“Maybe.”
“I have opportunity. Lease to own. No start-up cost. Steam table, cash box, coolers, napkin dispenser, all zose things it has already. Permits, credit accounts, all zat. Some money we need to buy inventory, but not so much. I have money. Maybe not enough, maybe I sell bronze medal, or maybe Joe have money. Somehow we get. We start in June, second week. Tomorrow I quit Fatburger, Tuesday I sign lease.”
“So what are you asking me?”
“You work. Me, you, Joe, we work. We sell hot dogs, lease to own. No down payment, no loan, low overhead. Zis makes great opportunity, Will! We make Hot Dog Heaven in Venice Beach! Some profits we split sree ways. You buy new car, not piece of shit Plymouth the color of old man’s pants. Other profit we pay toward principal, until we own free and clear. You still have radio show, maybe you say, Come on down young people, come to Venice Beach and eat hot dog at Hot Dog Heaven! ”
“I told you, I don’t talk.”
He waved it off. “Bah. Radio advertising is not so good, anyway. Nobody really listening. Word of mouth is best. All day long in summer, we get walks-ins, tourist, young people. We have markup of five hundred percent! You know what is zat? Zat five dollar for one dollar. Big margin. We keep simple, no bells, no whistles. Create cash flow, that is the key, generate revenue stream, branch out, you understand?”
“Yeah,” I lied, but if nothing else, the river-of-money metaphor was coming through loud and clear.
Having given voice to his excitement, Eugene settled back in his chair and kicked his feet up on the table.
“Zis is gonna be good, Will. You wait and see.”
He clasped his arms behind his head as though he were fashioning an abs-and-thighs pose and reclined even further. But before Eugene could meditate too long on Hot Dog Heaven, he lurched suddenly forward in his chair.
“Shit motherfuck. I forget to turn water on in 219!”
He was out the door in a matter of seconds.
Consummate professionals to the bitter end, Eugene and Acne Scar Joe issued Fatburger their two weeks’ notice the following day. I, in true Miller fashion, opted for the short ending. I didn’t show up for my Monday afternoon shift, leaving hamburgers behind forever. My destiny lay in hot dogs.
Still, there remained the question of short-term sustenance. And the matter of capital. I couldn’t bear to see Eugene sell his bronze medal, which, for the record, I’d never actually seen. So I wrote Big Bill and put the touch on him for five hundred bucks. He sent a thousand. In the letter that came with the check, he said that he was proud of my initiative and took the opportunity to remind me that not only was I a radio star, I was soon to be a restaurateur. By the way, had I heard anything from Lulu?
I had not. A half dozen times I had phoned Lulu in Seattle, but she never answered the phone. I left messages on her machine.
“What’s the deal, Lu? What happened? I know you’re there, pick up. What’s wrong? Are you all right? Is this about what happened? Is this about Troy? Talk to me, Lu.”
But she never called. And so I called Troy and left messages.
“What’s up? Have you heard from Lulu? What’s the deal, why won’t you call me back?”
And when Troy never called me back either, I cursed them both as conspirators. My vexation was such that it threatened to become an affliction. I conjured a thousand scenarios, ranging from the improbably hopeful to the infinitely bleak, that might account for Lulu’s silence, and I believed every last one of them. I was lost. It was as though Lulu had gone to cheerleading camp all over again.
Mercifully, as the weeks progressed, the whirlwind of activity surrounding me kept Lulu off my mind, at least some of the time. Mornings I went to classes.
None of my other instructors could match the billowy sleeves of Gerard Smith for pure passion, but some of it was pretty interesting. I read Swift and Fielding, and they were both funny, but not as funny as that crazy Frog Rabelais, and not as funny as Voltaire. Nobody was as funny as Voltaire. In anthropology, I learned such useful methodological concepts as cultural relativism, an idea I liked because it was all about context, it was wide open, it made all the other ideas it came into contact with more complex. I also learned that every female anthropology major in Santa Monica in 1991 had the same hair—lusterless brown, awkward in length, willful, confused, neglected, didn’t know whether it wanted to be long or short. I thought of it as anthro hair—and like its distant cousin poodle hair, the women who wore it were inexplicably attracted to me. This was definitely the case with Elaine Niemeyer. Though Elaine was an anthropology major, I met her in a sociology class. Her hair was completely conflicted. One side of it would be tucked neatly behind an ear, while the other side would be hanging in frazzled disarray over her face. Sometimes she pulled the back up, and the front back. Other times she wore uneven ponytails. Her hair seemed to set the tone for her whole personality.
