Hardscrabble Road (7 page)

She would remember what night the election was on, because so many of the people she managed cared so much about elections,
and so many of the programs she handled wound themselves around election results when the time came. She looked on them the
way she looked on Oscar nights and the nights Miss America was crowned. It was the contest that mattered. Contests created
conflict and conflict created narrative drive and narrative drive created radio programs people wanted to listen to, and if
people wanted to listen to your programs, advertisers wanted to advertise on them. It didn’t even matter if the conflict was
controversial, or what kind of controversial it was. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern both made a lot of money.

Now she looked at the pile of papers on her desk and bit her lip. It was cold. There was a draft from the window at her back.
Every time the pane rattled in the wind she could feel needles of ice running up and down her spine. Her story was simple,
uncomplicated, and mostly (she thought) uninteresting. She had grown up in a suburb of Lehigh in a family that had been well-off
enough that she’d never really thought about money, but not as well-off as the families of the two doctors and three lawyers
in town, whose daughters sent away to New York for handbags and panty hose from Lord & Taylor. She had worked hard at school
and gotten good grades, because that’s what you did. It was your job, and it was important to be conscientious at your job.
She had joined the school newspaper and later the school yearbook staff. It was a matter of getting up every morning and doing
what you were supposed to do. She knew that she was neither a genius nor an
idiot, in the same way she knew that she was neither a beauty nor a beast. She had friends without being popular, a place
on the honor roll without being valedictorian, was good for a game of basketball in gym class without being athletic in a
way likely to get her noticed by a scout from one of the bigger universities. When the time came, she had gone off to Gettysburg
College, one of those good enough schools that were not quite up to being first tier, never mind Ivy League. On the day she
graduated, she was like a thousand other girls at good-but-not-great colleges from one end of the country to the other. The
only thing she had going for her was that steady conscientiousness that was the closest she had come to finding a moral center
to her life. Other people debated the existence and definition of good and evil. Marla did not debate. She only insisted—for
herself as well as everybody else—that work get done when it was supposed to and as it was supposed to, that records be kept
with thoroughness and care, that letters and phone calls be answered within the day if at all possible, and that no problem
be left unattended until there was time to attend to it. Marla Hildebrand hated procrastination.

At the moment, she also hated Drew Harrigan, and this Markey person, and every single lawyer in the city of Philadelphia.
If she had been susceptible to migraines, she would have gotten one. As it was, her teeth hurt. Conscientiousness buys you
things. She didn’t know when she’d first understood that, but it had been a long time before she’d landed at LibertyHeart
Communications, and what it had bought her at the moment was the fact that she was the youngest network programming executive
in American radio. She was so young that there had even been speculation in the trades that she’d only gotten this last promotion
because she was sleeping with Frank Sheehy, the president and CEO and chairman of the board and founder—which was a good damned
trick, since Frank was as gay as she was straight and made no secret of it. When she surfaced long enough to consider conditions
in the real world around her, Marla sometimes wondered how Frank got away with it. You would have thought Drew Harrigan’s
devoted fans would have had a hissy fit long ago about his show being carried on a network that belonged to a “pervert,” but
they never did. It made Marla think that she must have it a lot more right than the talking heads she saw on CNN on the odd
night she decided to tune it in. Nobody really cared about any of the stuff they said they cared about. They only said they
cared about it to give themselves something to do, and keep from being bored.

Personally, Marla preferred to stave off boredom with steak, wine, chocolate, and a good mystery novel, but it was probably
a good thing other people didn’t agree with her, because if they did there would be no Liberty-Heart Communications for her
to run the programming for.

Of course, if this kept up, there might not be any LibertyHeart Communications
to run the programming for anyway. That was why Frank was sitting on her couch—all right, lying half off it and half on it—and
she was pawing through reports at six o’clock in the evening. She had been in the office since before six in the morning,
and it was time to go home.

