How I Nearly Sank KUOI FM

Author’s note: Though the events in this story are true, the events in which they happened has been altered to make the narrator seem less spineless.  It is also true that despite the author’s best efforts to the contrary, the three Furies of Symbolism, Connotation and Artifice entered the writing and mixed shit up.  The author asks you to kindle disregard these issues and just read the following account as true.







According to its website, KUOI “owns the largest music library of any college station in the Northwest.”  My claim to fame is that I designed the database for that music library back in ’91.  That was the year one of my drunken, on-air rants got heard and nearly brought the station down.  I’d started at the station as a work study grunt in ’90.  I thought I was getting a job as a DJ. 

“You know much about independent music?”

“Yeah, I guess.” 

“Like who?”

“Well, I really like Rush and King’s X, and the Chili Peppers are pretty cool, I think.”

They gave me the job of creating a database.  I was to catalog the hundreds of LP’s, EP’s, cassette tapes and the growing number of CD’s that were loosely filed in the stations big central room.  I spent the first semester learning the genres, sub-genres, cross-genres and anti-genres that years of staff and DJ’s had adapted or invented and then written, sometimes in pencil, on a small, white label in the upper-right corner of the album sleeve—usually there were least two or three crossing-outs and “corrections”.  Most were faded.  Some I couldn’t read.  Color-coded stickers stuck on the sides were supposed to help keep similar shit together but there were only five colors and I’d counted about 20 genres.

Anyway, the skinny, wire-haired guy named Tim was the music director.  He’d call me into the office, sit me down and say listen to this.  He introduced me to Primus, The Butthole Surfers, Melvins, Sonic Youth and Steven Jesse Bernstein.  There were Sub Pop stickers all over the station.  They gave me my own show the following semester, from 2 to 6 a.m. on Sunday morning.  I wanted to call it The Dead Zone because of the time and the fact that it’d be mid-winter, but there was already a show of the same name for the Deadheads in town and “it might get too confusing.”  Outside of insomniacs, stoners and acid-heads, I figured no one would be listening, and so I mixed up the genres as much as possible: a few metal or punk tunes followed by a new age or classical piece followed by some spoken word or comedy.  I like to think that I introduced Primus and Bill Hicks to northern Idaho, but the truth was that no one was listening, and once again my claim to fame is that I designed the database. 

It’s good that no one was listening.  I was a heavy drinker and taking more than a little acid at that point—it is not something I recommend, sitting alone in a radio station at night with all those little blinking lights and no one but the microphone floating there in the air in front of you, waiting to fill it up with wisdom.  Nope.  My best friend, Willard, sometimes joined me for co-host duties.  He’d arrive with a bottle of rum and we’d spend the next couple hours drinking, talking, and most importantly ranting.  We’d always do our top ten list of things we hated, a list which always contained the police, the president of the university (Willard wasn’t a student, but he was an underpaid janitor in the art building) and the Greeks.  Willard was always getting harassed walking through Greek-row.  Something about this five-foot-nothing in black jack-boots and wife-beater, heavily tattooed skin and a mane of straight black hair that reached down to the crack of his ass (yes, he looked a bit like Cousin It), prompted the hecklers to stand out from their farmer-boy self-cheering squads and shout insults.  We’d both had our fair share of harassment from drunk, testosterone-fueled frat boys both on and off campus.  At the station, down would go one rum and then two, three four, and out the microphone we’d spout vitriolic over the airwaves, once all over the porcelain because I’d reached eight one sweaty, misguided night. 

The weeks blurred by.  With the help of DJ’s and staff, I’d whittled the music categories down to twelve and was now in the process of entering the albums into the computer.  The DJing was getting to me though, though more accurately it was the isolation with that microphone, the drugs, the alcohol and the sleepless nights that I would stretch to two just to see what would happen.  The acid wasn’t helping make me more socially adept, but the booze was worse.  Drunk drinking, the ol’ ego’d swell to porn star proportions; rants would stretch on for twenty sweaty minutes.  The freedom of speech, brothers and sisters, was being assaulted by chicken-brained bigots who wanted to keep everyone like children and keep all children safe from harm and thinking.  After too much beer and weed at one particularly dark get-together at Willard’s, I passed out on air, slumped forward over the controls, sleeping, snoring perhaps, but definitely not in.  The buzz and ring of the telephone woke me.  WTF?  Where was I?

“Hmm?  Hello?”

“Hey.”

“What’s up?”

“Not much, man.  You just had twenty minutes of dead air there, though, man.”

“Huh.”

“Dead air, man.  You okay?”

“Oh, shit.  Yeah, dude.  Thanks.”  Click.

Weeks or maybe months later someone else called.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?  Nobody wants to hear this shit at 4:30 in the morning!”  It was Black Flag, I think.

“Oh.” 

Puffing on a cigarette, I thought: Somewhere out there in that big blackness beyond the control booth’s window I’ve touched someone.  I smiled.  It felt good.

Something was going on down in the station during the days, though, and Tim was at the center of it.  It took me a while to catch on to it.  Several times when I’d be entering data into the computer, the phone would ring and Tim would pick it up and launch into some variation of the following conversation:

“Yeah, this is him.  Yes.  No.  Fuck you, too.”  Slam! 

