In Radio Programming and Management, I learned about focus groups and groupthink and leadership skills and the whole cluster-fuck of middle management. I learned about money demos and TSL and cume. I learned about market research. Units. Trends. Quarterlies.
Above all, I learned to abhor the entire concept of management. Didn’t they know that no amount of formulating could ever create the magic of Vin Scully or Jaime Jarrin or Bill Balance? Didn’t they see the futility of all their research and marketing? Were they
trying
to kill the poetry?
Were they trying to silence the beautiful voices? You couldn’t teach radio any more than you could teach philosophy. It wasn’t a doctrine, it was an act. Thank heavens for Gerard Smith for understanding that.
Gerard didn’t teach philosophy, he inspired it. His clogs walked on air, high above the vagaries of day-to-day life. Even Sartre could not
de
fl
ate his billowy sleeves. Never mind that humanity was condemned to futility, that life was irrational, and being absurd. Never mind that suicide was the only question. To hear Gerard Smith contemplate the tenets of existentialism, to see him spinning circles in the dead grass under a slate-gray sky, waving his arms about like semaphore
fl
ags, you’d have thought he was contemplating the
Nutcracker
, not suicide.
To Gerard Smith, the turgid prose of Bergson rang like a boys’ choir.
Croce’s
Filoso
fi
a dello Spirito
was to be sucked on like a Lifesaver until the tongue cleaved it into two even crescents and it disintegrated in the heat of your mouth. Philosophy really
fl
oated his boat. And why not?
Why not occupy your mind every waking moment with loftier questions than
Which way is the bathroom
?
and
What the hell’s buried in Al
Capone’s vault?
Why not celebrate the fact that we’re not condemned to the mental life of a saltine cracker? Gerard Smith made a philosopher out of me.
In the afternoons, as Eugene and Joe served out the last of their tenure at Fatburger, I prepared for the grand opening of Hot Dog Heaven: I scrubbed and shined and organized. I phoned distributors, hung junk-store prints of Coney Island behind the counter for atmosphere, painted a sandwich board, repainted the menu board.
And this work was altogether different from my toils at Fatburger. I was building something in the emptiness, de
fi
ning it, giving it context. In the evenings I came home tired, but deliciously so. I ate udon noodles. I slept. If I dreamt at all, it was only in those moments right before sleep, when I willfully dreamt of Lulu. I woke up shortly before midnight, drove groggily
to the station, and worked as the overnight producer until 6:00 AM, where I answered phones,
screened requests, drank coffee with nondairy creamer, catalogued music, organized the refrigerator, and
tended to all the other glamor
ous enterprises that populate the life of a radio producer. Sometimes I studied Anthropology or English Lit. Sometimes I fell asleep with my face in a book in my wainscoted cubicle, which, being in the basement with the rest of the station, was really more of a catacomb, windowless to the outside world.
A shaggy-haired kid named Nate Obergottsberger was the overnight host to whom my production expertise was assigned. I spent countless hours at my post by the board, watching Nate through the glass. His head was gigantic, like the moais of Easter Island. He could barely get his cans on, distending the headset so far beyond capacity that the phones never sat
fl
ush on his ears. His forehead was greasy, greasier than mine. You could almost see your re
fl
ection in it. Night after night I watched him in his little terrarium, punching carts and lea
fi
ng through stacks of CDs and records.
Four times an hour Nate did spot sets and station IDs. This he managed, just barely. But once every hour he was forced to read the events calendar, an endeavor that accounted in large part for his greasy forehead. The task was a source of great anxiety to him—the very thought of it set him to pacing in his terrarium. It was unsettling to behold. And even if he read the calendar every hour for the rest of his life, it seemed the chore would never get easier. He had no gift for gab. Worse, he seemed to have no aptitude. He lacked radio instincts almost as much as he lacked good pipes. His voice neither resonated nor cut. It was wholly without texture. His cadence varied between faltering and spasmodic; at times words tripped out of his mouth and tumbled down stairwells, while at others they didn’t come out at all—they just froze trembling at the top of the stairs. His chair was always squeaking in the background.
