The Frumious Bandersnatch

itwas total horseshit. Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew, and—with the exception of the crew and the caterers and the black dancer who’d be playing the role of the Bandersnatch when Tamar performed the song later tonight—everyone on this showboat vessel knew that most Top 40 and rock radio stations today got paid by the record manufacturers, and in some instances by the performing artists themselves, to play their songs on the air.

Moreover, this practice of Pay-for-Play, as it was called, was entirely legal provided the station mentioned on air that payment had been made. Usually, the deejay merely said, “This record was brought to you by Bison Records.” Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew that the music industry was a twelve-billion-dollar-a-year business. They further knew that only three broadcasters controlled more than half of the top hundred radio markets in the U.S. There were 10,000—count ’em, Maude—10,000 commercial radio stations in the land, and record companies depended on about 1,000 of the largest ones to create hits and sell records. Each of those thousand stations added approximately three new songs to its playlist every week.

Enter the independent record promoter.

Hired by the record company, the indie got paid each time there was an “add” to the playlist of a Top 40 or rock station. Average price for an add was a thousand bucks, but the fee could go as high as five or ten thousand depending on the number of listeners a station had. All in all, the indies earned about three million bucks a week for their services.

That was a lot of fried corn husks, honey.

Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew, and everyone connected with either Bison Records or WHAM—“Radio 180 on your dial!”—that a record promoter named Arturo Garcia, who worked for the indie firm of Instant Prompt, Inc., had made a deal with WHAM that guaranteed the station $300,000 in annual promotional payments provided its list of clients regularly made the station’s playlist. Morever, in certain special circumstances…

Consider, for example, the case of Tamar Valparaiso’s debut album,Bandersnatch. What with Carroll’s original rhyming (which would certainly sound like hip-hop doggerel to many teenagers), and what with Tamar’s poundingly simple five-note melody (that would most certainly sound sexually-driven to many teenagers), the title-song single seemed poised, please dear God, to do what Alicia Keys’Songs in A Minor had done in its first week, more than 235,000 copies for a debut album, #1 on both the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart and the R&B Album Chart, please dear God, let it happen!

But just in case God wasn’t listening, and just in case all that legal payola didn’t do the trick, IPI (ever mindful of its guiding slogan, “The Tin Is in the Spin”) was paying WHAM—and each of forty other top stations around the country—a $5,000 bonus for fifty plays in the first week of “Bandersnatch’s” release. That came to a hundred bucks a spin, and that was a whole lot of tin, man.

To put it mildly, much was riding on the success of that album.

Meanwhile, in the main stateroom of theRiver Princess, Tamar Valparaiso was getting into her scanty costume.

EVER SINCE9/11, and especially since the FBI began issuing vague warnings of terrorist attacks hither and yon but nowhere in particular, the Police Department had been on high alert for any possible threats to the city’s bridges. There were 143 men and 4 women in the Harbor Patrol Unit, which operated a municipal navy of twenty vessels, ranging in size from twenty to fifty-two feet. The workhorse of the HPU was the new 36-foot launch, which could travel up to thirty-eight miles an hour—more than twice the speed of the older vessels in the fleet. The Police Department had recently purchased four of these boats at a cost of $370,000 per. To the relief of taxpayers everywhere in the city, the boats were expected to last twenty years.

Not too long ago, Sergeant Andrew McIntosh would have been wearing the same orange life vest over his blue uniform, but there wouldn’t have been a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle lying across the dash. You broke those out only when you were going on a drug raid. Those and the twelve-gauge shotguns. Nowadays, with lunatics running loose all over the world, the heavy weapons werede rigueur for the course, as they said in old Glasgow, Scotland, from which fine city McIntosh’s grandmother had migrated.

McIntosh was fifty-two years old, and he’d been driving boats for the HPU for twenty-two years now, before which he’d operated a charter fishing boat in Calm’s Point. Back then, watching the police boats pulling into the marina, he’d wondered what the hell he was doing ferrying drunken fishermen all over the Sound. He finally asked himself Why not give it a shot? Took the Police Department exam the very next week, asked for assignment to the Harbor Patrol the minute he got out of the Academy.

Back then, the Police Department was still calling itself the Isola PD, even though precincts were located in all five sections of the city. Eventually, Calm’s Point, Majesta, Riverhead, and Bethtown rose up in protest, demanding equal rights or some such. The department, figuring it would cover all the bases and not cause any more riots than were absolutely necessary, began calling itself “Municipal PD,” and then “Metro PD,” and then “MPD” for short. Some of the older hands, however—McIntosh included—felt they had changed the name only because the acronym “IPD” for Isola Police Department was being translated by the ordinary citizenry to mean “I Peed,” a not entirely flattering descriptive image for stalwarts of the law rushing to the rescue.

There was nothing suspicious about the twenty-seven footer moving slowly toward the Hamilton Bridge, except that she was cruising along with just her running lights on. No lights in the cabin or anywhere else on the boat. Well, that wasn’ttoo unusual, McIntosh supposed, but even so, in these difficult times he didn’t want to be blamed later on if some crazy bastard ran a boat full of explosives into one of the bridge’s pylons. So he hit a switch on the dash, and a red light began blinking and rotating on the prow of the launch, and he signaled to Officer Betty Knowles to throw a light onto the smaller boat ahead.

Aboard the Rinker, Avery Hanes whispered, “Let me handle this.”

Well, hell, he was the smart one.

“WHY DO Ihave to be black?” Jonah was asking her.

Tamar didn’t know what to answer the poor man.

Because the good Lord intended you to be that way?

She hated deep philosophical questions.

Like when a reporter fromBillboard magazine asked her what she thought of Mick Jagger, and she’d had to admit she didn’t know who Mick Jagger was. When the reporter explained that he was a seminal rock singer, she didn’t mention that she didn’t know what “seminal” meant. Instead, she told them she didn’t consider herself a rock singer, and besides she was very young. So, of course they asked what kind of singer she considered herself to be, and she’d had to admit she thought of her kind of music as mainstream pop. But a question like Jonah’s absolutely floored her. She’d never suspected till this very moment that he was so deep.

What she was hoping was that nobody would be disappointed because she and Jonah wouldn’t be duplicating all the bells and whistles on the video, but of course how could they do that on a little boat in the middle of the river? Tonight, she’d be lip-synching, which was okay because everyone in the crowd was very hip, she guessed, and surely nobody expected her to reallyperform the entire video, did they? Shit, it had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot the thing with all the special effects and everything, so how could anyone expect aduplication of all that on this dinky little boat here, even though Barney kept calling it a “launch.” She certainly hoped nobody had such wild expectations in mind, which was a good title for a song and maybe for her next album, “Wild Expectations.” She certainly hoped they would appreciate her just lip-synching while she dry-humped Jonah.

Jonah was as gay as a bowl of daisies.

This was okay because he only came across that way when you were talking to him. Lisping and all, and sort of limp-wristed, a total caricature of a fag.

“Why do I have to be black?”

And a little limp flick of the wrist.

Cause you unfortunate,amigo, Tamar should have said.

Jonah hadn’t done any talking on the video, and he certainly wouldn’t be doing any talking tonight, either. Even Tamar herself wouldn’t be talking until after the record played and they danced to it. Then she’d do the interview with Channel Four, and whatever other interviews she had to do with all the press people out there, and then they’d call it a night and hope for the best.