Sweet Embraceable Lou: A Radio "Write."

An old-timer, amazed and bewildered by the technology at work here, might say "great and manifold are the blessings of this medium...that really affords us the opportunity to talk to you." I feel pretty much the same about keeping this blog. I have already written that I choose not to expound endlessly about my chosen vocation, which, depending on the events that transpire, could alternately bore, incite, or put my professional ass in a sling.

However, since it IS a part of my life, a little radio will find its way to the page, now and again--especially if it's funny. There will be no commentary or criticism of the business as it stands, but there will be remarks about greats and not-so-greats you may have listened to in the past. Greats who have influenced me, and maybe a couple who've offended my sensibilities...and yours. There's one whom I found so outrageous, I intended to to write a short story based on his peculiarities. I never found the time or energy, because, believe it or not, the radio work can burn you out.

I have enough, though, to provide a few laughs for those who don't need a plot or an ending to their stories. The first two full pages, and situational notes are here, plus a recently written preface that I hope will crack you up, without, of course, actually injuring ribs.

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In this, the seventh year of the new millennium, there are still veterans of the airwaves who will probably toil until their last, tobacco saturated breath. Guys who are so venerated, their gaffs, mistakes and idiosyncrasies are tolerated with no questions asked. Guys so inept, when they actually did things correctly, it was celebrated...even though their record at doing things right was like that of The Ancient Mariner: as was written in the poem, "He taketh one in three."

One of these gentlemen I called "Sweet Embraceable Lou," and these are some of his exploits, based on fact.

SWEET EMBRACEABLE LOU: Lou's Lucky Strike

Lou Fogg. His name suited him perfectly. Mentally, he had been a little foggy since the days of his misspent youth. An expansive ego had his head in the clouds, and the smoke from his omnipresent Lucky Strike cigarette made his skull truly appear enshrouded. Fog was the word that described him literally and figuratively.

His addiction to Lucky Strikes had him sneaking smokes in the damnedest places. One evening, while the hits of a generation played on , he shuffled around the radio station, looking for a place where he could toke-up without being detected. He chose a unisex restroom with one commode, and a fan that worked only if a second switch was flipped simultaneously with the lights.

In his haste to light up a Lucky, Sweet Embraceable Lou hit only the switch for the lights, put down the lid on the bowl, and fumbled through his pockets for a match. It vaguely dawned on him that he might take this time to use the room for its actual purpose. Alma, his 28-year-old girlfriend, has cooked another volatile meal of pinto beans, cheese and burritos, the kind of dinner that left the old man as plugged as a freshly spackled hole in the wall. His only relief would be to somehow force a moment of flatulence...which is exactly what he did, sitting there on a covered bowl, without ventilation, just as he was putting a light to his cigarette.

WHOOSH!!

Methane met match, and Lou's fuzzy, grey eyebrows went up in one quick POOF! The old man was so out of it, he thought someone had taken his picture with an old-fashioned powder-flash.

Moving with more speed than even he thought was possible, Lou swung over to the basin and splashed water on his smoldering brows, stubbed out his Lucky Strike, and tossed the butt into the trash can. He hastily dried himself, turned out the light, and doddered back to the studio.

Welcome to a night on the air with Sweet Embraceable Lou Fogg, a man not competent to tie his own shoes. One of those remarkable human beings who floated through life like an aerialist, falling once or twice, but always landing on his feet like a pixilated feline. He knew not how he survived--he simply had an instinct for it.

Even his choice of cigarette brands was touched by some aesthetic serendipity. How else would you describe the days and nights of a man who should have been, by all rights, sleeping in a cardboard box, or (at best) with reluctant relatives. His very existence was...a Lucky Strike.

Not that Good 'Ol, Sweet Embraceable Lou ever knew that. His sense of entitlement went back to the crib.

"They had cribs back then?" we would ask ourselves when the subject came up. Apparently so. Lou Fogg came into the world in as slippery a fashion as he would lead his life. One night, sometime in the 1920's (we were never sure which year. The older he looked, the younger he would tell us he was), Miss Fiona Fogg, an increasingly hefty former-flapper with a love for bathtub hooch and card players, staggered into her bathroom to do battle with a case of constipation that would bring Paul Bunyan to his knees. What she thought was the massive dump to end all dumps was nothing of the sort...and baby Lou entered the world with an accidental splash.

