Much as I wanted to tell my old partner that we'd been canned
myself, the words stuck in my throat. I sputtered and sighed for a
minute until, I guess, it struck him that something must be wrong and he
ran off to our producer's office, where I had just been.
    After seventeen years on the air as Hammy and Barnard (with four
more at the beginning under the name Esso Oil Presents 'How Do You Do?
with Michael Hamilton and Barnard Espy') we'd been deemed insufficient
insurance against the coming tide of television, and that was that.
Dumped from the radio without, as we used to have to say, so much as a
how do you do.
    We'd already hedged our bets by cutting down on the number of serial
segments we did for the show so as not to scare off occasional
listeners. We reinvented the program with more politics and intellectual
guests. We got okay numbers for it, just not what we needed.

    I sat in the office and stared at Hammy's desk, waiting for him. It
was uncharacteristically covered in garish bath toys; he'd gotten an
armload of them that morning for his niece. He burst through the door
and cursed once, loudly.
    Then he said, "Let's pack," and handed me a folded box.
    We'd kept the room, if not scrupulously clean, then at least
businesslike. Hammy had a large framed photo of his family and a smaller
one of Mahatma Gandhi, whose philosophy I'd seen him become quite taken
with recently. I had my vanity shelf: the ribbons from broadcasters'
associations that Hammy at first wouldn't accept and later learned to
quietly dispose of, I still kept. I also kept the dishrag we'd draped
over his microphone at our first show to keep his booming voice from
sending too many unwanted pops into the homes of our listeners. For the
most part, though, our office held the refuse of dreary, unsentimental
business.
    "What do you think of this preacher who wants the kids to swear
their faith in God every day at school, eh?" Hammy bellowed as he
riffled through folders. "Are we one nation, standing together? Hell no,
that's not good enough! We've got to be one nation under God... and
Eisenhower wants to do it! How about that, Barney?"
    In no mood to consider it, I quoted back, "God bless America and all
the ships at sea."
    "That's different. That's show business, Barn! You can say that
before a radio program and it doesn't mean anything. Nobody else has to
raise their hand and swear to it unless they're reaching for the dial.
What if I don't want my kids living under God?"
    "Okay."
    "What if my family lives under that fellow I met in Seattle instead?
All of us are gods, he said. Live by intent instead of reflex. I like
the sound of that well enough. Why isn't that going in the Pledge?"
    I meant to tell him to stop it already, but when I looked at him I
started crying. I can't really explain it. Hammy was joking, wasn't he?
The Seattleite certainly was; after explaining it all he offered to help
paint us blue and take us carousing with his followers, which we begged
off.
    Hammy lifted the dishrag, furry with age, out of my box and said
quietly, "It has gotten harder to quiet me down since then, hasn't it?"

    Two hours later they came to have us sign the walking papers and
found that we'd departed, leaving a whole lot of confetti that used to
be scripts with a single rubber ducky perched on top. "Lord of all he
surveys," Hammy said as he nestled the thing in, "and smarter than the
bunch of them put together." We had saluted the duck as we left, hand on
heart.

written for Heather Ralph while standing up 8/17/03

I consulted my housemates a lot at the beginning, trying to get the numbers and dates right (or at least plausible). This is another case of my trying to fake my way through something I only know a little about... I've read scripts from some vintage radio programs and maybe even heard a few, but I certainly don't know their history or have a sense whether a program like this ever existed.

Partway through I searched the web, curious when "God bless America" became a common phrase, and found two intriguing tidbits: first, the claim that it started with a radio broadcaster saying "God bless America and all the ships at sea" in every program for some period of time, and second, that the drive to put "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance had been led by an individual preacher who got the President's ear. I was probably a little too thrilled at how well this information meshed with the story I'd begun, and gave (I suspect) too little background for someone who didn't know what I was talking about to follow the conversation. (That, and my 'research' may have actually misled me; I didn't go very deep.)

Then we have the Church of Mez, a nice bunch of folks I met at Burning Man, who I had to work into a story set decades before the Church was invented. The "Seattleite" is Mez himself, who was painted blue when I met him and whose namesake philosophy is summarized in a few lines there -- again, based on a very small amount of research on the web.

That section didn't go very well, I don't think. It's kind of polemical, and I was trying to summarize too many things at once. I was trying to have it sound different from the rest of the story, a distraction for Hammy who, used to ranting, could easily slip back into it for comfort while his old friend became uncomfortable. Oh well.

I thought "Barnard Espy" was a decent, if unusual name, but once I started having Michael call him "Barney" I remembered that "Barney" is also a nickname for the more common "Bernard", making my character's name look like a misspelling. Could have been worse.

My verb tenses got tangled in the last paragraph, as I tried to jump forward and then back again, putting a lot of detail into a small space. Execution aside, I'm pretty happy with the story; though in some ways it fits into my long pattern of showing people in their moment of failure, this one was about people who had a good run, and I hope the end seems appropriately triumphal.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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