Elaine never engaged in class discussions directly, but she always reacted to them—usually by furrowing her brow, or muttering bullshit under her breath. Sometimes she laughed out loud like a crazy person at nothing discernible, then, an instant later, retreated into frowning silence. There was something hard about Elaine Niemeyer, that much was clear—not hard in a cold way, but in a world-weary way—or at least that’s what her scowling manner projected. I caught Elaine stealing glances at me one afternoon during a lecture on symbolic interaction. The first time I registered her gaze, I was certain she was looking at someone behind me, but soon realized I was sitting in a corner. After about twenty minutes, there ceased to be anything furtive about her glances. She was staring at me. There was nothing come-hither in her gaze—curious, perhaps, maybe even slightly annoyed. It was the gaze of an anthropologist—an unstable one. And I suppose it was this instability that I found attractive about Elaine Niemeyer. Between her instability, and her confused hair, and her gently sloping forehead with the little pockmark scars, there was just enough about Elaine Niemeyer to remind me dimly of Lulu Trudeau.
I started stealing glances back at Elaine. But I did nothing to actively pursue her. I was still stifled by the awkward silence of my waning moments with Shelly Beach, still trying to get the daiquiri and pepperoni taste of Cheryl off my tongue—and, not least, still terrified of exposing my wee soldier to the theater of battle.
One day as we filed out of class, she fell into stride with me.
“What a load of bullshit,” she said. “I’m so fucking sick of the bullshit. Everywhere I look is bullshit. Every stinking text I read is just oozing the stuff. Don’t you just hate it?”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit. You love it. I watch your face during lectures, you’re all lit up. You’re like the rest of them. But whatever—I don’t care. If that’s what floats your boat, more power to you.” Elaine swept one side of her hair back, and released the other. “I guess I just have a low bullshit threshold, that’s all. You wanna hang out sometime? You could buy me dinner or something.”
How could I refuse such an offer? I’d be lying if I said that ions didn’t prickle on the back of my neck, that a few slumbering possibilities weren’t awakened by Elaine’s invitation. But those stolen glances before we ever exchanged a word were as close as Elaine and I would ever come to romance. It wasn’t long before I was back on familiar turf. I can’t say whether Elaine’s erratic disposition was to blame, or whether my own bullshit quotient simply proved beyond her threshold. Whatever the case, Elaine got drunk at TGIF’s and started yelling about Catholics, espousing a theory of religious codependency between bitter exclamations of “bullshit!” I didn’t mind so much, I wasn’t Catholic, and my own bullshit threshold was apparently relatively high. At least she wasn’t dull. In fact, things seemed to be moving in the right direction. Elaine invited me back to her apartment, where she fumbled with her CD collection, and started making some gin and tonics. After about five minutes, she forgot about the drinks and stretched out on
the sofa with her bare feet in my lap. Her big toes were misshapen by knobby yellow calluses. Had they been Lulu’s toes, I would have loved them. Instead, I didn’t know what to do with them. What kind of girl put her sweaty feet in your lap? Was I supposed to touch them? Before I could formulate any kind of conclusion, Elaine passed out with her face pressed against the arm of the sofa. She was soon sawing logs. What was it about me that inspired drunkenness in women? Not bubbly, effervescent drunkenness, or even sloppy, willing drunkenness, but the kind of drunkenness that drove women to vomit on dashboards, or lose consciousness.