Literally baptized with the flotsam and jetsam, he would spend his boyhood around the curbs and gutters of pre-war southern California. Fiona doted on her unexpected bundle of joy. Obviously impervious to physical and emotional pain (consider her son's delivery!), she even endured the heckling of Lou's neighborhood pals. The mean little bastards would see the over-stuffed baba, recall the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk and chant, "Fee, Fi, Fo, FOGG!"

LOU-ICIDE: Life on the Streets

He grew up a lean boy, without much of an appetite for food (mother Fiona would routinely finish his plates with great gusto). Lou's earliest interests in life were stealing, and girls. As he entered puberty, it were as if an acetylene torch went off in his trousers. The depression era was known for its devastating poverty and its criminals, not its promiscuity. No one told Lou.

And here are remaining notes I made:

* That his last name was Fogg cannot be too strongly noted. It was more than coincidence. It were as if his surname were chosen to describe the musings that rumbled in his medulla oblongnotta.

* Sweet Embraceable Lou could not have withstood an actual embrace--a heart slap on the back would disassemble him like a house made of tooth pics. His gaunt frame was like an old TV antennae with swatches of hair and vital organs, precariously clinging to it.

* His voice put me in the mind of a the sound a goose would make while strangulating. As he entered his dotage, he would punctuate his speech with a nervous giggle that could be mistaken for the vocal response to a very unnecessary prostate exam--he squeaked like a rusty bird cage door, and mumbled like the rumble of loose gurney wheels. Somehow, the voice that emanated from that larynx had mesmerized an entire culture of the street.

* ...the song was a minute from ending when Lou opened the mike and thankfully groaned, "ahhhhhhh! That was wonderful! Embraceable!" Then he realized that the groan of delight was actually an involuntary response of relief. He'd suffered another moment of on-air incontinence. "Milton," he warbled distantly to his engineer, "...get a sponge."

* One evening, a fun-loving jock plopped a dollop of the prescription laxative Purge into Lou's coffee. The shit literally hit the fan...and the control board.

* A feral animal apparently took the brunt of the fusillade, as the angry listeners emptied two 45s from afar. Sweet Embraceable Lou traipsed blithely through the hail of lead, wondering only who had their TV on so loud...and if a sudden breeze had picked up.

* The on-air coughing spell had lasted nearly two minutes before Lou finally closed the mike and headed to the men's room. After ten minutes, he was at last able to prod a few voluntary drops from his uncooperative bladder. "Goddamn thing!" he mumbled to no one in particular. "it only works when it feels like it." Lou then heel-toed it outdoors to light up another Lucky Strike and puffed away.
"Hey...workin' when they feel like it! I'll say that on the air," Lou exclaimed as loudly as he could, only to himself. Barely ambulatory, he made his way back into the studio and keyed open the mike, forty seconds into a love song.

"This one's for my engineer, Milton, who works only when he feels like it." Still on the air, he began sniffing. "Hey, I smell smoke. Where's it coming from? Must be Milton's shoes: It's dinnertime! Heeeeeeeeeeee!! HEY! Milton! I didn't mean it! Don't beat me up!"

Milton was swatting Lou with his own jacket to douse the flames that had erupted from the pocket of Lou's ratty coat...the pocket where Embraceable Lou had put the still-lighted Lucky Strike when he had his brainstorm for the on-air bit.

* Growing more furious by the day, Milton sometimes wondered what it would be like to rid himself of his elderly meal ticket. However, babysitting the octogenarian was better than pumping gas--though the fumes from Lou's gas were just as noxious as anything billowing from a refinery.

After periodic expulsions, Lou would warble something like, "My girlfriend makes burritos and sends me to work with a box of Baby Wipes!" Milton thought a cork would be more useful and less expensive. the flatulence and his frequent smoking made Sweet Embraceable Lou's potential for spontaneous combustion greater than that of the Hindenburg.

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That's it, that's all. Maybe it's peaked some curiosity. Maybe one day it'll yield a plot and a short story. For now, a guffaw or two will do.

Next week...my heart, my pain...40 years following the Los Angeles Dodgers.