The noise of my air conditioner going at full blast all evening drowned out the sounds of the world falling apart, so I was caught completely unaware this morning.

I suppose I didn’t feel the earth move or the house shake because I had gone to bed piss drunk and just a bit strung out on some Vicodin.

I should explain. I’m not always like that. I just had a bad day. Well, a bad week. My wife left me, my dog ran away, my latest art exhibit sold only one painting and, well, you’ve probably heard stories like mine before. Up until last week, my life was moving along rather smoothly. Monday came and suddenly the world had it in for me. It was a gang killing, I tell you. Tuesday stabbed me, Wednesday shot me, Thursday hog-tied me and made me watch Celine Dion videos.

And now, Friday. The world has gone to hell, it seems. My street is on fire and I think the old Brown house imploded. Trees have sunk into the ground, cars are spinning in mid-air and the children – my GOD, the children – they are like roving gangs of attack dogs, stalking up and down the street, seemingly oblivious to the flames and whatnot. Whatever happened overnight while I was in my pity-me stupor has given the neighborhood children an evil dose of rabies.

My first thought is to turn on the television to see what the hell is going on, but I guess when your town is aflame and the sidewalks have buckled, the cable will go kaput. Same for the internet. Which is a moot point, as my computer has slid off the desk and onto the floor in a heap of plastic shards and wires. The F4 key shot straight across the room, into the eye socket of my poseable Spider-Man and he appears to be winking a hint to “save as” before it all goes to hell. Too late, Spidey. I step on B, curse a little and that’s when I hear the pounding at the front door.

It’s the kids. They look feral and hungry and, well, scary. I’m a grown man. A grown man with a hangover and the dulling effects of Vicodin still lingering in his brain, but a man nonetheless. I will not let some children, rabid or otherwise, make me afraid in my own home. Right. I stamp my foot down for good measure. No one is there to see my indignation except me and the fruit flies that have gathered over my kitchen sink. It’s like a convention over there and I forget the deranged children for a moment as I imagine a fruit fly convention, complete with entertainment and little name tags and a registration desk. What kind of lectures to they have? Will they be dining on my rotten bananas at the lunch lecture? Is babysitting available?

(Now, don’t think I’ve lost my mind. No, I’ve always had thoughts like this. My brain is somewhat…scattered. Easily distracted. And I’m probably still drunk at this point)

The pounding at the door starts up again. The kids are still there and I think one of them is gnawing at the doorhandle. I decide to be brave.

“What? What do you want?”
“Gunh. Ugnhur. Gnnnarrrr!”
“Come again?”
“GUNHHHHHHURRG!”

Ok, so they’ve lost their ability to speak. This is wonderful. Grunting, rabid children who appear to be very hungry and not at all unlikely to eat a fellow human. I slide the deadbolt closed, realizing how futile it is. It does give me a brief moment of feeling like I’ve done something to protect myself, though. I take what I can get.

“Mr. Grant! Mr. Grant!”
Oh, lord. It’s Mrs. Beasley, that bat who lives next door to the Browns (who, apparently, no longer live anywhere) and who has an unnerving habit of putting a Mr. in front of my first name. I hear her voice above the cacophony of grunts and groans and fire and crumbling buildings. Her voice is that shrill, that high all the time, though in this instant it’s tinged with a bit of panic. I look out the small window in my door and I see Mrs. Beasley standing on my walkway, holding this morning’s paper and looking for all the world like the universe is not imploding around her.

“Mr. Grant, my Sasha peed on your newspaper!” Sasha being her little fucker of a dog – some small, yapping, obnoxious white piece of fluff that’s supposed to be descended directly from royal dog blood or some shit like that. Mrs. Beasley does not seem to be aware that the Grimwald boy is tearing at her house dress, teeth bared and eyes blazing. This annoys me more than alarms me. I expect that if I’m going to go into full panic mode about a situation that everyone will panic right along with me. It’s like going to the doctor, alarmed that you’ve developed a strange growth on your back and the doctor, instead of looking as alarmed as you did upon discovering the growth, seems to think it’s all a run of the mill annoyance. It’s infuriating. Hello? Panic? Alarm? Are you with me or not? Because if you’re not going to settle into my mode of hysteria, then I’m going to label you an immediate enemy.

