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He gave me a look that told me I didn't need to answer, and we never spoke about it again. The truth was that we were both too valuable to Willy that summer for him to get in our way. Me for the sound system, her for the local following of guys who showed up every night hoping to drink her bathwater but would accept Willy's booze as a lesser alternative.

Once when we were putting ourselves back together before returning to the bar, she smiled suggestively and said, “I'd like to see you function in warmth.” But whenever I'd try to make that happen, she was elusive. I asked her out multiple times to no avail.

“I don't know if that's a good idea,” she'd say anytime I suggested we go somewhere besides the ice box. She offered no further explanation, so of course, the more she begged off, the more I wanted the chance to try to expand her perception of me, which I figured was pretty limited. I had no idea what she thought of me. Summer fuck buddy? Local stoner? Easy, albeit fast, lay? Clearly she didn't want me to be her boyfriend, and I started to obsess over why. The most obvious reason was that she was smart and beautiful and clearly going places, while I was bartender in a strip mall. Then finally one night, we had a real conversation.

Last call at Shooter's was 2 a.m. and I'd gotten into the habit of trying to time my walk to my car with hers. We'd make small talk and always end up going our separate ways but I'd usually linger in my car, smoke a bone, and wait until I saw her rear tail lights leaving the lot. Sometimes I was tempted to follow, wondering where she lived and if there was a boyfriend waiting, but I never did. One night, I watched as she walked to her car, but after ten minutes, her headlights still hadn't come on. I turned off my car radio and then heard the faint sound of her engine turning over but not starting.

I got out and went over to her car. “Do you need me to jump you?”

“Again?”

We both laughed. I pulled the cables from my trunk and had her running in no time. This time, when I asked her if she wanted to hang out, she told me to hop in. Within minutes we were parking near the beach.

I had a doobie in my shirt pocket and asked her if she wanted to get high.

“No, but you go ahead.”

We sat there with the windows down on a steamy summer night with her engine off and an accessory cassette deck playing the Rolling Stones'
Goat's Head Soup
. Soon after I fired up, I felt her hand reaching for a hit. Thus began our first real dialogue. We mostly talked about the bar. She wanted to know how long I'd been there, why the guys called her Envy, and whether Willy had ever said anything about walking in on us.

“Never a word,” I told her.

We goofed on some of the regulars, and continued to get high.

“You ought to be playing songs for more than a barroom, Stan,” she said.

“You mean like a club DJ?”

“No, I was thinking radio DJ.”

The thought had never occurred to me. She said that she thought I had a real talent for knowing what people liked to hear.

“You make them happy.”

“I think watching you in a suede skirt while getting shit-faced makes them happy,” I said.

“Don't let yourself get stuck at Shooter's. You're too talented for that.”

Her comment was both an endorsement of my skill and an affirmation of what separated us. She wasn't getting stuck at Shooter's. In another month, she would be heading back to college, a few grand richer for having spent a summer waitressing, and I'd still be spinning classic rock for a bunch of rednecks. It was a more effective wakeup call about my situation in life than any speech I'd ever heard from my parents or a guidance counselor.

As the summer wore on, I dreaded September. I knew that once she went back to FSU I was doomed. I kept trying to come up with ideas that would keep me relevant when her semester began, but nothing seemed plausible. And then just like that, we were done. One night as we were closing up, she mentioned that it was her last night at Shooter's, and before I could pull her aside to say goodbye, she disappeared. She returned to FSU and I never saw her again. Nor did I stop thinking about her. The one the locals called Envy.

Susan Miller.

I certainly knew what had become of her—the entire state of Florida knew her bio, and soon, so would the entire nation. She had met Bob Tobias during her junior year at FSU and, as the press releases and magazine profiles told it, fallen head over heels in love. In those days, Tobias was the antithesis of me. A total stud, he was a football phenom with a 4.0 who had the world by the balls. While I was still clutching a bong in my bedroom upstairs in my parents' place or pouring drafts at Shooter's, he was throwing touchdowns on national TV. They married soon after graduation in a wedding that was featured in all the Florida papers. She became a lobbyist in Tallahassee, bore him three daughters, and as his political career ascended, became a poster girl for everything right about the Sunshine State. Now, she was possibly poised to become the nation's first lady.

