His loyal men, Allan and EZ, were laughing when he walked in. “Hey boss,” EZ said. Levine did not like to call him EZ, and called him “Ezra,” with a tiny flick of scorn. “Listen to what went down at the dry cleaners.”
This was for a radio ad he’d agreed to produce, Incredible Cleaners. “We’re incredible!” in the booming, joyful tone of the voice-over actor they’d hired had been ricocheting through Studio A for the past two days. They’d used a stringer to interview the owner of the place, and Allan was pasting together a kind of mission statement that would provide a sober balance to the actor’s hysteria. Allan pressed PLAY and Phil Needle heard the shy, reedy voice of this stringer they kept using.
“So, sir, why did you choose the name Incredible Cleaners?”
“
Why the hell do you think
?
”
The crew laughed and cued it up again. Levine smiled widely and guiltily. “How did that happen?” Phil Needle asked.
“There’s nothing usable,” Allan said. “I’ve been trying to cherry-pick for a day now. The whole thing’s like that.”
“Did he realize it was an advertisement for his own business?”
“I don’t know what he realized,” Allan said.
“We shouldn’t use that stringer anymore,” Phil Needle decided.
“Maybe now’s the time for your cross-flowering?”
“What?”
“I’m not using the right word. You know, bees and flowers.”
“Pollination,” Phil Needle said. Leonard Steed had helped him develop an idea that sometime he should surprise a client with a new kind of ad. The ad would be honest. It would have no bells and whistles, no catchy jingles, no statements of purpose. The only sound in the ad would be the testimonial of Phil Needle of Phil Needle Productions, saying that the client needed no bells and whistles, no catchy jingles, no statements of purpose, because the client was so good that Phil Needle of Phil Needle Productions was a customer. Cleverly, Leonard Steed pointed out, the ad had something flying under the radar, an ad buried in the ad for Phil Needle Productions. He hadn’t used this idea yet, but it appealed to him. “
Cross-pollination
is the word. Yes, let’s do that.”
“The thing where you are just going to say you’re a customer?” EZ scratched his nose. “Do you like Incredible Cleaners?”
“Yes, I like them,” Phil Needle said. “They clean clothes.”
“Do they clean
your
clothes?”
“They pay me to produce an ad,” Phil Needle said, “and I use some of my money to clean my clothes, yes.” Incredible Cleaners was across town.
“I guess that’s the American way,” EZ acknowledged.
“
America
.” Allan snapped his fingers. “I had an idea for the America show, another episode we could do. The Olympics. That’s an American story.”
“But it’s boring,” EZ said. “The stories are all the same. All those kids, practicing every day, in honor of some family member who hadn’t lived to see the day.”
Phil Needle knew now why his daughter had quit swimming. She was bored. All she had to do was say so, but maybe she had. He looked at his hands, jealous of the Olympians, the smile they had when they’d just predictably done something real hard real well. “Do we know what we’re calling this America show?” Allan asked him.
“No,” Phil Needle said. “That’s the first issue for the staff meeting.”
“I vote
America, America
,” Dr. Croc said, limping into the studio. As always he was carrying too many bags. He was a fat man, almost as old as Phil Needle, and just looking at his hat Phil Needle wanted to weep. “After the song.”
“You’re late,” Phil Needle said.
“I ran into this guy on the streetcar,” Dr. Croc said, and handed Phil Needle a printed card. “He’s a plumber. He said he’ll always give us a deal, if we ever need a plumber. He won’t rip us off. He wants to be our go-to guy. Today’s consumers like that kind of deal.”