So now I’m staring at Mrs. Beasley like she’s the spawn of Satan himself.

“Open the door, Grant. I know you’re home!” She’s staggering up the walk – staggering because she’s dragging the Grimwald boy behind her and he’s gnawing on her baggy-stockinged leg, spitting out pieces of hosiery as he tries to get to the meat. “I just want to pay you for the newspaper and apologize for Sasha’s incontinence.” The last syllable of incontinence goes up a notch in pitch and Mrs. Beasley disappears from my view. Alarmed, I slide open the deadbolt and open the door just a crack. That’s enough to see that the Grimwald boy has pulled Mrs. Beasley to the ground and is about to latch onto her face with his mouthful of baby teeth. I contemplate this for a minute, wondering why he would go for her gaunt face which is nothing more than wrinkles held together by a slab of foundation. Why not the midsection, or leg, somewhere meaty where a growing boy could get some nutrition? This gives me an idea for a drawing, but the idea is lost when my reverie is broken by a high pitched wail. It’s coming from the boy, not Mrs. Beasely. I fling the door open, forsaking my own safety (sorry, I feel the need to point that out, because I look like an ass up until now). Sasha is dragging the kid off of Mrs. Beasley, her teeth firmly set into the boy’s arm. There’s blood, there’s screaming, there’s growling and there’s Mrs. Beasley looking like she just woke up from a ten year coma and is surprised to find out that gas is four dollars a gallon. She looks around at the boy, her dog, the crumbling houses and spinning cars and asks “Did something happen here, Mr. Grant?”

“Something. Yes.”

She pulls Sasha off the boy and kisses her nose.

“It would be polite to ask me in, Grant.”

“Would you like to come in, Mrs. Beasley?” She smiles at me. You know how sometimes you will glance at an old lady, like your grandmother, or your aunt – the one who smells like death – and you see something in them, just a small, brief glimmer, that makes you think they must have once been beautiful young women? Yea, not so much with Mrs. Beasley. Something in her smile makes me think she was an ugly, sour kid, the kind who was destined to become a lonely old lady walking her incontinent dog in her bathrobe every morning.

I clear the couch of plaster that has been raining down from the ceiling and offer Mrs. Beasley a seat. Sasha is dripping blood out of her mouth, and I think she peed on my rug, but the resale value of this house has gone to shit in the past few hours anyhow.

Another high pitched squeal from outside, not as feral as the boy’s. Before I can figure out the source of the scream, the front door flies open and there’s Terri, the neurotic high school kid from next door. She’s babbling about vampires, aliens, robots, the rapture, nuclear war and something about never getting on Facebook again. She’s freaking out at a million miles an hour and I let her go until her freak engine has run itself out. She collapses on the floor and curls up into a little ball of Armageddon sorrow. Sasha runs over to her, licks her face a few time and then pees on the girl’s leg.

“Mr. Grant?” Mrs. Beasely stands up, smooths out her housedress. “Do you think you could take me dancing at the Copacabana tonight?”

I take stock of the situation. Outside: end of the world, feral, flesh eating children. Inside: An old lady with sudden onset dementia, a teenage girl with OCD and Sasha the Incontinent Wonder Pup. I have all the makings of a failed sitcom

Todd was an alcoholic and a drug addict. Not in the broad sense of those terms that people tend to use in a weird form of negative exaggeration, but in the truest sense. He spent most of his life, starting at age 14 up until age 29 in a holding pattern of booze, drugs and the down and dirty lifestyle of a starving punk rock musician. Eventually, he quit them all. Not before he cheated death a couple of times. Not before an expensive stint in rehab. Not before jail and homelessness and a night that found him in an alley bleeding, dying and then pronounced dead.

That was over seven years ago. In those seven years, he cleaned up, sobered up, became an AA sponsor, got a degree, started a new career. In order to do that he had to sacrifice being a musician – the only career he had known til then -, he had to give up his friends, his hangouts, his life. He had to change his whole world. And he did. He moved farther north, away from the people and places that urged the old lifestyle on. He started a new life.

Last year, Todd’s parents came to visit us from California.