As the years went by, it was almost impossible for me to avoid hearing about her. Even after I'd left Florida, I would spot her and her husband in the local press whenever I returned home to visit my parents. I charted her path as best I could and wondered if she'd ever taken an interest in mine. I had come a long way since she'd known me at Shooter's. Stanislaw Pawlowsky hadn't been in a position to influence much of
anything, let alone her husband's presidential aspirations. But Stan Powers could throw up a roadblock or two if he followed Phil Dean's advice. That seemed unfair given that Susan Miller had done more than just about anyone else to put me on the career path to where I was today.

After Susan returned to college, I'd realized I had to get out of Shooter's. For one thing, going to work was pure agony. I couldn't unload a beer truck without thinking about her. It seemed that every song I played would conjure up some memory of what had apparently been only a summer fling. Everything in the bar reminded me of her. Of us. It was time for me to get my shit together and find the next thing, and the only idea I had was the one she'd given me.

My mission was to find a job that paid me to do what I'd done for Willy only without having to serve beers and put money into a huge holster. That opportunity came when I pestered a 5,000-watt daytimer outside of town to hire me for minimum wage as a weekend morning guy. The station was one step removed from a boom box. It broadcast from beneath its own transmitter in a building surrounded by livestock, and could only be heard during sunlit hours, which meant that my first hour on the air at 5 a.m. was for a crowd of one—but I didn't care. I was being paid a couple of bucks to do something I enjoyed, and I was no longer trapped in a bar where I kept obsessing over a girl who got away. A sense of ambition I never knew I had began to kindle.

•  •  •

Twenty years, five stations, and 1100 miles away later, I was broadcasting live from a classic rock station in Pittsburgh. It was called WBXM and was owned by radio giant Star Channel Radio. It was also where Stanislaw Pawlowsky, now known as
just Stan or Stan the Man, did afternoon drive every weekday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

“You're tuned to Buxom FM, WBXM, now let's get
Stanned
.”

I wish I had a nickel for every time that line came out of my mouth in the Steel City. But the catchphrase worked. And I could rightfully take the credit because at a time when consultants and company playlists were becoming the norm, I had minimal interference from the suits and basically relied on the instincts I'd developed at Shooter's. When my fingers thumbed the carts on which the station library was stored, I asked myself one thing: is anybody ordering a shot over at Shooter's when they hear this, and will that fucking fake pistol fire? If the answer was no, I looked for something else.

Pittsburgh was the perfect training ground. It was the nation's 25
^th
radio market and a town with a working-class mentality that I really dug. These people worked hard, loved their Steelers, and liked to unwind by drinking shitloads of Iron City beer while listening to rock music. And there was something else: a major concert venue in the Mellon Arena, or as the locals still called it, the old Civic Arena. It was home not only to the Pittsburgh Penguins, but also to every touring act from the Rolling Stones to Radiohead. Our station was on the call list of every major record and concert promoter, many of whom would offer interviews with bands releasing albums or touring. If they were touring, they were coming to Pittsburgh. And if they were coming to Pittsburgh, they were going to want to sell tickets on Buxom FM.

The interviews were usually run by a service out of California that would book a particular band member in eight-minute increments, so one second a rock god would be talking to me in Pittsburgh, and the next he'd be talking to a guy in
Dallas. Or Phoenix. Or Philly. This didn't allow me to develop a rapport with any of the artists, not in the span of a few minutes, and more often than not, the singer or bass player was confused as to what market he was reaching. “Hello, Cleveland!” Still, I loved it, and allowed the suspension of belief to set in like we were old buddies. These were the guys I had grown up idolizing. They were the musicians whose lyrics I had once spent hours reading on album jackets because I thought they had all the answers. And if one of them so much as answered a question by including my first name, it gave me a woody.

