Nicholas Santalucia

Selling a Radio Spot in The Delph / October 21, 2015 by Nicholas Santalucia

Agnew needs to pay rent. Unfortunately, he's a radio journalist. Unemployed and almost entirely inexperienced, Agnew tries to make up for his shortcomings by being as unprincipled and shamelessly click-baiting as possible. Over 8 “radio bulletins” Agnew reports the most off-beat stories he can find and offers misguided self-help to other aspiring journalists.

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Everyone's trying to get into radio, but to sell a spot in The Delph, you've got to know what you're doing. I used to intern for the biggest public access station in the city, and I'm going to help you sell your story. All you need to remember is K.A.L.O.L.A.C.W.E.A.V.A.F.N.S.

Know your Assets and Liabilities

I've outlined mine below:

Assets

I know the director of the biggest public access station in The Delph.
My name is well known in the field.
My pitch is a follow-up on the most talked about radio bit in years.

Depending on how things play out, these things should help me sell my story. I also have a copy of the keys to my old station’s van, so I borrowed that.

Liabilities

Gill Reeber’s tight schedule — he’s out the door of the station at 5:00 every day.
It’s 4:30.
My overdue rent, which means I won’t be able to sit on this one.
Everything listed under Assets, depending on how things play out.
All of these fucking red lights. I mean, seriously.

I've got some unique forces working for and against me. But to be a successful radio journalist, you've got to:

Overcome Your Liabilities With Your Assets

I'm on a tight schedule and am getting clowned by a bunch of traffic lights (liability). However, I'm also in a car which is under someone else's name (asset).

I check for cops and floor it through the intersection. A camera flashes behind me and some jerks honk at me, but it’s 4:37 and I can see Gill packing up his backpack that he got free at a conference 15 years ago. The station secretary is, undoubtedly, reaching into the candy bowl on her desk in order to, as she says, “End this day on a sweet note!”

Another red light, another liability overcome, another camera flash behind me. “Press,” I tell the jerks I pass. “Press, press, press,” all the way down E Street to the station.

I get to DelphaRay-Dio at 4:51 and am surprised that Gill isn’t hunched over the reception area politely laughing at the secretary's jokes. “Well Gill, do you think one sweet ever hurt anyone?” she asked him, every day I was an intern here.

“Well, uh, um, well no I guess it hasn't,” he'd say.

“Then why don't you have one, you skinny-minny?” Then she'd pick out a good one from her bowl and unwrap it for him and he'd smile as he ate it. There was a lot of sexual tension in everything they did.

Be Confident

I walk in and the secretary pulls her hand out of the candy bowl. She grabs the pendant of some saint around her neck and goes red in the face. She opens her mouth and a piece of chocolate falls out. She is speechless (asset). I walk into Gill’s office unannounced.

Gill Reeber has really let himself go since my departure. His desk, never tidy, is now stacked with papers so high that I can only see the top of his balding head, which is bent down and pressed into an old telephone receiver. His voice is nasally and, as always, it sounds like he’s complaining; totally unfit for radio. It is a liability of his.

“Yes,” he says, “stolen… The DelphaRay-Dio van, that’s right… Well no, I don’t have the information with me right now, but you’ve definitely seen it… Yes, the dorsal fin on top and the Roman historian painted on the side… Well in fact I think I know the young man that stole it… Yes, his name is — ” (liability!)

I pull the cord out of the wall.

“Agnew,” he says it like he’s calling me into his office, “Hello? Are you still there?”

“Hey, Gill.” I sit down. He looks up. I can just see his eyes over all the papers.

“You cannot be here Agnew.”

“I’m actually — ”

“Do you have the van, young man?”

“Yes, of course. I was just borrowing it.” I put the keys on a stack of papers and he snatches them. A few sheets fly off the top with them. “I’m not a thief, Gill.”

“Is all the equipment still in it?”

“There was no equipment in it.”

He thinks about this, and then says, “You need to go now, Agnew. Right now.”

“Look,” I say, “Just hang on, alright? I’ve got something else for you. A story.”

“You are wasting my time, young man”

“Hang on, hang on. Wait. What’s the biggest story in The Delph right now, Gill?” His eyes squint. “Probably mine, right? For better or worse, probably the Drexler story.” His eyes widen. “So,” I say, “I revisited Dr. Drexler’s.”

He bolts up out of his chair. Now I can see his little shoulders peaking up over the papers. “Are you serious?” His voice cracks, and then he starts shouting. “Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea how much trouble you have caused me already?”

“Come on, Gill.” I hold my field recorder up and give it a little shake. “Two hundred bucks.” I smile.

Work With Your Editor

His face comes launching through the stacks of papers. His little body follows and then he falls onto me and I fall backwards in my chair. He’s slapping my face like a cat. He’s scratching my belly. He’s crying and yelling. I am too.

“I need money man. I did so much work for you and you didn't pay me for any of it.” I pinch his nose.

“You didn't do a lick of work, you bum,” he says and starts scratching my belly.

“Your station is a joke.” I pull his hair.