When his parents took the “tour” of our house, I pointed out all the work Todd did on the inside and outside. They had already seen the before and after pictures, so they knew the bulk of what he did. But still, for them to see all of it – the new living room, the perfectly landscaped lawn, the transformation of the backyard from weed and vine infested jungle to a suburban dream with a patio and pond and beautiful flowers, with all the woodwork; the planters, the fence, the waterfalls all built by their son’s hands -some deep realization hit me as I looked at his parents and saw the pride light up their faces. It wasn’t just the work he did, but how healthy and happy he looked, how my kids interacted with him, how he made our house a home. They were seeing the culmination of six years of sobriety. They were seeing the potential they always saw in their son fully realized.

It was a bittersweet moment for all of us, I think. Later on, we realized we had both been thinking the same thing. After all he put his parents through – the drugs, the alcohol, the failed rehab, the absent son – he had finally found that place in life that they always dreamed of for him. A regular life, one with a career, a family, a home. And here he was, happy and content with all those things they wanted for him, and here he was, sober and straight and able to have a normal, healthy relationship with his parents. And he’s 3,000 miles away. They don’t get to spend these years with him. They don’t get to enjoy the person they knew Todd was, but took all these years to flourish.

I think – no, I know – his parents pride is important to him. And he has that. But I also know it’s sort of sad to him that he’s so far from them now. In a way, he owes them the pleasure of these years, when he can sit with his father and have a conversation about capital gains tax or spend the day with his mother, reminiscing about his childhood. I can see where his mom skips some parts and glosses over others when talking about the past, but I can also see that she always had high hopes for Todd. She never gave up on him, even when he was at the bottom. In her heart, she knew he was the kind of person that could do better, and would do better.

She was right. It takes a lot for a person to be at the lowest place they’ve ever been and pick up from there. It’s easy to give in and say, well I’m here, might as well stay here til I’m dead. It can’t be easy to walk away from the only life you know, the only friends you know, the only things you know how to do, and try to start over.

Of all the years of my life - and that’s nearly 43 of them - 1977 is the year I could tell you the most about. Actually it’s the year I would want to tell you the most about. It was a time so jam packed with intensity and emotion and drama - I don’t recall any other year of my life being quite like that one. Of course, I was barely 15 at the time and there’s enough emotion and insanity inherent in that alone to make the year worth telling about. But there was something so different about 1977, especially the late spring and summer. Especially in New York.

I was in the midst of my first year in the local Catholic high school. I had a new set of friends, a new way of life, a new outlook on the world. I would be 15 in a few months. Life was good. Life was mine.

Though we lived on Long Island, we weren’t that far removed from the glamour and excitement of New York City. Even at our young ages (and I doubt there is a Long Island parent today that would be as permissive as our parents were back then) we would sometimes take the train to the city on weekends and just walk around, using our allowance money to buy records and eat burgers at the Steak and Brew, where we tried to pass ourselves off as 18 year olds to get the free pitchers of beer that came with the burgers. No matter how good it was to be 14 or 15, it seemed there was always something better on the horizon. We wanted to be 18 or 19. We wanted to cruise around in cars and go to bars. We were jealous of the permissive lifestyle that was so prevalent in NY at the time - Studio 54 opened in 1977, punk rock was on the rise and bands like The Dead Boys were playing at CBGB’s - it seemed there was so much turmoil, yet so much excitement - it was all so glamorous in a decadent way, you couldn’t help but want to be caught up in it.

New York City was just coming out of terrible times - there had been a huge financial crisis (I’ll never forget the Daily News headline from when the president was asked to help bail NYC out: Ford to City: Drop Dead) and there had been a stretch when the South Bronx was literally on fire for the longest time - I remember this because my father was a fireman at the time and he was always talking about, how there would be no fires left to fight in the area eventually because it was all going to burn down and Bushwick (Brooklyn) where my father worked was no better. My parents discussed all this at the dinner table with us, and we watched the nightly news and together we watched New York City (meaning all five boroughs) almost die before our eyes.

So there we were in 1977 and the city was alive. There was so much happening. And we would sit on our suburban porches and be wistful about it because at our ages we may have been able to get to the city on a weekend day, but even in the summer there was no way we would be able to take part in the nightlife that was going on there. As much as we wanted to stick safety pins in our faces or some of us wanted to wear glittering dresses and platform shoes and dance the night away, it wasn’t going to happen. And we knew that by the time we were old enough to enjoy this stuff, it would all be gone and there would be new scenes, so we lived vicariously through newspaper accounts and tales from older friends’ siblings.