When tours came to town, I could sometimes finagle tickets and a backstage pass from the promoters and attend a meet and greet with the bands. That was great too, and I'd often take not only a date, but also my tape recorder, partly so that people knew I was in the biz, and partly to grab some audio for the afternoon show.

Some of the stuff that happened backstage you couldn't make up. Jon Anderson from Yes was always one of my favorite singers. Well, he came to town on a solo tour at a 500-seat club and I was given a pair of tickets and a pass. I jumped at the opportunity to hear the man who sang “Roundabout” and “All Good People” in a setting of just a few hundred. After the show, I flashed my laminate and expected to be one of 30 or so who would get to shake his hand and maybe grab some audio. Only this time, there was no meet and greet. There was just me, Jon, and his beautiful wife, Jane. So we sat and talked, and somehow the conversation turned to politics and the c-word. Yes.
That
c-word. It's probably the only word even I will not say, much less put in print. He launched into a dialogue about how the word was beautiful, and how it had been defiled by men around the world and how I needed to play a role in bringing it back.

Oddly enough what set him off was a controversy over whether American politicians should hold the hand of the Saudi King. Of all things, a photograph of President George W. Bush holding the king's hand had really riled up the usually sedate singer. The Saudis, Anderson said, had a “serious damn problem on women. They don't treat women with any respect at all, for God's sake. No, they don't treat women well. And woman is the earth mother, for God's sake. Come on, we've got to wake up!”

I tried to change the subject. But before I could, Anderson blurted out:

“There's a great book called
C-nt
. Everybody's got to buy it.”

Thank God this was taped. I didn't need George Carlin to tell me that word should not be broadcast.

“You know, ‘c-nt' was a beautiful African word for the divine, the flower of the woman, the vagina. C-nt!” he continued. “It's an African word and it's a beautiful word. But you know, men fucked it up. They changed it into something misogynistic and derogative.”

Well, the following day that aired on Buxom FM—all beeped, of course. Even so, it was huge. In fact, I think the beeps added to the rebellious nature of the conversation. My interview even got a brief mention in
Rolling Stone
! And even after all this time, I found myself wondering whether Susan might have read or heard about it. Sober, I was not.

Another night, Ted Nugent came to town and I was offered the opportunity to go to his hotel room and interview him before he left to do a local show. I took a buddy of mine with me who couldn't believe that we were about to encounter the Motor City Madman in his suite. He thought I was pranking him right up until the minute that Uncle Ted greeted us in his doorway in stocking feet and welcomed us in.

Now I've never been too good with electronics—I have a clock/DVD player at home that still blinks “12:00” 24/7—and that night, I had some crappy old tape recorder that actually recorded on cassettes.

We were all sitting around a dining table in Nuge's suite and he was on a roll talking both politics and rock. The man was both insane and an interviewer's dream, sounding off on everything from music to hunting to politics. We seemed to hit it off and I remember him telling me that I was his “blood brother” and so forth.

Then all of a sudden I felt something on my foot and looked down to see that the cassette tape had spooled out of the machine and was now running onto the floor. Nugent didn't notice. Now I had a real dilemma. Should I tell him and acknowledge that the 15 minutes he'd given me was for nothing, or just try to finish up the interview and scoop up the tape without him noticing? I grew worried. They didn't call him the Motor City “Madman” for nothing.

I sat there deliberating and ultimately figured it was in my best interest to fess up. When I did, he had a surprise for me. He reached into an ankle holster and pulled out a cannon the size of the one Dirty Harry wielded. Nuge pointed it at the cassette recorder and asked my permission to “blow it the fuck up.” Then he smiled and said to come to the show and catch him backstage and we'd try again. I hustled out the door with Memorex tape between my fingers. Later that night he made good on the offer. When I told the story on the radio, complete with Nuge wanting to nuke my recorder, some liberal prosecutor in city hall heard me and issued a warrant for his arrest because he hadn't had a carry permit in Pittsburgh!