“You're a loser.” He picks up a piece of paper and shoves it into my mouth. I push his hands away and pull it out. It's a court order. All of the papers around the room are a some kind of court order featuring Gill's name, the station’s, Dr. Drexler's, and mine.

The secretary comes in the room and wails. Her doughy fist is white around Saint Someone. “No Gilly,” she says “you’re going to kill him!”

Gill gives me one last slap on the face and shoves my stomach and stumbles backwards belly-up on his hands and feet. “You can go to hell,” he says, crawling like a crab with his chin on his chest, “dick.” He collapses and the secretary runs to him and falls to her knees. She shoves his head into her breasts and rubs his bald spot.

“Oh Gilly, oh Gilly.” She looks at me like I’m a villain. “Go,” she says.

“Alright, shit. I’m out.” I get up and try to flatten my blazer where he crumpled it. “You're lucky I'm not suing you for that,” I say.

On my way I take a piece of candy from the bowl at reception. There’s a police car in the parking lot (liability) so I go out the side door and hail a cab.

Avoid Legal Action

Unfortunately my assets did not pan out as expected— except for the van. Also, my confidence didn't do much in the end and the differences with my editor were a bit too big to work out. I also realize now that given the gag-orders, cease and desists, and other various pieces of ongoing litigation surrounding me and my story, it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to sell it.

It's also unlikely that I'll be able to go home without running into my landlord, who I for sure cannot pay, so I tell the cabbie to take me to the library where I think I can spend the night. Also, I ask him what his deal is, because to sell a radio spot in The Delph, you have to:

Find a New Story

Unfortunately, he takes this as an excuse to bore the shit out of me. I guess he thinks I don't know what a refugee is—and that there's a booming market for sob stories. The upshot is that I get the address of the trafficker that got him here, who I am definitely going to get in touch with. Also, when he stops at a red light there's a crowd of people I can jump into and get away from him without paying the fare.

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Nicholas Santalucia is at nicsanta.com

Revisiting Dr. Drexler's / October 14, 2015 by Nicholas Santalucia

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I’m standing once again on the steps of Dr. Drexler’s School of Surgery and Dissection. You listeners may remember my last report from this hall of anatomical study, or at least the great controversy that it caused. It seems the world was not ready for such an honest look at how those who save our lives learn their craft.

Critics decried the scenes I described here as distasteful, gruesome, and journalistically unethical. The manner in which students fetched their cadavers from oversized refrigerators, one listener thought “glib.” That they elbowed for room around the bodies whose lifetimes of hardships were evident in mangled joints and ruined organs, some found to be “too much.” And that I reported young women putting make up on the specimen that used to be Bob Young of N Street and 23rd (who shot himself in the head last year and was only donated to science because his church refused to bury him) may legally constitute “defamation” and “libel.” There was some debate regarding trigger warnings, too.

In any case, several professional associations of broadcasters and radio journalists, to which I formerly belonged, found it to be grounds for “expulsion.”

The impact of my raw reporting on the realities of medical pedagogy was severely negative for everyone involved. (The sole exception being, touchingly, the wife and children of Mr. Young, whose church relented, collected his body, cleaned it up, pieced it together again, and it gave it proper rites in a private ceremony. Private insofar as they threatened to call the police when I showed up.) But unquestionably the worst burnt, and least intended victims of the media firestorm fanned by my fervor for story telling were — no, not the gaggle of corpses from the meth lab explosion — but the very students of Dr. Drexler’s School of Surgery and Dissection.

I have learned that as a result of my story donations of new cadavers have stopped completely. Whereas upon my last visit they were coming in thick and fast, arranged by pigmentation and stacked five by five, cremated en masse at the end of every semester so the school wouldn’t have to run the freezers over break, they now have none.

It is a sad reflection on the state of education today. How will this development affect our nation’s future medical practitioners? Have they begun to rely solely on owl pellets? Will one day, when your heart stops and you’re brought to the emergency room, the surgeon open you up and, out of habit, look for rodent bones? And would he find them? Keep listening.

The corridors are quiet. The operation theaters: empty, but from deep in this old stone building, the familiar voice of the old stony doctor leads me to the storage freezer in the basement. At first glance through the little window in the door, it seems my research may have mislead me. A peculiar room choice, no question, but there the doctor is at the front of it, lecturing on a platform beneath a large angled mirror, one hand in the pocket of his bloodied white coat and the other inside a young man’s head.

He’s naming nerves and digging around the gray matter to find synapses. His students are nodding and taking notes. It doesn’t look so different from my last visit. The smell has even improved; last time I was here, the stench of formaldehyde and carcass reminded me too much of the whiskey I’d been drinking for the last several days and I vomited. Now, there’s no smell at all.

Dr. Drexler spots me in the little window and puts everything back in the young man’s head just as he found it. He reattaches the bit of skull he’d removed with tiny metal plates. One of the students even sews up the scalp and when she’s finished, you wouldn’t know someone had just been poking around beneath it. If nothing else, perhaps their sense of economy has improved.

Dr. Drexler opens the freezer room door. He tells the students to keep working on their labs and shakes my hand. His is gooey.

“Agnew,” he says.

“Dr. Drexler. I hope you don’t mind if I visit?”