Dr. Croc walked into the office with a go-to guy’s card almost every week. A long time ago, for a short stretch, Dr. Croc had been the host of a briefly somewhat popular morning radio show in New York City. The show was called
The Dr. Croc and Whiskers Show
, and Whiskers was a woman who sounded young and sultry on the air but was actually middle-aged and always eating pineapple slices from plastic cartons. Phil Needle had the occasional fill-in shift in the afternoons, lunchtime dedications that would arrive via fax in the office, and he’d wait his turn, watching Dr. Croc laughing through the soundproof glass, and one night at the opening of some club—“Come buy Dr. Croc a drink!” said the promo—Dr. Croc gave Phil Needle some cocaine.
For a time, drugs made New York City a wondrous sea for Phil Needle, and Dr. Croc was his first mate of appetite and fortune. But in a few months the microphone kept staring at Phil Needle in the booth, and he felt his unreliability creeping out of his skin; there was a look white people shared on the subway, when other people were misbehaving, and the more drugs he took the less often they shared it with him. The elevator was more crowded every day, because of some new business on the floor below, Orthodox Jew after Orthodox Jew pushing Phil Needle against the grimy mirror before finally leaving him all alone in the box for one more floor. It was a sign. He cut down on the drugs over a week’s vacation back in San Francisco visiting his parents, and returned to New York steady enough to convince Dr. Croc, now sober and fired and scared, to work for him at the new company Leonard Steed had convinced him to start, and to meet his wife, almost immediately after finally ending things with Eleanor.
Eleanor.
“We have guys,” Phil Needle said gently to Dr. Croc now, gently and wearily. “We rent this office, Croc. We don’t have to take care of the plumbing.”
“Today’s consumers didn’t know that,” Dr. Croc said, taking the card back. Referring to himself as “Today’s consumers” was a joke he used to do on the air, and he couldn’t stop doing it.
“So, sir, why did you choose the name Incredible Cleaners?”
“
Why the hell do you think
?
”
“I’ll cross-pollinate after the meeting,” Phil Needle said. “You can cue it up for me and I’ll do it in Studio A.”
“This is Studio A,” Allan said blankly.
Phil Needle nodded in agreement. “And right now,” he said, “I want a status report on Belly Jefferson.”
“The interview’s done,” EZ said. “We just need background.”
“I’ll do background,” Dr. Croc said. “I want to learn how. I could do it tonight. You know, they call me Mr. Batteries, because I can run all night, so let me do it.”
“They already call you Dr. Croc,” Levine said patiently. “They can’t call you Dr. Croc
and
Mr. Batteries.”
This was a way Levine kept talking. Phil Needle felt that Dr. Croc wanted to learn more about the craft of radio, and Phil Needle was willing to be a resource. Also, Dr. Croc hardly did anything around the office. “Could he do that?” he asked EZ. “Could he do background?”
“If you tell me more what you need,” EZ said reluctantly, scratching his head. “I put your questions in yesterday afternoon, and Barry finished with the actor last night, so—”
“I told you,” Phil Needle said. “He’s not an actor. We’re not making something up here. It’s an interview with Belly Jefferson. Belly Jefferson was a real person. These interviews actually happened.”
“In the thirties,” Levine said. Phil Needle turned around and looked at her, remembering what Leonard Steed had suggested he say when an employee of his said something he didn’t like.
“Ouch,” said Phil Needle.
Levine stopped smiling. “What?” she said.
“Look, it’s hard to say this, because I’m afraid you’ll take it as criticism.”
She leaned against the wall. The boys exchanged a look. “
Is
it criticism?”
“See what I mean?” Phil Needle said. “This is an important project, Levine. It’s riches for us if we pull it through. I need my whole crew standing with me.”
“You told me you wanted my take on things.”
“I do.”
“Well, it seems strange to me. If you want to tell a genuine American story, why do we have an actor pretending to be this dead blues guy?”
“Belly Jefferson was an American outlaw,” Phil Needle said. “It wasn’t like today, when musicians are always giving interviews.” He waved his hands at a shelf of old episodes of
Riding the Rails.
“This was a rare conversation that Belly Jefferson had with someone from the Smithsonian, but the original audio is not of a quality we want to associate with Phil Needle Productions, and so we’re re-creating the original interview.”
