yustyoking

  

            “Where you been all week?” asks my younger bro’ Timothy. Dig it, Tim the Air Force pilot— with his brown leather flyboy jacket—is stationed in Texas. He flies bombing missions all o’er the world. And he’s asking me where I’ve been!

            It’s a prescient question. I’ve spent the week preparing a script for a bit of “radio theater.” About 50% music and 50% talk, this format entails matching clever musical choices to commentary. You want the song lyrics to compliment the patter. For instance, when I bitch about the incredulity of government statements, I follow it with The Jefferson Airplane‘s “Somebody To Love.” The song opens with the lyric:

                               “When the truth is found to be lies,

                                 And all the joy within you dies…”

                                                                         ©  1966 Darby Slick

            Pretty neat!

            This time around, the topic is my dubious career as an undergraduate at Moosegrave College in Washington, D.C.

             I was the dude who spent a year at U. of Maryland 1965-66— mostly getting drunk— dropped out of school and got shipped to ‘Nam. Upon returning to “the world,” I enrolled as a journalism major at Moosegrave College. Expensive as all get out, with this tremendous reputation, Moosegrave’s School of Journalism included a ramshackle radio station. It had an AM side and an FM side.

             The FM half broadcast 1200 watts in the D.C. area, piggybacking on the antenna at WTOP. We was too cheap to buy our own. College radio, their FCC broadcasting charter allowed them to play classical, jazz, easy listening and talk shows.

              AM was on-campus only radio, a glorified public address system broadcasting through the electrical grid to the dorms. What a melange of angry young disc jockeys! Drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll radio, there were fistfights in the outer office, people so stoned on pot, they knocked the needle clear across the on-air turntable, and wild chatter. “Hairy and loose” was the industry judgment, and not in a good way.

             Guess where I worked?!

             Our call letters? WACK-AM & FM in Washington, D.C.

                                                       *

             “Fifty years and cookin’, this Spring sports a reunion of you and your soul mates from the glory years of WACK-AM,” read the invite, penned by “Lucifer Heart-Throb” himself, Gene Goldstein. “Come! Bring your Significant Other.

            “We’ll be checking hairlines.

             “P.S. Send $50 to cover the cost of the event. Thanx!”

                                                       *

              I have to give them credit. The FM station got a PBS affiliation in the 1990’s. Our dinky AM outfit has dwindled to the status of a podcast. Yet, we’re having a reunion! Location— and this is perfect— is the upper level of a concrete parking garage behind the Dalecarlia Reservoir off MacArthur Blvd. How fitting. We’re going to party on a concrete deck! At least there’s free parking.

              And the invitation includes one-hour shows on the website! So I write this inane script, dredging up the most embarrassing moments of my college career.

              The time Heart-Throb himself left an unsealed letter to his girlfriend in New Jersey on a desk in the office. It was stamped and ready to go, but he forgot it, when a fistfight broke out in the parking lot. Something of a pugilist, Gene loved watching fistfights. So Boopsie— who is now my business partner in the field of screenwriting— slipped the letter under a blotter and told me about it. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” I said, going to my locker in the Arts building and getting a brown crayon. Stopping by the Men’s Room, I picked up a wad of pristine toilet paper. Energetically applying brown crayon to toilet paper, we prepared a little surprise for Madeleine in Cherry Hill, NJ. I stuck it in the envelope with Gene’s love letter. Licked and sealed the envelope. Getting in my red MG Midget, I drove to the post office on Massachusetts Avenue and mailed the letter.

                “Has anybody seen my letter to Maddie?” asked Gene.

                “Oh, yeah!” Boopsie piped up. “K.K. mailed it for you! He was goin’ to the post office anyway, so he took it.”

                “Oh, okay,” said Gene, at a loss to understand why anybody would do anybody else a favor… Ever.

               This is very embarrassing to tell about.

               Sure there were repercussions! Of course there were! “It was a joke! “ we told Gene, who was understandably furious.

              Too young to know any better, we all continued to work together at WACK.

              If I was a journalism major, why did I have a locker in the Arts building?

              “If you’re a journalism major,” Dean Williamson asked me, “why do you want to study fine art?”

               It interests me, you cretin! I was thinking, but I couldn’t get the dean to sign on by telling him that. “I want to become an art critic. For the newspapers,” I lied.

              “Oh… OH! That’s brilliant!” said the dean, signing my forms.

               There was the time I was to give a report before my Art History class based on my term paper, “The Nature of Concrete Art.” My thesis was, since any found object or industrial cube can now be mounted on a base and declared as Art, the only criterion for what is and what is NOT art is the intention of the artist. This was a very big issue back in the 1960’s.

