by Bobby Bones
As soon as I had that degree in hand, I was out of Arkadelphia and on the highway to Little Rock, where I moved into a tiny two-bedroom apartment with a college buddy, Josh, and his wife. It was a good arrangement for all of us as we were just scraping by. Living with a pair of newlyweds didn’t bother me in the least; I still considered having my own room a luxury since it was still so new to me. (Sad. I know.)
The first time I had my own bedroom still remains one of the highlights of my life. It was sophomore year of college, and Courtney and I had decided to share a two-bedroom apartment with rooms across the hall from each other. We paid our deposit, signed the lease to rent the place, and got the key. As soon as I walked in, I went straight up to the bedroom, shut the door, and sat on the floor of my room, my room. There was no furniture, but just the act of shutting the door was a revelation. Before then I never had a space I could call my own.
Other than bedrooms, Courtney and I shared everything that year—including a TV, a nineteen-inch Panasonic that we found at a yard sale because we couldn’t afford a new one. This thing was no flat-screen; it was a beast. Still, we’d walk it back and forth to each other’s room, dragging the cable wire behind. Luckily, Courtney and I had opposite schedules, so the TV share worked out.
Nothing that year could top the feeling I had when I first walked into my own room. Not a lot could top it in general. If I were to make a list of the greatest moments of my life, getting my own bedroom would be on it. (Maybe that’s why now I never leave my bedroom. Minor emotional breakthrough! I have a nice place. I live downtown in Nashville, with plenty of space and a nice living room. I even have a pool table—obviously I’m still single as of the writing of this book! But I bet you I haven’t watched TV in my living room more than ten times since I moved in over a year ago. I stay in my room. All the time. And I love it. It is still my happy space.)
When I first moved to Little Rock, I was happy to have a cozy living situation with Josh and his wife. It was nice to have a few familiar faces around as I tried to find my way in the big city where there was so much for me to learn. In Little Rock you had to pay for parking. What in the world? It was an entirely new concept to me to take my hard-earned money and use it to park my car. This is what city folks did?
Of course, paying for parking was the least of it. The big city was also a huge lesson in crime. The kind of robberies I was used to growing up in Mountain Pine was someone stealing a handsaw or ice chest from someone’s shed. Little Rock was a whole different story. As a whole, Arkansas has the dubious distinction of often ranking as one of the nation’s most violent states (as well as one of the poorest). And within the state, Little Rock is one of the most violent cities. (In 2015, Little Rock earned the title of number one most dangerous city under two hundred thousand people in the United States, according to the FBI.)
I don’t know if I got used to Little Rock’s crime, but I sure got a taste of it one night while on my way to a radio station event at the Electric Cowboy, a mix between a megaclub and a country music bar. (There was a huge dance floor where they played country music for forty-five minutes and then Nelly for the next fifteen. And so forth for hours.)
I had brought along a girl who I was dating at the time (although looking back, I think she was dating like five dudes, and I was just a guy who got her into the Electric Cowboy for free). Before we went into the event, I drove up to an ATM right on the side of the club. I had just slipped my bank card into the machine when I heard someone yell, “How much money you got in there, boy?”
I thought it was a joke, someone from the station or a listener pulling my leg. But when I turned around, what I saw wasn’t funny at all. A man in a mask approached the driver’s-side window and put a gun right up to my face. He dragged it from my cheekbone to my temple. And then he pressed. And pressed again, harder.
Now, as I’ve said in the past, I am no tough guy. Never have been. But in this empirically terrifying moment, I wasn’t freaked out. Not because I had some sort of Clint Eastwood plan to wrestle the gun away from the dude but because the whole situation seemed fake. It was as if I were watching TV, not in the middle of a real-life situation.
Unfortunately, the guy in the mask was not an actor and the gun he put up to my head was not a prop. As he shoved the gun into my temple over and over, he yelled, “How much money you got in there?”
