Chapter Text
“The old man’s in a Kraftwerk mood,” Frank observes. “He must be getting stoned tonight.”
Why a small radio station needs two overnight security guards is a question you avoid asking out loud, since if management ever decides to let one of you go, Frank has seniority. It’s an easy enough job, and pays the bills while you wait and hope for something to open up that will actually let you use your degree. You and Frank clock in at 10 pm and take turns walking around the building till dawn. There are usually a couple of deejays and staffers still in the building when you start your shift, but only one of them is reliably around after midnight.
For certain very small values of “reliable.”
He’s the one Frank refers to as the old man, but he’s the kind of individual who attracts nicknames like a picnic attracts ants, and the station manager (whom you've only met once, when you signed on for this job) refers to him as “Bobby.” On-air he is called Bob, as in “Mad Bob's Late-Nite Platter Party.”
Frank says nobody knows his real name:
“We can’t even agree if he’s an American pretending to be a Brit,” he tells you on your second night of work, “or a Brit pretending to be a different kind of Brit. He’s got at least four accents and they all sound equally fake.”
On another occasion, he says: “The old man told us once he used to deejay for ‘Radio Caroline.’ Ever hear of it? Me neither. Other times he says he was a roadie for Procul Harum— well, sometimes it’s Procul Harum, sometimes it’s another band. He’s making it all up, anyhow.”
“Be funny if one bit of it were true, but we didn’t know which.”
“I think he actually is British, at least," Frank allows. "I mean, have you seen his front teeth?”
It is in fact nearly a month in before you see ‘the old man’s’ front teeth, or any part of him at all, but you get used to hearing his voice over the receiver in the break room— perhaps it would be more accurate to say his voices. One of them sounds like a serious BBC newsreader, as long as you ignore the actual words being said. One is softer, lighter; while another sounds like forty miles of bad road, with the kind of accent Hollywood ascribes to pirates.
“Does he just make up different voices for fun?” you ask Frank, who shrugs:
“There’s nothing he doesn’t just do for fun. You should watch out, by the way— he’s a real lech. He and Maria used to date for a while.” The wording implies a certain reciprocity on the part of Maria, the station’s news announcer; and you aren’t sure that dating her is evidence of "lechery" so much as "having functional eyes"— but you don’t feel like having that conversation with Frank right now. Speaking of—
“Do you wanna get breakfast? When our shift’s up?”
“Sorry, what?”
“You know," says Frank. "Do you want to go out for breakfast? Together? The diner around the corner’s not bad.”
“Oh, uh, ok. But if this is like, asking me out for coffee, then you should know I’m seeing someone.”
Frank swallows your lie; or pretends to.
You finally meet the radio host when, walking down the west corridor one night, you hear a crash and some muffled swearing from one of the studios. Letting yourself in with your master key, you see a man straddling the windowsill and trying to disentangle his leg from the extension cord that’s pulled a microphone off a nearby shelf, creating the sound that drew your attention.
Your entry has drawn the intruder’s attention:
“Good evening!” He flashes you a broad, gap-toothed smile and touches the cowlick that falls across his brow. His eye-searing floral-print shirt hangs open above jeans even a grunge rocker wouldn't be caught dead in. He attempts a bow— or at any rate he leans forward— and loses his balance, landing with a grunted curse on the studio floor beside the microphone.
“You can’t be here,” you tell him, making sure he can see the walkie-talkie in your hand. He doesn't seem like much of a threat, but you never know.
“Of course I’m here,” he counters, looking up at you wide-eyed. “I exist.” He frowns: "Don't I?"
“I mean, this area is for station employees only—”
“But I am a station employee,” the man says, picking himself up, along with the microphone. Both are surprisingly undamaged. “I’m on the air right now.” He gestures towards the empty radio booth where you can see a record spinning on one of the turntables, the needle dangerously near the groove that marks the end of the song. Before you can argue, he’s shambled into the booth; squeezed behind the desk strewn with scribbled notes, cigarette butts, newspaper clippings, books, and candy-bar wrappers; and pulled the active microphone towards himself, flicking several switches and turning a dial:
“…Big thank-you to Kraftwerk for giving us a lift on the autobahn,” he growls into the mike, pronouncing the song title as ‘Autobarn,’ —and hearing his voice through the medium of radio technology you finally recognize it.
Frank wasn't wrong about those front teeth.
Mad Bob eyes you, gives a brisk tug on his awful shirt and fumbles with the buttons till his hairy chest and belly are more-or-less modestly covered, even as he continues talking into the mike:
“Auf Wiedersehn, boys! Y’know, gentle listeners out there in the ether, there is no speed limit on the autobahn, and there oughtn’t to be a time limit on the song ‘Autobahn.’ If Kraftwerk want to play synths for twenty-two minutes, so be it! LET ELECTRONICA THRIVE!" he roars, before dropping into his serious-announcer voice:
“And now, a few adverts from our grotty sponsors.”
He cues up an ad, switches off the mike and scrabbles through the albums on his desk, squinting at the sticky-notes on the covers, before he edges around the desk again and opens the booth door to speak to you:
“Don’t stand there with your mouth open. I’m not in the mood tonight.”
“Did you really just play a twenty-minute song?” you ask him.
“Twenty-two minutes. I’m getting on in years— takes me a while nowadays to climb out the window, cross the street to the shop, buy weed from the young fellow behind the counter, smoke weed with the young fellow behind the counter, and get back up here. As you saw.” He’s still gripping the spare mike whose cord tangled him, and now he glares at it and drops it in the wastepaper bin with a clang. Turning around to snatch up two albums from the stack on the desk, he holds them both up and asks: “What do you think? Stravinsky, or Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry?”
