by Don Keith
"Hav-a-Tampa cigar time is 9:50. With studios in the French Quarter at the Roosevelt Hotel, this is WWL, way down yonder in New Orleans."
"This is the air-castle of the South, WSM, Nashville, Tennessee. Webb Pierce will be stopping by later..."
"It's 57 degrees on Peachtree, and you're listening to WSB, Atlanta."
"It's the All-Night Trucker's Show here on WBAP, with a song going out to John and all the drivers at the Mid-Con Truck Stop up there in North Platte, Nebraska, tonight. Here’s ole Hank Williams himself..."
"And now, folks, stay tuned to the Back-to-the-Bible-and-Jesus-Hour here on XERF. But first, have you ever thought about how much money you could make raisin' baby chicks right there in your own backyard?"
Most of the stations were only people talking, or bits and pieces of dramas that Jimmy happened to drop into the middle of. He felt as if he was eavesdropping on someone else's conversations. But some of the stations were playing the same songs he had come to know from WROG. And their announcers had the same break-neck spiels, the same joy and excitement that rattled the speakers and slapped a smile on his face.
He carefully tweaked the knob to pull those signals through more clearly. He was disappointed as they inevitably faded away. Then, later, he located some of them again on the crest of another wave and listened to a few songs before they once again plunged beneath the surf noise.
The strain of saving all those drowning signals finally made him drowsy. He fell into a sound sleep right there on the floor, only to awaken to the hums and sirens from the radio an hour later, his arms and legs cold and stiff. Grandmama had fallen asleep in her well-worn chair and snored louder than the hiss of her television set, now delivering nothing but snow and noise. Jimmy turned the set off and shook her awake.
"What? Restin' my eyes. You eat supper yet?"
She was fumbling for a cigarette from the empty pack but finally realized it was well past ten and the TV stations had signed off for the night. She stumbled groggily off to bed.
Now, in the pre-dawn stillness before she woke up and turned on the Cyclops in the other room for the day, Jimmy quietly listened to the deep, smooth voice of Jerry Diamond on WROG. Jimmy had already formed a mind-picture of the man inside the radio: in his mid-thirties, broad-shouldered, handsome, well-dressed, hair dark and wavy and combed straight back, casually smoking a cigarette, sipping hot coffee between sentences, as he spoke to Jimmy and the thousands of others who were coming to life to the sound of his friendly morning chatter.
Jimmy rinsed out his milk glass in the red-stained kitchen sink, slipped on his worn sneakers, and eased quietly out the front door. He did not want to risk Grandmama waking up and remembering some chore that might delay his serving his sentence at the radio station. And he did not doubt for a second that Charlie McGee would, indeed, have the F.B.I. come after him if he failed to show up for tower-climbing penance.
Detroit Simmons was already sitting on the front steps, his back to the door, waiting for him. He jumped as if he had been shot when Jimmy opened it.
"Jimmy Gill?"
"Morning," he responded, the word clipped and short and an intentional bit of gruffness in his voice.
"Boy! I thought for sure that old man had done shot you or put you in jail last night!"
"He threatened to do both."
"Jimmy, you are crazy, man. What do you mean, climbing up that thing like that? What if you fell off? What if they had started shooting at you?"
Jimmy was glad his friend had been worried, but he would never admit it to Detroit. He was still irritated, remembering that his best friend had run away and left him at the mercy of the station’s livid engineer.
"You sure took off lickety-split when he came up," Jimmy reminded him.
Detroit’s face fell, ashamed he had left Jimmy to fall or get captured.
“Listen,” Dee said sincerely. “Let me promise you one thing, Jimmy Gill. I won’t ever leave you like that again. It don’t matter what, I won’t ever leave you again. Do you believe me?”
"Yeah, Dee. I do. Don't worry about it anyhow. I'd have probably done the same thing myself."
That caused Detroit to brighten a little. Finally, he broke into a big smile. They shook one of their secret handshakes, an Indian one that Detroit had seen in a Roy Rogers picture.
"Tell you what, Jimmy. Let's go build a fort today. We can find some tree limbs and build it on the ditch bank and play like..."