“Tim’s pissed off the Greeks when he sent that pamphlet to the Tribune,” the station manager explained to me when I finally asked what was going on.

Tim had come across a copy of a secret, intra-house pamphlet for The Russian Ball.  He’d delivered it to the town’s newspaper.  The Russian Ball was this annual dance for those sperms trying to enter fraternities and sororities during the early weeks of the school year known as Rush Week (hence the name Russian Ball.  Oh, those goofy kids and their clever names!)  The pamphlet was chock full of sexist and racist cartoons and jokes that only a coddled adolescent who’d been hit repeatedly by a taser to the fucking head would find humorous.  The town got stirred up, though: here was this danc dressed up as this formal, respectable affair, but the invitations for the damn thing were probably more sexist and racist than anything dreamed up by a group of white supremacists gang-stroking themselves at their Hayden Lake compound just north of town.  Racism and sexism in northern Idaho!  No way! the town residents seemed to say in truly mind-boggling dismay.  The president came down hard on the frat.  The frat’s national chapter, under pressure to stamp out any unseemly hints of racism or sexism, slapped them with a heavy fine.  I think The Ball was canceled, but I don’t remember well.  Of course, the frat boys were pissed off and, thanks to the newspaper article, knew exactly who to blame—Tim hadn’t bothered to keep him name secret.  But in an interview a few days later, Tim lied that he’d been recording calls to the station and handing the tapes to the police soon.  The death threats stopped.  Things quieted down.  The fraternity made a public apology.  Things seemed to go back to normal and the whole shitty thing seemed to have been forgotten.  I was wrong, of course.

One night a few weeks later, I’d stumbled out of the bar to hit the cash machine.  Three other guys were there before me, but I could tell they were together, so I leaned up against the door frame nice and steady, waiting.  The little guy turned around and looked at me.

“Hey, you,” he said, turning.  The bookends eyed me curiously.  “You’re that fucker!” the little bristly dude announced.

“Huh?” came my witty retort.

“You’re that fucker.”

“What?  Dude, what’re you talking about?”

“You’re that asshole from the radio station.”  Why is that short fuckers have such bad tempers?  “Tim!” he announced with glee, remembering, pointing at me. 

“No," I said slowly, not getting his meaning.  "No, I’m not Tim.”

“Yes you are, you fuck!  I know you.  I saw your picture in the paper.  You know how much shit you got us into?  What the fuck, man?  We weren’t hurting anyone.  That shit was private.”  Little bristly was up in my face now, and the bookends were, appropriately on either side of me, glowering down at me.  Oh shit, I thought.

“Look,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, “I’m not Tim.  You got the wrong guy.”

“Bullshit.  Prove it.”

“How?”

“Show us some ID.”

“What?”  That freaked me out.  It sounded too much like all those other nights getting ID'd by cops with bad attitudes.  I pulled out my driver’s license and showed them.  The bookends, apparently literate, deflated.  Little bristly dude backed off.

“Sorry,” he said.  “But I’m going to kick the shit out of that guy if I ever find him.”

I got my 10 bucks and went back to the bar.  Tim and some others were still sitting in the booth where I’d left them.  I said nothing of what had happened. 

Two nights later I was back at the station, drunk again but with two days of ineffectual anger stewed inside me. 

"Three one, these frat boys come up to me like cops, demanding my ID.  Three to one, these frat boys end up managers somewhere, cops, managers, bosses, rule-making, little-minded mother fuckers stomping on people, stomping down anything they don't like, and what they don't like is everything--everything that ain't them.  Ain't nobody gonna doing anything about them here, 'cause these are the farmer's sons, our future leaders, preserving the morality and the finest traditions."

I blabbered on about what had happened to me at the ATM, knowing full-well that few would be listening.  This tirade, too, would pass unnoticed.  Of course, as in so many other things, I was wrong.

On Monday, Tim called into the station office.  He looked more pissed-off than I'd ever seen him. 

“Do you have any idea what you were doing last night?  Do you know what it would’ve cost us if anyone from the FCC had been listening?”

I didn’t.  Somehow, inexplicably it turned out, no one had gotten around to giving me the requisite training me or had even gone over the rules.  I figured that since everyone said we were an “independent” station, anything would go.  I couldn’t think enough to defend myself, though.

“Ten years, man: ten years our annual operating budget.  If they’d heard you, we’d be gone, man.  You should think about that,” he said and slammed the door behind him.  I did think about it.  I quit the next day.  Maybe I was ashamed.  I don’t remember.  Mostly I was just disappointed. 

Tim had been listening.  He must’ve heard how I’d been threatened for him.  But he hadn’t said anything.  Maybe he’d just been disappointed in me.  Maybe he'd felt that his stand against hateful speech had been trivialized by the drunken ravings of one of his staff or used as an excuse to rant against the Greeks.  I never found out what he'd been thinking, and frankly I wasn’t too interested to know: It had happened.  I’d both finished the database and had nearly sunk the radio station.  A drunken poet can be proud of any little bits of infamy that floats their way.