Irene stands facing the window, having felt inspired to grill pancakes this beautiful cool August morning, and gets a kiss from her elder boy Tim, who had just followed the smell out of the woodwork singing in, unbeknownst to her, a voice he and his buddies had just derived from Axl Rose off some live bootleg that’s making rounds.
“Owwww she musta been a beautiful bayy-bayy...”
“Why thank you Timmy, it’s the pancakes, right?”
“Cuz now she’s got a great big ol’ boo-tayyy...”
“I knew it was too good to be true.”
Tim turns to his brother, “now can we get a haye HAYE haye?”
Nick chimes in best he can between mouthfuls, having only heard the tape once,
“Ah hay HAYYE haye yeahh!”
Poor Ned can only shake his head and and grins around some scrambled eggs, “You idiots.”
Tim sits down with a stack,
“Now baybay go in there and make me a MAYE taye...”
Irene fires back, “you BETTER not!”
- - - - -
Somewhere between an old Tensor lamp and some well-worn Masonite, Nick sits at his workbench that Dad built a few years ago after showing a serious interest in soldering. He’d started with one of thos beginner hobby kits with the spring-loaded connectors then worked his way up through the 150-in-one variety and recently started consulting the Engineer’s Notebook - all available at your friendly neighborhood Radio Shack! Then there’s a worn copy of Electronics Hobbyist from a few years back and had managed to breadboard some of the simpler projects but hadn’t put anything in a case yet, except for an ultra-simple AM transmitter for the sixth grade science fair. It impressed everyone and he even tricked the superintendent with a fake page to the office. It comes honest, this passion, hobby, whatever it is, and even his by-the-numbers old man sees himself in an a wandering tinkerer with shoeboxes full of quarter-watt resistors, zener diodes and 555 timer chips. At least the boy’s not out screwing up, somewhere.
Tonight it’s different. Usually this is just a diversion, something to chew on, see what happens, put on some music and get away from homework, or people, but there’s a twinge of something, there’s a voltage within him, lurking, warning. As a preteen he would take a capacitor to church since the carpet would produce more static than he’d ever seen during the cold months. One time the capacitor had a broken lead, against his finger, but he tapped the remaining lead against a metal switch plate and the ensuing ark found his elbow. That was enough for that day, but today’s another day. There are tone decoder circuits in the Notebook, not to mention an LED readout. Standard tone pairs for touchpad phones are lying around at the school library and it all checks out, and then, lo and behold a magazine at the drugstore has a recipe built around a $13 DTMF receiver chip.
Did they honestly think he was gonna sit this one out?
- - - - -
On a pensive, wintery, Saturday afternoon with nothing on TV, Nick can’t decide on a tape to put in and just wishes he could make his own music.
Finding one’s sound is a big a journey as any we undertake. he had the inclination to play guitar but budget cuts kept him from doing lessons at school in 8th grade, and his brother’s old acoustic had 12 accessible frets and bowed pretty badly, dry bronze strings just aren’t inviting. For years he would wander into pawn shops and fumble for chords on various Mexican Fenders, always missing at least one string but surely having a million stories to tell to someone who could just love it enough.
FM 106 in the next county broke out their own guitars every night, classics and newer stuff but with a lean toward power pop and arena bands. These days the airwaves have a lot for the rockers, even Duran Duran has their moments, and the old guard was still active with projects like The Firm and Honey Drippers.
Back then he would even tape some nights with Bob Shultz signed on at 7, and how something like Scandal’s Warrior sounded so badass, Bob just had the right attitude for the time and the music, even when they’d whip out something blatantly provocative like Kiss’ Heaven’s On Fire, or Billy Idol’s Flesh for Fantasy…and then that John Paar track…some of those made even Nick secretly echo his mom’s pondering, what’s the world coming to?
Still, when free lessons at school dropped off the radar, he started with an old Mel Bay book for chords then progressed to a surplus hymnal to painstakingly plink out out the melody line to The Old Rugged Cross, with dreams of playing it as an offertory on a shiny red Strat. But then any mention of an electric pretty much drew rain clouds around the house.
“I don’t want you in a rock band, with all the drugs and partying,” she’d murmur.
Nick failed to see that had anything whatsoever to do with music. But alas, Irene is a piano type, but abhors anything with swing, or swagger, for that matter.
