My 24 hours as a pariah

It's a weird feeling when the news is solely about how awful you are.

I woke up at the Airport Marriot in Minneapolis on the Monday of Super Bowl week and thought I had survived a terrible fuck up. Tom Brady was going to join Kirk & Callahan at the top of the hour, according to my Twitter feed. For the first time in 72 hours, I exhaled.

On a WEEI show the previous Thursday night, I made an incredibly dumb remark about how Brady’s young daughter was acting in the opening scene of his Facebook series. It was the first of many ridiculous things I said that evening, and the truth is, I didn’t think anything of it. I put more thought into my hourly order from the third-floor vending machine.

Throughout my early run at WEEI, I constantly pushed myself to the edge. As the self-affirmed crazy gay guy, I regaled listeners with stories about bathhouse rendezvous and Grindr hookups, relishing my role as the station’s most-hated personality. Along the way, I made plenty of mistakes. I aired dirty laundry and hurled insults at complete strangers. For me, airtime was worth more than dignity.

There is an art to being edgy on the radio. Think of your personality as a volume knob. During most encounters, it’s probably turned somewhere in the middle. You don’t want to bore, but also don’t want to offend. Generally, you try to stay neutral. There’s no point in upsetting anybody.

But in radio, that’s entirely the point. The proof can be found in Private Parts—just ask any radio guy. During one notable scene, a consultant comes back with some surprising news: People who say they hate Howard Stern listen to his show for twice as long as people who say they like him. And that is our defense whenever we’re called on our shit.

So how do you generate outrage, while not coming across as a completely loathsome dick? It’s a balancing act. You have to control your volume knob. It’s tempting to always hover around the maximum level, but eventually your speaker gets blown out. That’s what happened to me.

I provide that tortured background for the sake of setting the scene. That’s how I, Alex Reimer, found myself just minutes away from becoming a 24-hour pariah.

The weekend before my abbreviated Super Bowl trip was strange. That Friday morning, they replayed my comment on K&C, just so everybody driving to work could hear it. Later, my program director called me in for a meeting. He wondered why I had to make fun of Tom Brady’s kid. It was a fair question. Then I went to co-host the midday show. I planned to ignore the noise, just as Belichick would’ve done. Too bad Patriots fans on Twitter didn’t receive the memo. Every 30 seconds, my mentions filled up with another dozen calls for my job. It was like six Russian troll farms were on the case.

The TB12 Avatars were foaming at their mouths.

I blacked out during the midday show, when we were interviewing some football guy about the offensive line, or something. I was on with Glenn Ordway, who knew me back when I was an overzealous college senior, and would drive an hour each way for unpaid spots on his Internet show. He was a legend in the business. I was elated.

Back then, the thought of coming out publicly never crossed my mind. Why would anybody need to know my sexuality when I was breaking down the Yoenis Cespedes trade?

So it was quite surreal indeed, that I was sitting in the studio with Glenn on the day I thought my dream job was going to blow up in my face. And the weirdest thing is, I don’t think we even discussed it. We just marched on with the show.

I have no idea how I slept that weekend. My guess is, vodka helped.

Throughout the weekend, the fear was that Brady would cancel his weekly Monday morning interview, and the story would explode. His regular spot was the station’s most valuable asset. They couldn’t afford to lose him.

At the top of the hour, he called in. I figured there was no way he could’ve known. But he did. One hang-up later, I bolted straight to the hallway, where I proceeded to pace for the next several hours. That afternoon, I was booked on a flight home, heading back to Boston as the most infamous character from Super Bowl 52.

It’s a weird feeling when the news is entirely about how awful you are. I wrote many stories in my day about media people screwing up. Each time, I sent out futile text messages for comment, inundating a random person’s inbox on the worst day of their professional life.

Being on the other side of the content machine really exposed the absurdity of the whole ordeal. A Boston Herald reporter called for comment while I was on the toilet; TV news people waited all day in trucks outside of my parents’ house. (At that time, I was an adult-with-training-wheels, still having mail forward to my childhood home.)

In time, the story became whatever people wanted it to be. Deadspin used it as an opportunity to rip Boston; the Globe called the episode a “calculated overreaction.” But mostly, people ripped me. Unsurprisingly, the masses did not think it was OK to disparage Tom Brady’s kid on the radio.

When I landed back in Boston, I was expecting my gate to be flooded with reporters and ravenous Patriots fans. But to my great relief, it was empty. There was a war brewing inside of my iPhone, and complete silence in Terminal 12.

There was also a Grindr guy. Some hot-looking frat bro recognized me from the news, and hit me up when I landed. I ended my hellacious day with dirty chat, handing over blackmail to a stranger during the one time in history it could’ve potentially been worth something. But I didn’t view it that way. On Grindr, I was just an avatar to be virtually gawked at. I could escape.

In between frantic calls to my cadre of good friends, all of whom now doubled as crisis management experts, I stared up at the ceiling in my childhood bedroom—fixating on photos of Albert Belle and Adam Dunn. As a kid, I collected pictures of weird baseball stars. I yearned to go back in time.

For the next month, I was told to stay off social media, and for the ensuing six months, I was kept off the air.

I’ve held a lot of different emotions about the ordeal. At first I was embarrassed, and then my shame turned to grievance. But through it all, it seemed like the defining moment of my life.

Three years later, it’s amazing how distant all of that feels. I feel like a different person. Most of all, I’ve learned the world can live without my daily commentary on every pseudo-controversy. My Twitter screen gives me a lot less anxiety.

There are better ways to spend a morning than pacing the Airport Marriot.