Train Tracks (17 page)

THIRTY-FOUR

First Boat in Hawaii: Sailing for the First Time

I
magine what it's like for a kid from New York to wind up in Hawaii: I'd never been to a place like that! It was like walking into heaven itself, or so I thought as I picked fallen plumeria blossoms from the sidewalks.

When you land in heaven, you think you can do anything. You are filled with a sense of confidence that only children and the mad have and can understand. But, when a grown-up has hubris, it becomes very dangerous and, in my case, that was true. I had never seen sunsets like in Hawaii. I used to bicycle up to the university, and I would see plumeria blossoms lying on the sidewalk. I would stop the bicycle and pick up the blossoms and look at them and smell them. Sure, I had seen roses on a fence in the Bronx when I was a little kid, and they were soft and beautiful—but this was something unique. The sweet perfume was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

Sunsets and sunrises and birds in the jungles in the back of the rain forest, that you'd never seen or heard before—and you started to get tuned into your own body in a way you'd never been. If you've never lived in the tropics and it's the first time, you start shedding clothing and shoes and leather, and you put it all away. And now you're in flip-flops and shorts. All of a sudden at night the breeze blows gently through your sleeves and you start to come alive in a new way. You go in the warm water and start to feel like the original man. So you buy a sailboat—that's the first big thing you buy.

So, I bought a sloop-rigged boat.
Tarange
was a sloop-rigged sailing vessel, about twenty-two feet long. She was made of white oak primarily and was built in Oregon, then sailed out to Hawaii. I bought her for next to nothing. She was in perfect shape and had no engine. I berthed her in the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor. Most people who own boats mainly use them to drink on and hang out—it's as good a thing to do as any—but I was foolish enough to actually want to sail the boat, even though I knew nothing about sailing. I took it out without an engine.

I knew it was pretty easy to get out because the wind was prevailing out of the yacht harbor. I thought,
Wow, this is great!
There I was on the boat alone. My friends cast me off, released the lines, pushed me backwards, and there I went: down the Ala Wai Channel, out of the harbor, out into the ocean. I was zipping along with the sail all the way out.

And there I was out in the Pacific Ocean, alone.
This is super. I'm really enjoying myself.
Then I realized I didn't know how to get back. I thought,
How do I turn this thing around if the wind is blowing out?
Well, I didn't know how, so I thought,
Well, I better figure this out because if this keeps up for a while, I'll soon be out in the middle of the ocean—and then there will be no way back at all.

I had no flares, no radio, no engine. All I had was confidence that was bordering on the insane. The first thing I did was resort to common sense. I dropped the sails because that would cut the motion of the boat. I dropped the sails and, using the tiller, turned the boat around—you know: flip-flop, flip-flop—until I got the boat pointing back towards the land. Then, I figured,
If the wind is blowing against me, there must be a way to go into a prevailing wind and still move against it. I've seen other people do it.
And little by little, lo and behold, I was able to—luckily (I don't know whether it was the current or God's hand itself)—get pushed back into the harbor. I learned quickly that sailing is not for the amateur. That's all there is to it.

Those days are over, but she was my first boat. I didn't save the life ring from
Tarange
because I didn't even have a life ring. I don't think I even had a life preserver! That was in the late sixties, an age when people thought with total madness about what they could do and accomplish.

Now I drive a powerboat. It has all sorts of safety equipment on it, but not as much as it should have. But I like powerboats a lot better than sailboats because they're easier to get out. I can get this boat underway in fifteen minutes. It's forty-nine feet long, twin diesels, forty tons, and I can go out on it alone and come back on it alone in almost any wind. That's the good part: just you and the birds and the water, the wind and the land. That's why I go out now, just to look at the water and look at the birds and look at the landforms, mainly—and the seals. I can name every species of bird on the Bay. I've come to understand that every animal has a personality—isn't it strange?

I still eat animals, but they all have a personality when you get to know them—and they all want to live. Dad taught me that everything wants to live. That's how he taught me to respect life. He said, “You'll notice that a cat wants to live, a dog wants to live, a rat wants to live, a mouse wants to live, a bird wants to live.” He learned that when he accidentally shot a bird as a kid. Remember, this is odd to a country boy—it sounds very weak, but remember, I'm a New York City boy. To us, it's a different experience than it is to you guys. I respect your ability to hunt for your food—but every animal actually has a personality when you get to know it. They're all different, just as we're all different: Every human is unique, like a snowflake. Well, guess what? So are animals! They're all unique. It's amazing when you come to understand that.