Then his dad was steeped in country gospel and expected him “play what he’s supposed to”, whatever that means.
But the biggest kick in the groin was when, just as the pop charts evolved away from rock, big brother (actually, his slightly shorter older brother…) had pretty much swayed with the breeze, embraced the Beastie Boys, then other rap, started hanging around room and not shying away from making an ass of himself over a female whenever he could.
Sometimes the sound just finds you, some dude cranking it out his car windows at a stoplight or down the block at the right moment, totally bitchin bad, gotta beeline inside and see if 106 is playing whatever, and call a buddy to see if they caught it too.
Or for those nights when the mind and eyes need a respite, especially if MTV is not an option (the Swansons were YEARS from getting cable), a theatrical production needs a score, only the ears can lead the way, and the images wake up, familiar faces, friend and foe alike, the possibilities, making music in the stadium, we all rock out, all are one, into the night.
Sometimes the sound is the only one that seems to understand.
Back in 7th grade Nick had been glued to the radio since mid-year and had access to what we call Top 40 as well as album rock, at least after 7pm from a station in the next county that was pretty mundane during the day. The pop charts had gotten dramatic by the end of 1984, with Bryan Adams’ Run To You and the Survivor hit I Can’t Hold Back, was the world just one big urgent phone call to a woman you can’t live one more moment without? Or banging on her door in the middle of the night?
Then there’s Don Henley’s Boys Of Summer, all the layers and Don’s cryptic lyrics, the…tone…is what says more than the lyrics ever could.
Especially what the guitar does.
One snowy night Nick heard Shultz remark that the roads out there suck, and then not long after that there was a new host for the evening shift. He was actually tempted to think that remark may have done him in, but no, all good things must end, and Shultz was a bit too good for that little station.
- - - - -
Just after 8th grade ends Nick finds himself at Youth Congress, held at a large church a couple counties over. It’s actually an old tabernacle that used to have wooden benches but thanks to a fund drive they have padded chairs that interlock. He got talked into being a delegate, because you have to have those in order to go. So he’s sitting here with three other youths, two of which belong to families that are usually part of a different church. It seemed like no big deal at first, Mom was glad he’s going naturally, but once he got into the van something didn’t seem right, Saturday mornings should be a bike ride and trying to find something on the air waves.
For some reason he’d found it necessary to jump on the hawaiian shirt bandwagon. Guys at school had been wearing them so he asked for one the last time they went to Pennys, red as a brothel lamp, this morning paired with white pants. Don Johnson eat your heart out.
Thankfully, any group of teenagers at 9am on a Saturday is going to be pretty subdued, but still, he couldn’t help feeling like a light bulb, and not just a high wattage kind, but a high wattage kind on the verge of blowout with a spot in the filament worn thin.
After some introductions the Congress leader gets up and addresses the crowd, he’s new around here but comes across as very stern, we must hold our ground in these challenging times, become faithful servants, tomorrow’s leaders today. Then they pass out ballots, and as he’s thinking how strange it is to vote for names of folks he’d never meet, they explain how sometimes we have to rely on the Lord for guidance. He randomly checks a few spots and tries to act confident, sweating a bit, unconsciously struggling to keep his head still and not shake it in exasperation.
Afterward the group retreats to the van and await their leader, talking about this and that. At one point Nick refers to someone with “he’s such a dick” and then looks at come-lately Kandy Kemper in embarrassment, only to have her chuckle and let him off the hook, “Oh you’re fine,” just before she decides to hang out with some folks from her other church in a nearby van.
- - - - -
Maps are usually printed with cities as yellow, if there’s any meaningful geography-forming meat around the dot or circle, and unincorporated areas in white, then green for major forestry and so forth.
Lines as roads connect cities and towns. Small towns have small dots and a little yellow, whereas major cities have a big circle encompassing several city blocks, town hall, parking garages and convenient open spaces for picketers.
A fourth-grade Nick has been spending a lot of time recently staring at maps and going rounds with his mother about what makes a “big” city. She’d insist that a “large” city meant a large population, but to Nick it meant how much yellow is spread out on the map. Chicago and St. Louis had a lot of yellow but some of that was all the surrounding towns. On a map there’s just a bit more yellow to Chicago but he was told over and over again how it’s really about ten times “bigger” than St. Louis.
