The Return of the Orange Virgin
by Rob Hunter
Pen Harrington was not drunk. He signed off the radio station at midnight and went home the three blocks to his small apartment and sat at the white enameled kitchen table for an hour staring at an unopened bottle of bourbon. Maybe he should just pack it in and live like Harry Pease. Pen and Harry had discovered one another early-on as kindred souls. They drank beer and wine and shot baskets through a hoop bolted to Harry's leaning outhouse. Harry's sister, Elizabeth, was trying to get him packed away downstate as a nut case. Elizabeth found him an embarrassment—she felt that the privy, beard and bib overalls placed her in a vulnerable position socially. Harry's personal hygiene wasn’t a big plus either. But thus far Harry roamed free and as yet unhindered.
Pen’s digs were in one of the big old carpenter gothic rambles facing the river on the hill just out of town. The maid’s room. Or Mom’s room in the post war years when the owners had money, or maid, or visiting mother-in-law up from Florida for the summer. The room was tacked on the rear just off the kitchen; of Mom, maid, money and kitchen none remained, and the family rented it out. For eight years he had been savoring the little indignities―low pay, no raises―that were the mete and portion of the small-time radio announcer: rude memos from the Bull O’ The Woods, the grinding boredom of working nights at a radio station in a small town where nobody stayed up late. After eight years he had met most of his audience face to face―the night shift at the mill, the police department dispatcher, truckers crossing the bridge to Canada and the hangers-on at the diner where the radio next to the cash register was never off.
Tonight’s memo had been accusatory, abrupt. They always were:
"Remember the paper for the wire service printer
and the ribbon must be changed every night.
The paper ran short last night and I had to go fishing in the trash barrel
for enough old stories to cover the morning casts."
The house next to Harry's had been standing empty for two years. Pen bought it for the tax bill during a three-week bender. The weather had come in through a broken window and heaved the floor but the joists and sills were in good shape. This was all before Pen worked at the radio station. He sold auto parts and was a part-time bartender at the Moose Island Casino. Despite its name the Casino had no gambling, only a marina and a pretentious restaurant with a cocktail lounge. Across the bay in Canada, the leeward side of the nor'easters, Pen saw plywood condominium townhouses rising like mushrooms. The boatbirds nested here from Memorial Day through to Labor Day in a forest of tacky Tudor half-beaming. Time-sharing, two weeks at a time. This was big money, but not smart money Pen felt. Pen knew he would turn over his property at a handsome profit—twenty, a hundred times increase. Biblical numbers. Just wait for the next stock market bubble.
Coming home he had kicked open the unlocked door, stalked to the sink and thrust his head under the running water. The water had an odor of wild raspberries. Strange. Slicking the hair back out of his eyes and trailing water across the linoleum Pen checked the gas stove for leaks. There were none. They were experimenting with a new fluoride treatment. Either that or a tank truck of flavored douche had gone off the road near the reservoir. The bottle had followed Pen from under the sink where it lived with the Lysol, Tydee Bowl and Drano and joined him at the table. Prince, a big yellow Labrador retriever, followed through the open door and with a thud and a sigh dropped to the floor; there was a favorite warm spot by the frost-free refrigerator. Prince kept Pen company nights at work. The night, Pen Harrington’s island in time, his six o’clock beach littered with bottled messages cast into the waters by the daytime workers.
The frustrations had been building up. These notes about procedures and things we must get done tonight, commercial copy for him to record and leave to be played during the day. No one bought time at night.
This night there had been the note from the Bull O’ The Woods and a stack of commercial copy from the sales secretary with a cloyingly sweet note―please do these tonight would you Pen, dear. They start the first thing in the morning. Lisa.
Around nine PM after the network news―live via satellite, big voiced bimbos in New York telling him about the Italian elections and the Texas floods―Pen recited the weather forecast and started an album that would give him twenty minutes at least. With the Moody Blues babysitting the station he felt secure and went down the hall to the production booth and plowed through the stack of commercial copy in one take. He would re-record the spots to cartridge, throwing some inoffensive music under his voice after the next network newsbreak at ten o’clock.