“And you’re saying it takes place at a blues club that’s not even real,” Levine said.
“Fiona’s is real,” Phil Needle said. “I’ve been negotiating with the owners for five days.”
“But you can’t
go
there,” Levine said. “It’s not like Incredible Cleaners.”
All Phil Needle could think of was that he didn’t go to Incredible Cleaners either, but the phone rang before he had to say anything. Thank you, powerful angels in the sky who occasionally do something to help. Levine leaned across Phil Needle to answer it, but their bodies did not touch.
“Phil Needle Productions. Yes, may I ask who—yes. Hey, I thought it was you. How are you? Yes. Yes. Me too. Okay. Yes, he’s right here.” She stopped giggling and put the phone to her chest. “It’s Leonard Steed.”
Leonard Steed!
Phil Needle talked to him every day and still it was like electric pants just hearing the name. “I’ll take it, of course,” said frantic Phil Needle. “In my office. Put him on hold.” Phil Needle ran a hand through his kempt hair and twitched his way back down the hall, past the plant they never moved. Why didn’t they? Why didn’t they? Why didn’t they move the plant to the window like he had once said? “Leonard,” he said, shutting his door with his foot, but he’d pressed the wrong button and tried again. “Steed, how are you?”
Leonard Steed was the somethingth-richest man in the country or the world. He was rotten rich. He lived in a house as big as a house, to which Phil Needle would never be invited, despite several promises of future invitations. He had long hair on the back of his head and no hair in front, just a huge round space over his calm, pretty eyes, where he did his thinking, and long shirts half-unbuttoned that always seemed to be blowing in the wind. He was an outlaw and a rapscallion, a fortune finder and a problem solver, and Phil Needle was very lucky to know him, although Leonard Steed had told him once that all luck was skill.
“Who am I talking to?”
“Phil Needle.”
“Good, good, good. How are you, Needle?”
“I’m good.”
“I’m hoping so. Needle, Roger Cuff let me down.”
Roger Cuff was another man in radio, with a long, shiny yacht he sailed into remote corners of the San Francisco Bay because, he once told Phil Needle in a whiskey whisper at an industry party, his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend liked to scream when he put it in her ass. He was another client of Leonard Steed’s and had an idea for a show Leonard Steed said he liked first best.
“He let you down?”
“Down like the blues,” Leonard Steed said with a staticky sigh. “You know his show idea,
What’s on Your Min
d
? I took a listen to the episode he finished and it’s a no-go.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s wrong with it is that people are apparently thinking about nothing anyone wants to hear. I mean, he found some guy outside a hospital and had him talk for a full forty-five seconds about his wife who was probably going to die. Who wants that? I don’t want that. I want his wife to live, Needle.”
“Of course.”
“I thought a show that asked ordinary people to speak their minds would feel outlaw, you know?”
“Absolutely.”
“And I placed so much confidence in Roger Cuff that I only listened to the show on the way out here, and now I’m out here, Needle, and I can’t give them this. And so I called you because I know you have ideas.”
“
Yes,
I have ideas.” In Phil Needle’s jumpy mind’s eye he saw Cuff’s yacht splitting in half as his ship sailed forward through the foam, Cuff, panicked and desperate, gripping one half of the boat, the girlfriend wet and frantic on the other half. Only time to rescue one of you.
“That’s what I figured, Needle. That’s why I co-produce your shows and why I took you on as a consulting client. Not a lot of people understand this business. It’s not like how it was when I graduated Harvard. Everything’s a dying art now.”
“Don’t get that way, Leonard.” This was a scene they played about once a week, Leonard Steed the despairing king, Phil Needle the inspiring young ruffian. “I just finished my episode today.”
“This thing you won’t tell me about?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Sure, but it’s a show I want?”
“I think so.”
“Don’t
think so
. Answer me. Is it a show I want?”
“Yes.”