“They have a lot of high-rise buildings there, the people are stacked up like shelves,” she’d say.
“Even the trains are elevated.”
So big cities always have that black steel ring in the middle, the downtown area, and state capitols have a star inside the circle, like Springfield on his main map. Before a family trip one year they got an atlas and he nearly wore it out, it was a lot to take in. Some states have secondary roads that are not advisable, dirt or gravel and you’re supposed to ask someone at a gas station if it’s a good idea. Oh, and Washington DC, when viewed next to a neighboring state has TWO circles around the star. The atlas has several of those if you look really close, like Nassau, Ottawa, Mexico City. They even show bits of forbidden places like Cuba and USSR, wow.
“Mom what’s a county seat?”
“That’s where the courthouse is, like uptown here, Jameson is our county seat.”
“Is it always the biggest city?”
“Not always hon.”
“Is there a county seat in Springfield, for Sang...sanga?”
“SANG-ga-mun, just like the river - I’m sure there is.”
“Is it the same thing as the state capitol?”
“No Nick they’re separate, different buildings and people to run things. We should take you through there sometime, the state capitol is an old building with a tall dome, it’s very pretty.”
“Oh OK.”
City-level details never cease to spur the imagination, the memorial parks and schools, named for someone who may or may not still evoke memories in the community, museums, golf courses, shopping malls, there is certainly more to this world than a boy can ever see in a hundred lifetimes.
On a map, it’s all worth checking out.
- - - - -
Sometime in Nick’s sixth grade year, Paps sent a special treat home with him, a solid-state multi-band portable receiver, branded Westminster, the only time he’d come across that brand. But someone was cleaning out their closet and gave it to Paps, and here we are.
Shortwave is something else, most nights, guess it comes with a mood, or what’s drifting in. There’s plenty of it, news read in a sidewalk American accent from Cuba, BBC’s hit parade, this day in history, translated tales from Taipei, Aggies football on WRNO, even the Christian Science Monitor is around but it doesn’t feel right to listen for some reason.
Once he fell asleep listening to Australia but they either fade away from propagation shift or else change frequencies, at least most of them do after an hour or two and they seem to read them off faster than he can follow. He’s gradually getting used to the meter bands, such as 31, 49, etc. but has to relearn them after leaving it alone for a spell.
And then, there’s the ones that seem to originate from towns in rural area that no one’s ever heard of till they receive the signal, the voice in the wilderness following what sounds like a 1950’s era spiritual sung by a medieval chorus, hailing the Second Coming, my beloved, which is surely closer today than it’s ever been.
Years later, even as Paps seems to be fading from this life, Nick still hooks it up to the wire through his window and gives it a whirl, day or night. Seems the BBC is really intense with the Tiananmen Square standoff at one point.
To balance things out that day he got the radio, Paps slipped Tim a few bills with a wink to get something for his girlfriend, as if he had one.
- - - - -
When Nick needed someplace to sit at lunch he usually gravitated toward Steve Settlemyer, a reliable muse since elementary playground, sharp dressed and articulate, somewhat musical, didn’t date much but ended up marrying well after college.
“Oh I’ve always called it the Horace. Never cared for the word toilet because it sounded like a place where there should be all kinds of toys, but instead it was, you know, and so I named it after the sound it makes when you flush...HORACCCCCE!!”
The group all chimed in one way or another, one of the free-thinking girls mentioned she calls it the Jane for basic feminist reasons, something which would have made her a lot more attractive to Nick if either one of them cared about anything besides the laughs in these moments.
“My whole family calls it that at home now, it’s hysterical.”
By senior year Nick had begun hanging with a mix of the new and old guard, upper and lower plus the new dude who would soon graduate early and join the Guard. Kyle, the preacher’s kid whose dad just took the pulpit at the Missionary church, wasn’t a big fan of cutting in lunch line, a privilege assumed by seniors and universally ignored by faculty monitors, but they would sing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” as recently made popular by Sam Kinison and somehow found themselves swarming with cotton candy-haired freshman coeds who would flirt shamelessly, some just wanting some spare change, but that was mostly Nick’s bit.
Kyle is dating an amateur model back in Decatur (a verifiable fact, she met him at the lockers to pick him up from school a couple times) and was just running out the clock before his stint.
