Talk (27 page)

“Bob's not angry with you so much as he is disappointed, Stan.”

I said nothing. It sounded like a guilt trip.

“He thought he had you figured out. He told me the night before our studio interview that he thought you were different than the rest of those guys. Since then you've proved him wrong. He never took you for a zealot.”

In our first reunion, it had been all Red State/Blue State analysis. But this time, Susan was making it personal. I bit my tongue and felt for the exterior of the breast pocket of my sport coat, seeking the assurance that the document was still in its place.

She was thinly smiling now, sitting opposite me on the sofa, and not exactly at the other end. She was leaning forward, clutching her drink, and staring right at me with those eyes.

“It was actually Bob's idea that I come to your studio that day.”

I would spend a long time afterwards trying to unravel his motivation. How much did he know? I wanted to ask but she kept talking and I kept listening.

“You ought to be proud of what you've accomplished, Stan.”

“And you as well.”

“I just never took you for a Tea Party guy.”

“So you told me at Delrios.”

She was so close to me that once again, I was aware of her scent. It was the same as I'd remembered, sweet and clean and natural, and it was all I could do not to reach out and touch her. The situation was surreal. Here I was sitting in a beachfront hotel room with a woman for whom I'd pined for more than two decades. In the intervening time, I'd built a career for myself largely based on advice she'd given to me. And now, she was married to a presidential frontrunner.

It was enough to make me quote Don King's
Only in America
. Instead I raised a glass and invoked another name.

“To Willy Blake and American exceptionalism.”

She reciprocated with that same trepidatious smile and continued on.

“Look, Stan. About the religion issue. Bob's Florida detractors have been calling him an atheist for years. He shouldn't be harmed politically just for understanding the Constitution better than his opponents. The easy thing would be for him to just spout out the same bullshit the others do, whether he meant it or not. But instead he's remained intellectually honest.”

Damn she was good. No wonder she'd been a superstar lobbyist. But I spoke up.

“You didn't need to run the risk of meeting me here or at Delrios just to tell me that.”

Susan sipped her wine before speaking.

“Perception matters more than reality in the political world, and if you persist with rumor and innuendo, you're going to do greater harm than you could ever have imagined.”

I said nothing.

“He's a good man, Stan, and I'm here to ask you to focus on something else. Call him a socialist. Crap all over his cancellation of the high-speed rail. Say he's a philanderer, I don't care. Do all those things that guys like you do. But the one thing I'm asking you not to do is challenge his faith. The country can handle the rest, but that will kill him, strange as it sounds.”

The part about “doing all those things that guys like you do” was a kick in the nuts. She was right, of course. But I didn't like hearing it. That was something Debbie would say. Christ, they both saw me in the same light.

So I drained my Jack mini. Then I said something that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the room.

“I'm thinking there is more to all this than some esoteric debate about the Establishment Clause.”

Her expression changed, and her dismissiveness was suddenly replaced with a clenched palate that told me I'd struck a nerve. Those green eyes drilled down on me with an intensity that made me nervous, and I scratched my chest because I wanted to confirm again that I held the goods.

“You hinted at that on the phone,” she said. “Cut the crap, Stan. What is it that you think you've got?”

“Well, I don't really give a shit about whether your husband repeats some senseless sound byte about Judeo-Christian roots,” I began, temporarily stepping out of Stan Powers' persona. “But if someone has made an intellectual investment in a belief system that is beyond fantastical—some might even say crazy—that would seem to reflect on their fitness for office, no?”

Susan did not immediately respond. But her body language told me that this was not the same confident, political gunslinger who'd sat across from me in Delrios. Instead I was increasingly convinced that the document inside my pocket was legitimate and that she knew her husband could never sustain its publication. America might have elected its first Catholic president and its first black president, but the election of a Scientologist was 95 million years away—coincidentally the same amount of time that the universe has existed according to L. Ron Hubbard. While Americans were willing to suspend disbelief when it came to their own faith or even other, conventional faiths, I could see no evidence that they were ready to entertain the precepts of Scientology. On the flight home from LA, I'd immersed myself in Janet Reitman's
Inside Scientology
, which pieced together lots of stuff I'd heard over the years but never fully understood. I'm not sure I understand now. But the basic tenets of Scientology—in which humans are believed to be descended from an ancient alien race ruled over by a guy named Xenu—make a virgin birth and resurrection seem staid.

According to Hubbard, we should all forget Adam and Eve because the real story of life on Earth began 95,000,000 years ago when Xenu, the leader of the Galactic Confederation, had been forced to solve an overpopulation problem by mass implanting. He had his hands full with opponents, so he put them inside volcanoes on the prison planet of Teegeeack—what we now call Earth—and wiped them out with hydrogen bombs leaving only the thetans, or souls, of his captives behind. These thetans were badasses. When millions of years later life began again on Teegeeack, the thetans attached themselves to human bodies. Scientologists believe they are the root cause of human problems, and that the only way a man can be saved is by freeing himself from the implanted thetans.

Bob Tobias needed the support of blue collar, Reagan Democrats in places like Ohio and Western Pennsylvania to defeat Margaret Haskel. And there was no way these folks were ready for that kind of culture shock. I'm not sure that people who live in glass houses and believe in things like the parting of the Red Sea or turning water into wine should necessarily throw stones, but still. This would be the death knell for Tobias' presidential hopes if word circulated to Duluth and Portsmouth.