Not much. Actually, I was broke. I’m not exaggerating. I was making seventeen thousand dollars a year, which didn’t leave a lot of cash after I paid rent, food, and gas. I probably had about thirty bucks or so in my bank account. In fact, I was only planning on taking out ten dollars so I had cash to buy my date a beer in case the club owner didn’t hook me up. But the robber didn’t care about my financial status.
“Whatever I have, I will give it all to you,” I said calmly.
“Get it out, now,” he said, pointing with his gun toward the ATM. And then he pistol-whipped me. He slammed the gun into my face with a down motion, stunning me. But oddly, it didn’t hurt. I was running on pure adrenaline at that point.
There was only one problem with the plan: I completely blanked on my PIN number. In my defense, it’s hard to think when there’s a gun in your face.
“I can’t remember my PIN number.”
“I should kill your mothereffing ass right now!”
With a beanie on his head and a dark cover over his face, his eyes were all that I saw—and they were vividly staring at me.
“Get the money out, boy,” he seethed.
Believe me, we were on the same page. All I wanted to do was get that thirty bucks out, give it to him, and get that gun out of my face. But I couldn’t remember my PIN number to save my life. So he did what guys who hold guns to other people’s heads do: he didn’t pull the trigger (too much paperwork) but instead slammed me in the head again.
Wow, I’m getting pistol-whipped, I thought to myself. It was so surreal, it was as if I were watching the scene from above, and at any minute I could have opened my eyes.
“If I knew my PIN number, I would give you every bit of money I had,” I pleaded. “The last thing I want you to do is shoot me or hit me with your gun again.”
While the masked man by my side was getting increasingly angry, my date chose that moment to shove her purse and the wallet I had handed to her earlier under her seat. I guess she thought since his attention was on me, she could save our credit cards, driver’s licenses, and . . . her makeup? It was a pretty stupid move, because just then we were both startled by a knocking on her window. There was another guy with a mask on, tapping her window with his gun in a motion for her to roll it down. We had been so consumed with the first guy that we had totally missed his accomplice. She put down her window, and he took her purse and my wallet. Meanwhile the guy by my window is still holding a gun to my head, repeating, “I’m going to effing kill you; I’m going to effing kill you.”
It was looking pretty bad for Bobby Estell in that moment. I was about to die for thirty dollars, because I couldn’t remember my stupid PIN number. (Incidentally, I never remembered it again. For the rest of my life, it was gone. Whatever part of my brain I stored that information in was erased.)
The dude then slammed me in the side of the head again with his gun, as hard as he could. That one, I felt a little bit.
“You’re lucky I don’t effing kill you,” he said.
Then they took off running. He didn’t kill me—or get my thirty dollars. If you’re reading this now, Robber, what up? Guess who’s got my thirty dollars? Me! (Well, I spent way over thirty dollars in therapy bills after that, because for a year straight I had nightmares every single night. Every single night it was the same scenario: the masked men robbing me at gunpoint, but this time I was in the actual bed where I was sleeping! It was terrifying. But at least the thug didn’t get my thirty dollars, right?)
Okay, so I had just been pistol-whipped, robbed, and had my life threatened. You’d think the first thing I’d do would be to call the
cops, right? No, not me. Being the guy always trying to turn a dime into a dollar, I called the TV news station instead. “I just got robbed at gunpoint,” I told them.
My reasoning went like this: I knew the cops weren’t going to catch those guys. They never catch those guys. To this day, they haven’t caught those guys. Now that I wasn’t dead from a gunshot to the head, I thought about it for a second: How can I get the most benefit from a bad situation? By calling the cops, having them come out only to not catch the thieves, and tell me not to call the news? Or, call the news first, have them do a story that might raise my profile a little and help me with ratings for my radio show, and then call the cops?
It was a no-brainer. I called the news, and three stations came out to the Electric Cowboy to cover it. Then I called the cops, who were pretty pissed that I decided to call the TV station before the police station.