Pen chocked the production room door open again, bullying a carton of teleprinter paper against it with his foot. Quick and slick as a fifty-dollar blowjob, he thought. Pen prided himself on his skills at reading cold copy: a meaningful delivery the first time through, his practiced baritone rhapsodizing the joys of clothing, tires, discount eyeglasses, scanning three lines ahead for syntactic traps, occasionally consulting the stopwatch he held high in his right hand near his plane of vision.
Headed back to the on-air control room, Pen paused to check the ball scores at the Associated Press wire. And froze. The swish-click of a locked groove was repeating from the control room monitor speakers. How long had this been going on?
He tore into the booth to discover the Moody Blues were less than one minute into the side he had started twenty minutes before. That iced it. Someone had been playing his records. That album had tracked just fine only a week ago and now it was fucked. Pen Harrington was the only announcer at WEST still playing records; he was uneasy with the new technology and peppered the night with oldies from the high renaissance of rock’n’roll. There was a comforting solidity in the physical contact with the twelve-inch vinyl. Pen felt at home with the old technology, at home with the night. The day staff played the latest contemporary country and soft rock hits direct from compact disk.
He felt a flush of chagrin rising under his collar. If anybody was listening he could only sound like a fool coming back on after twenty minutes of a repeating record. And it had played all right last Thursday. Pen distanced himself from the offending mantra. He did not speak. He killed the record, played a jingle and started up the music service automation, a chain of CD jukeboxes fired by a microprocessor. This was a programming service the station rented, tiny silver wafers that arrived in the mail, updated weekly, the latest current country and adult contemporary hits rotated by turns. Pen didn’t like this music. Adult Contemptuous, he called it: a prostate massage for brain-dead downeasters, its homogenized, soothing selections culled as the least offensive of the current pop hits sounded great as background music at the stores and in the malls. Elevator music. No balls in the malls, thought Pen, no condoms in the condominiums. It was the mainstay of WEST’s daytime programming.
Cap’n Dan wasn’t choosy and had been happy enough to find a grownup who could read and write. The high school kids―once the backbone of small-market radio—were making 25 cents an hour more at McDonald’s than he was paying and didn’t listen to the station anyway. Pen was usually on time, left the control room neat for the next announcer. He could speak and hear; that was all Cap’n Dan required.
He had hit a locked groove while doing double duty, something that happens to the best of us, Pen rationalized. Except it had happened now and it had happened to him, the kind of gaffe the celestial lottery reserved for the high school part-timers who staffed the station weekends. But what really frosted Pen was there had been no calls. No one, nobody had called the station to ask what the hell was going on. No Mister Mike, WEST’s general manager and only salesman; no Cap’n Dan, WEST’s founder and sole proprietor; no Bull O’ The Woods; no listeners.
No listeners. Ergo: there was nobody listening.
Broke and drunk, then sober again, Pen Harrington had landed the announcing job at WEST. The ebullient, effusive Pen Harrington of the days of summer girls, summer boats and summer money had gone away. When he thought about his house on the ledge at all, it was as a haven with an address where he would receive the government entitlement checks that would start in twelve years if he lived, a roosting place to await the inevitable while inflation nibbled at his monthly stipend.
"Twelve fucking years."
It was a good life all the same: companionship at the diner, crony talk at the hardware store, winter afternoons watching basketball videos with Harry Pease. Testy and reclusive, he had occasional moments of brilliance on the air. The job didn’t pay a lot and, compared with Harry Pease, Pen’s personal hygiene was immaculate. But the night shift kept him isolated. Pen was a lover of women past their bloom, the night waitresses and night-duty nurses about town: lonely women he met through their calls to the radio station while he was at work.
Pen poured himself four fingers of bourbon and replaced the bottle under the sink.
Perhaps it was time to go.
copyright 1993, 2006 Rob Hunter