by Don Keith
The weather was crisp and dry. Detroit and Jimmy played most of the morning along the high line bank, shooting savage Indians off passing ore trains with stick-rifles, or defending the underpass from the onslaught of German soldiers marching in from occupied territory in Ishkooda. But Dee had to leave early for a Christmas Eve get-together with kin-folks down in Bessemer so the wars had to end by noon.
Grandmama was the only kin-folk Jimmy had, but he did not want to sit there with her and watch the soaps awkwardly weave the holiday into their sad plots. The lavishly decorated backdrops on the quiz show sets depressed him, too. All the stations on the big Zenith radio had been given over to Christmas songs and he had grown tired of them a week ago.
Finally, he decided to leave. There was no guilt. He doubted Grandmama would miss him before he came back.
He dove into the bushes in the backyard and headed for the radio station. Charlie had not asked him to work that day, but there was simply nothing else for him to do. No other place to go. No one else for him to spend Christmas Eve with.
The backdoor at WROG was closed against the cold wind but not locked, so he went on in, wishing Big Beulah, the transmitter, a good holiday as he passed her humming, pulsing chamber. The warm red glow inside her huge electronic tubes did bear just a hint of holiday cheer as they winked back at him with what looked like sincere wishes.
Charlie McGee was leaned back in his chair, legs propped up on the desk, sound asleep. Empty, tipped-over Dixie cups were strewn among the junk on the desk. They smelled of well-spiked eggnog, just like Jimmy’s mother had celebrated the holiday season with during her last Christmas on earth. The familiar smell made him sad.
Charlie snorted, snored, belched and then slumbered deeply again. It looked as if Rockin’ Randy would have to turn off Big Beulah’s high voltage after he played “Dixie” that night. Charlie McGee usually did that chore, but he was dead to the world.
Jimmy ambled into the hallway, checked the “on air” light by habit, and then turned into the control room to wish Randy Mathews a merry Christmas. Lately, when he was not on the telephone with a girl, the huge man invited Jimmy to come on into the control room, to sit down for a while, and to talk with him between records. They had almost become friends.
Sometimes, the huge man almost desperately insisted on the company. Jimmy figured it was only because he was so young that they could be pals. Maybe that was why Randy was able to open up to him. To tell him things he was unable to say to the other disk jockeys. They would have almost certainly laughed and made fun. It never occurred to Jimmy Gill to make fun of him. He was glad to be a good listener, honored Randy wanted to confide in him.
And Jimmy had learned a lot about Rockin’ Randy during their little talks. He was a hopelessly lonely man, desperately looking for someone, anyone, who would accept his grotesque physique.
He told Jimmy how badly it hurt to have people attracted to him by his radio voice, his on-air persona, only to be quickly, rudely rejected when they finally saw him. How the women had been so willing, so anxious, then would laugh or ridicule him cruelly when he showed up in person. Or others who actually turned and ran away in disgust when they met in a bar or cafe.
“I lie my ass off to them, Jimmy,” he admitted. “I tell them I’m six-two, one-seventy-five. I even lie about the color of my eyes and I don’t even know why that would matter. Shit, I know they’ll eventually see me, see how fat I am, but it’s good to have them want me for a little while. It’d really be something to have somebody feel the same way about me once she saw what I looked like.” Then he would laugh and say, “Oh, hell. I guess I just got the perfect face for radio, Jimmy, my boy.”
Or he would slap the counter and promise, “One day I’m going to lose me some weight and go through all them women like Sherman went through Georgia.”
But the hurt was still in his eyes until the next time he turned on the microphone and spoke. Then it faded away for a while. Rockin’ Randy was not one bit repulsive on the radio.
The smell of eggnog and liquor was almost overpowering when Jimmy pushed open the control room door. More Dixie cups littered the floor. The counter top was covered with paper plates, bits of food, gnawed bones, half-full cups of eggnog and punch.
Jimmy shook his head wearily. It would be his job to clean up most of this mess the day after Christmas.
Randy was swigging more of something green and foamy when he waddled shakily into the control room. He belched loudly then noticed that he had company.