THIRTY-FIVE

The Leather Man Gets Brain Cancer

T
his is about a man who grew up as one of my father's best friends in a very poor neighborhood in New York City. They were immigrants together; their parents came over, maybe on the same boat, or they met each other in the slums of New York. They both had a very tough life, and they worked their way up, little by little, as immigrants have to do as they struggle in any society. This man went into a business that took off at a certain point like a rocket; he hit a fad in a certain business and started to make a great deal of money. He moved way beyond our family.

While we lived in an attached brick house in Queens, he had the money to move his family to a detached house. I remember how important that distinction was in those days: It's like the Buick LeSabre as opposed to the Buick Roadmaster—or, God forbid, you were Rockefeller and bought a Cadillac, if you can imagine. People used to grade their status in those days by their car model and house. I don't suppose it's much different today.

So he moved to this detached house in Roslyn, New York. It was a beautiful house. It had its own lawn all around it (we only had a little strip of grass in the backyard and a tiny one in the front). The carpet was wall-to-wall and pink.

He was a big cigar smoker. We would go and visit; I had a very good time. He would gloat with the cigar and lord it over my father. We'd leave. My father never said anything against him, but you know, I could see in his eyes that he was a little, let's say, that he lost that little battle at that time. You know how humans are—they're competitive! Even if they love their friend, if their friend does better than them, there's a degree of envy in every human being. It's just one of the cardinal sins.

As years went on, the man's business continued to thrive. Then I left home and moved away from NYC. I went and did my thing collecting plants, working for my graduate degrees thousands of miles away—I was living six thousand miles away, then nine thousand, in the Fiji Islands. Lo and behold, on one of my trips back to New York, when I was already a father myself, I heard that this man's leather business had collapsed entirely. The fad that he rode like a wave died. People were no longer buying that particular product, and the man who had a chain of successful wholesale stores lost everything.

He lost everything, and it was so fast that he wound up living where he started: on the Lower East Side of New York in a poor relative's apartment, with his wife and the relative's family—back where he started in a one-room apartment. And that's where I come in.

I came back from one of my trips to the Fiji Islands. I was a young man—I don't remember how old I was; maybe thirty-five to forty. My father was dead, and here sits the leather man. Now, remember, I loved him like another father. I loved all my father's friends. You know how it is when you're a kid in a very close-knit community: You tend to love the people like they're your own. We all grew up so close together, and there was never a bad word between him and my father.

He sat there, shrunken up in the chair in my parents' living room, after he'd lost everything. He looked up at me, still smoking a cigar, and practically pleaded, “Michael, Michael, look what happened to me. Look what happened to me.” His eyes were wandering left and right. He didn't understand what happened to him. He said, “I'd rather have cancer than what God did to me.”

I soon left New York again. I went back to do what I did, which was to collect plants, and lo and behold, I heard that two years later he died from one of the most rapidly invasive forms of brain cancer.

Be careful what you say: God hears the truth but waits.

THIRTY-SIX

From Immigrant's Son to Radio Stardom

M
y father was an immigrant. He came here when he was seven. He was not born here, but I was born here. He was a citizen when I was born. I'm not an anchor baby—don't get me wrong—but I do have one foot in the Old World and one foot in the New World, so I really speak from a knowledgeable position about it. I understand what it's like to live in a poor household with many people. Trust me, we lived in such a place—I didn't even have my own bedroom in the Bronx. There was one bedroom and a tiny living room with a fake fireplace. I remember hanging stockings on the fake fireplace: I thought Santa would give me a gift.

So, part in the Old World, part in the New World. My grandmother didn't speak a word of English in the house. She spoke the old language from the old country. She was so wonderful! Boy, did I love her. She was so beautiful, very stoic—very, very Russian, this woman. She spoke to me in Russian by the way. I am not a Russian-language speaker, but it's strange: I can understand the language to a certain extent. It's a very hard language for an American to learn. The alphabet is very complicated for an English speaker. I can surely imagine how hard it is for a Spanish speaker to learn English, by the way. English is a tough language, very tough!

But, in my home, my parents spoke only English. To make a long story short, here I am, a “man-child in the Promised Land.” When my turn came to assume my position in this country in my chosen profession, they said, “White men need not apply.” The positions were closed. So, you can understand where I am coming from. I got so angry that I produced a virgin demo in 1993 and sent it out to about 220 radio stations. I got a return from about five to ten of them. Five of them said, “That's really good stuff. Would you like to work at our station?” I remember, to this day: One of them was in Boston of all places. I don't remember the stations that said, “We like what you did,” but, nevertheless, I was living in San Francisco as I am now and one of the offers came from a local station. The guy said to me, “Good stuff. Would you like to come on in and talk to us?”

