A Voice In The Night (2 page)

Chapter 3

WICC was a giant step up the radio food chain for Luke, although its studios were a step down. It sat above a car battery distributor that occupied the first floor of a two-story, brick factory building that had been converted over to cheap office space. First-time visitors invariably walked into the lobby with its display of batteries, then walked back outside to check again for the station’s neon call letters on the wall.

But the station could be heard up and down the East Coast and a number of deejays had gone on from there to 50,000 watt monster stations in New York, L.A. and Chicago, the ones Luke had searched the dial for as a boy. Bob Crane, the star of Hogan’s Heroes had been a jock there a few years before. Later he would die a tabloid death, murdered in Scottsdale, Arizona after living off rerun payments and dinner theatre for 20 years.

Luke worked the 7 to midnight show, five nights a week, sticking to the station’s rigid top 40 format that relegated the deejay to dropping in the time, temperature, song titles and self-promotional phrases for the station. “The hits just keep on comin’.”

Exactly. That was the problem. By the time a song made it to the top 40 list, Luke and the other deejays were so sick of it they turned off the air monitor to escape still another playing.

Radio had changed since Luke’s dream days because of Ted Storer, a station owner in Kansas City. He had watched kids at a teen hangout play the same songs on the juke box over and over again. The next day he invented the top 40 format and that was the end of the era when deejays were artists with the freedom to create a mood with their delivery and music choices. Now you could drive coast-to-coast and every station sounded the same, except for the few adult, middle-of-the-road holdouts that clung to an aging demographic.

Luke now thought of it almost like a factory job, punching out songs, the time, the temperatures as though on a production line. He wanted to be one of the talkers, like Shepherd, or Barry Farber. But rock and roll, format radio was still fun in a mechanical, mindless sort of way. And it paid well enough to pay for a new, red Healey 3000 roadster that he and Eileen zipped up to the Rhode Island beaches or the Cape on summer weekends, their hair whipped in the backwash of the windshield, their skin browned by the sun. They were in their few years of physical perfection. “We have to remember all this,” she hollered one day over the impossible din of the Healey and the wind.

“All what?”

“Everything. The way everything is and feels. Pull over a minute.”

He did, braking hard, diving into a dusty turn-off. The dust caught up with them and settled over the car, over them. “What.”

“I was just thinking that this is the best of our lives –
right now.
Look at you. Look at me. Look at this car. Everything is new. We can go anywhere, be anything.”

“Okay.”

“No not okay. We have to decide and do it and not just take what we get. You’re good at what you do Luke, but you could still be playing records on the radio when you’re fifty.” He started to respond, then swallowed it back and stared down at his hands resting on the bottom arc of the glossy wood steering wheel. The cars swooshed by on Route 1. She was right. She had shown him the future he feared. Inexorably in the last year she had become the gatekeeper of their shared life. He liked that she was better at it, would watch and weigh, do the homework, tell him the truth. His trust changed her. Her cynicism retreated, replaced by confidence born of his belief in her.

“And we don’t have to stay here. We can cross the Hudson River ya know. They’ve got bridges and everything.” She pantomimed the crossing by porpoising her hand in front of his eyes, a visual aid, and comic relief. He laughed hard, mimicking her porpoise-hand back at her with a grin that told her they had decided something that summer morning, in the Healey, in a dusty place at the side of the road. Four weeks later the newlyweds left for San Diego. In later years they would pull out the color snapshots from the cross-country trip. How young and golden they were then, the effect amplified by the fading of the stronger colors, leaving a sepia light that seemed to emanate from them both. How unaware they were of the miracle and controversy they were driving toward.

They packed the Healey with a small duffel of clothes, lashed to the luggage rack. Behind the seats rode pieces of Luke’s growing library, books that he’d began educating himself from after abandoning school. The rest of their things were on a moving van, grinding slowly across the continent, packed along with four other households heading west.

At 21, their bodies were immune to the punishing ride of the roadster. They experienced every turn, every road surface through the seats of their pants, awash in the insistent heating system of the car. Although it was July, the Healey poured engine compartment heat up their legs and across their bodies due to a peculiar design whose only control was a pair of doors through the firewall that could be closed to, in theory, turn off the heat. In fact, they had little effect, and they were bathed in perspiration much of the time, their shorts and tee shirts thoroughly dampened after each morning’s opening miles.

West of Harrisburg, they wheeled into a single-tabled picnic stop along a quiet stretch of Route 22. “We’re that TV show, ya know. Route 66.” She hummed the program’s sweeping theme, rocking from side to side on the bench to animate it, her arms conducting an imagined string section. “Soda. I need sooodaaa,” Luke mugged. She pulled two Coke’s out of the grocery bag and the church key, passed them over for him to drain in a single swallow each. She continued the theme as she pulled lunch out like magicians’ rabbits. Through their lives, she would whisper the music to him when she wanted to bring back the shear freedom of the journey west. Through nights of sick children, the storm of public criticism he would be forced to endure, she could summon back those two weeks on the road with a few bars of it, their shorthand for shared happiness. He would nod. Yes. He remembered.

At Pittsburgh, they stopped by KDKA, America’s first real radio station, disappointed in the grimy studios of the broadcasting landmark. Pittsburgh itself at first seemed even more sinister than Luke had envisioned, listening to the station late at night in his boy-room. The night sky was on fire as they hit the eastern outskirts, the Bessemer furnaces of the steel mills belching columns of it skyward like searchlights. At one point she almost reached for his hand, seeking reassurance that they weren’t driving into the very gates of Hell.

