Free The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson Page A

a wall clock on the wall, but when he wanted the correct time, Smith always went into a huddle with his watch.
    On his first delirious night at the controls, he opened his program with a 45 rpm recording of a Portuguese orchestra doing their country’s national anthem, after which they played the American national anthem, managing to make them both sound exactly the same. Next Smith read the intro to his show from a little yellow card he held before his face with a trembling hand, but his mike was still switched to Off. When he was done reading he turned it to On and desperately asked English a few incomprehensible questions that went out over the air.
    While Smith read his introduction to each song from one of his yellow cards, pushed the button that set it spinning, and then cued up the next record on the other turntable with the sweating vertigo of a person under fire, one of the newsmen—for English’s money there were too many newspeople around the place—taped a phone interview in the hall closet with a Vietnam veteran about Agent Orange. Acoustically the closet was the only place, because the phone company had refused to wire the production studio as long as the station was in arrears. “And why did they do that!” the newsman was saying. He felt he had to shout. “What was it exactly that they told you!” Smith liked to keep the speakers in the studio turned up high. The music of his homeland carried him away. He was moved to tears by a ballad, a typical one of tootly violins and a passion-wrung male voice begging violently in Portuguese, except when every now and then it sobbed in English, “Hoppy birthday—to you—my dolling …” “It sounds like you were getting the runaround here, am I right?” the newsman cried. Smith looked at his watch, at the wall clock, at the digital clock. He was getting alarmed. The timing on his play list must not have been working out. Time was his conqueror. When the song was done he talked in a choked, halting fashion to the audience, holding no yellow cards now, clutching the microphone by its neck. English sensed he was confessing his incompetence and apologizing for his whole life.
    Before too long, the interview in the closet was over. Berryman, the reporter, was leaning against the glass window of the announcer’s studio looking drained of blood. English motioned to him to come on into the studio, though there was hardly any room, if only to stop him breathing on the glass like a kid who needed a nickel. Berryman was tall and pale, with the look, to English’s eye, of a real juicer, just the kind of washout you’d expect to locate in one of the closets around here. Everyone at WPRD was either just starting out in the radio business or completely finished. There was nobody in between. “I just got fired,” Berryman said.
    “Bullshit.”
    “No. No. Ray Sands was just in here, and he fired me.”
    “You must’ve misheard him. He must’ve not recognized you and he must’ve said, ‘You’re hired.’”
    Smith turned and asked a question, but now he couldn’t say anything intelligible because his bald head was tuned to Portuguese. He might have been requesting permission to explode the station. English nodded and smiled, rather than make him feel misunderstood.
    “What’d he fire you for?” English asked Berryman.
    “He was standing in the fucking hallway,” the reporter said. “He was waiting for me when I came out of the fucking closet. He said the fucking interview was hogwash. He pronounced my fucking fate.”
    “Hogwash? What has he got against hogwash? I mean, hey”—English pointed at the day’s small stack of Special Programs tapes—“Baba Ram Dass. Check this out, Berryman—‘The Nicest People on Cape Cod.’ And anyway, when did Sands even get a chance to hear the tape?”
    “He didn’t hear this tape,” Berryman said. “This is part two. He heard part one. He heard it last week, on the air.” Berryman held out the tape, a