And then David Berkowitz came along and the aura of NYC seemed to dive headlong into a dark time that would abate only when the New York Yankees would win the World Series that year - and even then the drama of the Yankees’ season with Reggie Jackson and George and Billy Martin was somehow fitting with the climate of the times.

When parents realized there was a serial killer on the loose, it was like life outside of school and home shut down. It didn’t matter that it seemed this killer only wanted to hurt a specific type of person - most notably young brunette women in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens - we were in close proximity to these killings and who knew where this guy was going to end up? So doors were shut and curfews were made and this layer of fear settled over us that spring and lasted well into summer. People talked about Son of Sam everywhere, in stores and at the pool in the dentist office, but they talked in whispers, as if saying his name out loud would be to call him into our suburban haven. I remember one friend’s mother - a holy roller who would make trays of cookies for us and serve them with religious tracts - moaning about how we deserved this, this day and age was so decadent what with it’s disco and punk rock and women dressing like whores. She pronounced whores so it rhymed with sewers. Dressed like hooo-ers. She was afraid the end times were coming and Son of Sam was just the harbinger of certain death and destruction and God’s wrath upon us.

Which it may very well have seemed to a lot of people that summer. I know I had my share of fear. While the summer of ‘77 and all of its intensity and scariness played out on the front page of the Daily News every day, there were other, smaller things going on in my little world that just added to the thickness that was beginning to choke the life out of summer. A young woman who lived five houses down was murdered; thrown off the roof of an apartment building in Brooklyn by a jealous boyfriend. My friend Lori had taken to visiting her relatives in Queens that summer - she came home with stories that made me wonder if Mrs. Holy Roller wasn’t on to something - a girl who had been raped with a broomstick right in her own bedroom, by relatives. A shopkeeper gunned down by a 14 year old. And Lori’s 13 year old cousin, nine months pregnant and shooting up heroin. Now, I think about all those stories and I know that Lori was exaggerating some and making some up and maybe she liked to see the horrified look on my face. But then, in the midst of New York on the brink, in the midst of this general feeling of an uprising of evil and animosity towards anyone who didn’t walk the walk of the norm - animosity that bordered on hatred - I believed it all and it made me feel sick. Between the oppressive heat and humidity and all that was going on around me, I felt a sick sense of dread that summer, but it was a dread tinged with a curious excitement. There was so much electricity in the air you could almost hear the crackling of static when you woke in the morning. And it was so damn hot, it was the first time I felt the cliche that the heat could make people crazy wasn’t a cliche at all, but true. The relentless sweltering had gotten to all of us, kids and adults alike; we were short tempered and cranky and prone to starting fights over nothing. It was like living on the edge and we all knew it. I think we aged five years that summer, all 14 and 15 but cynical and hardened in a lot of ways, just from having so much death and tension and raw energy shoved in our faces every day, from the shell shocked parents harping on us and hammering us with statistics and warnings. And we were living all this out with a soundtrack, huddled in the abandoned house next to the high school or in the sump or in someone’s basement or fort every night, listening to this bizarre mix of the Ramones and Sex Pistols, Kiss and Foghat, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Queen. We were all revved up with no place to go, just some green grass and white picket fence kids both fearing the world we were living in and wanting so much to be an intrinsic part of all that fear, to be in there, at CBGB’s or on the quiet streets fo Brooklyn, looking for a serial killer. We settled for drinking cheap beer and smoking stolen cigarettes and alternating our disaffected youth rock music with the sounds of baseballs being hit out of Yankee Stadium.

July 13, 1977 found us sitting in front of my house. Nature was offering us a freaky show of heat lightning and we stared at the sky for a while, entertained by nothing more than streaks of electricity bolting through the air. And then a weird thing happened. It was subtle, almost imperceptible from where we were sitting, but I noticed it and so did Lori. The night sky got darker. Something changed. It was about 9pm. By 9:30 or so, news of the New York City blackout had spread and we realized we had witnessed it in a way.

