Blog Love Omega Glee: Tony The Perv (4 February 2012)

"So you're the new guy, huh?" Tony, the announcer with the shift before Jake, says, ushering Jake through the radio station door, "I wonder how long you'll last."

Tony has a mustache, glasses, and a slouch. He wears jeans and a torn sweatshirt that says "WCYA 1020 AM Real Music. Real People. Real Drunk" on it. "Well, you beat Skip hanging around hassling me. I've been working this job for twenty years. The only good thing about it is I have my duties honed to a well-oiled machine's wet dream, and the rest of the time I do whatever I want," he says, heading back to the studio.

As Jake was trained to do, he gets his chart and picks the songs on cart assigned to him for the night. They're mostly 1970s soft rock with a smattering of oldies and some newer stuff. He forms several stacks of carts on a side table in the studio and goes to pull the latest news off the wire. When he comes back, there's a photograph of a woman having sex with what looks to be a donkey on top of the carts. "What's this?" Jake says.

"A woman fucking a donkey, what's it look like?" Tony says, then picks up the telephone, "WCYA 1020 AM Real Music Real People."

Tony's quiet, then smiles and turns his back on Jake. He whispers into the phone, "Hi, Sweetie, how are you? You haven't called in a while."

Another pause. "What are you wearing?"

Another pause. "Ooh, you little minx. Is your mother home?"

Jake goes and does a transmitter reading. Then he gets the golden age of radio record he starts his shift with at eleven p.m. Tonight it's an episode of Fibber McGee And Molly, originally broadcast in 1938. While reading the liner notes, Jake notices that the station has gone silent. He runs in the studio and sees Tony put his headphones on and go on air. He says into the microphone, "That was a cover by Alicia Keys of John Cage's '4'33". I'll be signing off here in a few minutes but you still have time to get your requests in at 216-000-WCYA, especially if you're young, female, and available when I get off work in ten minutes. After me, it'll be the golden age of radio. Tonight it's The Great Gildersleeve."

When Tony gets off the air, Jake says, "Uh, I think tonight it's Fibber McGee And Molly."

"Eh, no one who actually listens to that will even remember what I said. They're all senile. So did they train you?"

Jake nods, "Yes, Marcela trained me."

"Oh, I'll have to untrain you, then train you the right way. How do you do the weather?"

"Um, you just read what's written on the news copy, but you update the temperatures throughout the shift by checking them on the National Weather Service website, or the Associated Press wire."

"Wrong. Before you read the news copy, look at the thermometer outside the restroom window, then you say whatever temperature it says for the temperature here, and then for the other city we always throw in to make people feel warm and fuzzy about how local we are, say Believer Heights, you make up a temperature a couple degrees different."

"But how do I know what temperature it is in Believer Heights?"

"You don't. But the listeners don't either, and those fucking idiots will trust anything they hear on the radio more than their own thermometers anyway so just make up something."

"But isn't that unethical?"

Tony laughs, "No, it's radio. Listen you can follow whatever Marcela and all those daytimers told you, or you can do what I tell you, which is the real way things get done at night, and is more fun anyway. I wouldn't have time for talking to teenage girls on the phone, surfing the Internet for porn, and running my side businesses if I did everything the way it was supposed to be done. It's the nighttime. It's different."

"What happened to the last overnight guy?"

"Mark? He quit. He said he saw a ghost. He probably just saw the ghost of the paycheck they pay us around here. Trust me, there's nothing scary about this place. The news guy sometimes comes in drunk in the middle of the night to tape news stories so he doesn't have to get up with his hangover to do it in the morning, but that's the only thing that happens out of the usual around here. Though one time when I was working an overnight, the news guy did bring some barfly he managed to pick up too and he fucked her in the production studio. I have pictures of that if you want to see them."

"Uh, maybe later."

"Trust me, the hardest thing about this job is staying awake. Play the national news at the top of the hour, follow the traffic charts, and you'll be all right. Whenever you start falling asleep, just take off all your clothes and dj naked. That always wakes me up. You'll be the only one here. Who cares?"

Jake looks at the chair in the studio that he's about to sit in for the next eight hours and imagines Tony's bare buttocks sweating into it. It is going to be a long night.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel, which is available in print and as an ebook.