Chapter 2

Stu, Saturday Night: Scratching, Skipping, And Drinking

It’s Friday night and Stu McLundy spins the discs at WTCP. He really does spin discs. He believes he’s the last disc jockey in all of the US of A who still puts the needle on the vinyl, spins the black circle, plays the oldies the way they were meant to be played. In fact, the title of his show - Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy - gives tribute to the best part of listening to records, according to Stu.

Stu McLundy’s a beefy, flabby man who wears sweat-stained blue Seersucker suits and masturbates to the Dawn part of Tony Orlando and Dawn. When he plays a long song, like “McArthur Park,” Stu’s either taking a dump or rubbing one out to the cover of Tony Orlando and Dawn’s Greatest Hits. Despite these personal defects, Stu’s somewhat of a folk hero in Greener Valley. He makes appearances at charity car washes, department store grand openings and the annual Kiwanis Thanksgiving Dinner for senior citizens. When people see him, they say Hey, it’s Scratch and Skip Stu! - though the kids have taken to calling him Scratch and Sniff Stu, thanks to the creeping sweat stains that make Stu smell like a can of old chicken soup. Sometimes they’ll ask him to say something radio-like and he’ll always, without fail, say Stu McLundy here with the greatest hits of the only eras that matter, about to drop the needle on the Defranco Family. “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat.” He says this all smooth and baritone and almost sexy. If you don’t know that Stu McLundy is a fat, sweaty, smelly, sexual pervert of a man, if you’ve never seen him but just heard his voice, you would think he must look like the Marlboro Man in Armani, drinking a martini, shaken not stirred. You might even fantasize about his disembodied voice. 

Stu is, for all intents and purposes, a fat, sweaty, perverted pig. But a well loved pig. The people of Greener Valley love him because they don’t know he’s a pig. He keeps his fantasizing and perversions to himself. He comes off as good natured, even gregarious, and people forgive his sweaty stench and seersucker suits because he plays their kind of music, because he brings the town together with his records and because K-Tel records put out an album called “The Best of Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy” and he went on NPR to talk about it one day, in what was probably the most famous moment anyone in Greener Valley ever had. They finished the segment by playing Stu’s signature song; the much maligned “Heartbeat is a Lovebeat.” It was a swell moment for Stu and all of Greener Valley.

Over at the WTCP headquarters on this particular Friday night, Stu McLundy’s stacking the final few records of the evening, carefully placing the DeFranco Family’s “Heartbeat” on the bottom of the pile, so he can - as always -sign off with what he believes to be the greatest pop song ever recorded. At 9:35, as he’s about to drop Bobby Goldsboro on the turntable, one Maurice P. Fetterling walks into the office, trailed by two men in dark suits and somber faces.

Maurice P. Fetterling. The owner of WTCP as well as the building WTCP sits in, as well as a wholesale tire warehouse, a decomposing tenement in the next town over and MPF’s, an establishment that seems like a good old pub from the outside, but which has several rooms in which activities which may or may not be legal take place. Maurice wears a nylon running suit that makes a swishing sound when he walks and has more than one thick, gold chain hanging around his neck. He wears yellow-tinted sunglasses, even when indoors, and his dark, wiry hair always has a sheen of hasn’t been washed about it. Maurice has dreams of being in the porn business, but so far the closest he has come was when he installed a hidden video camera in the back rooms of MPF’s and compiled a stash of VHS tapes he calls “Maurice’s Greatest Hits.”

Maurice P. Fetterling has been an absentee boss for the most part, making an appearance in the station offices every few weeks or so. So when he waltzes into the studio, it’s a surprise to Stu. When it becomes apparent Maurice isn’t alone, Stu’s surprise turns to chagrin. Those fellows in their dark suits have bad news written all over them. They may as well be carrying signs that say We Are Here To Fuck You Over!

Maurice swishes his way through the obstacle course of crates of albums, empty soda bottles and piles of dirty tissues that are the victims of Dawn porn. Stu doesn’t make an attempt to rise to meet his boss; he sits there fondling his DeFranco family vinyl as Maurice bends down and shoves his hand toward Stu.

“Stu. My man. Good to see you again. How’s tricks? Wife, kids ok?” Stu slips his hand into Maurice’s grip and pumps halfheartedly. He doesn’t have a wife. Or kids. Maybe tricks. Maurice knows this, which makes Stu even more uneasy. Before he can answer, Maurice pulls his hand away and points toward the two Fuck You Over men.