He stopped mid-plan, sensing Jimmy was not going to be joining him in this particular adventure.
"I got to go back to the radio station and work or the man said he'd have the F.B.I. out after me," Jimmy explained.
"Radio station?"
He told Detroit what happened after his swift retreat. That the place with the strange flashing lights, the tall tower and the spirit-buzzes had turned out to be the WROG radio station. Then they walked along together through the woods, as far as their tree-bridge. Detroit stood in the clearing as Jimmy made his way toward the rear of the radio building. He stayed there, watching almost sadly until they had lost sight of each other through the tall grass. Before he let Jimmy go, though, Detroit made it clear that he was still leery of this strange place, still not sure if its witchcraft was good or bad.
Jimmy was not so sure either, but his curiosity was stronger than any fear he had. The humming at the base of the tower was just as eerie as ever as he walked past it. Wires strung on poles stretched back from the tower to the low brick building, and he followed their trail. The undergrowth was shorter and thinner in their wake.
A back door to the building was propped open by a big square chunk of metal with a nest of multi-colored, twisted wires at its crown. Cool air was being sucked in around him as he stepped carefully around the door prop and into a dark hallway. He remembered Charlie McGee's warning about being cooked alive by the power of the station. Maybe he would not get fried if he stayed on tip-toes.
There was a strange smell inside the building. Something like he remembered from the time lightning had run into their old house and burned up Grandmama's stove. A sharp electric smell. A big fan roared overhead and pulled air down the hallway. Thick air that was much warmer than the cool morning breeze he had just left outside.
And there was the familiar flashing blue-hued light, pulsing at him from behind a dusty glass panel on his left. Several bulbous cylinders with cables sprouting from their tops throbbed to some unheard, hypnotic beat.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he noticed the knobs and buttons and huge, oversized on-off switches that pushed through metal panels in the wall. Meters that danced and swung across cryptic numbers and notches and symbols that were printed on their faces. If a sorcerer with a magic wand had suddenly appeared in a shower of light at the far end of the hallway, Jimmy Gill would not have been one bit surprised.
Cautiously, he moved past more smudged windows that looked in on other glass jars with glowing embers captured inside them. They were all tied together with tangles of gray and black and red wires. Slowly, he made his way toward a dim light that beckoned from a doorway at the end of the hall.
Around the corner and through the opening, he spied the back of Charlie McGee's head. The little man was sitting at a desk piled high with books and papers and tools and junk. He held a magazine close to his nose, carefully examining pictures of women with no clothes on. He was so intent on his reading that he apparently did not hear Jimmy’s footsteps above the growling of all the equipment in big racks all around where he sat.
"I'm here, Mr. McGee," Jimmy spoke, loudly enough to overcome the noise of the fans and the pounding of the music that gushed from a huge speaker in the corner of the junk-filled room.
It was as if someone had turned on a jolt of electricity to the man’s chair. He jumped straight up, sent the magazine flying like a freed pigeon, cracked his knee hard on the desk with the wet sound of bone on metal, and let loose a stream of curses and oaths that left the air smoky and charre
d. The little man danced and hobbled and swore some more, and then, still pale with pain, he sat down in the middle of the desk-top amid the electrical parts and dusty books, rubbing his knee.
"What are you sneakin' up on me for, you little yard monkey?"
His glasses had been knocked crooked during his jig, and his leg was bony and white when he rolled up a pants leg to check the damage. But the hair on his head had not moved. It was plastered in place with grease.
“I’m sorry, Mr. McGee. I really am.”
He tried to look as apologetic as he could and McGee must have seen that it was sincere. He finally straightened his spectacles, rolled down his pants, stood and tested the leg, and then motioned for him to come closer.
"You’re a damned hour early anyhow. Shit. Well, come on in here and let me put your tower-climbing ass to work before you cause anybody else any more trouble."
He hopped around the room, still favoring his left leg, checked the big chunk of black-banded watch on his wrist and then led Jimmy back down the long hallway next to the blue-glowing bottles. He stopped at one of the glass windows and looked for a moment at the pulsating electronic display behind it.