Instead of addressing what I'd said, Susan's demeanor changed. The self-assured political wife disappeared and she seemed more like the girl I'd known years ago. And suddenly, she was anxious to fill in a few blanks.

“You know, I thought of you when I went back to FSU. I knew you'd left Shooter's because I called after you were already gone. They told me you'd gone to be a DJ and I was thrilled.”

She was speaking more softly now, and looking straight into my eyes.

“I knew you'd make it, I just never though that politics was your thing.”

I toyed with telling her the story of the format change from classic rock to talk, but decided not to interrupt her. This was the most forthcoming she'd ever been with me and I'd waited a long time for these doors to be unlocked.

“I lost track of you after a while. Then I found out about your success in Pittsburgh when I Googled your name a few years ago and found a mention in the
News-Press
. Only then did I understand that you were working under a shortened name.”

“It's a rock thing,” I mumbled.

“Then I lost you again. I had no idea that you were doing talk as Stan Powers until the rise of the Tea Party when I saw you on TV. I'd actually heard about Stan Powers long before I realized he was you. All the politicos in Florida are familiar with
Morning Power
. You've really come a long way, Stan.”

“So what happened?”

“You mean back then?”

“Yeah.”

“I had some growing up to do. It really wasn't about you. I don't regret a minute of those nights at Shooter's, but I am sorry for how I handled it at the end. You were a good guy. You were owed better than that.”

For years I had felt certain that she didn't even remember, that the abrupt ending of our brief relationship had been something inconsequential for her.

“My one consolation is that I gave you the career advice. I just never thought you'd put your talents to work like this. Someday you'll have to tell me how you went from making the pistol fire to picking presidents.”

The sudden, jarring ringing of her cell phone interrupted the discussion. She looked down, and the nervous expression on her face told me that I should let her handle this in private. Tobias? Maybe he wanted to know what was taking so long.
Or what I knew. A media person? I wasn't sure. But I walked back into my room without saying a word, and quietly closed the door. I sat on the one club chair and looked out at the Gulf, toward Sand Key in the distance. In my mind's eye, I was back on Rt. 41, inside Shooter's, pouring drafts and playing something like Pure Prairie League's “Amie” while trying to track the movements of a younger, smoking hot Susan Miller. So lost in my thoughts was I that I didn't hear the door opening and the footsteps behind me.

“Is it cold enough in here for you, Stan?”

Susan was behind me, buck naked, and apparently prepared to negotiate my silence.

You'd think I'd have been elated to settle that decades-old score with the still gorgeous Susan Miller at the Clearwater Hilton. Actually, I was miserable in the weeks that followed. First, I'd betrayed Debbie. It was one thing to mind-fuck an old flame. It was quite another to actually do it. No, Debbie and I weren't married, but she deserved better from me than that. She was smart. She was sexy. She had a great career. She came from a nice family. And as far as I knew, she'd never betrayed the trust I'd placed in her. I was proud to walk into any room with her and was always aware of the roving eyes of the many guys who'd immediately cast their gaze upon her. She wasn't deficient in any demonstrable way. I was. I'd been walking around with a 20-plus-year hard-on that wasn't worth it. Never is. And I'd allowed that and my obsessive desire to get syndicated to let me take her for granted and discount her advice, which I knew to be valid. Because even though Debbie wasn't in the loop about most of my day-to-day decisions, everything she had warned me about was coming true.

She had long been telling me that I would not be able to maintain the Sybil-like existence between real life and radio.

“I don't get it, Stan. You're plenty engaging in real life. Why not let your audience see the real you?”

“Because this audience has no time for a slacker from Ft. Myers who likes to blow a few bones and thinks most politicians are full of shit, especially those who live on the fringe.”

“Great. That makes you like everyone else.”

“Everyone
except
those who listen to talk radio. The ‘everyone else' you describe is too busy earning a living, raising their kids, and watching over their elderly parents to sit, fixated, listening to my brand of communication. You don't fucking get it. I work as the caretaker at a clubhouse for conservatives. These are people who once had no place else to go and now have found a home. I might as well try peddling vegan burgers at a Mickey D's. It won't sell.”

We'd go round and round like that. Debbie's perspective was always the exact opposite of whatever Phil Dean recommended and I was convinced hers was a professional death sentence. But now, with the nomination battles over and the summer slogging on, and the spotlight turned on me full bore, my misery escalated.

And the conventions were coming. The Democrats would have their Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the Republicans would follow the next week in Tampa. That left me with little time to sort out a lot of things. For starters, I'd logged a call to Jules to ask him to get the suits at MML&J off my back. The disciplinary action was still outstanding, and if I was selling my soul for the sake of ratings, I wanted resolution. Despite their pleasure with my defense of the Ten Commandments on
Real Time
, not to mention my takedown of the wife swapper in the GOP field, they still hadn't taken my reprimand out of their
file. It was a total passive-aggressive thing that only made me distrust them more. It would not have surprised me to learn that Rod Chinkles had impressed upon his father the need for leverage to keep me ideologically in line until the election was over. After I waited two days, Jules finally called.

“I need you to come to New York in two days,” he said.

It was a Wednesday morning and I'd stayed too long at Delrios with Clay and Carl the night before. I tried desperately to clear the cobwebs from my head as he spoke. I knew immediately that this was important. I'd never even seen the inside of his office. Still, with all that was on my plate, I hesitated at the idea of making a trip just to get him to log a call.