Here's what the virgin demo said, from 1993:

And now, direct from the towers above Manhattan, it's “The Michael Savage Show.” To the right of Rush and to the left of God, and now—Michael Savage.

I'm glad I can be with you seven nights a week because these stories are just not going away. I mean, every day in every way we're getting assaulted. Look at these questions before us today. Look at the questions before us! You know they say that I'm to the right of Rush and to the left of God. Do immigrants carry diseases? Are lawyers really humans?

All right, let's pause. You see how daring this was? You say, “Well, it's commonplace today,” but it was not commonplace in the early nineties; it was really daring. It broke open new ground. I changed the media landscape! That's it; that's how I started.

Then I did a show—I'll never forget it. I blew through it because I was under the weather. I'll never forget it: The local station manager called me and said, “Would you like to fill in?”

I said, “Sure, I'll try it.” Now, I had never done radio except on book tours. I had done ten national book tours, where you go around and do radio and television. They were very stressful. Along the way I remember various program directors saying to me, “You know, you're really good on the radio. You should consider a career in radio.” How could you get a job in radio? It was as real to me as becoming an astronaut. Of course I wanted to do it, but I didn't know how to get into radio.

But let me tell you something: Desperation breeds creativity and creativity breeds a lot of opportunity. I think that fate had a hand in it; this, and God. I really think I was set out to do this from the beginning! All right, so he says, “fill in.” The first show I filled in for was on a liberal talk station in San Francisco—it's still there. It's a powerhouse 50,000 watt-er. He gives me a show to fill in for. The guy who hosts the overnight show and is a hater—hates white people, let's say, like Obama's pastor. Exactly, a Reverend Wright! All night long, hate radio: against whites, against America. He himself, of course, is living the high life—as is Reverend Wright in his new $10 million house. You understand how it works. Curse America and laugh all the way to the bank, you know.

So, that's the kind of show I filled in on! I never listened to the creep and I'm never up in the middle of the night. So, I go on the air and I start to talk about illegal immigrants. Soon the hate callers began. I was overwhelmed because, remember what my last incarnation was? I was the good doctor, the nutritionist and the herbalist who gave lectures around the world!

Normally, I would give lectures about health and vitamins and nutrition in America. At one point, I was director of nutrition for a major international nutrition company. They sent me to Malaysia to talk about their products. My audience was all Muslim women, and they were a great audience. These were moderate Muslim women who were interested in nutritional supplements. They received it very well. I spoke and it was translated.

So, I had been all over the world doing lectures and I was usually very well received. Frankly, I was like the “beloved doctor”—that kind of thing. Now I do talk radio and I walk into a propeller of hatred from the Left. I never encountered such hatred from the people, from the regular listeners of this guy's show! That night, when the shift ended (from midnight to five
A.M
.), I drive home from that station. The whole way home I'm in a paranoid state. I'm looking in the rearview mirror—I thought I was being followed! I get home. I say to my wife when I get home, when she wakes up, “I'm never going to do radio as long as I live. I can't take the hatred of the callers! The liberals are the most hateful people I've ever encountered in the world. No amount of money would be worth doing this!”

The station called me the next day when I woke up. They said, “Wow, you did a great job, Savage! Would you like to fill in again?”

I said, “No, I will never fill in again as long as I live. I don't ever want to do radio again.” Ask them! I'm not making it up!

“Why?”

“I'm not going to go into a show again with these haters.”

“Well, how about filling in during the day?”

I said, “I don't know. I don't think I could do radio: It's too hateful. The people who call are full of hate, the Left-wingers.”

So they said, “Tell you what: You won't have to do the night shift again. You'll do a day shift.”

I did a little fill-in on the day, and I shook up the whole local media. Then eventually they created a local conservative station and I went on that. They made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Remember, I was making a fairly good living as an author and consultant. I didn't want anything to do with radio, but the temptation was too great.

I've got to tell you something else. Radio—you ask anyone in the media who knows how to do it right, and they'll all tell you the same thing: Nothing in the world of media could compare to the high you get off radio. There's nothing that can compare to the feelings you get! When you do this right, there's no performance in the world that equals radio.