"Five hundred volts at ten amps of current. Five-thousand watts of pure power. That’s enough to tickle aerials in five states, boy. And this here's Big Beulah. She was home-made from the ground up. Ain’t but one or two more like her anywhere else in the whole world. Doherty modulation. Water-cooled from stem to stern. A feller’s got to be as much a plumber as an electronics man to keep this old bitch in heat. That spray pond out back keeps the water cool so we can keep Big Beulah bathed and beautiful. And them big pumps along the wall back yonder keeps the water circulatin’. Else this whole thing would melt into a big copper junk pile in just a few minutes."
Jimmy didn't understand much of what Charlie McGee was saying but he remembered the "five-thousand watts" from the station sign-off and promised he would ask somebody about it sometime. And at least he could now tell Detroit what the fountain behind the building was. They stopped at a collection of fifty-five gallon drums filled with trash and papers.
"Finally got around to my spring cleaning last week. You’re going to tote all this shit out to the trash pile at the far end of the field so we can burn it," he ordered, and waved vaguely back toward where the tower stood. "And then come on back up to my office when you’re finished with that and I'll have some more things for you to do. And make sure you don't be slippin' up on me again or I may yet throw your little juvenile delinquent ass in the high voltage cage and fry you like a chicken."
He did not care what Charlie McGee said, or what work he made him do. He was so proud to be a part of the radio station that he gladly did the dirty work.
Once the barrels were emptied, he made his way again past Big Beulah, stomping and kicking up as much of a warning noise as he could. He saw Charlie hastily slide the naked-girl magazine under a stack of papers when he heard him coming, then the little man stood carefully on his injured leg and motioned for him to once again follow him.
This time, they went the other way out of the engineering office, through a heavy door onto carpeted floors and down a narrow hall. Then they made a quick left into a tiny cramped room with a small glass window in the door. A red "ON AIR" light above the door warned them to stay out, but Charlie McGee ignored it and led Jimmy right on into the musty darkness.
A big upright panel filled with knobs and switches and meters stared back at them from along the far wall of the room. Stacks of 45 RPM records seemed to cover every flat surface that was not already filled with foot-high piles of ragged yellow paper covered with purple typing.
A skinny man with bad teeth sat before the control panel and spoke into a mesh-covered box, his voice deep and booming as he told a tilted glass window in front of him that Fats Domino was coming up next on WROG. The walls of the room seemed to vibrate with the force and resonance of his words. He hit a switch on the panel in front of him, a turntable at his right elbow spun into motion, and he flipped another couple of switches, all seemingly in the same motion.
There was a sudden deafening explosion of noise from a speaker that was as tall as Jimmy and stood in the far corner of the room. He covered both ears. The skinny man sitting behind the panel angrily jerked the headphones off his head and slammed them down hard onto the desk in front of him. He ignored the stack of records he had knocked over. Red-faced, he twisted around in the chair toward the two intruders while reaching awkwardly behind him to spin some kind of a knob. The song's volume fell to only a murmur.
"Dammit, Charlie! How many times have I told you not to barge in here when I'm talkin' on the air?"
Jimmy couldn’t believe it. The man’s voice that had just been so mellow and strong was now high pitched and nasal as he spat at Charlie McGee. He could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds, had ratty hair twisted in all directions by the headset he had been wearing, sweat rings under the arms of his black tee-shirt, and several days' growth of beard covering his snarl.
"Jerry Diamond, this is my slave," Charlie introduced Jimmy, paying no attention at all to the skinny man's anger.
"What's your name, slave?"
The skinny man had suddenly lost his mad-on. He accidentally knocked over another stack of records as he stood. He extended his hand, ignoring the disks as they crashed noisily to the floor.
"Jimmy Gill," he said, shaking the man’s bony fingers.
Jerry Diamond? Had Charlie said “Jerry Diamond”?
"Well, I'm pleased to meet you, Jimmy," he said, dropping his speech an octave closer to his familiar radio voice. “Welcome to WROG Radio.”
