Lunar Descent (26 page)

Moss was looking distinctly uncomfortable; his next pause went longer than the usual two-second delay. This wasn't a situation out of which he could easily bluff his way.
Like I said, Les … if this was something I could rubber-stamp myself, I'd do it in a second. Your people would have their bonuses with my blessings
.

“Bonuses
and
reinstatement of production risers
and
shipment of nonessentials,” Lester pointedly reminded him. “You've got a lot of promises to keep, sport. They're not going to be very happy if you dump 'em like this.”

Moss's eyebrows rose. His mouth turned into a lopsided grin.
Hey, it ain't just me. You're the one who took it to them. I'm a quarter of million miles away … nobody's going to throw a plate of food at me during dinner in the mess hall tonight
.

Riddell sucked in his breath. “They won't do that. They know who makes the decisions around here. Besides, you're not dealing with children up here.” No point in telling him that he had just broken up a fight over who got to watch something on TV. Lester shook his head and held out his hands. “C'mon, Arnie, level with me for once. Who do I have to talk to in order to get a straight answer about this? Ken? Rock? It's a simple goddamn decision, for chrissakes.”

Again, a longer-than-necessary pause.
It's Crespin and Chapman and all the rest of the board. They've got to review your production figures, and you know what that takes. Meetings, memos, departmental reports, more meetings … you know this is a bureaucracy. Takes time to get anything done. You're acting like my kid when it's allowance day and he wants his five dollars
.

“What do you make your boy do?” Lester shot back. “File a one-hundred-page report on how many fetal pigs he's dissected in biology class?”

Moss grinned.
No. He's just got to show me his report card
. The grin faded.
There's also the matter of the tug your pilot crashed, and the missing Spam-cans. They're not satisfied with the final report you made. Look … I know and they know the Vacuum Suckers were behind that whole thing, but they were counting on you to prove it. You gave us this song-and-dance about a faulty electrical system and pilot error and stray telemetry signals, and maybe it was enough to get NASA off everyone's backs, but the guys upstairs are still pissed off about the whole thing
.

“So they're pissed off. Who cares? That was six weeks ago. The piracy stopped, didn't it? And besides, it doesn't have a thing to with the six-week production quota and the bonus situation. I've just about …”

Again, Lester stopped and took a deep breath. He wasn't getting anywhere by getting tough with Moss; he should have realized that his old buddy didn't intimidate easily. Time to try a little old-fashioned groveling. “C'mon, Arnie,” he begged. “Tell me something I can take back to these guys. You're right … it's allowance day, and the kids want their bucks. Maybe you aren't able to give me a straight answer right now, but at least tell me
when
you can give me something concrete. Next week? Two weeks? Monday? What?”

Moss sighed and looked away from the camera, apparently lost in thought. Finally he looked back at the screen.
I'll give you a call soon, Les
, he said slowly. Despite the inexactitude of his answer, for the first time during their conversation Lester sensed that Arnie was being candid with him.
There's a lot of complicated shit going down here right now and … well, I don't know if I'm at liberty to discuss the details with you
.

Lester frowned; a shiver ran down his back. “Details? Arnie, are you talking about Uchu-Hiko?” He waited; no reply. “Hey, is this something with the Japanese? What the hell is going on down there?”

Moss avoided looking at the screen.
Uh-uh. Nothing like that. Hey, I gotta go. I'll get back to you soon as I know something definite, okay
? He leaned slightly forward in his seat, reaching for the base of his phone.

“Arnie?” Lester said. “Hey, Moss! Don't hang up! What are you trying to …” Then his phone screen went blank, replaced by lines of luminescent type which told him how long the call had taken, the amount of money it had cost, and how much time he had left on his telephone budget. Seventeen minutes on an AT&T comsat, he thought, and not a damn thing resolved.

Lester settled back in his chair, propped one foot up on the edge of his desk, and let his head fall back. Nothing resolved, but something learned nonetheless. Some bad kind of weirdness was coming down the road … but he was damned if he knew exactly what it was.

