Excerpt: The Bitch Whisperer

“Nice show, Mac,” she said to me at midnight when I came to pay her.
“Whatever,” I said. “Thanks for not putting Lorelei on like I said, you freakin' bimbo.”
“Come over here and look at her My Space page.”
“Not interested.”
“No, seriously, come look at it.”
“Not interested.”
“Oh, get in here and look!” Ashley grabbed my arm and pulled me inside the production studio. As usual, she had a laptop connected to a station Ethernet cable.
Against my will, I saw Lorelei.
And that's all you need to know about that.
“That's all you've got to say?” Ashley asked me when I told her what I thought of what I saw.
“What else is there?”
“She looks like a really nice lady!”
“No.”
“Oh, come on, aren't you the least bit curious?”
“No. Isn't it Friday?”
Ash smiled. “Yes, it is.”
“I shouldn't. You deliberately disobeyed me.”
“I'm so sorry, Mufasa.” She gave me that damned pout of hers. I wonder how many frat boys she's turned to Jello with it.
I opened my wallet and pulled out two twenties.
“Thank you,” she cooed, taking them gently yet firmly from my hand, barely after I had my wallet back in my hip pocket. “You're so sweet to do this.”
“Don't get a swelled head,” I said. “It's a personal protest. You know that.”
“But you don't have to 'protest' this way, you know.”
“Is that a come-on?”
Ashley rolled her eyes. “No. Have a good night, Mac.”
“You too,” I said as she left the studio.
I hung around and listened to the piped-in overnight show for a few minutes, then waved goodbye to the board op, another unpaid intern, and left. Off to my exciting weekend of. . . sleep. At least that's what I had in mind that Friday night. Sleep. Sometimes I get a pizza but at my age that's not the smartest option anymore.
For those of you not familiar with the drill: Radio is a cheap-assed industry run by cheap-assed bastards who happily take advantage of college kids who still think a career of fame and fortune can be made in it. They don't pay those kids one red cent for spending an entire summer working eight, ten, twelve hours a day, sometimes all week long. “We're paying you with experience!” they say. “We're paying you with a resume!” Then the same cheap bastards laugh their asses off at those same “resume's” from former college interns naïve enough to think they actually meant it. It wouldn't be so bad if that resume could at least get you a minimum-wage gig in a small town station in the middle of western Nebraska or something like in the old days, but now it won't even get you that. It's all network, all automated, to save money. It makes no sense at all to me. It guarantees radio as I know it is going to die. And I really don't know what I'm going to do after it does. Push a broom somewhere, I guess. Good thing I don't care about money anyway.
So I paid Ashley forty bucks every couple of weeks for being my “producer,” which might actually be worth something on a resume some day. It meant I had to be really careful with my own grocery shopping, but she was a hard-working kid. She deserved the scratch. Besides, it wasn't forever, she had to go back to school at the end of summer. Not like I was depriving myself or anything.