Hardscrabble Road(15)
“What the hell?” Frank said.
Marla was ecstatic. “Don’t you love it? It’s like the Darwin Awards for radio. Sometimes he does stuff from the Darwin Awards, and then he gives them credit. Oh, and plugs their books and their Web site—www.darwinawards.com.”
“The whole show is this?”
“No.” Marla turned the tape off for a moment. “This is the opening bit, where he collects stories of people being stupid from all over the country and then reads them. There’s a section later in the show where he takes phone calls, but that’s not the best part. At the end of the show, every once in a while, probably when he has material, he does stories on local charlatans. Psychics. Alternative medicine scams. Faith healers.”
“He goes after religion?”
“Calm down.” Marla said. “It’s not as bad as you think. He doesn’t go after regular religion, churches, things like that. He goes after these guys who get people to come and pay them money so they can pray over them and declare them well, except the people never are well. You know what I mean.”
“I know that shows like that get absolutely no money and have absolutely no audience,” Frank said. “For Christ’s sake, Marla, what are you thinking? That group up in New York, what’s their names, CSICOP, those people, they’ve been trying to get into radio or television for years, and it’s always bombed flat. People like their illusions. They don’t want to hear that their favorite psychic is an alcoholic fraud who’s using their money to take vacations in Barbados.”
“Listen,” Marla said. “The problem with CSICOP’s stuff is that it’s always too serious. I like CSICOP a lot, I really do, but they’re always dead serious and full of references to I don’t know what, scientific protocols and things. Most people get bored with that stuff and won’t follow it, and a lot of people can’t follow it. But that isn’t what Mike Barbarossa does. What he really is is debunking for the same audience that listens to Drew Harrigan, well, some of them, plus a lot of guys in the same situation who can’t stand Harrigan. The guys we’ve never been able to reach before. What Mike Barbarossa does is to make those guys feel smarter than the idiots around them and smarter than the kind of PhD that falls for this sort of nonsense. It’s perfect. And Mike Barbarossa is perfect. Listen to that voice.”
Marla pushed the play button again.
Mike Barbarossa said, “Now we come to the case of Mr. James Burns, of Alamo, Michigan, where they have one of those little liberal arts colleges you can never figure out why anybody goes to them. Mr. Burns was trying to fix his truck one night. He’d been hearing a niggling little noise, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. So what Mr. Burns did was to get a friend of his to drive the truck out to the Interstate while he hung on underneath it and listened. They found his body wrapped around the drive shaft.”
“Oof,” Frank said.
Marla turned the tape off again. “It’s good stuff, Frank, and it will work. At least let me call this guy and ask him if he’ll send me an audition tape. It won’t cost us anything, it won’t cost him any more than a FedEx package, we’ll have better quality sound. We can have him on the network in a month and on the syndication list in three. It won’t matter if Drew Harrigan has to go to jail for life. We’ll have a backup. And a good one. Listen to me, Frank. I think this is the coming thing.”
Frank actually did appear to be listening. Marla had to give him that. Just to make the case stronger, she turned on the speaker and let the voice of Drew Harrigan’s stand-in host flow through the room. Except that the voice didn’t actually flow. It sort of dripped. It sounded like the man had sucked on a helium balloon.
“Turn it off,” Frank said. “You’ve made your point.”
“I can call him?”
“Go right ahead.”
“I can tell him we’re looking for a headliner?”
“Isn’t that pushing it?”
“Maybe, but I’m going to tell him. Trust me, Frank, this will work. And we’ll all feel better about it. You don’t like Drew Harrigan anyway. He’s a pompous windbag and a pain in the ass to work with. I don’t like Drew Harrigan. He’s a walking threat of a sexual harassment suit, if nothing else. And the techies don’t like Drew Harrigan. You’d think these people would realize that you just shouldn’t piss off the staff, but they never do. I’m going to go make a phone call to Seattle.”
“I’m going to go have some more coffee,” Frank said. “Do you remember when you hired Drew Harrigan? I told you at the time that we’d come to regret it.”