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 once in his worthless life, he was listening to the show to make sure we didn’t do anything stupid, and you go berserk on the air.” He shook his head and picked up his beer. “He was not happy when he talked with me.”

Allie rolled back over and buried her face in her pillow. “Good. Maybe you’ll get fired. Then you won’t have to worry about success anymore, and you can stop screwing up my life and the lives of those around you by playing Nazi music.”

“That does it.” Charlie picked up his pillow and stood up, pulling the quilt with him.

“Hey!” Allie sat up and grabbed for the quilt, but he was too fast for her.

“If you want me, I’d be on the couch,” he said over his shoulder.

“I may never want you again,” Allie yelled after him.

“Ha.” He turned to look down at her superciliously from the door. “You’ll probably be out on the couch with me by morning.”

“Ha yourself, you yuppie scum. Don’t hold your breath waiting. Your brain needs all the oxygen it can get.”

Charlie slammed the door behind him, and Allie flopped back down in the bed, put the pillow over her head and screamed with fury and frustration.

7

Allie moved behind the scenes at the University of Riverbend campus the next day, making sure there were plenty of bumper stickers and station programs to hand out, that nobody hot-wired the sound system while Stewart slept in the back of the station van, and that none of the cassettes disappeared or were mysteriously wiped clean of music. If somebody was out to get them, she wanted to be there first.

The entire time she kept an eye on Charlie, studying him to make optimum use of future public appearances. She wasn’t sure she was ready to forgive him, but she’d been relieved the night before when an hour after he’d stormed out of her bedroom, he’d come back, tossed his pillow on the bed and threw the quilt over her. “I figured you were cold without the quilt,” he’d said and climbed in beside her. “Ha,” she’d said, but she’d snuggled her back up next to his just the same.

Now, she watched him charm the crowd and felt her anger fade completely. Natural charisma, she decided, watching him lean over the portable broadcast counter to smile at a coed who was waving a bumper sticker for him to sign. Most of these kids didn’t know who he was, since Tuttle graft was not uppermost in their minds as entertainment value. They’d just wandered by to pick up those dumb bumper stickers and stopped to listen to him as he sat slumped in his chair with his feet on the table. Charlie’s patter was completely off the cuff and off the wall. It took a really focused person to ignore him, and not many college kids were focused on a Saturday afternoon.