The sound meter bounces forward and backward in front of him as he delivers, in a voice laden from years of cigarette smoke, each word. The various lights from the sound board flash across his face and the clocks count each second with militant accuracy in front of him. His co-host smiles in the adjacent room and a few seconds of silence deafen the audience; a seemingly eternal gap between the airwaves.
“And welcome back to ‘TV on the Radio’” he says.
She pauses, laughs, and switches the pen she holding to her other hand. Her hair is short, with gentle spikes coming off in various directions; not like the 1980’s punk kids’ hair (gelled with sharp points and a greasy shimmer), and her laughter is genuine and warm.
“I wasn’t sure what you were doing there. You paused and I was like, that’s totally my queue to come in.”
“I was putting my headphones on,” he explains to both her and an audience of transparent listeners.
“Yeah I saw that.”
He stares on through the glass pane that separates the two of them. There is a glossy sign hanging on the far wall and two lights bounce off its surface, and dimly, across the dark room. Just enough light to see his hands move over the sound board, carefully adjusting the knobs. A bracelet made of tattered fabric slides up his arm as it glances over the two turn tables on his left hand side.
“So as you know this is ‘TV on the Radio.’ Here with you, as always, is the wonderful DJ Bay. Oh yeah, that’s me,” he says with a laugh.
“Oh my gosh.”
“And we got DJ Calvina over there,” he continues.
“What’s up, what’s up Clarion,” she shouts into her mike.
The wall behind her is covered with sound foam to help with acoustics and in the middle, a center piece of “WCUC 91.7” jettisons from the wall. The light, which shimmers off her black nails as she places the pen down, is far brighter than the room with the sound board because of the florescent bulbs positioned perfectly above her head.
Outside of these two rooms, the place is a labyrinth with quarters twisting off the left and right side of the hallway; offices, a vinyl library, a sound room, more hallways, and more offices. One could get lost if they weren’t careful about navigating the rooms and the airwaves. The DJs take little notice of this though; they are swaying back and forth in conversation, lost in the endless sea of their banter.
“Keeping it real,” DJ Bay says into his microphone, “Kicking off a new semester. Pretty excited.”
“Super-duper excited,” DJ Calvina replies.
“Hopefully this semester, guys, we will be starting to get some more on-TV-esque. We had some going on beforehand so I’ll be able to set it up. I just need a director and I think I’m just going to hire somebody.”
“So if you are a director and if you are interested…”she says.
“If you work at the TV station, you know how to run the board, and you feel like sitting through an hour and a half of listening to our awesomeness…”
“And laughing cause that’s what we pretty much do the entire time,” she adds.
“Well obviously.”
When he talks and moves, his beard scratches the air like a needle scratches a Frank Sinatra vinyl: both smooth and abrasive, with veteran knowledge. The wire on his headphones writhes around like a serpent, lost in a trance to his master’s music.
“I got a lot of rap songs I want to play today.”
“Wow, that’s interesting for you,” she states and then takes back. “Actually that’s not interesting for you ‘cause you were jamming the other day to some B.O.B.”
“Like, I listen to a lot of older stuff, given,” he rescinds after some silence, “I like a lot of nineties and, in fact…I’m going to play some eighties music.”
She is wearing a gold cross on her neck, which slides to the right as she rotates her chair to the left, the right, and back to the left again. Contrasted against the black Starter shirt she is wearing, it sits brightly and noticeably like a full moon at midnight.
“Wow, that’s new for our show,” she says “‘cause we usually do nineties and now.”
“I want to do some like eighties dance party music, like some ‘Mony Mony,’ ‘My Sharona’…”
“Some ‘Mony Mony,’” she echoes in disbelief. “What is coming up next; we need some music here.”
“Oh you don’t even know. We are not going to go ‘Hey let’s just play some music we like to listen to;’ we are playing music that you want to party to.”
Her headphones are covering only one of her ears, and the top piece is pressing down on her spiky hair. Her eyes widen; a smile that goes from ear to ear grows even bigger.
“We’re playing some music that’s going to blow your head…”
“All over the back of your couch,” he finishes.
“Exactly,” she states, “You took the words right out of my mouth.”
His hands dance across a screen, a database filled with music and bright colors that crash against each other. A few records are scattered behind him, and the stark gap between yesterday and the present synchronize together in this mixing pot of a room. History’s poetic and forgotten burden alleviated between two who want to remember the past and present the masses a few songs to get them through the current.
“So right now, we got the one, the only, the theme song of last semester…”
The music starts; a showy electric guitar with a hint of summer road trips and river exploration sounds off through the station.
“The ‘Crown on the Ground,’” he finishes.
“Oh ya,” she shouts.
“Keep it tuned here, WCUC, 91.7. This is ‘TV on the Radio,’ Have a request? Call in 393-2514.”
He switches their microphones off and a light flashes across the room; a beacon that a caller is making a request. He slides his headphones off as he reaches for the phone and the lights from the sound board flash across his face.