Nate constantly repeated himself, ending sentences with the same word or phrase with which he began them.
“Sub Pop Records released the EP last November on Sub Pop Records.”
“Thursday marks the third consecutive week of our tribute Thursday.”
“We began our set with a release from The Melvins, who began our set.”
Nate’s saving graces were two: One, his speech impediment, a slighty lazy
S
, lent him a degree of pathos (or as he himself would say,
pathoth
), and two, he loved the music—he had an encyclopedic knowledge of it, and a genuine appreciation for those who created it.
Nate simply didn’t understand the concept of projection. He lacked the ability or desire to voice his enthusiasm, assuming, perhaps, that the music would do it for him. More importantly, he did not grasp the concept of illusion, the ability to generate enthusiasm about anything at will—music, carpet cleaner, boiled eggs. Creating this illusion was an indispensable skill to the broadcaster, whose livelihood demanded that he make
Grunt Truck
sound like
Stravinsky
, and the campus blood drive sound like Mardi Gras. Nate made
Grunt Truck
sound like
Grunt Truck
. He made the campus blood drive sound like the campus blood drive.
Lastly, there remained the problem of Nate’s brand. The brand was all-important. A catchy handle went a long way. Nobody named Kemal Amin Kasem ever hosted
American Top 40
. And Shadoe Stevens commanded a whole lot more attention than Ted Pritchard. For months, as his friend and producer, I beseeched Nate to change his last name.
“Obergottsberger doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue,” I observed.
“It sounds like a neurological disorder. Obergottsberger’s Disease.
What about Nate Mars, or Nate at Night? Something sexy, something mysterious.”
But Nate wouldn’t budge. Obergottsberger was the name God gave him. And besides, with a name like Obergottsberger, he’d never have to worry about making a big name for himself.
A one-celled organism changed my life. Lulu would say that was a metaphor. I’d say it was an accident. But it happened. It was presumably a one-celled dino
fl
agellate that infected the habitat of the razor clams Nate Obergottsberger ate at a restaurant in Pismo Beach on a Monday afternoon in early June, 19
91, that changed my life irrevo
cably. By the time Nate arrived at the studio, minutes before airtime, he was feverish, sweating, clutching his gut. He went straight for the altar and spent the better part of his shift there—passing clams out one end or the other. Goggle-eyed, pea-green, and stammering, with puke on his shirttail and toilet paper stuck to his shoe, Nate managed to plod and falter his way through all of his spot sets. It was a heroic performance. He didn’t sound any worse than usual. But the top of the
fi
ve o’clock hour caught him off his guard.
“You gotta do the calendar, man, you gotta. I’m gonna bust, man, I’m gonna bust,” he groaned. His forehead was
fi
lmy, even by Nate standards. Sweat was beading on the end of his nose. His eyes were like squashed beetles.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” I said.
Fifteen seconds to airtime. A cold hand gripped my heart. I’d spoken once before on the air. Once! Nate had asked me during the calendar to con
fi
rm a date, and over the talk-back from the control booth, I’d said: “Yeah, April 10th.” That was it, the sum total of my on-air experience,
Yeah, April 10th
.
Five seconds to airtime. I wanted to disappear. But something happened when I sat behind the mic: My fear went away. My throat opened up like it had a will of its own, and my voice streamed out like the Blue Danube Waltz. My diction was
fl
awless, my cadence was harmonic perfection, and the words danced and pirouetted off my tongue and into the mic. And it didn’t even matter that
Tad
was playing at
The Cat Club
, or
The Roxy
was giving a bene
fi
t show on May 23rd—I might as well have been talking about the
fl
ight of the albatross, or the splendor of the Leonids—because it was all about the voice, the dazzling, hypnotic voice.