But The Golden Triangle downtown was all new and revitalized. On Seventh Avenue, they passed KQV’s glass-fronted studios and slammed on the brakes, reversed back up the street and looked into the glitter, chrome and flashing lights that surrounded Chuck Brinkman the deejay that was on the air at the moment. They tuned to 1410 and listened for a few minutes. “That’s what it’s supposed to be like,” Luke said. They eventually pulled away from the curb, edging west in the night, scanning for a motel and sleep.

Chapter 4

He started out low and intimate, and stayed that way, almost whispering. “This is Luke Trimble, with Voices in The Night – KOGO, San Diego. Our lines are open. Give us a call.” His being here was pure luck. Three of the station’s air staff had mutinied over format changes and the manager had canned them on the spot. Luke’s audition tape was on his desk. He got the job because he was available right away, and because he dared to be different in a medium that was now based on strict control of everything that went over the airwaves. They called it “format discipline.”

But Luke had become irreverent over the last year in Connecticut, treating sponsors’ commercials and things in general with just a hint of sarcasm. It had begun out of boredom one night. By week’s end, the sponsors were calling in, not to cancel their advertising, but to buy more. Customers were talking about the quirky ads, and merchandise was moving off the shelves. The first night on the San Diego air he’d hit on something else. Because he wasn’t up on local issues, he decided to make the first show about that. “I’m the new boy and I can’t-believe-I’m-in-California.” Turns out everyone
else
was from another place and the lines lit up. People wanted to tell him their stories. He asked. They answered. It was novel. It was a hit.

From then on the callers were the show and Luke, not the authority, but the catalyst, asking, probing, prodding.

The other piece of luck was Jake. His producer and engineer was an unmade bed in the same clothes every day. At first, Luke would squint through the glass, wondering if the guy had nodded off. In fact, Jake was often mistaken as a cripple by studio guests owing to his lurched-over posture and spastic moves. A phone was embedded between his right shoulder and ear and he mumbled to callers, screening out the nut jobs by punching their lines into endless hold.

“After this call, a three-spot seque and news,” Jake murmured into Luke’s headset.

“Thanks for the call. Voices in The Night-KOGO-San Diego. News next, but first there’s this.” Luke barely nodded a cue and Jake punched the number one Spotmatic deck for the first of three ads.

Later, they huddled over breakfast in the 24-hour diner, Jake hunched over his plate, Eileen in her starched white uniform, Luke leaning back, listening. “We’ve got a good thing here but it can be better,” Jake said to the scrambled eggs. Luke squinted. “How?”

“Even less of you,” Jake smirked, looking up devilishly from his dish.

“Oh. Fine. I was starting to like it here too.”

“No. Really. You hang back nice and push the callers up front. But it’s still one-on-one. What if the callers could talk to
each other
? Eileen’s eyes swung between them like a tennis spectator. Luke looked over for a sign, a signal. She smiled, eyebrows arched, and barely nodded.

“Alright, but how?” Luke squinted the challenge at Jake.

“Gimme a pen. A pencil. Something.” A passing waitress dropped a Ticondaroga in front of Jake without changing her gait. He dove for the napkin holder, swiping his sleeve through two breakfasts. He already had it worked out in the engineer’s side of his brain. He carved a couple of circuit diagrams into the napkin, and folded it into his shirt pocket. “Not a problem. I’ll have it ready tonight.” He held up the pencil, and the waitress grabbed it on the return trip, like a ring from a merry-go- round.

It looked simple and it was. A box with four knobs. A couple of wires hung down, ending in alligator clips. About $25 in parts from Radio Shack. Jake hooked it to the phone lines and they were ready to conference up to four on-the-air callers at once. “We’re violating about a million Bell System patents here, no big thing,” said Jake as he hooked it up somewhere under the control panel. I’ll hide it in my locker when we’re not using it.”

That night, it started out a little ragged. Luke didn’t sort out what to do at first, and the callers weren’t too sure either. But after a couple of hours, it smoothed out.

When they were in a break, the private studio line lit up. Only Eileen and the station manager knew this number. She got through first. “I’ve been listening. It’s good. Really good.” His wife never exaggerated. This he could take to the bank. “Yeah? Ya think?”

“Yeah. I think. Gotta go. Got sick people here.”

Zack Osfelder was right behind her. The station manager was a legend in the business for the brutal control that he exercised on the rest of the on-the-air staff. But the ratings proved him right. He had no patience for anything on the air that was extraneous. Night or day he would call the studio to point out unnecessary, empty chatter. “Who goddam cares?” was all he would say, sometimes often enough to drive the guy on the air out forever. One drivetime deejay had to be taken away in restraints after Zack’s repeated needling drove him to tear the music library apart in a fury. He never returned.

“I don’t know how the hell you’re doing that bit with the callers, but keep it up. This shit is outstanding.” Zack hung up, replaced by a dial tone. Two weeks later, billboards were going up all over town. Voices In The Night.7p.m - 12. Luke Trimble. KOGO 600. Luke and Eileen drove past one with its hand-painted likeness of him. “Geez.
That’s
close,” she said. “It doesn’t look anything
like
you.”

“I’ve got a face for radio, baby.”