The Sweet Smell Of Nostalgia

Okay, so I live in the middle of nowhere. Imagine the town from Footloose and you're pretty close. Fifteen miles of US highway to the closest McDonald's, three bars and six churches, and not a single store or gas station stays open past midnight on weekends. Not a lot of opportunity for a kid around here to do much but dream of more exciting places, places not surrounded by corn and soybean fields. Places where the newest songs on the radio haven't been played out already everywhere else. So at nineteen, instead of hanging around with other equally bored kids getting drunk or high, I listened to the radio: syndicated radio.

Z-Rock was a nationally syndicated radio station out of Dallas and it actually played music from the current calendar year. I'm sure plenty of people out in internet-land remember Z-Rock and its famous DJs: Wipeout in the evening, Jim Coda overnight, and of course Loud Debbie Dowd the token news-chick. (Piece of inside news: not many of the jocks liked her much). Anyway, being syndicated they had a toll-free line (but of course THAT was always busy and I've always been impatient) but they also had a direct line: the warp line. So I started calling the warp line late at night and talking to Jim Coda. Maybe I was bright and articulate and had a sparkling personality at the time or maybe, and much more likely, it was a pretty boring shift and I didn't ask him to screw up his play list with requests all the time. Either way, we talked. He was a decent guy, kind of a WKRP Johnny Fever type of guy, and we chatted for months about music and news and his kids, stuff like that. But with my looks and sense of humor, I fell in love with the idea of radio INSTANTLY. After all, if Debbie could do it...

Anyway, after talking to Coda for a while, I started calling Wipeout and talking to him. By then, of course, I'd already mailed my photo off to Jim and gotten his promo shot back in return, and apparently he'd left it on the deck or something because Wipeout knew who I was by name. Seems I looked just like some girl who broke his watch in a bar one night. My doppelganger just hates timepieces. So now I had two friends at the station, plus Debbie but she didn't count because I had her convinced I was a militant New York lesbian with a crush on her and that I was planning a vacation to visit her at the station. I was mean.

My job at the time was in retail, all sorts of screwed up hours, and after a week of early bedtimes I finally got the chance to call Jim for a late-night chat. I dialed, got the familiar burst of static followed by a curt "Z-Rock" but alas, it was not Jim. Turns out the new guy had gotten let go from a station upstairs (ABC Radio, lots of stations in one huge building) but had worked for Z-Rock years ago. And (follow closely here) Jim was looking for a change of scenery so they'd traded. But despite giving me all this info, the new guy wouldn't give me the number to the booth upstairs! So he called Jim and then I called him back and he, with Jim's okay, finally gave me the number. And that is how I made friend number three at Z-Rock. But then Jim got fired a month later and took his old job back and Bladerunner, as he was known on-air, was out on the street after all. But I had his home number so we kept chatting and when he planned a cross-country road-trip I offered him a break from hotel fare and roadside rest stops if he needed it. Plans were made and I was excited.

Why was I excited? (Get your mind out of the gutter; I didn't even know the guy!) Because here was a nationwide celebrity, albeit a midnight radio host for only a month, and he would be visiting me. Keep in mind I live in an area where police scanners are used as entertainment and the mall sighting of a local TV news anchor is considered paparazzi-worthy. Oh well, the day came and it was cool. He said my hometown looked like the town out of Needful Things, said that if he lived here he would open a store by that name and sell exotic fruit and import CDs. Basically, he showed up, took a shower, cleaned his contacts, took a nap, and we went out for KFC fifteen miles away. He was going to get a good night's sleep but he called his next stop and plans had been made sooner than he'd thought so he had to leave. I never heard from him again. My brief brush with minor-league fame was over. But my brief brush with notoriety was coming.

While he was at my place, he called his old friends at the station in Dallas. He told them he was visiting his fans one by one like the Snapple van (remember that dumb promotion?). Sadly, he never called them back. Half the guys thought I'd slept with him and the other half thought I'd killed him! (As if I weren't talented enough to do both.) So suddenly I went from being Chuck, the girl who'll keep you company during a boring shift, to being Chuck, the girl who may have killed one of our own. Things were never the same after that, and I could never reach him at home to tell him of this damage to my good name. I finally left a message on his machine and I guess he did stop by the booth and let himself be seen alive, but the station got shut down, replaced by Radio Disney, that New Year's Eve and I lost touch with all of my DJs.

Fast forward a decade or so later. I am no longer nineteen, no longer able to stay up all night or afford phone bills like that, and going through some physical aging issues. To be fair, I pine for my youth. (Insert wistful sigh here.) And it wasn't so long ago that I wrote up a big long post wherein I mentioned being a radio groupie back in the day. So imagine my surprise when I find this on imdb. What does this mean, you ask? Well if you click on the actor who plays Evan enough, you get this! My Bladerunner! Okay, not exactly mine, but I did eat chicken with him once and he used my shower. So I google his real name and his on-air name and a whole lot of false leads later I find his myspace page! I set up an account (Tom is my only friend :( ) and sent him a message.

He remembered me and said very polite things and that was that. I'm not delusional enough to think I was ever anything more than a groupie to a DJ naive enough to give out his home number but it's always nice to be remembered by someone who has no doubt had many many groupies since me. I guess it's the same reason my husband, in Al Bundy fashion, feels the need to relate high school football stories, and also the entire premise of Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion. We all like to relive our youth now and then. And we all miss our youth sometimes too, no matter how happy we are in the present. I miss late night calls to Z-Rock, and being subtly referred to on the air, and scaring that uppity news chick, and it's a huge ego boost to know that the days I so fondly remember are also remembered by someone who has probably had a lot more exciting times since then than I have.

Now I just hope that movie is stocked in these hick little video shops so i don't have to drive fifteen miles to rent it.