I remember my mother having this sense of panic about her. I remember her saying “this won’t be like 1965″ and it was only later on that I knew what she meant - the blackout of 1965 was calm and peaceful. The blackout of 1977 was anything but, and we could almost anticipate it, sitting in my mother’s kitchen listening to the radio for breaking news. I thought again of my friend’s mother. It was all coming to a head - Son of Sam, disco, punk rock, Abe Beame and money woes and rapes and murders and pregnant 13 year old girls on smack. Somewhere in Levittown, Mrs. Holy Roller was probably under her kitchen table with some candles and her rosary beads and the bible, waiting for Satan himself to bang down her door.

I was scared. Out there on Long Island, where we had lights and television and safety, I was scared. The news of the riots and looting and mayhem came in and my mother remarked that New York City was a sinking ship, a disaster of Titanic proportions. My father was at work in Bushwick and that panicked me, it even panicked my friends. This was the climax of everything, of all the turbulence and fear and the explosion we had been waiting for - or predicting - was happening.

I thought this would be the end of all it, in a way. I thought of the graphic my English teach had drawn on the blackboard just a few months ago, showing the movement of a story, with the climax as the peak of a mountain and then everything slowly rolling down the hill after that, towards the inevitable resolution. I expected that everything after the black out would be anti-climatic as the conclusion of this summer drew near. Although it was only mid-July, it was if summer was ending right then and there. I never wanted so badly to get back to school and normalcy and routine. I hated that there was more than another month of this floating feeling left, that time and all the empty space between July and September was pulling us towards something worse, something even darker. Maybe the blackout and the subsequent mess of arrests and broken glass was it. Maybe from here on, we could get back to the business of being kids who don;’t think about things like men who stalk and kill. And we tried. We hung out, we listened to records, we went to the movies and started and ended teenage romances and some of us went to summer school during the day because we didn’t pay attention in 9th grade biology.

On July 31, Son of Sam struck again and broke us out of our complacent reverie. It’s not like we had forgotten about him - he was on the front page nearly every day and we were devouring every word from Jimmy Breslin, who had become this cult figure demigod, an agent to Satan to some people, who thought Breslin was giving the killer too much publicity, a hero to others who praised Breslin’s caustic, raw writing and his willingness to be a pawn in order to bring this killer into the open where he could be caught.

And finally, he was caught. August 10, 1977, with summer almost over, with back to school banners already hung in the windows of May’s department store with all the hot, open days of freedom already taken from us, a killer was moved off the streets and into jail and the sigh of relief everyone breathed nearly cooled the air.

Somehow it fell to the Yankees to salvage 1977 for us. Ron Guidry, Mike Torrez, Sparky Lyle, Mr. October with his five home runs in the series, three in one game. Watching those games against the Dodgers, listening to the sounds of the cheers, New York seemed good again. It seemed whole. And then there was Howard Cosell on ABC during game 2 of the series, as another one of those Bronx fires burned out of control behind the Stadium and he intoned “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” And that seemed to epitomize it right there, to encapsulate everything about that summer.

The Yanks won the series, Ed Koch replaced Abe Beame that November and New York, as always, recovered. But not without leaving its mark on some of us, even 14 year old kids out in suburbia who vicariously lived through the whole sordid summer, but felt every bit as if it belonged to them too. It makes quite a story, anyhow.

1. The DJ Plays Our Kind of Music

Now and then he takes a phone-in
And anyone who’s feeling lonely
Can call him up
And make a little conversation
And in the night there’s music playing
Soft behind the words he’s saying
Would I like to make a dedication

Curtis Freeman is a small man with very little hair. He walks hunched over, making him appear smaller than he already is and he pushes that little hair off to one side, which only serves to accentuate the fact that he is on the downhill side of going bald. He wears a constant frown and his brows are always furrowed and people say that Curtis Freeman is the very definition of sad and pathetic. He is a puppy who’s been kicked, a child who is lost, a man without an island and any other metaphor the people of Green Valley can find for sad or forlorn.

On this day, Curtis Freeman is wearing an ill fitting black trench coat that hangs almost to his heels and slopes off his shoulders lazily. He is holding an attache case that seems to weigh him down, causing his hunch to be even hunchier and he bows his head toward the ground as he walks, so as not to let the day’s barrage of rain strike his face. He discovered a flat tire on his car in the train lot, so he is walking home the two miles from the station, in the cold autumn rain, occasionally slipping on a wet leaf or being chased by a loose dog. Such is the life of Curtis Freeman.