The Mouth of the South (Pressclips.3)

Excerpted from “Hellraiser—Harry Drinkwater, The Last Angry DJ In America” by J.R. Presley;
Rolling Stone,
November 7, 2023:

The radio disc jockey who later became known to fans and enemies alike as the “Mouth of the South” first came to public attention in 2002, when he was a second-year law student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

By his own account, Harry Drinkwater led an unremarkable, even typical, college career: attending classes during the day, studying in his dorm room or in the library at night until about ten o'clock, after which he sometimes wandered down to Elliston Place to indulge in his favorite hobby, watching new session-musician bands try their licks at the legendary Nashville rock venue, the Exit/In. Drinkwater's ambition was to be a public defender in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina; that was his goal until the day he happened upon a student demonstration on the Vandy campus.

“There were about twenty students in front of the president's office,” Drinkwater recalls. “This was right after the Duck River nuke outside Manchester had its near-meltdown, and these guys were protesting Vandy's investment in Southern Nuclear Utilities, the plant's owner. They were actually being pretty peaceful about it—carrying placards, chanting slogans, that sort of thing—but there were about a hundred or so frat boys standing around them. Throwing beer cans at 'em, yelling obscenities, making rude gestures at the girls. I was just standing there—watching, not participating either way—when all of a sudden the frat animals charged the demonstrators and began to beat the holy crap out of them. And because I just happened to be there, a couple of them decided to jump me, too.”

Drinkwater laughs. “So there I am, with one of these neanderthals having me in a full nelson and the other tenderizing my stomach with his fists, and I look up to see [former Vanderbilt University President] Gilbert Gallagher standing in his office window, watching the whole thing and laughing his ass off. And right then I kind of decided it was time for a career change.”

The next day, Drinkwater went to Vandy's student-operated campus radio station, WRVU-FM, and applied for an unpaid position as an announcer. As luck would have it, the station's general manager at the time was Kate Humphrey, who would later become the program director of WJBR-FM in Boston (and one of Drinkwater's many bosses in his career).

“Harry made no attempt to hide what he wanted to do on the air,” Humphrey says. “He wanted a soapbox for his views. But he knew his music, and I was angry about the breakup of the demonstration myself, so once we got him his license and he had been trained, we put him right on the air. The only ground rules I gave him were to say nothing which would break FCC rules or cause the university to shut us down.”

As he would many more time in the future, Drinkwater ignored those ground rules. At almost every stop-set, Harry Drinkwater railed against Gallagher, the university's board of directors, its regents and trustees, the frat system to which a majority of the underclassmen belonged, and anyone else whose stance rankled him. More than once, Vandy's administration attempted to shut down WRVU, only to be stopped either by faculty members or liberal trustees who—despite the fact that they themselves were often categorically attacked by Drinkwater—believed in the student DJ's right to express his opinions.

Although Drinkwater was once attacked in WRVU's studio by a gang of irate fraternity members, he also became a celebrity, both on and off campus. His play-list was his own selection; his choice of music included an eclectic mix of the best oldies as well as the prime cuts of cutting-edge new groups. In comparison to the bland, homogenized play-lists of Nashville's commercial rock stations, Drinkwater's alternative-AOR show was a welcome change. At the height of his career at WRVU, Drinkwater was easily one of the most popular radio announcers in Music City—no small feat for a college jock in a major radio market.

Nonetheless, it was a short career, lasting less than ten months. The FCC suspended the station's license (after Drinkwater called Gallagher “a Nazi motherfucker” on the air) and the former law student was expelled, for bad grades as well as bad attitude. But by then an article on Drinkwater had already appeared in
CMJ
, attracting the attention of Jules Fontana, the general manager of WXKQ-FM in Atlanta.

“We were at the dead rock-bottom of the Arbitron and Birch books,” Fontana recalls. “We had just lost our morning-drive person, and the owner was threatening to fire everyone and switch our format to country. I sorta knew it was a risk to hire Drinkwater, but I figured, ‘Hey, what have I got to lose?'”

Within two months of his expulsion from Vanderbilt, Harry Drinkwater became the new morning announcer at WXKQ. At six
A.M
. on December 1, 2003, Atlanta was rudely shaken out of bed by the Red Hot Chili Peppers' “Nobody Weird Like Me,” followed by a tirade against Santa Claus as being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Coca-Cola. And this was only the beginning.

