Confessions Pt. 2

So July 27th will mark my 8 year anniversary here at KTSM radio, which means I've been doing this a really long time. So I was reminded about my beginnings in radio some 10 years ago.

It all started in January of 1996. I had heard about one of the community radio stations who would let anyone be a Disc Jockey, but wouldn't get paid. I figured this was going to be my foot in the door, so I got a shift at the station. I was thrilled, I had just recieved my drivers license & now have the job I wanted to be doing for a long time. KXCR 89.5 FM was a community run jazz station, staffed by people with little skill, but the love of either jazz music or want to be in radio. It's studios were in a many-times renovated building on the wrong side of the tracks & seen way too many remodels. Creaking floors, skittish plumbing & unfavorable neighbors made it an interesting place to work.

There had always been warnings about the parkinglot. People's cars would be routinely broken into by the neighbors, yet never caught. So, it happened one day that I was working on a Sunday afternoon. I had the monitors (studio speakers) extremely low & was generally relaxing. I had put on my headphones & turned on the microphone & instantly heard the unmistakable shatter of glass. It was close, I knew that, but didn't register that it was my truck being broken into. It was until after my break that I started playing music that I took a look at the truck and saw the window shattered & the stereo missing.

The cops came, filled out a report & had said the neighbors were under suspicion for doing this to cars in the neighborhood. Strangely enough, the neighbors themselves were outside listening to the cop tell me about the rash of break-ins. I stared sternly at the neighbors who stared back at me, almost smug. I went back into the studio, the next DJ was ready to go on air, so I grabbed my stuff & went back outside.

It's one of the most humbling things in the world to go out to your car after it's been vandalized & try to make sense out of a destroyed dashboard & broken glass. I found a shop rag in the back area of the truck & brushed off the bits of glass on the seat, from the floor & watched in facination as the drivers side window, still held together by the window tint tore and fell to the ground. The people who lived next door were all outside and staring at me. I just got up from the ground, stared at them until they shuffled around elsewhere in the yard.

I was angrier than hell. I wanted retribution, retalliation, SOMETHING to get back at these assholes who dammaged my car. There's nothing worse than dammaging another guys car. You just don't do that. Aside from running each and every one of them down, I thought about things I could do to these people that would show them I knew it was them and to watch their backs. Then I remembered as I was talking to the cop, the woman of the house was hanging a load of wet clothes on the clothes line.

The back parking lot of KXCR radio was a dirt lot. Dirt, rocks, more dirt & more rocks. The plan came together really fast. I started up the truck & revved the engine pretty hard. This caused people next door to peer out through their windows out to the parking lot. I moved the truck slowly out from the spot I had it and maneuvered towards the wet clothes. I parked as close to the fence as I could (a chain-link) with the front of the truck facing the clothes line, put it into reverse & held the brake. With one vicious hit of the gas, a cloud of dirt flew up from the rear wheels and into the next yard.

I sat there for about a minute, released the brake & did a viciously fast J-turn in the short space of the lot. I then reversed one last time back to the fence, this time, the rear of the truck was facing the fence and directly at the clothesline, clothes already filthy dirty. At this time, I heard a scream from the next yard and people starting to come out so I held the brake & threw it into drive. The better placment of the wheels dug deep into the packed dirt & a cloud of dirt filled the yard thick. I released the brake & tore out of the back alley as if the Devil himself was after me, looking back to see the woman in the middle of the dirt cloud coughing & trying to wave the dirt away from her face.

I made one last pass through the alleyway to see the dirty clothes and saw the load of white laundry was a dense, muddy brown. There were pointing & loud cussing coming from the whole lot of them, so I simply passed them all with a fond flip of the finger & drove the truck home. I just recently told my mom about this incident yesterday. She couldn't stop laughing. It's hard to laugh at the time, but to hear the full story later on brings a smile and sense of retribution to us.