“I just can’t believe that so much of our income depends on one man,” Frank said. “I mean, he’s only one man. Granted, he’s
the size of a house, and he probably takes up two seats on any airplane he flies on that he doesn’t actually own, the principle
remains the same. Was that smart of us, relying so much on one man?”

“We didn’t do it on purpose, Frank. We were putting together a lineup, we were putting together a network, we were putting
together a syndicate, and along came Drew.”

“Do you ever wonder about that? I mean, he’s got nothing to speak of. No credentials. The level of his commentary barely rises
to the standard of a high school debating team—no, he’d get kicked off a high school debating team. He spends too much time
shouting. Whatever made Drew Harrigan the biggest thing on radio since rock ’n’ roll?”

“The same thing that made Father Coughlin the biggest thing on radio since radio, back in the day when Father Coughlin was
a force to be reckoned with.”

“Meaning racism and xenophobia?”

“Meaning that radio reaches a downscale audience,” Marla said, blocking out the thought that she’d already had to explain
this at least a dozen times over the years. “The kind of people you never met at Princeton. Or, what was it?, Andover—”

“—Exeter.”

“Same difference.”

“We don’t think so.”

“Everybody else does. Trust me, Frank. Anyway, it’s a downscale audience. Mostly white men in blue-collar jobs or, worse,
who’ve lost them. Guys who are worried about making the next car payment and worried about making the rent and worried about
the state of their credit card bills. Guys who wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and find themselves staring straight
into the face of a loser.”

“And Drew is what? One of their own?”

“Sort of.”

“You’d think they’d all be socialists.”

“They aren’t ‘ists.’ They don’t go that far. They just know that they’ve got to put up with being embarrassed every single
day, and it’s always by the local doctor or lawyer or professor at the community college, the guys who went and got the education
they didn’t get and probably couldn’t have
gotten because they didn’t have the academic talent, those guys. And they hate them. They truly hate them.”

“So the whole phenomenon runs on hate.”

“The whole phenomenon runs on resentment. Drew makes them feel real. He says what they think and says it’s okay and makes
millions of dollars doing it. They feel like they’re getting their own back. I think of Drew as an addiction. When they can’t
have him, they get depressed. They go into withdrawal.”

“And they haven’t abandoned him because of the, ah, legal trouble?”

“You mean, because it turns out he’s been broadcasting high for the last three years? No, of course not. Half of them think
he’s the victim of some left-wing plot. All of them have or have had alcohol and drug problems of their own. They sympathize.”

“Then I don’t understand. Why are we having a problem with the numbers?”

“Well,” Marla said, “think of it this way. Their addiction is to Drew, not to right-wing politics. Oh, some of them have an
addiction to right-wing politics, and those people will go on listening no matter who’s putting out the message. But most
of these guys want Drew, personally. And Drew isn’t here. Drew is in rehab.”

“And they don’t like his replacement?”

“We’ve had three replacements in three weeks. None of them has gone over, and I don’t think any of the others we’re going
to try will. Drew is a true phenomenon. He’s practically sui generis. Even Limbaugh doesn’t generate the kind of blind loyalty
he does. Our numbers are off by fifty percent since the day Drew announced the drug thing, and that isn’t the worst news.
The worst news is that they’re still falling, and they’re falling fast.”

Frank thought about it. “But it’s temporary, isn’t it? Drew will be out of rehab, in, what, forty days?”

“Forty-two. I’ve got the replacements doing a countdown. But Frank, you’ve got to face some facts. One is that even though
Drew may get out of rehab, he may not be available to work right away. Or if he is, maybe not for long.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that the DA isn’t going to let this go. He can’t let this go. People would scream bloody murder. He’s going to have
to prosecute.”

“But there won’t be a trial,” Frank said. “There never is in cases like this. There’ll be a plea bargain. I know Drew is stupid,
but he’s not stupid enough to go to trial and risk getting sent to a penitentiary.”