When it was over, the last item recited, I punched a cart and sat back in my squeaky chair—which hadn’t squeaked once during my performance. I relived the experience three times over. With a welling of blood in my chest, I reveled in the potency of this miracle.
It wasn’t pride thumping like a herd of elephants in my chest, but gratitude, as though I’d been granted a gift. Maybe it was my destiny to speak to the disenfranchised masses—all the hopeless ineffectual dweebs like me, sitting alone in their darkened rooms, pining for a fate grander than acne—maybe I’d pull them together by the force of my hypnotic mint-smelling rhetoric, inspire them from my electric pulpit, like some secular Elmer Gantry for the new millennium. Or maybe it was just my destiny to do overnights at a college radio station. Either way, I was grateful.
When I played the air-check the next day for Eugene Gobernecki, he was in awe of my radio persona.
“Shit motherfuck. How come all the time zey not having you talk? Zey have guy talking he sound like Donald Duck! But
you
, you good. You sound like pro. Zey gonna get rid of him, give talking job to you.”
When Nate heard the air-check, he said, “That wuth good, man, really, that wuth good, but
…
” Then he mopped his greasy forehead with a shirtsleeve and mumbled a few halfhearted suggestions about
hitting the post on the muthic bed
and
thlowing down a bit
before suggesting that I do the calendar every night.
The next night I did the calendar every hour, and by the third hour I started adding little
fl
ourishes and personal touches, and once I even made a joke. And the morning after I made the joke, Eugene Gobernecki knocked on my door in his coveralls again, this time clutching a manila folder, and he walked past me into the kitchen like it was his own kitchen and sat down at the table and
fl
ashed his gold tooth.
“Oh shit. Zat was funny what you say about band from Milwau-kee. And when you screw up the date and you make choking sound, zat’s good stuff.”
“What were you doing awake at four in the morning?”
“Zis,” he said, slapping the folder down on the table. He opened it to reveal a stack of clumsily handwritten pages.
“What’s this?”
“Business plan for Hot Dog Heaven,” he announced.
“Wow. Geez, Eugene, I
…
”
“What?”
“Well, I don’t know if I’m ready to commit the next three—”
“I know, I know,” he said. “You big radio star now. Not to worry.
You give me three months. After that, I buy you out anytime. We set fair price.”
“Deal.”
“Good. Now I
fi
x sink in 117.” Eugene closed the folder, swept it up, and hopped to his feet in one
fl
uid motion. He was gone in a
fl
ash.
After a week, the events calendar served only as a rough guide, like directions scrawled hastily on a cocktail napkin. I began spinning my own verbiage, and it was good: fast, funny, succinct. The words simply aligned themselves on my tongue in endless streams. My in
fl
ection improved daily. My voice got smarter, it knew instinctively just how to wrap around syllables—just which syllables to wrap tightest about, which ones to let glide, and which ones to balance precariously on the tip of my tongue for the briefest of moments before releasing them like tiny dirigibles into the atmosphere. And interestingly, I found that when I
fl
exed my voice, I always smiled, so that the words sounded happy. And I don’t mean that
Feelin’-Groovy-Hello-Lamppost-Whatcha-Knowin
smile, but a
Beaming-Like-Big-Bill-in-the-Middle-of-a-Front-Double-Bicep
smile. A turgid smile. The smile of a pro. The smile of a champion. Smiling from the outside in, not because I was happy—though certainly I was happy—but smiling because it was impossible to create the illusion that I was happy without smiling. Smiling because it was impossible to sound enthusiastic with a straight face. And people don’t listen to radio to hear straight faces. I never hurried. I was cool. I was suddenly infused—as though by magic—with the con
fi
dence of a Chad or a Daryl or a Troy. And for once in my life I had reason to be con
fi
dent, because on the radio I looked like Matt Dillon. I sounded like Casey Kasem. I pulled words out of thin air like David Copper
fi
eld.