Curtis gets to his house at 6:13 p.m., a full hour after he usually gets home. He is soaked right down to his underwear, which he wrings out over the bathtub before depositing them in the laundry basket. He puts on his pajamas - grey sweatpants and a t-shirt that depicts the women of Farscape - much sooner than he normally would and settles down at the kitchen table for a meal of Dinty Moore stew and crackers. First, he turns on the radio.

If there’s one thing in Curtis Freeman’s life that brings him a small glimmer of happiness, it’s the WKLX greatest hits of the 60’s and 70’s, especially from 6 to 10 pm Monday through Friday and 10am-6pm on weekends, when Stu McLundy is spinning the discs.

Stu really does spin discs. He believes he is the last disc jockey in all of the US of A who still puts the needle on the vinyl, spins the black circle, plays the oldies the way they were meant to be played. In fact, his show is called Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy, as a tribute to what Stu thinks is the best part about listening to records.

Stu is a beefy, flabby man who wears sweat-stained blue Seersucker suits and masturbates to the Dawn part of Tony Orlando and Dawn. When he plays a long song, like McArthur Park, Stu is either taking a dump or rubbing one out to the cover of Tony Orlando and Dawn’s Greatest Hits. Despite these personal defects, Stu is somewhat of a celebrity in Green Valley. He makes appearances at charity car washes, department store grand openings and the annual Kiwanis Thanksgiving Dinner for senior citizens. When people see him, they say Hey, it’s Scratch and Skip Stu! - though the kids have taken to calling him Scratch and Sniff Stu, thanks to the creeping sweat stains that make Stu smell like a can of old chicken soup. Sometimes they’ll ask him to say something radio-like and he’ll always, without fail, say Stu McLundy here with the greatest hits of the only eras that matter, about to drop the needle on the Defranco Family. Heartbeat, it’s a lovebeat. He says this all smooth and baritone and almost sexy. If you didn’t know that Stu McLundy is a fat, sweaty, smelly, sexual pervert of a man, if you’ve never seen him but just heard his voice, you would think he must look like the Marlboro Man in Armani, drinking a martini, shaken not stirred. You might even fantasize about his disembodied voice. The people of Green Valley tolerate him and some even love him, because K-Tel records put out an album called The Best of Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy and he went on NPR to talk about it one day, in what was probably the most famous moment anyone in Green Valley ever had. They finished the segment by playing Stu’s signature song, the much maligned Heartbeat is a Lovebeat. It was a swell moment for Stu and all of Green Valley.

Curtis Freeman turns on the radio, annoyed that he has already missed a good twenty minutes of Scratch and Skip. He hopes he didn’t miss any Chicago or Three Dog Night. He digs into his Dinty Moore, crumbling some Saltine crackers over the stew and nods his head in time to Freda Payne’s Band of Gold. His radio is small and old, a gift from his brother nearly twenty years ago. The sound is tinny and mono and that’s alright with Curtis, because every song sounds like it did back in the days when AM radio played music. The song ends and Stu McLundy’s voice fills Curtis’s kitchen. Stu’s voice bounces off the toaster and microwave, absorbs into the ceiling, and is a warm caress around Curtis’s head, is an aural Zoloft.. Curtis sits up straighter, lets his frown turn just a bit upside down and the weight of his world on his slumped shoulders lifts a bit. He finishes his stew, cleans off his plate, turns up the radio and does an awkward sort of dance across the tiled floor as Brand New Key wafts through the kitchen. This goes on for hours, as Curtis sweeps the floor, plays two games of solitaire on his laptop, dishes out a bowl of vanilla ice cream, reads the daily comics and does his awkward dance to the pop hits of days gone by in between all of minutiae of his life.

2. You Don’t Mess Around With Jim

You don’t on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim’

Over at the KLX headquarters, Stu McLundy is stacking the final few records of the evening, carefully placing the DeFranco Family’s Heartbeat on the bottom of the pile, so he can - as always -sign off with what he believes is the greatest pop song ever recorded. At 9:35, as he’s about to drop Bobby Goldsboro on the turntable, one Marcus P. Fetterling walks into the office, trailed by two men in dark suits and somber faces.