"Lulu's so damned afraid to come in here with you disk-jockey animals and she won’t get within a hundred feet of the transmitters," Charlie was saying, "so I'm going to let old Jimmy do some cleaning up for me. He'll get all this teletype paper crap outta your way so you can have an easier time getting one of your women spread-eagled up here on this desk."
"Don’t pay no attention to this old fart, Jimmy. You the young'un that was doin' the Tarzan bit off the tower yesterday?" Jerry asked, his voice unconsciously drifting back higher and thinner.
"More like Cheetah, if you ask me," Charlie answered for Jimmy. “Damn monkey-ass!”
Diamond suddenly spun around as if he had been signaled from somewhere by someone that Jimmy could not see. He plopped back down hard into the ragged chair, cranked the big knob on the panel clockwise until the final strains of the song were again blasting painfully throughout the room, slapped a switch that instantly muted the music completely and simultaneously set afire a brilliant red light bulb in front of him. He coughed brutally three or four times. It sounded as if a piece of lung might follow. Then he twisted another knob on the panel and retrieved his deepest voice from somewhere in that emaciated little body.
As the words flowed smoothly from him, he dug blindly into yet another stack of 45 RPM records that had been near his elbow. He found one and held it up so he could read the label in the red glow of the light bulb. Gracefully, he sailed the disk onto another turntable to his left that had been spinning away, empty. He lifted the phono arm until the needle fell onto the lip of the disk and caught hold. He did all this without missing a beat in the continuous, melodious speech he had been making into the microphone.
"...and here's a new one from another great young artist you'll be hearing a lot about...from Memphis, just like Elvis Presley is...it’s Jerry...Lee...Lewis!"
The switch was flipped and screaming, manic piano music filled the tiny room. Jerry Diamond danced in his chair, waving his arms over his head, loudly singing along off-key with the lyrics for a few words. But then he quickly hushed, dropped his shoulders, and quietly watched the two meters in front of him wiggle wildly. It was almost as if he was ashamed for having lost his cool for a while, for allowing himself to get carried away by the music with an audience looking on.
After a moment, he turned and winked at Jimmy, then reached
underneath the spinning turntable and pulled out a filthy trash can. He dragged it over to the edge of the desk and raked into it a pile of yellow paper, brown lunch sacks, cigarette packs, a paper cup half-full of coffee, the dried-up rind of an orange and some other unidentifiable garbage. Then he dumped in two ash trays full of cigarette butts and an old cigar or two. Diamond stood and packed the mess down with a sneakered foot. He sneezed several times as the dust kicked back at him and then pushed the trash can over toward Jimmy with the foot.
He spoke in his fullest, deepest, window-rattling disk jockey voice.
"Mr. Jimmy Gill, let me be the first to welcome you to the exciting, fast-paced world of radio broadcasting."
Eight
Jimmy never figured out where punishment for climbing the tower ended and a part-time job with WROG began. He didn’t care. After hauling out drums filled with junk and bags of garbage and old electronic gizmos for two full days, Charlie next had him stripping ivy from the back wall of the building and slapping on new paint. Then he put him to hacking down the weeds in the trail from the station to the building at the tower’s base.
After a week or so of that, he presented him with a bucket and a squeegee and told him to wash the glass windows that looked in on various rooms inside the station. Both the filthy window that shielded the transmitter named Big Beulah, and the smaller slanting pane that looked into the room where Jerry Diamond and the other deejays played their wonderful rock-and-roll records.
Charlie McGee usually shooed the boy on home by eleven o’clock or so each morning, but after two weeks of dishing out the punishment, he handed Jimmy a crisp, new one-dollar bill. He told Jimmy to go on home before the wage-an-hour people crawled all over his ass, and he gruffly disappeared back into the darkness and noise of Big Beulah's den.
It was the first money Jimmy Gill had ever earned. He stood there for a while and looked at the new dollar bill, felt its texture, smelled it, carefully folded it and put it into his overall bib pocket. Later, he searched through the chiffarobe drawers until he found a mateless sock without a hole in it and put the dollar in that. He kept each of the dollar bills Charlie McGee gave him from then on, and hid the sock in the bottom of the radio, behind the big speaker and underneath the electronic chassis.