Any way, I hope you enjoy the story. I used the title later on as the name of my first TEE Album.

Radio Personality
By Jay Larsen
© 1990

He flipped the sterile page of another day and was pleased to notice an inscription in thin red ink on today's calendar page. A rush of suppressed memory came flooding in, to infuse what he had expected to be another ordinary day with exquisite anticipation. Today he would sample the new radio station. The red ink told him so.

The station was not strictly speaking new; it had begun broadcasting exactly one year ago today. But knowing the true importance of the magic called radio he had made a conscious decision not to tune-in this new station during its first year. Virgin stations were not to be trusted. During the first year things would be wound too tight; programming would be designed only to convert masses of new, unaware listeners. The broadcasting personnel and the machines they served would be new at their jobs, unused to working together. The red notation on his calendar, recorded by his own hand one year ago, proclaimed that it was now safe to sample the waters of this untried station.

With false calmness, he flicked the familiar power switch on the stereo receiver. As the power hummed through the cold circuits, he was twisting the dial, sending the glowing green band-indicator gliding across the face of the radio like a canoe skimming the surface of an unexplored lake.

He halted the indicator just short of the new station in order to partake of the delicate pre-station static and howl. The eerie howling shift from chaos to clarity was an essential part of the true listening experience. He could never submit to the sterile dissections of the new digital tuners, cutting directly from station to station as if the ocean of background noises and ghost stations did not exist. The security of the island lost its meaning without the threat of the ocean's tempest beating on the margins of the shore.

An electric whine spiced with distant sprinklings of salsa music from a distant south-of-the-border transmitter coalesced slowly into the rising, crystal clear chant of an advertising abbot proclaiming a new miracle 'available at finer drug stores everywhere!'
He breathed a sigh of thanks for such a fortunate omen. He hated nothing worse than tuning-in at mid-song; broadcast music should be received from start to finish.

He heard the announcer's confident voice announcing the beginning of the morning news overlaid with a perplexing ringing noise. Confused for a moment, he began to fine tune the station but stopped as he realized that the shrill sound came, not from his speakers, but from across the room.

"Damn,'' he said, and a few quick steps brought him within range of the ringing phone. He snatched the receiver from its base, muting the interfering bell in mid-ring.

''The President today announced that he would veto any attempt by the Congress to cut Social Security Benefits,'' the announcer intoned.

He reluctantly held the cool plastic to his ear, hoping that the call could be terminated before the first song began. ''Yes?''

''Did I wake you up?'' It was his girlfriend's voice. He hadn't heard from her in several days, and in the excitement of tuning-in he had forgotten to leave his customary have-a-nice-day-at-work message on her answering machine this morning.

The newscaster shifted from national to local news as he attempted to end the conversation with his usual formula of empty greetings and chatter. But an undercurrent of stress in her voice warned that she would not be so easily pacified today.

''We have to talk' I don't think I'll go to work today...'' Her voice tailed off into expectant silence.

Taking his cue without skipping a beat, he told her he would drive over to her place and pick her up. They could drive out to their favorite spot by the river and talk. And, more importantly, though he remained silent on this point, he would be able to listen to the new station on his car stereo. He hung up the phone, grabbed a sweater to keep off the early autumn chill, and sprinted to his car as the end of the news was heralded by another chorus of commercials.

The first song was not disappointing. It came in crystal clear as the power antennae on his Buick extended to its full length. He checked the balance and the equalizer as he started driving. And he began humming the tune as he passed the familiar buildings of the old high school. The song had been a favorite of his as a teenager, and as he drove the song seemed to bridge the intervening years, bringing back feelings of mystery and yearning. He turned the car into his girlfriend's neighborhood. It was an older tract, and the big oaks and pines that dominated the front yards and buckled the sidewalks swayed in time to the music. He smiled, knowing now what he had only suspected when he first drove these streets as a teen, that he received far more from the radio broadcast than most listeners.

The trees waved him into his girlfriend's drive as the song faded and gave him the empty air space he needed to honk the horn. A deep voice announced the station's call letters and summoned his girlfriend from her house. She raised on finger to indicate that she needed a minute and ran to her car to get her coat while he was invited to compare copy machines by a friendly commercial. She opened the passenger door and got in, her shapely body the perfect compliment to a sleek beer ad.

She didn't lean over and kiss him like she usually did when he picked her up. Instead she pretended to be interested in lighting a cigarette. He shrugged and backed out of the drive while the announcer recited a list of upcoming community events. He glanced at her, and when she caught him looking she jerked her eyes away.

''Do you think it will rain today?'' she asked.

He just smiled as the announcer answered for him. ''The weatherman says this persistent cloud cover should be breaking up by early this afternoon. It should be warm and sunny today with a high of 87. Indian Summer.''

