking more like a peeled egg then ever, came to stand in the doorway, looking sleepy but interested. “I was just in the break room, and I realized you probably didn’t know.”

  “Know what?” Charlie frowned at him.

  “You’re on the air.” Stewart shrugged. “It’s good stuff, but-”

  “The tape can’t be over yet,” Charlie looked around frantically.

  “It never started.”

  “Oh, hell.” Charlie put the headphones back on. Sure enough, no 2 Live Crew. He looked at the mike slide and closed his eyes when he saw it was up. “Uh, for those of you listening at home, Alice McGuffey has just walked out in a huff. And for the record, she does a very nice huff. She overreacts, though. And now, let’s try that 2 Live Crew again, shall we? This is for all you yuppie scum dweebs out there who dig rap. There must be at least two of you.”

  He punched the tape again and listened. Silence. “All right,” he said into the mike, “we won’t do rap. Seems we have a defective tape. Let’s try Elvis since he was on deck next, anyway.” He punched the next tape, shoved the slide up and heard absolutely nothing.

  Then he looked at Stewart. “Go get me a tape. Any tape. Now.” Then as Stewart disappeared, he spoke into the mike. “Well, it’s a darn shame our phones are down because this would sure make one heck of a call-in topic. Send in those postcards, folks, and vote your preference, Manilow or Crew. Although, come to think of it, that is a pretty lousy choice. Maybe I’ll try something different.” He babbled on about some of the other choices he could have made, feeling like a fool and developing a real need for revenge on whoever had wiped his tapes. When Stewart came loping back and thrust a CD at him, he shoved it into the player. “Or we could play something good like this one.”

  Frank Sinatra began to sing “My Way.”

  Charlie looked at Stewart. “You’re kidding.”

  “I like Frank.” Stewart shoved a handful of CDs at him. “Here’s more new ones. Want me to check to see if anything you’ve got in here has music on it?”

  “That would be good.” Charlie put his head in his hands. “This is a disaster.”

  Stewart dropped the new CDs on the counter and picked up the old tapes. “Not really. You had your mike slide shoved up so people could hear you talk. That’s good.”

  Charlie looked at him as if he were demented, always a possibility with Stewart. “How is that good?”

  “Because if you hadn’t, you’da had yourself some dead air. Nothing’s worse than dead air.”

  Charlie shook his head. “I suppose not. What’s wrong with the tapes?”

  Stewart picked up the one on the top of his stack and looked at it. “Doesn’t look like anything’s wrong. It’s one of our old tapes, all right. Must go back five or six years. Maybe it was too old.”

  “I played it this afternoon,” Charlie said.

  Stewart shrugged. “Maybe somebody erased it. I’ll check all of them, but I bet somebody did it on purpose. Not everybody likes you, you know. The mayor, for instance.”

  Charlie snorted. “You trying to tell me that Rollie Whitcomb snuck in here and erased my tapes so I’d have dead air? Come on. The man can barely drive a car.”

  Stewart shrugged again. “You asked.”

  Charlie tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. “So Allie and I just broadcast our 2 Live Crew fight to greater Tuttle. All right. That’s okay. I can’t possibly get in trouble for this. Unless the FCC bars ‘yuppie scum dweeb’, in which case, pay the fine. I’m covered on this. I am not in trouble.”

  Somehow, though, he knew he was.

  That was just the way his life was going.

  Stewart left the booth. A few minutes later, while Charlie was figuring out the angles, the phone rang, and he picked it up out of habit.

  * * *

  Charlie got home that night, Allie was already in bed in the dark. He got a beer, undressed, and climbed in beside her, touching the cold can to her back.

  “Get out,” she said and drew away from him.

  “It’s the yuppie scum dweeb. Wake up.” He drank a third it the beer in one gulp and then put the cold can against his forehead.

  “Go sleep on the couch.”

  “Oh, no, Alice.” He put the can on the table beside the bed, turned on the light and rolled her over to face him.

  “You can’t for a minute think I’m going to have sex with you.” She tried to push him away. “You can’t possibly…”

  “After you left, Stewart, who has not been paying attention, noticed the phones were down. So he turned them on. We got over a dozen calls in less than an hour. Roughly speaking, fifty-five percent were in favor of you, forty-two percent were in favor of me and three percent wanted to know exactly what a yuppie scum dweeb was.”

  “Send them your picture.” Allie rolled away from him.

  He rolled her back. “One person suggested baking soda for the mustard on your blouse.”

  “Why are we discussing this?” Allie asked, and the edge in her voice told him she was still mad and not just faking it.

  Charlie sighed. “Because we have a meeting with Bill on Monday. For onc