I sat pinned to the sofa beneath the dead weight of Elaine’s feet for a while. I don’t know why I lingered. I guess because it made me feel like a stranger to myself, being in someone else’s space, and there was a certain comfort in such an estrangement. But also there was desolation and sadness—for her, for me, for all but the fortunate in love. When I finally excavated myself from beneath Elaine’s feet, she did not awaken. I covered her with a dusty afghan, and still she did not stir. In spite of her snoring, Elaine looked softer and sweeter lying there than I’d ever seen her. Gravity had arranged her hair into some semblance of order. There was no scowl on her face, or any sign of the word bullshit on her lips. I wished that I could be whatever it was Elaine Niemeyer needed me to be, but at the same time knew that I could never be that thing. If only I had pursued that line of thought a little further—and seen that nobody could ever be that thing for anybody—I might have spared Lulu a lot of suffering.
After that night, Elaine and I stopped exchanging glances in class. There was no unpleasantness between us—only a slight lingering discomfort born of embarrassment. Elaine cut her hair off and changed majors at the end of the semester. But I doubt that had anything to do with me.
Nothing Like Gold’s
In Radio Programming and Management, I learned about focus groups and groupthink and leadership skills and the whole clusterfuck of middle management. I learned about money demos and TSL and cume. I learned about market research. Units. Trends. Quarterlies. Above all, I learned to abhor the entire concept of management. Didn’t they know that no amount of formulating could ever create the magic of Vin Scully or Jaime Jarrin or Bill Balance? Didn’t they see the futility of all their research and marketing? Were they trying to kill the poetry? Were they trying to silence the beautiful voices? You couldn’t teach radio any more than you could teach philosophy. It wasn’t a doctrine, it was an act. Thank heavens for Gerard Smith for understanding that. Gerard didn’t teach philosophy, he inspired it. His clogs walked on air, high above the vagaries of day-to-day life. Even Sartre could not deflate his billowy sleeves. Never mind that humanity was condemned to futility, that life was irrational, and being absurd. Never mind that suicide was the only question. To hear Gerard Smith contemplate the tenets of existentialism, to see him spinning circles in the dead grass under a slate-gray sky, waving his arms about like semaphore flags, you’d have thought he was contemplating the Nutcracker, not suicide. To Gerard Smith, the turgid prose of Bergson rang like a boys’ choir. Croce’s Filosofia dello Spirito was to be sucked on like a Lifesaver until the tongue cleaved it into two even crescents and it disintegrated in the heat of your mouth. Philosophy really floated his boat. And why not? Why not occupy your mind every waking moment with loftier questions than Which way is the bathroom ? and What the hell’s buried in Al Capone’s vault? Why not celebrate the fact that we’re not condemned to the mental life of a saltine cracker? Gerard Smith made a philosopher out of me.
In the afternoons, as Eugene and Joe served out the last of their tenure at Fatburger, I prepared for the grand opening of Hot Dog Heaven: I scrubbed and shined and organized. I phoned distributors, hung junk-store prints of Coney Island behind the counter for atmosphere, painted a sandwich board, repainted the menu board. And this work was altogether different from my toils at Fatburger. I was building something in the emptiness, defining it, giving it context. In the evenings I came home tired, but deliciously so. I ate udon noodles. I slept. If I dreamt at all, it was only in those moments right before sleep, when I willfully dreamt of Lulu. I woke up shortly before midnight, drove groggily to the station, and worked as the overnight producer until 6:00 AM, where I answered phones, screened requests, drank coffee with nondairy creamer, catalogued music, organized the refrigerator, and tended to all the other glamorous enterprises that populate the life of a radio producer. Sometimes I studied Anthropology or English Lit. Sometimes I fell asleep with my face in a book in my wainscoted cubicle, which, being in the basement with the rest of the station, was really more of a catacomb, windowless to the outside world.
A shaggy-haired kid named Nate Obergottsberger was the overnight host to whom my production expertise was assigned. I spent countless hours at my post by the board, watching Nate through the glass. His head was gigantic, like the moais of Easter Island. He could barely get his cans on, distending the headset so far beyond capacity that the phones never sat flush on his ears. His forehead was greasy, greasier than mine. You could almost see your reflection in it. Night after night I watched him in his little terrarium, punching carts and leafing through stacks of CDs and records.