“No, he’s not. But the DA still has that problem, and my guess is that he’s going to insist on Drew doing at least some jail
time. The Feds won’t.
No matter which side is in power when the time comes to do something about Drew’s case, they’ll back away. The Republicans
will do it because they don’t want to slam one of their own. The Democrats will do it because they don’t want to be accused
of playing politics. But the DA, Frank, the DA is stuck between a rock and a hard place. He’s going to have to insist on something
serious. Especially if he’s going after Sherman Markey. I mean, how would it look—you stick the addled old homeless guy in
jail for delivering the drugs but you let the rich celebrity go free because you think he’s a victim?”

“Crap,” Frank said.

“I’ve talked to the legal department. They say we should get ready for at least ten months’ incarceration when this all shakes
out.”

“Worse crap.”

“I know. You’re right, by the way. We shouldn’t be relying so much on just one man, and the fact that we do goes a long way
to explaining the fact that we aren’t bigger than we are, when we should be. And I think that it would definitely be a good
idea if we started looked around to expand our roster, maybe even expand our scope.”

“You mean actually hire liberals for once? Can’t be done. Most of them can read.”

“I meant looking into shock jocks. But in the meantime, we’ve got a big problem, and we need to think of something we can
do about it.”

“Have you thought of something?” Frank looked curious.

Marla sighed. “No. Aside from murdering Sherman Markey, I can’t think of anything to do at the moment. We’ve got the replacements
doing the countdown and pleading for the fans to support Drew, which they do; they just don’t want to listen to somebody else.
We’d be better off if Drew could make the pleas for support himself from rehab, but of course if he did that the DA would
land on him and we’d be in the same mess, except there’d be pictures of Drew with a number plate under his chin running in
all the daily papers. But we do need to think of something, Frank, and we need to think of it fast.”

“Are we losing money?”

“Now? No. Most of our advertisers are on long-term contracts. But long-term contracts run out, and they’re not happy. If Drew
does have to go to jail for ten months, we’ll be eviscerated. I mean it. They won’t stand for it.”

“The contracts are all coming due?”

“The contracts all have escape clauses in them. The advertisers aren’t using them now because this is supposed to be a short-term
thing and they don’t want the fans to get mad at them, but they won’t put up with ten months. They really won’t.”

“How would killing Sherman Markey help?”

“What? Oh. It’s what I said. It’s the contrast. The DA can’t be seen to be hounding this poor old man into prison and letting
the celebrity go free. If there was no poor old man to hound, it would be easier to let Drew off, run the process out for
a year or two, and then quietly, when nobody was looking, give him probation. Do you see what I mean?”

“I suppose so.”

“Of course, we could have something really interesting happen and find out who was really getting Drew the drugs, but I’m
not expecting that anytime soon. Doesn’t it bother you any? Who do you think was really procuring for him?”

“Ellen, probably.”

“Ellen can barely procure coffee at Starbucks. Oh, never mind. I’m just fussing now. It will all work itself out in the wash.
But we’ve got the next forty-two days, plus probably another six to eight months after that, to save our asses from this thing,
and we’d better do it. We’re not going to survive as a network or a syndicate with only one property.”

“I know,” Frank said. He stood up. “Do you know what I wanted to do when I started this network? I wanted to do rock ’n’ roll.
I wanted to be the place that wouldn’t fire Alan Freed. I don’t know if there’s a disc jockey anywhere these days who’s like
Alan Freed.”

“Rock ’n’ roll is a wholly owned subsidiary of global capitalism. Or so says Jig Tyler. There’s somebody you could put on
the air. We’d probably get firebombed by the local militia.”

“I’m going to go find someplace where there isn’t a draft. It’s freezing in here. You should get that window fixed.”

“It’s not broken.”

“It’s letting in cold air.”

Actually, there was a thin film of ice along the bottom of it, right where the pane connected to the frame. Marla started
pulling the papers on her desk into stacks.

“Lucy can do this tomorrow,” she said. “But I don’t want you to go to bed tonight without thinking about this. Thinking about
what you want to do. Come in in the morning and be ready to give me my marching orders on our next step. If you don’t, we’re
all going to be out of work in eighteen months.”