“Got company, my man. Put on that long song with the guitars. Freeman? Seabird?” Stu senses nervousness in Maurice’s voice, a shakiness that says, “Just pretend we have it together here, ok, my man?” Stu opts to play Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You, Baby,” figuring seventeen minutes of moans and disco would be enough to get him through whatever the Fuck You brothers and Maurice have to say to him.

“Stu McLundy. Bob Harrison. Mike Hamm.” Maurice says this as a way of introduction. They are in Maurice’s office, which is dark and musty and unused. Speckles of dust flit in and out of the small light the lone lamp gives off. After an exchange of handshakes, Maurice sits down and a herd of dust bunnies scamper around his chair. He pulls a bottle of Jack Daniels and four paper cups from his desk drawer. The cups are small and have riddles on them. Bob and Mike decline a drink. Stu takes his (Why did the boy throw a clock out the window? Because he wanted to see time fly!), drinks it like an 18 year old frat boy. One shot, grimace, wipe mouth with sleeve.

“Stu, I’m gonna be straight with you here. Bob and Mike represent Jack.”

“Jack who?”

“Not Jack who. Jack what.”

Stu holds his Dixie cup out for another drink. He stares at the cup while Maurice pours and finally gets the joke. Time fly! Hah!

“What’s a Jackwhat?”

Bob stands up. Broad shouldered and imposing, he reminds Stu of that guy in Men in Black. Not Will Smith. The white one. Tommy Lee Jones.

“Jack is the new wave in radio, Mr. McLundy.”

Uh oh. Stu’s stomach does a flip-flop and he can feel the whiskey climbing up his esophagus. He swallows it back down. These men don’t understand how important this radio station is to this town, Stu thinks. No one does. They have no understanding of why Stu lives here or how this town works.

Mike stands up. Except for the suit, he’s nothing like Bob. He’s a hipster, a young know it all with a goatee and that dirty English boy haircut and a faint whiff of Urban Outfitters lingering around him.

“Mr. McLundy - can I call you Stu? Good. Stu - WTCP has become problematic for Mr. Fetterling, in that it is no longer - if it ever has been - fiscally solvent. Therefore, it would be prudent of him to let go of the entity known as WTCP in order to bring his finances into a better place, monetarily speaking.”

“Ah, fuck.” Maurice swings his chair around, stares at Stu with an attempt at a forlorn look. “Mrs. F. is divorcing me. Taking me for everything. I’m selling the station. Jack is taking over.” He swings the chair back around and faces Bob and Mike. “Can he go back to the studio now? Song’s almost over?”

Stu is nervous and anxious and befuddled and just a bit buzzed, and the sweat stains on his armpits have bled down to his waist and around his back. He pours himself another cup of whiskey, chugs it, then lets out a small growl.

“Who the FUCK is Jack?”

It’s Maurice Fetterling’s turn to be nervous. Stu McLundy’s halfway to drunk and the Fuck You Over twins are looking anxious. Stu keeps shouting “Who the FUCK is Jack?” Maurice stares hard at his employee. Don’t blow this, Stu, Maurice says inside his head, hoping that his eyes give away what his brain is thinking.              

Bob and Mike both stand, and Stu half expects the Tommy Lee Jones looking guy to pull out a gun. Stu, bypassing his Dixie cup, takes a swig of Jack right from Maurice’s bottle. He dribbles a little of the whiskey down the front of his shirt and it just blends right in with the sweat stain, now the size of a small continent.

Bob takes control. “Jack is not a person, per se, but a voice. The voice. Yes, the voice of radio listeners everywhere. Jack represents every man, woman and child who is sick of what their current radio station has to offer. Jack is that guy who is going to save them from the tedium and boredom of the same playlist day after day. Jack will give the people what they want. Variety.” As he says this, his arms make a sweeping motion and he raises his eyebrows. This has the effect of Bob saying, without really saying, "Your station as is does not have any variety at all. In fact, you suck. Hard."

"What kind of variety do you mean?" Stu sounds indignant. Which, of course, he is. "I play everything from hard rock to disco!" Stu’s panicking, but there’s something more than the loss of job ingrained in that panic. It’s about the loss of a town. “A little help here,” he whispers to no one in the room, hoping whoever needs to hear it, does.

"Mr. McLundy, I don't doubt that your 70's show is chock full of 70's variety, but we - Jack, rather - encompass all decades and all genres. Our research shows that people wouldn't mind hearing a little Nickelback mixed in with their Carly Simon!" Stu is not sure what Nickelback sounds like but just assumes it’s some new fangled band the kids love. "The people of Greener Valley do not want to hear Nickelback, Mr. Know it All. I happen to know exactly what the people here want, and whatever Nickelback is, is not it."

