After Midnight (11 page)

Arthur Hoyt’s last broadcast on March 28, 1984, has since morphed into Radioland legend, along with Uncle Don’s “little bastards” comment and Harry von Zell’s comic mispronunciation of Herbert Hoover’s name. The entire two hour show (three hours on a regular night) has been posted somewhere on Youtube.com and the broadcast has been profiled in several books and on dozens of websites devoted to urban legends.

It simply amazes me how the myth’s persisted. It’s taken on a life of its own. No matter what I or anyone else who was there that night says, it will never die.

For almost thirty years we’ve pretended it was a hoax, that we were injecting a little dark humor into a somber night. Well, I’m done lying, I’m sick of it. At the time it seemed like the best thing to do, but in retrospect it really wasn’t. We got together over beers and decided it would be better if we looked like a band of morbid pranksters than liars or worse. Little good that did us. We all still lost our jobs, and the media industry blacklisted us. Everyone knew our faces from the papers and the nightly newscasts, and we all became pariahs. It took me four years to get back in the biz, hosting a metal show at a small-wattage station in Newport News, and I only got the job after the boss extracted a written statement from me that I wouldn’t pull any “funny business” like Hoytgate.

I’ve come a long way since then. I host a nationally syndicated conservative talk radio show, on before Rush Limbaugh in most markets, and have written
several bestselling books. But the Hoyt affair still haunts me today. Sometimes at night, as I lay with my fingers laced behind my head, I look into the darkness and wonder if it actually happened. But even then I know it did. I lied to the world, and that was hard, but I can’t lie to myself.

Arthur Hoyt was a walking controversy from his first day on the air in 1962. He got fired and driven out of cities every year or so and one time even spent a few days in jail on obscenities charges in Atlantic City (he was doing a show with Lenny Bruce, and wasn’t about to let some pinko commie bastard upstage
him
).

But that none of that ever really hurt him.
He was always the most popular radio host no matter where he went or what he did. Remember, all this was
long
before Howard Stern and The Grease Man, and people had never heard anything like it. He was the original rude, aggressive, shrill, crass smartass. He was so big, a lot of guys tried to emulate him, but they could never get his sound and style right. A few are still in local radio, but no one really knows or cares who they are.

In 1969, Hoyt was offered the chance to appear at Woodstock, but he turned it down and supposedly drenched the guy who came to him with a Coke. He was in Tampa then. He got let go in ’71 after dropping the S-bomb, and wasn’t
even out the door when a rep from D.C. asked him to take over the morning drive-time. Hoyt accepted, and did his first show in September.

The problem was
, no one listened. I guess he was too much to swallow that early. He lingered there until ’75, when he was moved to an evening slot. He did pretty damn well, actually, so in hindsight it seems moving him to midnight was a risky move. But to midnight he went in ’78, and there he stayed. He drew an enormous listenership, which exploded when he started taking calls, and in ’81 he was nationally syndicated.

I entered the picture in 1984 as a young intern fresh from a failed tenure in college. I had been in love with radio from my earliest days. I don’t know what
it was about radio, but I was captivated with it and, when I flunked college, I immediately started looking for a crack in the biz to slide through. I was home for two months before I found it in the paper. I knew going in that I would be a go-fer (go-fer this, go-fer that), but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be a part of the crew in a real live radio station.

             
My day ended officially at three, since I wasn’t on the payroll, but, of course, I hung around, usually staying until after midnight. Some of the afternoon guys were cool enough to let me sit in while they broadcast. John and Mike, who did their show from 5 to 7:30, never did more than let me watch from the production booth, where I was a giddy child surrounded by wonders greater than anything Willy Wonka had to offer. But Joe and Dukes, who spiced up the Washington region’s dull evenings with commentary, stories, jokes, stunts, and the hilarious like from 7:30 to 11:30, actually had me
on their show
a few times, mainly to poke fun at me on slow nights.

I usually left this heavenly world at 11:30 with Joe and Dukes, because Hoyt would blow like an A-bomb if he came in and had to suffer my shiny, unlined mug peering wide-eyed from the production booth. My day pretty much ended when Joe and Dukes left, but I was always reluctant to return to my trashy little apartment
in Southeast, so I would stay on for the first half hour or so of Hoyt’s show.

That night, Joe and Dukes were hosting some kind of special or something, and their time slot was generously expanded to twelve, replacing the half hour newscast that separated theirs and Hoyt’s shows. It was about five after midnight when they finally left the studio. I was in the lobby in a thin, uncomfortable waiting room chair listening to rock ’n’ roll on my transistor radio and gazing at the portraits of popular radio personalities, past and present, which lined the gray walls.

They passed me by, mumbling something and snickering, one (Joe) a plump meatball, the other (Dukes, of course) a tall, black-headed pretty-boy type.

“Take it easy, Eddie,” Joe said without turning his head; as he walked his double chin jiggled like Jell-O.

“See you tomorrow, Ed,” Dukes said, jerkily glancing at me as if I were nothing more than a homeless man on the street, and he ashamed to pass by without a dime or a quarter for my grubby, outstretched hand.

“See
ya, guys,” I eagerly ejaculated, hating the juvenile quality of my voice.

Not too long after they left, as
Krokus was “Screaming in the Night” on 96.9, the elevator doors
pinged!
open and Hoyt came
click-clacking
down the marble hall, dressed in dirty slacks and a tan trench coat, shoulders black from the pouring rain outside. His face, as usual, was tightly puckered, as if he’d just gone down on a lemon.

He passed briskly by in a swish of gin-and-ashtray smelling air which made me retch, barged into the
studio, and slammed the door so hard that it quivered fearfully in its frame.

