We Are Pirates: A Novel Read Free Page A

them were girls. Phil Needle wanted a girl at the desk, a pleasant, young girl who would greet people who walked into the offices, like Phil Needle, with a smile and on good days a wink.
    The first applicant was a drunk. Or at least she was drunk at the interview, and drunk at the second interview Phil Needle scheduled for her as another chance, because anybody might get drunk at the first interview. In order to project himself as part of a dynamic, re-inventive company, he told the second one, Alma Levine, that he needed her to come in for an interview bright and early Monday morning. She suggested eleven o’clock. He was too embarrassed to get back to her and say he forgot that Monday was going to be Memorial Day, and so now he sat in his office listening to “(Water on a) Drowning Man,” a song by Belly Jefferson, for inspiration and because he wanted to. Belly Jefferson had died in 1970, just when he had been rediscovered. He left behind a number of illegitimate children who became perfectly legitimate businessmen with rights to Belly Jefferson’s image and likeness and any portrayal of him in any media, because at this point in American history they could do such things. They were interfering with the outlaw spirit Phil Needle was trying to embody.
    Phil Needle had an idea. It was a huge idea, like a craggy island rising out of the water while the ocean fizzled obsequiously around it. It was a radio show. It would be about America and it would be broadcast everywhere, in people’s cars and homes and computers. The show—he didn’t know what it was called yet—would embody the American outlaw spirit. So far Leonard Steed liked this idea very, very much.
    It was his destiny, he knew it was, but if the boat was to reach the destiny, he needed an American story that would launch the boat of the show across the ocean of radio. A practical, smaller version of this was that Phil Needle had to produce a sample episode in order to officially pitch the show to Leonard Steed. Steed had advised this as his consultant and told him this officially as his producing partner. Phil Needle Productions was contractually obligated to split its profits with Leonard Steed, and additionally Phil Needle had hired Leonard Steed as a consultant through Re-Edison. That added up to a substantial investment, but Phil Needle felt with this show he could live up to it. But to live up to it he needed a story, and his story was “Belly Jefferson, an American something.”
    Phil Needle hadn’t told Leonard Steed that the episode was about Belly Jefferson. Phil Needle scarcely ever stopped thinking about the day he would fly down to Los Angeles, walk through the lobby of the Steed Building, past the cotton gin, go up the elevator to Leonard Steed’s office and then sit down in front of Leonard Steed and have him listen to an episode he, Phil Needle, had produced about the man who sang “Cotton Gin Blues.” Usually Leonard Steed was the outlaw in that room. That day, it would be him, Phil Needle, and within months of that day his new condo, with the view of the bridge and the water that was supposed to inspire him, would perhaps not seem so unaffordable as to make his stomach sink. Surely that day could come. But to reach this day he had to clear his desk of these papers lily-padding all over one another, and to clear his desk he needed a new girl, and so it was not beyond reason to say that it was his destiny who walked into his office at eleven o’clock. He watched her walk past the desk she’d sit at if the job was hers and knock on his open door.
    “Knock, knock,” she said. She seemed like she looked cute, with trendy shoes and a slightly lovely top. “Are you Phil Needle?”
    “Yes,” said Phil Needle, and turned the music down.
    “I’m here for the interview? I’m Alma Levine.”
    “Right,” Phil Needle said, and scurried the papers around his desk for her résumé as she sat down. It was two pages long, but the second page