"Oh, Mr. McLundy, you misunderstand." Bob's voice reeks of condescension but Stu, in his nervous anger, does not hear it. "Once we add some very powerful equipment to the existing TCP station, our market will encompass not only the surrounding towns, but the city as well. Greener Valley really won't mean that much to us in the long run."

Stu, having been in the radio business for more years than the Urban Outfitter guy has been alive, should know what that all means, but, being on the verge of drunk and angry and not really knowing much about radio outside of his own show, doesn't quite compute what Bob is saying.

"I still don't know whatthefuck Jack is," he says.

Mike takes over. “The voice of Jack is ‘played,’ so to speak, by Walter Newsome, a voice actor with many commercials and cartoon voiceovers to his credit. Jack was created...”

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” Stu McLundy stands and lumbers towards the two Men in Black. Maurice’s office is small and not made for maneuvering, especially by a large, buzzed, enraged man and Stu clumsily kicks a garbage pail and knocks over a box fan on his way to the men. Mike cowers, muttering a holy shit, the man’s crazy, while Bob remains calm and stoic as Stu carries on. “I don’t want to know the personal history of this fucking Jackboy guy. I just,” he pauses, burps and moves on without missing a beat, “want to know what kind of music Jackboy is going to be playing and...” Pause. A hiccup this time. “If he intends for me to play that kind of music, too. Because, I will tell you this, Mr. Fancy black suit guy, I don’t give a flying fuck what Jack is into and what he likes. I’m not changing my show for anyone or any Jack.” Stu stands there, arms crossed, looking like a teacher expectantly waiting an answer from a kid he knows damn well forgot to study.

“Ahh, Stu. Here’s the thing.” Maurice Fetterling approaches this with caution, worried that another Stu McLundy outburst will blow the deal for him. “See, Bob and Mike here are from MediaMart. You know, that big company that owns almost everything in the world.” Wink, wink, nudge, nudge at the two suited men. “And uh...they, well, they bought WTCP outright, Stu. Gave me a nice sum of money for it, too. But uhh..they own the station now. And that means, well, that means that, err....”

“WTCP will not be needing the services of Stu McLundy. Your last show will be Sunday. Please vacate the premises at 6pm Sunday evening. We would appreciate it if you would clean your office before you leave.” Bob Harrison puts out his hand for a shake, but Stu just stands there. Bob pulls his hand away and winks at Stu. “Don’t worry mate, you’ll end up on your feet.” Mike Hamm nods at Stu. “Aight, man.” Stu pulls his arm back in a motion that’s supposed to look as if he’s going to haul off and punch each of the Fuck You twins in the face, simultaneously if possible, but has the effect of throwing him off balance. He stumbles backwards, hits the wall and slumps downward, his hair leaving a spidery trail of grease as he sinks to the floor.

The men are gone. Stu McLundy is shell shocked and sits on the floor, debating whether to cry or scream. These people do not know what they have just done. They just popped the cork on a shitload of trouble, not the kind of trouble that can be fixed with paper contracts and dollars bills. Stu knows. Maybe Mrs. Beasley knows. A handful of people in Greener Valley might know. Stu feels both panicky and drunk, but drunk wins and Stu stays there, propped against the wall, muttering to himself.

Stu talks to himself for a few minutes then gets up and heads for the bathroom. It’s a small bathroom, barely big enough to squeeze his ample body in there and sit down with room to maneuver. But he’s not in there to sit. The days of sitting around in this bathroom while “Love to Love You, Baby” plays are gone. Now, he just needs to splash some water on his face, pull himself together.

Stu douses himself with water, dries off with the cheap ass paper towels Fetterling buys from Costco. He stares in the mirror as goes through four, five, six of those damn paper towels trying to get dry. And then he sees it.

There it is, he thinks. The crack in the armor.  He stares at the small tear in his skin that wasn’t there just a few hours ago. It’s happening. God damn it, it’s happening. The tear is right above his left eyebrow, a small hole in his skin revealing grey bone beneath it. He folds the pieces of skin together and places his palm over the tear until his hand feels hot. He waits. Hopes.

He removes his hand and the tear is gone, a small, barely visible scar in its place. It matches similar scars in various places on his body.

“Good. I still got it,” he says out loud. “We’re not totally screwed yet.”

He goes back to the studio, takes another slug of liquor for good measure.

Stu McLundy wipes the lip of the Jack Daniels bottle with his sleeve and pours a double shot into a Dixie riddle cup.

Why did the turkey cross the road?
To prove it wasn’t a chicken!

Stu knows he can’t be a chicken here. He’s got to do something. Before it’s too late.