I might have seemed pathetic to the Little Rock PD, but I had to get ratings to keep my job. I was still relatively new to Little Rock radio, and we had a main competitor in town that we were neck and neck with in terms of listener numbers. I couldn’t afford to lose my 17K-a-year dream job. As much as I had loved working at Hobby Lobby as a teenager, I didn’t want to go back.
I could write an entire chapter about my time at Hobby Lobby. I know that I’ve really only written about my radio career to this point, but I had many other jobs. I worked at the marina, did maintenance on a golf course, waited tables—and was an employee of Hobby Lobby. That position at Hobby Lobby was a big deal to me because I got to wear a vest. I remember my first day on the job, being given my blue vest, putting both arms through the armholes and puffing out my chest with pride. In the break room a few minutes before my first shift was about to start, all I had to do was get my name tag and I was ready to walk out onto the floor.
I went to the supervisor, who handed me my name tag, and thought to myself, How cool is this? I get to wear something on this already badass vest that tells people my name. It’s almost like I’m famous. With name tag in hand, I went into the bathroom to pin it on. But as soon as I got in front of the bathroom mirror I went from totally psyched to completely bummed out. The reason? My name tag read, HOBBY LOBBY BOBBY.
How I didn’t foresee that Hobby Lobby Bobby was going to be part of my Hobby Lobby experience I will never know. But there I was (and to some remain to this day), Hobby Lobby Bobby. Even still, I loved working at Hobby Lobby. You can find ANYTHING for a crafts project. Need a picture frame? Check. A button in the shape of the Eiffel Tower? Check. Rainbow-colored pipe cleaner pack? Check!
Despite the cornucopia of craft supplies, I just didn’t want my old job (or name tag) at Hobby Lobby back now that I was a DJ in Little Rock. Radio was my home. And I was going to do anything to keep it that way. Even using my second close call with death (yeah, there are even more besides falling on the boat trailer and being held up at gunpoint outside the Electric Cowboy) to my professional advantage.
In addition to using my own experience with violent assault as PR, I also worked hard on my night show to make it one listeners would want to tune in to. Naturally I played a bunch of music, but I also tried out anything and everything to see what worked on the radio. On air I played guitar, talked about current events, and interviewed the occasional pop star. I also kept trying to find what separated me from everyone else. And at the time, I hadn’t really found it.
I was still trying to have a big voice, say things the “right” way, and time my talk breaks out perfectly. But I wasn’t a natural. I remember streaming radio on the Internet and listening to guys like Kane at WFLZ in Tampa, Atom Smasher at KRBE in Houston, and Tony Fly at KDWB in Minneapolis and thinking, “I will never ever be as good as those guys.” I knew I couldn’t compete doing what they did. So I did the one thing that I could do better than anyone else. And that was be me. I talked on air about being single, being a dork, not knowing my dad—the list goes on and on. The more I divulged, the more real it felt. The more I divulged, the more comfortable I was being me—even if it was awkward driving through Taco Bell and having an employee say to me, “Sorry you got dumped last night.” The oddness of strangers knowing every intimate detail of my life didn’t take away from my sense of completion. It’s totally counterintuitive, but from behind a microphone I felt safe talking about the most personal subjects, those things that I didn’t feel comfortable talking about anywhere else.
My radio style took a long time to develop. Heck, I’m still developing, but it was in Little Rock that I found how I was going to be a big radio personality. And that was to be as honest as possible on the air. (I also credit Howard Stern with being a huge influence and motivation on me in this way. I’ve never met Howard, only read his books and seen his movie, but I owe a lot to him because he was really the first radio person I had ever known to “put it all out there.”)