I sighed. He was in a
really
bad mood, just great. I hoped to God that he wouldn’t come out into the hall before I left. He usually didn’t, but when he did he always glared at me like I had killed his mother.

Not too long after Hoyt arrived
Johnny Marcus and Nadine Mann came strutting down the hall like they were God’s gift to humanity. They passed me, softly discussing something, and disappeared into the break room. They regularly appeared on Hoyt’s “Today’s Panel,” where various topics were debated, lampooned and disparaged. Johnny was tall and wiry with wavy brown hair and tiny glasses, and wore the same tweed jacket with leather patches day in and day out. Nadine was short, midnight black with a bushy afro, and as liberal as they come.

They both wrote op-ed pieces for the
Washington Star
, and spent every waking moment out of the office in each other’s company. Dukes would often say that he wasn’t sure if she was his faghag, or he her dyke tyke.

I switched from 96.9 to 106.7, W.E.F.T., just as Hoyt’s show was beginning. The
news and the weather finished, Hoyt’s theme music swelled, and the canned announcer took off. “Welcome to the freewheeling Arthur Hoyt Show. He’s the devil’s advocate, the Red Chairman, the angry, white, apolitical Elvis, the grand poobah and the FCC’s worst nightmare; hated by the SDS, the KKK, and everyone in-between. Heeeereeessss Arrrtieeeee!”

Over the music, the lemon sour whine of Arthur Hoyt issued forth: “Tonight I’m sore at EMTs, police officers, idiot drivers and wrecked vehicles, so watch out.”

I rolled my eyes; he was always sore at something.

“See, some retard wrapped his car around a telephone pole in front of my building tonight. I was almost late because the inconsiderate slobs who call themselves first responders were clogging up the street taking care of this idiot. Anyway, like I said, I’m mad at the wo
rld, so call up and share – or take – my wrath; no morons need apply.”

After the music finished up and Hoyt did a long monologue about idiots in all parts of society and the world, he took a call from an elderly woman who was enraged at his continued use of the word “retarded” and its der
ivatives, as she had a mentally-challenged son. Though Hoyt kept his language clean, I am uncomfortable repeating the horrible things that he said to the woman.

The next call came from a former cop who fueled Hoyt’s current hatred of medical service technicians by telling him that an EMT friend of his purposefully caused trouble on the highway for a good laugh.

“I knew it,” Hoyt said calmly, after actually
thanking
the cop for his bit of information. “That’s how the sick bastards get their kicks.”

A few calls later, just when it seemed that that situation was over, an irate paramedic from the ambulance garage under the hospital phoned in, offended by Hoyt’s beef with his kind.

“Look, we’re hard-workin’ people. We don’t wanna be out there anymore than you want us out there, but…”

“Why must you block highways?” Hoyt asked.

“Huh?” asked the medic.

“You and your
brethren park right in the middle of the road when you
know
people are trying to get through.”

The medic
laughed, a humorless sound of disbelief. “Where do you want us to park, Arthur,” he asked, “on the sidewalks?”

“Listen here, smartass!” Art spat, “this is
my
show. I won’t have you insulting me!”

“What?” the caller drew, “I didn’t insult you. I called you Arthur…”

“Your tone!” Hoyt shouted. “The tone you said it in.”

For a moment the medic was silent,
then he chuckled. “Look, friend, you need to calm down…”

“Don’t tell
me
anything! I…”

“Why do you listen to him?”

Startled, I turned to see Johnny Marcus standing in front of the break room door, a Styrofoam cup of coffee held loosely in one hand.

“He’s funny,” I replied meekly.

Johnny snorted, “About as funny as rectal cancer. It’s actually sad; he’s a bitter, lonely old man.”

It was an oft repeated rumor around the studio that Hoyt had lost his wife and daughter during the
Andrea Doria
disaster in the mid-fifties. He was supposedly in America waiting for them to come home from a vacation when he was roused from his hotel room and told of the collision. When he found out that his family was dead, he was said to have had had a nervous breakdown, and had never been the same since.

Thinking that he was spewing repressed grief and I was enjoying it the way a
sicko enjoys a
Faces of Death
video, I began to feel a hot rise of shame.

Having spoken more words to me than he ever had before, Johnny Marcus returned to the break room, happy to leave me with my guilt. But the show rolled on and, dead family or not, it was one of the best I had ever heard. Once, a young man roughly my age called in and actually fulfilled Hoyt’s request to start a fight with his ill-tempered mother. Even he laughed genuinely at that.

But his negativity soon reasserted itself when a black man called in and accused him of being an old racist, and was affirmed when an airhead valley girl phoned in and giggled at his insults until his voice shook with rage.

Finally, Hoyt needed a breather and went to commercial. I sat the radio aside and stood, a hot cramp rising in my leg. I stretched, yawned, and shambled up the hall to the bathroom near the elevator. When I stepped in one of the overhead lights flickered with an electric sound, and went out. For a split second I was hesitant to enter the horror movie atmosphere, but shook that away and did my business.

Done, I hobbled over to one of the sinks, drew cold water, cupped my hands under the flow, and splashed it against my face. I looked up at myself in the smudged mirror, my face pale and my eyes pink.

I needed sleep, but I hated going home. I was happy all day at the station, but when I got home my mood always darkened. I
hated
my dingy little apartment, the cold look of it, the dank smell of it, the…

I was startled from my thoughts
when the bathroom door slammed open against the wall. I jerked as though shot and spun my head around; for a moment I didn’t even recognize Johnny Marcus in the threshold. He looked puzzled at me, as if I couldn’t have been more out of place, and seemed to shake himself out of a trance. He rushed past me to the urinal closest to the far wall. I watched as he flung his tie over his shoulder, unzipped his pants, and went about his business.