                I wanted to read and explain the report to my classmates. Field questions.

                Two hours before my presentation, Daryl the Pot Head approached me on campus, waving a joint, and said, “Man, you gotta taste some of this Acapulco Gold!” He and his buddy, Billy the Burp, were already high as kites.

               “Naw, I got a report to give!” I explained.

              “Je-sus, man! Just one toke!”

              One toke led to another and by the time it was 3 o’clock, I was wasted. I stumbled over to the Arts building, pulled aside some of my classmates and explained my predicament. They were furiously disappointed.

              “Wha’? Wha’?” I kept mumbling. “Jus’ tell Professor Janning I’ll come ba’ an’ do it nes week. I gotta go home!”

              “What are we supposed to tell him? That you’re stoned?”

              “Stoma’ ache. Tell him I got acute stoma’ ache,” I mumbled. I drove my MG Midget home to my parents’ house, where I had a basement room. Every stop sign looked the size of the Empire State Building. I slammed on the brakes along a residential street when I saw an enormous pink rabbit on a suburban lawn. When I looked a second time, I saw it was a magnolia bush.

              That was the occasion I learned that I could not ingest pot if I wanted to accomplish anything in life.

              I still smoked dope, but only at parties or on weekends when I had leisure time to kill.

              Hey! I’m the guy who got cheated, when my dime bag mostly contained seeds and stems! In retaliation, I planted the seeds behind the carport among my mom’s mint.

             “Some weed is invading my mint plants,” complained my mom.

             “Oh! I’ll take care of it!” I offered, which amazed my mom. Otherwise, I never volunteered to do gardening chores.

            “Holy guacamole!” said my buddies, duly impressed. “Menthol marijuana! How in the world did you do that? You gotta market this stuff!” 

                                                       *

           “There are eight million stories in the Naked City” said the old TV show. Just relating eleven of them on a podcast, it took me a week to grind out an air-tight script.

            The anonymous note left on the windshield of my MG Midget: “I hate you, Kevin Feingold!”

           Spooning with my girlfriend who, fondling my privates, burst into tears because— in my comfort zone— I fell asleep!

            “I’m not stupid,” I wrote. “I know you can Google anything nowadays on the Internet. Yet, these tales of yesteryear are so— how shall I say— piquant, I seriously doubt you’re gonna hear this stuff anywhere else!”

            Boopsie and me playing a tape recording of the room-mate to a senator’s daughter. The roomy castigates her classmate for bad hygiene. In detail. Descriptively. Vividly. By name. The station got a phone call from the senator’s office, threatening to sue the station for libel and defamation of character! Dean Williamson was not amused!

           We were almost expelled for that little imbroglio.

           Moosegrave College… I couldn’t get a moose, but, yes, on a visit to NYC, I found a pawn shop and purchased a shaggy, mangy moose head that definitely had seen better days. Cost me $20. “It graced a barber shop for years, but the barber retired an’ his wife brought it in here,” the proprietor told me. He seemed relieved to get rid of the thing. “You want me to wrap it?” he asked doubtfully, his face a giant question mark.

           “Naw!”

             Driving home on the New Jersey Turnpike with a moose head in the passenger seat and the top down was a classical gas. “What is that?” asked the toll collectors, worried that I was an ax murderer on a rampage. “Oh! It’s a moose head!”

           We couldn’t sneak it into the college president’s residence, so we propped it on the office chair, behind the desk, in Dean Williamson’s office.

            The phone rang at the radio station. “This is Dean Williamson!” his angry voice echoed down the wire. “I’m not asking who did this!

            “Come and take it away!!! ”

            Nobody in authority liked my moose head.

            We mounted it on a wall at WACK. It was great!

                                                          *

             I drive to the college to do my podcast and kind of stare down the FM station. Two teenage boys, lean and muscular, wearing nothing but running shoes and black cotton briefs, come jogging down the street. A 19-year-old lass with a blue plastic helmet and a face full of freckles shoots past me on her racing bike, her ponytail trailing in the wind. I proceed to the fourth floor of the student union building and find the AM studio, amidst the plasterboard and plastic sheeting of summer renovations.

             Tommy, the engineer— a full head of wild brown hair and granny glasses— takes my CD’s, eyes my playlist and says, “Awesome! The Seeds, “Pushin’ Too Hard.” The Beatles, “Rain.” These are some of my favorite songs!… Listen! We have to do a public service announcement regarding the celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee. Can you fake a British accent? Mine sucks!”

             The broadcast goes beautifully. I have rehearsed with a small cassette tape recorder, so I know which words to attenuate and how to couch my phrasing.