“Hello, Jimmy Gill!” His words were slurred and liquid, his eyes glassy. Grease stains pocked his shirt, and Jimmy could not even see the control board in front of the man because of the remnants of the party. “Merry Christmas all over you, you little son of a bitch!”
Through the glass, Jimmy could see that all the metal chairs in the studio had been folded up and leaned against the walls and a table had been erected from a couple of Charlie’s saw horses and sheets of plywood. The final morsels of a Christmas feast littered plastic drop cloths that covered the makeshift banquet table.
There did not appear to be anyone else at the station. Everyone had gone home to spend Christmas with family. Or maybe to sleep off the party.
From the looks of him, Randy Mathews was not going to make it the last twenty minutes before sundown and sign-off, much less to home.
“You okay, Randy?” Jimmy asked.
The deejay did not seem to hear the boy or even understand the question. From force of habit, he managed to cue up another Christmas record on the turntable and send the music spinning out into the cold December air. It was quite a talent to be so damned dexterous when he was so drunk.
“Another Christmas by myself, Jimmy,” he finally said between slurps of punch. “Nobody wants no fat-ass hanging around, you know. Hell, I’m too big to even play damn Santa Claus!”
He belched sourly, made a terrible face, rubbed his chest as if in pain, then reached for some other unidentifiable bit of food amid the heap of rubbish mounded up in front of him. Something from the stack of food fell over onto the turntable where the Christmas song was playing and sent the tone arm skipping with a screech of noise. It did not faze Randy. He deftly grabbed another disk, centered it on the other spinning turntable, dropped the needle onto the first groove, and slapped on the mike switch.
“Here’s another song of the season just for you. ’White Christmas.’ Bing Crosby on eight-twenty, WROG,” he spoke, without a trace of a slur. He expertly ended his introduction just as the mellow voiced Crosby started singing about his snowy fantasy. Maybe the man would be able to make it until sign-off after all, Jimmy thought.
But then Randy stood up suddenly, as if something had prodded him. He seemed more wobbly than normal, his knees cracking loudly as he struggled to stretch upright and get out from between the turntables without tipping them over. Jimmy stepped back quickly to give Randy room as he squeezed through the doorway, a moving mountain of human flesh staggering to the restroom across the hall.
“That damned record is two minutes and five seconds long. I’ll be back, Mr. Gill. I’ll be back once I...” The door to the restroom slammed shut on his smeared words.
Jimmy wanted to help, but all he could do was hold the control room door open for Randy’s eventual return. It was sure to be a hasty one, and Randy seemed to be having a hard time doing anything hastily this Christmas Eve. Just opening the control room door might be too tough a task.
Randy seemed to stay in the restroom forever. For a moment, Jimmy was afraid he may have passed out drunk and would not make it back before Bing Crosby finished the song. But just then, the latch popped and Randy clumsily pushed open the door and tried to get turned to the proper angle to squeeze his bulk back out into the hallway.
He looked lost. Not sure where he was at all. His huge, custom-made jeans were still unfastened, threatening to fall down around his ankles and trip him up, but he managed to grip them with one meaty hand and take a few staggering s
teps out of the men’s room and into the hall, filling it completely with his foul smelling mass.
Bing Crosby was, by then, on the last verse of the song.
“Better hurry, Randy,” Jimmy urged. “The song’s about...”
But then he noticed the glassy look in the man’s heavy-lidded eyes. The sick gray pallor of his pitted, scarred face. The odd blue tint of his thick lips.
“I don’t feel so good, Jimmy,” Rockin’ Randy said in pinched voice.
It occurred to Jimmy that the deejay was about to throw up, so he took a step backward, into the control studio, out of range. But instead of vomiting, Rockin’ Randy suddenly pitched forward like a falling radio tower and landed hard, flat on his face. His whole massive body quivered once, twice, and then was deathly still.
Jimmy ran the only direction he could figure to run, through the door into Charlie McGee’s office. He desperately tried to shake the drunken engineer awake. But McGee was unconscious, no help at all.