“God, did I have fun in Atlanta!” Drinkwater cackles. “They're still talking about me there.…” Considering some of his exploits, that's not an idle boast. In his role as an activist-DJ, Drinkwater's favorite gag was to call various Atlanta public officials—the mayor, the chairman of the city council, the chief of police, the superintendent of public works, and so on—at their homes at the earliest possible hour and ask them blunt on-air questions about their jobs. He took a remote-broadcast team to the executive offices of the McGuinness Corporation (the Atlanta-based owner of his old foe, Southern Nuclear Utilities) and camped out in the reception area of CEO Michael Edgerton's office for twelve hours, giving half-hour updates to his audience about the upcoming unscheduled interview, until McGuinness' security staff finally lost patience and threw them out of the building.

He delivered coffee and doughnuts to skyscraper construction crews and did a remote broadcast from the Atlanta sewer system. His guest-shows were also memorable: He asked the sexagenarian former film star Warren Beatty if he was “getting any good ass lately” (“Sure, with your sister” was Beatty's playful response), discussed comic books with Nobel laureate Harlan Ellison, told Ku Klux Klan leader Newt Cahill to “go suck on an exhaust pipe,” and allegedly had sex with Gina LaMotta in the record library during a
long
station break.

During his nine-year tenure, WXKQ steadily rose in ratings and on-the-street listenership. By 2007, it had become the top station in Atlanta, and Harry Drinkwater had become a household name in the Deep South. Yet Drinkwater had simultaneously become a curse to the station's management and ownership. “There's an unwritten code in radio,” Jules Fontana explains, “and that is, ‘Never piss off your advertisers.' Harry knew that code, and he did his best to break it every chance he got.”

Drinkwater didn't spare any company, local or national, that bought air-time on WXKQ. Car dealerships, fast-food chains, soft-drink makers (including the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola), the manufacturers of jeans and pimple cream and condoms, and the U.S. Army—all caught Drinkwater's ire for real or imagined offenses. Until, one day, the ad agencies which represented all these clients collectively went to WXKQ's management and issued a simple ultimatum: “He goes, or we go.” Guess who went?

“Well, I was fed up with Atlanta anyway,” Drinkwater says unconvincingly.

He was quickly snapped up by WJBR in Boston, hired by his old college friend, Kate Humphrey, over the misgivings of the station's owners. Since WJBR's evening format did not allow for on-air interviews, Humphrey thought it was safe to put Drink-water in the afternoon-drive slot. “I told Harry that anything he said was okay, as long as it didn't concern our advertisers,” she says. “He kept his promise … but I forgot to mention sports.”

Within a few weeks of coming on board with WJBR, Harry Drinkwater was regularly attacking a hallowed Boston institution, the Red Sox baseball team, which was currently experiencing one of its worst all-time losing streaks. It's okay for a native Bostonian to dump on the Red Sox, but not for a newly arrived Southerner. After three bomb-threats and the torching of Humphrey's car, Harry Drinkwater was out on the street again.

Harry returned below the Mason-Dixon line, and over the next decade gradually began to work his way through the ranks of FM-rock radio stations. On the strength of his résumé, he was hired by WBNT in Louisville, WCCS in Macon, WDPW in Charlotte, WEUP in Memphis, WNEP in Jackson, WOQQ and WRLT in Bowling Green, and WSST in Shelbyville. In recent years, he has taken on a number of pseudonyms—Marvin Gardens in Memphis, Ben Dover in Jackson, I.P. Freely in Bowling Green. At all these stations, his style has remained consistent. And he has been fired from them all, always for opening his mouth. His average tenure has been twelve months, although in Charlotte he lasted three weeks, and in Memphis he lasted one day (he made fun of the local Elvis Presley tourist industry).

At each station, he played music which fit the appropriate formats, kept the FCC-required logbooks in perfect order, showed up on time for his air-shifts and never missed station meetings, never brought booze or drugs into the studio or invited groupies into the station. He has rarely even been known to argue directly with management or other staff members (“I just quietly disagree,” he says with a chuckle). Almost everyone who was interviewed for the article has described Harry Drinkwater, in terms of his off-the-air behavior, as “polite” or “friendly” or “gentlemanly.”