A Voice In The Night Read Free Page A

that way, almost whispering. “This is Luke Trimble, with Voices in The Night – KOGO, San Diego. Our lines are open. Give us a call.” His being here was pure luck. Three of the station’s air staff had mutinied over format changes and the manager had canned them on the spot. Luke’s audition tape was on his desk. He got the job because he was available right away, and because he dared to be different in a medium that was now based on strict control of everything that went over the airwaves. They called it “format discipline.”
    But Luke had become irreverent over the last year in Connecticut, treating sponsors’ commercials and things in general with just a hint of sarcasm. It had begun out of boredom one night. By week’s end, the sponsors were calling in, not to cancel their advertising, but to buy more. Customers were talking about the quirky ads, and merchandise was moving off the shelves. The first night on the San Diego air he’d hit on something else. Because he wasn’t up on local issues, he decided to make the first show about that. “I’m the new boy and I can’t-believe-I’m-in-California.” Turns out everyone else was from another place and the lines lit up. People wanted to tell him their stories. He asked. They answered. It was novel. It was a hit.
    From then on the callers were the show and Luke, not the authority, but the catalyst, asking, probing, prodding.
    The other piece of luck was Jake. His producer and engineer was an unmade bed in the same clothes every day. At first, Luke would squint through the glass, wondering if the guy had nodded off. In fact, Jake was often mistaken as a cripple by studio guests owing to his lurched-over posture and spastic moves. A phone was embedded between his right shoulder and ear and he mumbled to callers, screening out the nut jobs by punching their lines into endless hold.
    “After this call, a three-spot seque and news,” Jake murmured into Luke’s headset.
    “Thanks for the call. Voices in The Night-KOGO-San Diego. News next, but first there’s this.” Luke barely nodded a cue and Jake punched the number one Spotmatic deck for the first of three ads.
    Later, they huddled over breakfast in the 24-hour diner, Jake hunched over his plate, Eileen in her starched white uniform, Luke leaning back, listening. “We’ve got a good thing here but it can be better,” Jake said to the scrambled eggs. Luke squinted. “How?”
    “Even less of you,” Jake smirked, looking up devilishly from his dish.
    “Oh. Fine. I was starting to like it here too.”
    “No. Really. You hang back nice and push the callers up front. But it’s still one-on-one. What if the callers could talk to each other ? Eileen’s eyes swung between them like a tennis spectator. Luke looked over for a sign, a signal. She smiled, eyebrows arched, and barely nodded.
    “Alright, but how?” Luke squinted the challenge at Jake.
    “Gimme a pen. A pencil. Something.” A passing waitress dropped a Ticondaroga in front of Jake without changing her gait. He dove for the napkin holder, swiping his sleeve through two breakfasts. He already had it worked out in the engineer’s side of his brain. He carved a couple of circuit diagrams into the napkin, and folded it into his shirt pocket. “Not a problem. I’ll have it ready tonight.” He held up the pencil, and the waitress grabbed it on the return trip, like a ring from a merry-go- round.
    It looked simple and it was. A box with four knobs. A couple of wires hung down, ending in alligator clips. About $25 in parts from Radio Shack. Jake hooked it to the phone lines and they were ready to conference up to four on-the-air callers at once. “We’re violating about a million Bell System patents here, no big thing,” said Jake as he hooked it up somewhere under the control panel. I’ll hide it in my locker when we’re not using it.”
    That night, it started out a little ragged. Luke didn’t sort out what to do at first, and the callers