He ran back to where Randy lay and tried to feel his pulse as he had seen the people on television do. At the neck, among the rolls of fat. Nothing. On one huge wrist. There was nothing there either. He listened for his breathing. There had never been a problem hearing Randy’s rasping, wheezing breathing before. Now, he was completely silent.
There was no doubt about it. Rockin’ Randy Mathews was dead.
Jimmy was in shock. Once again, he had witnessed a man’s death right there in front of him. But strangely, only one thought dominated his mind at that awful moment. The monitor speaker on the bathroom wall no longer sounded music. It only clucked a rhythmic, repetitive, clicking sound. The pop of the turntable needle striking the label of the Bing Crosby record over and over as it spun around and around, now played out.
Five-thousand watts of the worst possible thing in radio: dead air!
In a daze, Jimmy stepped around Randy’s still body on the hallway floor and into the control room. Quickly, he located another Christmas record from a stack of disks next to the mixing board. He dusted the garbage off the other turntable, centered the disk quickly but carefully, laid the needle on the outer edge of it, and turned up the knob marked “TT 1” until there was music gushing from the speakers.
Church bells. Violins. A chorus humming peacefully about mangers and stars and Wise Men.
Then the voice of Perry Como filled the filthy room, and Jimmy turned it up loud, trying to blot out the last few minutes from his mind with the words of “Silent Night.” His hands shook violently on the controls and he was near tears.
Then something hit him like a punch in the gut.
He was “on the wind!”
He was sitting there in front of the control board, playing songs for God-knows-how-many thousands of people who had tuned in to WROG that late Christmas Eve afternoon. People on the highway trying to get home. People still working, the radio cranked up loud to give them any kind of holiday spirit they could find. People at home, cooking, decorating, wrapping presents, using the station as background for whatever they were doing at that magic moment.
For a few minutes, Jimmy Gill completely forgot about the dead man, growing cold on the hallway floor a mere ten feet away. He set up another record, turned the knob on the control board down until it clicked into the “cue” position, then spun the disk around with his finger until the first note of music roared in the tinny cue speaker under the desk. Then he backed the record up a quarter turn and turned up the volume knob for that turntable. He waited patiently and hit the switch to kick it off just as Perry Como finished his song.
Seamless. The songs mixed together as if they were meant to be that way. And chills ran all over Jimmy Gill.
He played several more Christmas records. Somehow, he accidentally started one at 78 RPM and blushed as if everyone out there in radio-land knew it was Jimmy Gill who had messed up the song, made it sound like a bunch of mice singing instead of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He backed one up too far when he cued it and fifteen or twenty seconds went by with no music on the air while it slowly twirled around to the beginning of the song. It seemed like an hour to him! And again, he blushed with embarrassment over his dumb error.
Then the clock above the control board said 4:45. Sundown in December. Time to sign off. Time to play “Dixie.” Time to do the speech. Time to go back and put Big Beulah to sleep for the night.
The disk of “Dixie” was hiding under a pile of crumbled cookies and divinity fudge and empty eggnog cups. He wiped it off as best he could on his shirtsleeve and cued it up to its beginning. Then, when the final holiday record faded with a flurry of sleigh bells, he hit the switch on the other turntable and turned up the music. Without hesitating, he flipped the switch that opened the microphone, turned the music back down half-way, and spoke the words from memory into the bird-cage mike at his lips.
“And so we come to the end of another broadcast day...”
He tried to make his eleven-year-old voice go deep and resonant as Randy and Jerry and the others always did. But there was only the shrill, high-pitched whine of a kid. Somehow, he got through the whole thing with only a stumble or two, raised the music level back up until the needles in front of him danced over into the red zone, let the music play out, then shut down both the turntables.
Only then did he pause for a breath. He was dizzy with a strange electric exhilaration that flooded through him.
Finally, he remembered why it was that he had been forced to go on the air in the first place. Randy. He had to call for help. He reached for the telephone on its hook at his hip, placed it to his ear, and searched for the rotary dial to call someone, anyone.