Marcus P. Fetterling is the owner of WKLX, as well as the building WKLX sits in, as well as a wholesale tire warehouse, a decomposing tenement in the next town over and MPF’s, an establishment that seems like a good old pub from the outside, but which has several rooms in which activities that may or may not be legal take place. Marcus wears a nylon running suit that makes a swishing sound when he walks and has more than one thick, gold chain hanging around his neck. He wears yellow-tinted sunglasses, even indoors, and his dark, wiry hair always has a sheen of hasn’t been washed about it. Marcus has dreams of being in the porn business, but so far the closest he has come was when he installed a hidden video camera in the back rooms of MPF’s and compiled a stash of VHS tapes he calls “Marcus’s Greatest Hits.”

Marcus P. Fetterling has been an absentee boss for the most part, making an appearance in the station offices every few weeks or so. So when he waltzes into the studio, Stu McLundy is surprised. When it is apparent Marcus is not alone, Stu’s surprise turns to chagrin. Those fellows in their dark suits have bad news written all over them. They may as well be carrying signs that say We Are Here To Fuck You Over!

Marcus swishes his way through the obstacle course of crates of albums, empty soda bottles and piles of dirty tissues that are the victims of Dawn porn. Stu doesn’t make an attempt to rise to meet his boss; he sits there fondling his DeFranco family vinyl as Marcus bends down and shoves his hand toward Stu.

“Stu. My man. Good to see you again. How’s tricks? Wife, kids ok?” Stu slips his hand into Marcus’s grip and pumps halfheartedly. He doesn’t have a wife. Or kids. Or tricks. Before he can answer, Marcus pulls his hand away and points toward the two Fuck You Over men. “Got company, my man. Put on that long song with the guitars. Freeman? Seabird?” Stu senses a nervousness in Marcus’s voice, a shakiness that says “just pretend we have it together here, ok, my man?” Stu opts to play Donna Summer’s Love to Love You, Baby, figuring seventeen minutes of moans and disco would be enough to get him through whatever the Fuck You brothers and Marcus have to say to him.

“Stu McLundy. Bob Harrison. Mike Hamm.” Marcus says this as a way of introduction. They are in Marcus’s office, which is dark and musty and unused. Speckles of dust flit in and out of the small light the lone lamp gives off. After an exchange of handshakes, Marcus sits down and a herd of dust bunnies scamper around his chair. He pulls a bottle of Jack Daniels and four paper cups from his desk drawer. The cups are small and have riddles on them. Bob and Mike decline a drink. Stu takes his (Why did the boy throw a clock out the window? Because he wanted to see time fly!) and drinks it like an 18 year old frat boy. One shot, grimace, wipe mouth with sleeve.

“Stu, I’m gonna be straight with you here. Bob and Mike represent Jim.”
“Jim who?”
“Not Jim who. Jim what.”
Stu holds his Dixie cup out for another drink. He stares at the cup while Marcus pours and finally gets the joke. Time fly! Hah!
“What’s a Jimwhat?”
Bob stands up. He is broad shouldered, imposing, reminds Stu of that guy in Men in Black. Not Will Smith. The white one. Tommy Lee. Tommy Jones something.

“Jim is the new wave in radio, Mr. McLundy.”

Uh oh. Stu’s stomach does a flip-flop and he can feel the whiskey climbing up his esophagus. He swallows it back down.

Mike stands up. Except for the suit, he’s nothing like Bob. He’s a hipster, with a goatee and that dirty English boy haircut and a faint whiff of Abercrombie & Fitch lingering around him.

“Mr. McLundy - can I call you Stu? Good. Stu - WKLX has become problematic for Mr. Fetterling, in that it is no longer - if it ever has been - fiscally solvent. Therefore, it would be prudent of him to let go of the entity known as WKLX in order to bring his finances into a better place, monetarily speaking.”

“Ah, fuck.” Marcus swings his chair around, stares at Stu with what he hopes is a forlorn look. “Mrs. F. is divorcing me. Taking me for everything. I’m selling the station. Jim is taking over.” He swings the chair back around and faces Bob and Mike. “Can he go back to the studio now? Song’s almost over?”

Stu is nervous and anxious and befuddled and just a bit buzzed, and the sweat stains on his armpits have bled down to his waist and around his back. He growls. “Who the FUCK is Jim?”

