Jeffrey Alan Payne - Doczine

“But….you can’t do that. Why would you do that? I’m your best part-time guy.”“I don’t agree Rick, but I’m glad that you think so. Look, I’m going on the air in fifteenminutes, and I haven’t had lunch. Your check will be mailed to you, and I hope you geteverything you want. Good luck.”I started to speak, but I heard the click of the phone as it disconnected. I had just gonefrom rock and roll radio superstar to unemployed schmuck within ninety seconds. Thiswas a devastating development in my professional growth. I was now stuck with my dayjob, the one that paid the rent, at a small clothing store that had absolutely no clientele. Iwas sure that it was going out of business any day, and I no longer had the notoriety ofbeing on the radio. There would be no more free stuff, and I’d have to depend on goodlooks and personality in order to obtain sex now.Radio had been my entire identity, the one thing that made me special. If the clothingstore went out of business, I could very soon find myself with no money to even pay rent.So this is what the real world is all about. No wonder my parents were so bitter.It was close to Christmas and my mom had offered to fly me to visit her, as a Christmasgift. My parents had divorced, while I was at school, and my mom had moved to a smallindustrial town in eastern Tennessee, to be close to her own mother and siblings.Kingsport, Tennessee was a great place to raise a family with a stable economy, strongchurch and community influences, and a town that generally suffered very littlesignificant crime. It was partnered with the towns of Johnson City and Bristol to form theTri-Cities. Bristol had the unique distinction of being a part of both Tennessee andVirginia, with a major thoroughfare that divided the town between the two, called StateStreet. You could stand on either side of State Street and be in either Tennessee orVirginia, depending on which sidewalk you were on.In terms of media market size, the Tri-Cities was ranked somewhere around eighty-ninth.This was much too small for my visions and plans of greatness, but I still took some ofmy “very best stuff” tapes with me just in case I could get a meeting with a programdirector. I was sure that “free stuff” availability was much more limited, but I was positivethat there were single women that would be anxious to be enlightened by the experienceof hearing my broadcast voice and feeling the essence of my manhood.I flew to the small Tri-City airport to be picked up by my mother and a couple of gigglingteenage cousins, who probably couldn’t believe that they were in the presence of adashing relative who had just graduated from university and had a job speaking on theradio. At one point I bent over to tie my shoe, only to rise and find them both staring atmy every subtle movement, anxious to witness the mechanics that locomoted this livingvirile Man God. Perhaps careful observation could reveal insight into the sexy intellect ofthis celebrity savant.The holidays were a fairly perfunctory but very warm and happy affair. We attended theChristmas get-togethers, commonly slathered in cake-like anomalies containing prunesand other forms of unrecognizable “fruit”, along with cookies sprinkled with multi-coloredpellets, cut in shapes designed to roughly resemble some sort of Christmas theme. We16