His eyes aren’t as red as you’d expect from a man who just came back from a trip across the street to smoke weed, and they’re fixed very sharply upon you.
"You’re the deejay—” (You’ve just parsed his earlier comment about your mouth. Lech indeed.) “Don’t they pay you to make the call, buttercup?” You’ve no idea how the sobriquet popped into your head, or how it made its way out; but it prompts him to throw back his head and give a gurgling, ribald cackle in his pirate voice:
“Absolutely right, damn your eyes.” He closes his own eyes tight, shuffles the pair of albums and sets them on the desktop, then picks one back up and reads the cover. “‘Scratch’ Perry it is, then.” He puts the record on the turntable, and a cheerful reggae beat comes up as the ad-break concludes. “You’ve good taste in music, lambkin.”
So goes your first meeting with Mad Bob, aka the Old Man, now aka Buttercup.
Another month goes by, and the springtime settles in and turns to early summer— the nights sweeter but somehow darker with the rustle of leaves and the perfume of lilacs. You’ve always loved that smell, and yet it tugs at your nerves with a subtle anxiety, a desperation for something to happen, good or bad, before the flowers are gone for another year. It casts a spell of romantic nostalgia even over the shabby little place you rent, so that the unfashionable floral wallpapers and pastel trims remind you of childhood visits with your relatives; and when you come home every morning after your shift and crawl into bed, you fantasize that when you wake you’ll be in your cousins’ bedroom at Aunt Maeve’s, leafing through their fashion magazines and longing to be that glamorous and that grown-up.
The mercury rises and your work uniform is uncomfortably warm now. Which is why, when you step across the station threshold one night and into a chill that reminds you of a meat locker, you’re pleased that management has finally dropped some money on air-conditioning.
Frank has other opinions:
“I feel all off-balance,” he complains, sticking a finger in his ear, “and this new AC isn’t helping the cold or the ear infection or whatever it is.” You make sympathetic noises, but finish up by reaffirming your satisfaction with the cooler temperature in the building.
The night ticks by and Frank’s right, the cold is getting to be a bit much. It doesn't help that you’d already sweated through your t-shirt on the way to work, so now it’s an icy damp against your skin. Meanwhile your colleague's inner-ear troubles are getting worse by the hour, and his face has developed a greenish tinge.
“I didn't eat anything in the past twenty-four hours I don’t normally eat,” he insists.
“Maybe you’d better go home, though. I can clock out for you later,” you offer: “Nobody’ll know.”
“Ugh, I’d say yes, but I don’t think I could make it back right now.”
In the end Frank agrees to stay put on one of the tattered faux-leather sofas in the employee break-room, with a bucket from the janitor’s closet at the ready. The break-room always smells of cigarettes and french fries, and you hope it doesn’t worsen his nausea, but there’s no place else he can lie down.
On your rounds, you yield to the temptation to knock on Buttercup’s door.
You aren’t sure if he’s got a car but you’ve certainly never seen him on the bus. He must have a car. Which still leaves the question of who can drive Frank home when Buttercup still has to do his show, and you have to guard the building— never mind that you don’t have a driver’s license.
All right. One step at a time. Maybe there's an hour-long piece of music he can put on.
In any case, you want a second opinion and there's only one other person around. If the man really was a roadie once upon a time, he must have dealt with a few medical emergencies. You reach his studio and pull the handle…
…and it feels like opening an oven door. No sign in here of the air-conditioning that’s turned the rest of the station into a refrigerator. The window used for trips to the convenience store is propped open, and you can hear crickets chirping outside and feel a breeze, but it’s not much help to the temperature in the room. In the radio booth (whose door is also propped open), the man you're looking for leans back in his chair with his feet on the untidy desk, and they’re bare, like his legs and like, um, the rest of him.
At the sight of you his eyebrows fly up:
“Fuck me!” He snatches a record album from the top of a nearby stack to place on his lap: “Sorry for parading before you au naturel, love, but it's like a Burmese rubber plantation in here.”
“Why don’t you have the air conditioning on?” you ask, trying to avert your eyes without making it too obvious that you’re averting your eyes. Though the mad deejay's surprise seems genuine, the last thing you need is him thinking that he can shock you.
Or that he has surprisingly nice legs.
“Air conditioning?” His voice breaks in on your thoughts.
“The rest of the building has polar temperatures. Never mind— I came in to tell you Frank’s got some kind of stomach bug. Might need to send him home.”
Those shrewd, dark, wistful eyes scan your face— for what, you don't know.
“Toss me kit over here,” he says at last, adding “An' don’t look.”
Filing away Buttercup’s shyness in front of you as a mystery for another night, you throw him his clothes. Tonight's outfit (found strewn across the linoleum) consists of sports socks, red running shorts, and a faded T-shirt with iron-on letters that read:
THE
BLOODY
WHO
THAT’S
ZEPPELIN
Are there underpants? There they are, hanging on one of the pushpins holding the Nirvana poster to the wall. You have to do a little jump to reach them, which draws a delighted giggle out of Buttercup.
"Don't laugh," you retort. "You're the one that's naked." You throw his underwear at him and turn your face to the hall door, listening to him grunt and sigh as he dresses.
"Alright, lambkin, I'm as decent as I can make meself. Let's go have a look at Frank."