3. Alone Again, Naturally

In an effort to make it clear to who
Ever what it’s like when your shattered
Left standing in the lurch, at a church
Where people ‘re saying,
“My God that’s tough, she stood him up!
No point in us remaining.
May as well go home.”
As I did on my own,
Alone again, naturally

Curtis Freeman was not always a sad man. Once, not too long ago, he was happy and in love and had a head full of thick, brown hair. It wasn’t until Sharon Weiss left him - two weeks before their scheduled wedding - that he started balding. And it was shortly after that Curtis’s shoulders began to hunch and his brows began to furrow.

Sharon left him a note on a Sunday morning in the form of a bright orange post-it slapped on his coffee machine. The message was written in Sharon’s flourished, fancy handwriting, all those curls and squiggles squeezed onto a 3X3 sheet of sticky paper.

Dear Curtis,

I am sorry to break your heart like this.
I am leaving town.
For good.
I love you still.
But not in that way.
Anymore.

Sorry,
Sharon

So Curtis did what any man in that situation would do: he used logic and reasoning to deduce where Sharon was headed, tracked her down, cornered her at the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike and killed her. He then drove all the way to Roscoe, NY, the Trout Fish capital of the world, with the body of his dead ex-fiancé in the trunk of his car, slightly bludgeoned and definitely bloody. He stopped at a deserted resort area, taking a few minutes to wax nostalgic about his childhood. He thought of all the summers they would drive up to Roscoe, four kids and two let’s-pretend-to-be-happy grownups stuffed into a sedan, every turn on the slithering road throwing blankets and pillows and board games across the back seat, his sisters and brother piling on each other, squealing in fake pain. They’d pass this place with it’s rows of white cottages and southern-style porches; the vacationers - most dressed in white and navy blue - swimming, boating, laughing, trout fishing, giving the resort a vibrant, idyllic feel.

Whatever it was then, it was no more. With the empty parking lot and bare sign and a lakefront that looks like a ghost town, it just seemed, much like Curtis Freeman, sad and forlorn.

Curtis pulled up in front of one shuttered cottage, dragged Sharon’s body out of the trunk and tossed her into the man-made lake. He sat on the porch for a few minutes, remembering the ladies with their sun umbrellas and the little girls and boys in tennis clothes. He smoked a cigarette, flicked the butt into the lake that contained the stinking body of his one true love, and drove back to Green Valley, singing along to Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky on repeat the whole way.

And now, months later and not a hint of suspicion hurled at Curtis, just sympathy and maybe a few snickers, he sits in his kitchen as always, waiting for the Stu McLundy show to wind down. 9:55 and it’s closing time for Scratch and Skip. Curtis reaches for the off button before Sharon Weiss’s favorite song and Stu McLundy’s calling card, Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat, begins.

He hears it play in his head anyhow as he gets ready for bed.

When he dreams, he dreams of his wedding that never was. Sharon is radiant in her wedding gown as she twirls her way onto the dance floor. As she gets nearer, Curtis sees that there are lily pads and fishing line stuck to the hem of the gown. The lace drips with dirty lake water and Sharon’s feet squish as she walks, leaving a trail of muddy footsteps. She sits down in a chair in the middle of the dance floor, ready for the part where the best man - Curtis’s brother Hank - removes the garter from Sharon’s tanned, smooth leg and tosses it to a lucky man in the crowd that has gathered around them. As he lifts Sharon’s dress, a trout slithers out from the garter. Hank grabs the trout and throws it backward over his head. Stu McLundy is there, hands stretched out. The trout lands in his arms and he cradles it like a baby. Sharon gets up to dance with Stu. She whispers in his ear, a whisper that Curtis, being the dreamer, can hear:

Listen to my heart pound
Listen to my love sound

Curtis wakes up sweating.

Did he? Did he really kill her? Sometimes he can’t remember, he can’t tell the difference between the dream of sitting in the kitchen thinking about his murderous revenge and the reality of sitting in his kitchen fantasizing a murderous revenge. Then and now and real and fake all blur together at 3am, with the soundtrack of the DeFranco family pounding furiously in his head.

He reaches for the phone, dials Sharon’s number blindly.

“Whuuuu,” she mumbles sleepily.

Curtis hangs up. Damn dreams.