Jeffrey Alan Payne - Doczine

The first rule I learned about starting out in radio, is don’t tell all your friends that you’redoing it. Wait until your presentation smoothes out a bit; then, you can invite everyoneto listen. I might have ended up receiving comments about how confident andprofessional I sounded, rather than returning home to my dorm mates’ lack of eyecontact and a widespread avoidance of the subject. “Oh, was it last night you were on?”They would pretend to recollect, knowing that I knew that they had listened. They justwanted to spare my feelings and couldn’t possibly think of anything positive to say.Nonetheless, it became my mission in life to become better. I didn’t want to beremembered as, “Oh, Rick Loonie worked at the radio station for a while,” then in a morehushed and cynical tone, “He sucked.”Over the course of the following summer, most students went home to summer jobs ortheir parents’ pools. I stayed behind and accepted the honorable position of “ChiefAnnouncer” at the university station. What that meant was I performed at least one,maybe two airshifts per day, because there weren’t enough people around to keep thestation on the air twenty-four hours.The fall semester after my original broadcast debut, the student body returned from theirseason of irreproachable frolic to find that Rick Loonie was now a radio star. Actually, Iwas probably only as good as any of the other amateur underclassmen on the air. It’sjust that I was so bad, when everyone had left for summer vacation. At any rate, I wasgood enough to inhabit the most coveted of all timeslots in university radio, Fridayafternoons.I became something of a campus celebrity, a status that I had never encountered before.I took to my new life style with verve and hunger; this provided instant gratification, therespect of my contemporaries, and most of all the lustily expressed adulation of theopposite sex.Women wanted to sleep with me, for no good reason. Sometimes I wouldn’t even knowthem. I’d get a call from a woman during my airshift. We’d chat during songs; then I’dput them on hold while I talked on the air, knowing that they could hear me on hold. Myvoice would be filled with the swagger of a mammal bristling with bravado and the urgeto mate. I’d come back on the phone to the sound of awe and desire.By the end of my shift, I’d be on my way to their student housing apartment to “playsome special requests”. Sometimes I’d put on a long song by a band like Yes, andleave the studio early. By the time “Close to the Edge” was finished, I’d be approachingtheir doorway, where I was almost immediately disrobed and ordered to “talk like you doon the radio”.Seriously, I was implored more than once to sound just like I did when I wasbroadcasting. I once did a weather forecast, while receiving oral gratification from awoman I had met on the phone only hours earlier. She said she also had a thing for thelocal television weatherman, so I guess it was some sort of meteorological fetish.Sex was not the only perk for an up and coming radio broadcaster. Free stuff abounded:concert tickets, albums, meals, drinks. Like the women who were attracted by thepremise of sleeping with that anonymous voice, the invisible being who seemed so5