A few well chosen songs propelled the Buick through the city streets and onto the old highway that led out of town. As he drove the two-lane road he began to get a feel for the philosophy of the new station. It was a time-travel station. Oldies were the mainstay, but just enough new music was mixed in to give the responsive listener the knowledge that the past was still alive and could be visited.

His girlfriend was quiet at first, and he didn't mind. She just kept smoking cigarettes, and he wondered what she would do when she ran out. She didn't say a word, leaving him to enjoy the familiar music that filled the interior of the car. As he slowed and turned onto the river road he began to feel as if he were piloting a musical time ship, driving not only on the paved river road of today, but also along the old gravel road he and his girlfriend had taken so many times before, back when the rhythmic energy of rock 'n' roll had been new and forbidden.

As the river came into view she started talking, reminiscing in an attempt to lead up to an explanation of where she had been the last few days. He tried to split his awareness into two separate channels of attention. He listened to her, but he did not want to lose his feeling of connection with the shifts and phases of the music. Even the commercials seemed only brief variations of a single but elusive theme that he was just beginning to understand.

Her voice was distracting at first, like a cackling static or a pulsing interference from a ghost station just out of receiving range. But then he glimpsed the rusty old train bridge spanning the river ahead, the site of so many late-night conversations and caresses. The presence of that great metal structure seemed to bring the day into greater clarity. The tone of his girlfriend's voice and the first strains of an old favorite shifted focus slightly, like the subtle nudge of the tuning knob that brings the signal in clear and undistorted.

He slowed the car and pulled onto the short gravel access road that crossed under the bridge and down to the river. The urgency of her voice said that she was confessing, but he knew not what. The rhythm of her voice had become more vital than the actual words she was saying. Her tight thin voice accented a back beat of the old song as the thumping bass line beckoned him into the past.

Dust billowed around the tires of the car and made a dense cloud in the rearview mirror. The crunch of gravel under rubber tires harmonized with the momentary static as the station was blocked by the steel and concrete of the bridge towering above him.

''Listen...I didn't mean for it to happen. It's not like I love him or anything. One minute we were talking. The next minute we where...you know.''

He had missed something. But the familiar rhythm of the old rock ballad brought him back in sync with her confession. The strangely slow tumble of the river voiced a polyphonic duet with the drums as it maneuvered over and around the rocks in its bed.

He rolled down his window and breathed in the warming air as he watched the breeze sweep away the last of the clouds. He pushed up the sleeves of his sweater and propped himself against the door of the car so that he could feel the sun on his arm and face. He shivered as a sharp current of electricity shot up his spine; his head tingled as if each of the hairs on his scalp and neck were tiny antennas. He said nothing as he received the multi-channeled signal: the familiar ballad, the breeze, the river, the confession.

She continued her staccato performance, giving reasons and excuses, though he asked for none. She did not look at him as her delivery became husky, choppy with a tempo that created a perfect counterpoint to the lonely wail of the guitar's amplified testimony of life's infidelities.

His head swam with the momentum of the performance. The song moved through him, and he would have started singing to make the lyrics his own, but the urge passed quickly beyond such teenage levels of ownership. He knew this song, this symphony of life was now his. It belonged to him and he to it more than if he were strutting upon a brightly lit stage singing and playing before the multitude. The music was being received into his senses with such emotional intimacy that is was his, all of it.

He knew that the good songwriters must have also felt this way, but always with other people's compositions. They wrote their songs in a desperate attempt to own them, to make the music their own. Yet they knew--like he knew now--that their songs would always belong to someone else. Someone who could really receive them. Someone like him.

Her confession reached a crescendo as he embraced his song.

''You go back Jack, do it again''

''Can you ever forgive me? I wouldn't blame you if you never spoke to me again.''

''Wheel turning round and round''

''I didn't mean to hurt you... I do love you.''

''You go back Jack, do it again''

He wasn't hurting. Couldn't she see that he was being transported to ecstasy? Every nerve tingled and burned with the building climax of his private symphony. How could he make her realize her part in this baroque composition'

Moving with the force of the music, he took her, and it was the only time that he truly felt joined with her. Then hot and tired from their love making and laughing like they had as children, they waded into the deep pool below the gray concrete abutment of the bridge. The water was cold and cleansing. She felt forgiven, and he felt as if the had truly risen from the fog of sleep for the very first time. The drumming of their hearts and the bass rumble of the river were joined by the intense rush of a passing train on the bridge above. They stood naked in the current and embraced as the train let out a long lonesome note. It faded into the distance, the last note in a memorable symphony of life.

The echoes of that day kept him warm for many weeks. But eventually, inevitably, the warmth faded away, and the drowsy confusion of everyday life began to fog his perceptions. So once again he waded into the wintery sea of static, searching, always searching, for the perfect radio station.

(C) copyright 1990 WhatDoWeKnow? and Jay Larsen, all rights reserved.