             “The only problem, “ Tommy says, as the telephone rings off the hook, “is that I get so wrapped up in your stories, I’m afraid I’ll forget to push the play button!”

             After the program, as another dude takes over, I field a few of the phone calls myself. “Great show! You can go to Hell!” says one caller. Another asks if I am a pervert. A third really likes my choice of music.

              I congratulate Tommy for making it so easy to produce the show. “I was really worried that my board man wouldn’t dig my vibe, but you truly got into it,” I chuckle.

             “Oh, yeah!” he replies, asking for an autographed copy of the script. “Even my wife has texted me that she thought it was terrific!”

              As I leave the building, a young blonde with a chow haircut stands on the steps, smoking a very long cigarette, eyeing me provocatively. I can stop and fall desperately in love with her or I can go to the party.

              I get the hell out of there.

                                                          *

              Eighty people attend the event, all looking a lot older but not necessarily wiser. Same goes for me, of course. Baby boomers, we’ll never really grow up. Interestingly, everyone has a food obsession. If we’re not yakking, we’re eating!

                Y’know, I was gonna wear my Beatles tie— a black tie with silkscreened white portraits of the Beatles on it— but chickened out, thinking it ostentatious. Ha! People have full-color ties celebrating Elizabeth Taylor, the Challenger shuttle (yeah, the one that exploded), Paul Simon, Bill Clinton (“What’s the definition of is?” it asks) and even a tie dedicated to my old mentor Murray the K.

                Radio personalities are all egomaniacs, that’s what attracts us to broadcast our voices to strangers. The other jocks congratulate me on a great show. They call it “storytelling” and “personal narration” and “stand-up.”  Then they ignore me, busy chattering among themselves.

               This fucking crap about networking is so over-rated! I had hoped to make some commercial contacts, but I am sorely disappointed. Everyone of all ages brags about their own personal exploits, basking in the glow of their own perfection and— as the alcohol freely flows— they act silly and begin fawning on one another.

             A lady with an iPad is webcasting in real time, as if there’s an audience for a WACK-AM reunion.

             Under a red and white striped circus tent, the caterer provides hot skewers of barbecued lamb, beef, shrimp, green peppers and potato wedges that are scrumptious. We all feed our faces with abandon!

            Since I don’t schmooze well, I team up with Cynthia Howard, a Moosegrave co-ed who is summer interning at WACK-FM. We sign people in at the entrance table. Yeah, sure! Folk breeze past us. They commandeer our pens. They fill in their name tags with sobriquets like “Maestro Flash,” “Arnold the Magnificent,” “The 13,” “Kevin the K” (that’s me!), “Rigaletto” and “Thursday Afternoon Rock Show with Murray Hampton.”

            “You know,” I do remark to Beth Ambrose, a former Program Director, “with all the media out there now, it’s amazing that radio is as strong as ever! We really, obviously, fill a need!”

             “Still,” says Beth, who makes her living designing theater sets, “it’s not like in the old days. Now radio is definitely a niche market.

             “During my tenure,” she exclaims, “I tried to have the PGA Tour broadcast on FM, but golf doesn’t seem like a sport that is properly accessible on an audio medium. There are only so many times you can say, ‘Aaaagh! He missed the putt by inches!’ before the listeners change stations.”

             The party is fun, but I feel like a eunuch. As a younger man, I would have been tongue-tied and sweating, working together with a raven-haired beauty like Cynthia. Now, she just strikes me as entirely well-meaning and extremely young. Mellower, I look at women my own age and wish I could figure out how to connect with them. I seem to have all the presence of wallpaper. So I stuff my face, fill my belly and drink bottled water.

             The facilities are in a bar across the street. You take the elevator down four floors, walk across the intersection and slip into Billy’s. A lot of people stop there to imbibe hard liquor, which is why the proprietor agreed to let us use his restrooms.

             Otherwise, the caterer has laid on a stock of microbrews, Watershed Pale Ale, Burning Doghouse Brown Beer (the most popular brewski), Righteous Christian Lager. Watching my former coworkers get pleasantly plastered, I feel glad I have foresworn alcohol.

             We can’t get them to leave, either. “Can we start clearing tables and dismantling the tent?” the young people hired as servers by the caterer keep asking me, as our 5 to 7 p.m. event nears 8:30 at night, with no end in sight.

             “Tear it all down!” I heartily suggest, jumping up from my folding chair and lending a hand.

              Later, enjoying the solitude of the summer evening, I walk through the woods surrounding the reservoir. I come upon two baby skunks. “Where’s your momma?” I ask them, as they sniff my brown leather sandals. It feels reassuring to see I haven’t lost touch with nature. I am sure their momma is lurking nearby. I back away quietly, return to my car and drive home.

                                                         *