“Why would I mind?” He brings me in the freezer and closes the big metal door behind us.

“I heard you’ve fallen on some hard times,” I say and he nods his head.

“It’s true that since your last visit, we’ve had to tighten our belts a bit.” We’re walking through groups of students around operating tables, standing close to each other to keep warm. They’re wearing thermals under their scrubs and I don’t want to get brain goo on my madras blazer. “But we’re making do,” the doctor says.

There are no cadavers, but all of the groups are tearing apart some organ or limb. A grave looking student across the room sees me and uses a detached arm to point me out to her friend. “Yes,” I say, “looks like it.”

“Well thankfully the worst of it is over now,” he says. “The bombs.”

“Bombs?”

“Or little grenades. I don’t know. Didn’t get a chance to see them. Blake tried to look at one though.”

“Oh?”

“And it killed him.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yes,” Dr. Drexler says. “It was the Papists, so there was nothing we could do.” The doctor stops walking and shrugs.

“I don’t understand.”

“But, Agnew,” now he turns to me and takes my shoulders. “Those attacks were the best thing to happen to us.”

“Not for Blake.”

“Yes, Blake, exactly. You see Agnew, we were in quite a position when the bodies stopped coming in. But all of a sudden, we had Blake.”

“You used — ?”

“Of course.”

“And you’re still using Blake? This is all Blake?” I look around at all the students cutting up bits of their former classmate.

“No. Please. That would have never worked. There was hardly anything left. Those bombs were small, but they were powerful,” he says. “Here, I’ll show you.”

Dr. Drexler brings me to an operating table. “Meet Rosie.” It’s the grave looking girl from across the room.

I introduce myself and go to shake her hand but she’s only got one. Her entire right arm is missing. Actually, it's on the operating table in front of us. She had pointed to me with her arm and now calipers are pulling back its skin and fat to expose the bone. Dr. Drexler asks how she is. “I’m good, doctor. I found where I fractured my radius in high school.”

“And it looks like you had some trauma to the elbow too, dear.”

She smiles. “That’s growing up with brothers for you.” Dr. Drexler chuckles sensibly and pats her on the nub.

“Yes, well, be sure your classmates have a look.” She nods. “And any phantom pain?”

“Not yet, but I’m still in shock.”

“Very good, girl. Keep at it.” Dr. Drexler pulls me away from the table and I realize that I’m leaning on the old man.

The students dissecting legs are wearing prosthetics: eyes, eye patches. A pale looking Indian is cutting open what looks to be a kidney and the young man whose head Dr. Drexler was just poking around inside drops some calipers and says “I can’t bend down.” I run to a garbage bin and throw up. It’s full of innards up to my nose. I throw up again. Dr. Drexler pats my back.

“Don’t worry, Agnew,” he says, “we mainly use pig testicles.”

The students are packing their organs and limbs into coolers with ice packs and Dr. Drexler tells me that he’ll be just a minute. He goes back to the platform at the front of the class and says “Excuse me, everyone,” and all the students turn to watch him. “As you know, there’s just one month left in the semester. Hooray.” He waves his finger around and the students laugh. “But, that means you are responsible for your final assignment. In order to demonstrate all you’ve learned this course, I’ll require from each of you a complete dissection and analysis of a human body. You will use your own. It is to be submitted by the end of the term.”

One student starts shouting. “This is too much,” he says. “You’ve gone mad,” and runs out of the freezer without his books. The rest of them accept the assignment like any students would a paper a few pages too long. Some write it down in their notebooks, then climb onto the tables and cut themselves open. Rosie helps the young man whose head was cut open lift his legs onto the table and then climbs onto the one next to him. He holds her incision open for her as she pulls out her liver, lungs, and heart with her only arm.

Some of the students realize that they smoke too much or drink too much, but for the most part they all maintain a medical distance from their subjects as they bleed out and their bodies shut down. A few scream out in pain or cry for the world they’re leaving — the rest roll their eyes at them as they roll to the backs of their heads. Dr. Drexler takes me into the corridor.

“Do you think you have enough for a story, or would you like to come back Agnew?” He helps me up the stairs.

“I’ve seen everything,” I say.

“And do you have any questions for me?” We’re outside his office.

“I mean,” I say, “are you worried about what you’re doing?”

“I am not.”

“The students cutting themselves apart? Killing themselves?”

Dr. Drexler sighs. “Agnew,” he says, “I could have easily starting robbing graves or paying prison wardens or going to the slums or what have you. My profession is no stranger to that. But consider the students.”

“The killed-themselves ones?”

“Yes, exactly. They had a month to complete the assignment, Agnew, but they all arrived at the same conclusion.” He looks at me. “Hm?” he asks and I shake my head. “Why put it off?”

It was a strange visit, but I still make my way down the steps of Dr. Drexler’s with a bit of a hop. I am back on the horse , in some regards. All I need to do now is unload this piece on some chump for two hundred bucks and I’ll be able to mostly pay rent. To get the inside scoop on how to sell a radio spot in The Delph, tune in next week.

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Nicholas Santalucia is at nicsanta.com.