There was one problem. He had never used a telephone before in his life, so he really did not know that there was supposed to be a dial tone there when he put it to his ear. But before he could figure that part out, there was a voice there instead. A sultry, low female voice that tickled his ear and sent chills down his backbone.
“Hello? Anybody there? Who is this?”
“Uh. This is Jimmy Gill.”
“Well, Jimmy Gill, huh? I’ve never heard you on the radio before, Jimmy. But I tell you one thing. You sure do have a sexy voice! What do you look like, darling?”
Jimmy dropped the phone as if it was radioactive, bolted through the doorway, tripped over the mound that had recently been Rockin’ Randy Mathews and fell flat, struggled to his feet again, and ran the length of the hallway to the front door of the station. Its deadbolt was locked and he had no key to open it.
Charlie McGee was even deeper asleep than before when he tried to shake him awake again. He only snorted this time.
Then, an idea hit him.
Jimmy trotted back toward the control room, hopped over Randy, once again snapped on the main microphone switch, put his lips against the coolness of its metal grill and begged for someone to help. Pleaded for anybody listening to please send an ambulance, to call the police.
Days later, he heard that calls had come in to the Birmingham Police Department from six states and twelve different counties in Alabama, urging them to send help over to WROG.
Having done the only thing he knew to do, and now crying softly, Jimmy made his way to the back steps of the radio station and sat outside in the frigid December air to wait for the help to arrive. The first star of the night flicked on as if its switch had just been thrown by an unseen hand. The tower lights, driven by an automatic timer, suddenly popped to life with their own blinking Christmas Eve display. There were holiday firecrackers snapping away in the distance. He could hear the squeals of kids in the trailer park across the highway from the station, excited by the fireworks and the imminent arrival of Santa Claus.
And just beyond the tree line, past the pulsing tower beacons, roman candles shot happily into the night sky, scattering the darkness, renting the ether with hot, colored fire. They looked to Jimmy just like a human soul might, climbing hard, burning brightly, then sputtering earthward, dying.
Thirteen
Rockin’ Randy Mathews was buried five days after Christmas, a piano crate for a coffin, in the cemetery a few blocks down the Superhighway from the WROG studios. It took four men two days to dig the grave by hand. It was carved from two separate plots that had been intended to one day be the resting place for both Randy and his sister.
There were fourteen pall-bearers who strained mightily to haul the crate from the back of a flat-bed truck to the edge of the grave. The group included Charlie McGee, Jerry Diamond, and the man from the radio station office with the bad hairpiece. The rest were men who worked in the cemetery. A small crane was brought in to lower the make-shift coffin into the gaping hole in the cold, muddy ground.
Jerry Lee Lewis, Pat Boone, Elvis Presley and other singing stars sent notes and flower arrangements. So did dozens of record companies and concert promoters and simple fans of the man’s radio show. Most of the cards were addressed to “Rockin’ Randy, c/o WROG”. Few knew his last name, and those who did misspell it. The massive bank of flowers was piled in a horseshoe shape around the grave, but they would be snatched up immediately after the funeral service, swiped by souvenir hunters.
Since he was sure he had been to too many of the things already, Jimmy Gill almost skipped the funeral. But he went because he felt he owed Randy at least that much. He stood at a distance, though, far from the few family members and the crowd of curiosity-seekers who pushed and shoved for a better view of the show. He had trouble hearing the preacher’s words as the cold wind snapped them up and carried them away, but somehow, he doubted he was missing much. Those in the crowd did not seem to be listening to him either. They stretched and stumbled, trying to see the famous names on the flower arrangements.
Then, completely uninvited, an odd thought entered Jimmy’s mind. Some of the women who stood there at the edge of the muddy grave, all sad-faced and sniffling, might have been some of the ones Randy had talked with on the telephone. Maybe the same ones he had arranged to meet and who had fled from the pitiful sight of the real Rockin’ Randy. He wondered how they felt, standing there, watching the rough crate about to be lowered into the earth forever. Did they regret the hurt they had caused? Did they wish they had been more tolerant, that they had given the poor man a chance?