A given for any radio personality is doing stunts. Stunts are what get people talking about you. The bigger and crazier, the more people will remember it, your show, and the radio station. When I was in Little Rock, someone else had to do the stunts that I devised because I was running the show and couldn’t leave the building. Enter my sidekick—Gilligan. That’s not his real name. I actually don’t remember his real name. If anyone gets a name on the air, I never call them by their real name off the air, so I don’t accidentally do it on air. Consequently, I have no idea what Gilligan’s real first name is. What I do know is that he began his illustrious career in radio as an intern for my show. That’s where I plucked him out of obscurity. He had a stoner, surfer voice that made anything he said sound kind of funny. But really the quality that landed him the job of my sidekick was that he would do whatever stupid thing I told him to.
When it comes to stunts, the general rule is the more stupid the better—until you cross that line from stupid into trouble. The problem is, you never really know when you’re going to cross it. In Little Rock, there were two Top 40 stations, Alice 107.7 and us. Because it’s rare for a town that size to have two stations both playing pop music, the competition was fierce. We went head to head every day. I know; sounds pretty dramatic for two radio stations that both played the Backstreet Boys . . .
One day, though, the other side went too far. I can no longer remember what started the whole series of events that subsequently unfolded, but their night DJ guy had done something that really irritated me. Whatever it was, I know it was stupid—like sticking-an-Alice-107.7-bumper-sticker-on-our-van stupid. But I was a twenty-one-year-old with a chip on my shoulder. Because of my days of being a puny, poor pirate, there is nothing I hate more than being picked on. If I think someone’s picking on me then I’ve got to fight back fifty times worse just to prove to them I’m not weak.
So that’s what I did with Alice 107.7. Irritated that they had messed with us, I hatched a diabolical plan to take over their airwaves. It began with Gilligan and me driving across town to Alice as soon as we got off the air. We had exactly one hour to accomplish our mission; I got off the air at 10 P.M., and Alice’s nighttime DJ, T. J. Mack, got off the air at 11.
Alice’s parent company had recently turned on a brand-new country station in their cluster of radio stations, so the plan was for Gilligan to take one of the cowboy hats lying around in our building (we had our own country station, too) and have him say he worked in their building. Because if you show up wearing a cowboy hat, they’re going to let you in, right?
Gilligan—a muscular six-foot-two-inch guy with long hair, gauged ears, and tattoos everywhere—put a cowboy hat on and beat on the door. Watching from my car across the street like some bad private dick, I saw the door open and Gilligan gesture with his hands. Then the person let him in! We were in. Holy crap. We were in their radio station!
It was all up to Gilligan now. In preparation for this moment, I had taught him how to use the equipment inside their studio using pictures they had posted to their website. I had scoured the Alice 107.7 website for pictures of their studios, mapped
out a diagram, and used them to show Gilligan how to get on the air by explaining what each of the important buttons did and how to locate them. And he was now in their building.
I started driving around Little Rock, waiting to hear from my hidden spy DJ. At around ten forty, Gilligan called me. “I’m in the bathroom,” he said. “I’m standing on the toilet so no one sees my feet, so no one knows there’s an extra body here.”
Gilligan hid in the bathroom and waited. So did I, by the road where people at the station drove out of when they were done. At a little after 11 P.M. I saw T. J. Mack drive right out. Gilligan did what he had been taught to do—he went into the radio station while it was on air, got on the radio station phone, and called my cell phone. Then he took their music three-quarters of the way down (if it goes silent, the engineer gets a call or alarm) and he turned me all the way up on the air. Lastly, he locked the door and left the station.
True to the original plan, I didn’t start talking until I was back in front of the station and he had jumped in the car. Then the fun began as we cruised around Little Rock, broadcasting live from my cell phone on our competitor’s radio airwaves.
“You don’t mess with Bobby Bones at Q100,” I said over a Celine Dion song that had been playing. “Everyone listen to Q100! Everyone listen to Q100!”
“Let me talk. Let me talk,” Gilligan said, grabbing the phone. “You don’t f—”
I tried to pull the phone back in time before he could say what he wanted to, which was, “You don’t f— with the Bobby Bones show on Q100.” But I didn’t get it back before he dropped the F-bomb on a Top 40 station.