Four times an hour Nate did spot sets and station IDs. This he managed, just barely. But once every hour he was forced to read the events calendar, an endeavor that accounted in large part for his greasy forehead. The task was a source of great anxiety to him—the very thought of it set him to pacing in his terrarium. It was unsettling to behold. And even if he read the calendar every hour for the rest of his life, it seemed the chore would never get easier. He had no gift for gab. Worse, he seemed to have no aptitude. He lacked radio instincts almost as much as he lacked good pipes. His voice neither resonated nor cut. It was wholly without texture. His cadence varied between faltering and spasmodic; at times words tripped out of his mouth and tumbled down stairwells, while at others they didn’t come out at all—they just froze trembling at the top of the stairs. His chair was always squeaking in the background.
Nate constantly repeated himself, ending sentences with the same word or phrase with which he began them.
“Sub Pop Records released the EP last November on Sub Pop Records.”
“Thursday marks the third consecutive week of our tribute Thursday.”
“We began our set with a release from The Melvins, who began our set.”
Nate’s saving graces were two: One, his speech impediment, a slighty lazy S, lent him a degree of pathos (or as he himself would say, pathoth), and two, he loved the music—he had an encyclopedic knowledge of it, and a genuine appreciation for those who created it. Nate simply didn’t understand the concept of projection. He lacked the ability or desire to voice his enthusiasm, assuming, perhaps, that the music would do it for him. More importantly, he did not grasp the concept of illusion, the ability to generate enthusiasm about anything at will—music, carpet cleaner, boiled eggs. Creating this illusion was an indispensable skill to the broadcaster, whose livelihood demanded that he make Grunt Truck sound like Stravinsky, and the campus blood drive sound like Mardi Gras. Nate made Grunt Truck sound like Grunt Truck. He made the campus blood drive sound like the campus blood drive.
Lastly, there remained the problem of Nate’s brand. The brand was all-important. A catchy handle went a long way. Nobody named Kemal Amin Kasem ever hosted American Top 40. And Shadoe Stevens commanded a whole lot more attention than Ted Pritchard. For months, as his friend and producer, I beseeched Nate to change his last name.
“Obergottsberger doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue,” I observed. “It sounds like a neurological disorder. Obergottsberger’s Disease. What about Nate Mars, or Nate at Night? Something sexy, something mysterious.”
But Nate wouldn’t budge. Obergottsberger was the name God gave him. And besides, with a name like Obergottsberger, he’d never have to worry about making a big name for himself.
Hot Dog Heaven
A one-celled organism changed my life. Lulu would say that was a metaphor. I’d say it was an accident. But it happened. It was presumably a one-celled dinoflagellate that infected the habitat of the razor clams Nate Obergottsberger ate at a restaurant in Pismo Beach on a Monday afternoon in early June, 1991, that changed my life irrevocably. By the time Nate arrived at the studio, minutes before airtime, he was feverish, sweating, clutching his gut. He went straight for the altar and spent the better part of his shift there—passing clams out one end or the other. Goggle-eyed, pea-green, and stammering, with puke on his shirttail and toilet paper stuck to his shoe, Nate managed to plod and falter his way through all of his spot sets. It was a heroic performance. He didn’t sound any worse than usual. But the top of the five o’clock hour caught him off his guard.
“You gotta do the calendar, man, you gotta. I’m gonna bust, man, I’m gonna bust,” he groaned. His forehead was filmy, even by Nate standards. Sweat was beading on the end of his nose. His eyes were like squashed beetles.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” I said.
Fifteen seconds to airtime. A cold hand gripped my heart. I’d spoken once before on the air. Once! Nate had asked me during the calendar to confirm a date, and over the talk-back from the control booth, I’d said: “Yeah, April 10th.” That was it, the sum total of my on-air experience, Yeah, April 10th.
Five seconds to airtime. I wanted to disappear. But something happened when I sat behind the mic: My fear went away. My throat opened up like it had a will of its own, and my voice streamed out like the Blue Danube Waltz. My diction was flawless, my cadence was harmonic perfection, and the words danced and pirouetted off my tongue and into the mic. And it didn’t even matter that Tad was playing at The Cat Club, or The Roxy was giving a benefit show on May 23rd—I might as well have been talking about the flight of the albatross, or the splendor of the Leonids—because it was all about the voice, the dazzling, hypnotic voice.