Кэрол Дуглас: Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

“But do you have fun? You gotta have fun . You gotta laugh at your own mojo, man. We can change lives, but we gotta start with accepting ourselves. Accenting ourselves. Take the bad of the past and BE-spell it into the good, for everyone.”

He had no answer to that. Her unhappy childhood, was (her amazing) hands down worse than his.

“So why are we so pouty tonight?” she asked. “For me, I know it makes my Orange Tango lips look gooood, and I know that they come in contact with nothing but the radio mic, but guys ain’t got no reason to gloat over cosmetics.”

When Letitia got folksy he knew he was being mocked. “You’re right, Letitia. I’m being an ass. An angsty ass. I would counsel myself to solicit a good kick in the pants. The ghost of the Mystifying Max in Temple’s past seems to be banishment-proof. He keeps popping up like a skeleton out of the grave.”

“That man do have some serious mojo, but that kind of thing can wear a woman out. And not in a good way. Keep that in mind.”

Her upfront fashion style, her vibrant optimism, the way she morphed into Ambrosia, both slinky and comforting, kept Matt shaking his head as he settled into his combination chair and magic carpet navigating the entire country.

“Letitia, you’ve got my number. I do fixate on family skeletons and ghosts from the past. It’s crazy to do that with all the great things I’ve got going. Who cares why my nasty stepfather, Cliff Effinger, was killed and who did it? Not anybody, really.”

“Right. And if you keep on gnawing at an unsolved murder, you might dig up someone who doesn’t want that solved going and putting a rattlesnake in your mailbox.”

“So. Trying to keep up the tradition and ‘protect’ Temple as Max Kinsella always did, I might get the opposite outcome?”

Letitia nodded solemnly. “That’s why I very, very reluctantly advise you to leave Las Vegas for the Chicago talk show offer. It’s the only course that makes sense.”

“I’d sure like to cut Temple and me loose from a lot of bad memories. I’d work days too.”

“That’s right. No Magical Max to wonder where he is at. And, hey, follow the money.”

“Maybe I’ve dithered too long. The network people have been silent.”

“After all those lavish efforts to woo you, sweetie? I bet my old seventies Plymouth against your fancy Jaguar gift car they’ll get back to you. I expect to see you on my home TV any month now, where I’ll be toasting you with a McDonald’s chocolate shake. Then I’ll stand right up and do a chocolate shake.”

“Letitia, you always make me laugh.”

“Then my work here is done,” she said, patting him on the cheek and dancing light-footed out the studio door.

That reminded Matt of the crazy TV cat food advertising opportunity that had come in for Temple and her Wonder Cat. Would Midnight Louie have to do the Bunny Hop to earn his lettuce? What a mental picture. Could it be Matt had lost out to his own fiancée?

Did he want to throw away a career to catch the murderer of a man nobody liked?

He had to quit this Hamlet act before somebody really got hurt. Time to slip into the deep space of Radioworld.

The minute Matt put on the headphones, he saw himself as an astronaut or a diver, somebody who floated like an infant tethered to an umbilical cord, a person abnormally high or below ordinary reality. For him, connecting with call-ins, voices in the night with an endless element of surprise, let him utterly forget himself. The first caller could sound distraught, the next hesitant, or ranting, weeping, nervous, self-justifying, shy, egocentric—his two hours on the air had come to feel like emotional Russian roulette crossed with impromptu meditation.

Still, always in the back of his mind, his own doubts and worries murmured nowadays, soaking up his own advice and often critiquing it.

Only tonight what threaded through the routine was a faint filament of panic he couldn’t lose, not even in a laugh with Letitia. Practicing the kind of intense investigative moves that Max Kinsella did could wear a man out all right, and maybe get him taken right off the planet.

The first line lit up. Matt nodded at Dave, the engineer, and sat back without a creak in the chair. They used a brief delay to “dump” a joke caller or cut bad language. Not all the touchy callers, though. Listeners liked Matt’s adept way of derailing the difficult ones.

“Gee, Ambrosia was kinda a downer tonight,” a bored girlish voice said. “What does signing off with all that ‘September Song’ stuff mean? It sounds like it was written in the olden days, girls with twirling curls and all.”

“It was,” Matt answered. “Mid-last century. It’s about lost chances. That must not be what you worry about.”

“‘September Song’ reminded me about having to go back to school soon. That’s a downer too.”

“High school?” he guessed.

“Same mean witchy cliques as junior high, only with bigger allowances. And they have all those jocks to date and wave under everybody else’s noses.”

“What’s your name?”

A long pause, probably for a couple reasons. One was committing to a radio conversation, the other was teenage discontent.

“Jessica.” Said with a wrinkled nose.

“Well, Jessica, that name has a certain gravitas.”

“Huh?”

“Gravitas is when people take you seriously. I’d take a Jessica totally seriously.”

“Really?” There came the edge of hope and vanity, when a young girl thought she might be Someone to Someone on the Radio. Or the Internet.

Dangerous.

Matt felt he was about to commit an Ann Landers. “All that high school stuff is not what’s really bothering you. You were smart enough to know that was coming.”

“Yeah?” She sort of liked being thought “smart”. “So tell me what my issues are.”

“Do your parents know you hate the high school vibe?”

“They say ‘get good grades, forget about all that social media stuff’. And they’re just… Me-dee-evil. Watch my phone and computer like I’m some baby.”

“You are.”

“Whaaat?”

“What classes are you looking forward to, what activities? What do you want to be ?”

“Miley Cyrus?” She giggled. “That would send the parents up the fire pole in reverse. ‘Classes, activities’, that is so uncool, Mr. Midnight. So parent-y. I used to think you sounded sexy.”

“Well, now we know what you really want. I can get to the next caller so you can sit there and listen, or you can come up with a reason for me to talk to you.”

“No, wait. I want to work on the school paper, but that’s so nerdy and the nerdy boys own doing all the jobs on that.”

“Drop the labels. Nobody ‘owns’ anything in high school, except finding out what they want to be. And not everyone is going to like that, or like it if you’re good at it. That’s the real world. Now, you want to write for a dying media, print news. There are people old enough to be your grandparents who’ve lost their jobs and livelihoods doing that. What do you think they’d be saying if they were calling in? Would they be worrying about what some kids you’ll never see after four years think of them? Wouldn’t they do just anything to get on a crummy school paper? Maybe not. But maybe they’d wish they could go back to those days. And you can do it. And find out if you like it.”

“Uh, but maybe nobody will let me on. Or let me on only to make me wish I wasn’t.”

“You must have something you really want to write, or you wouldn’t freak out at trying.”

“Well, maybe something on…bullying. Not me. Not big-time bullying, but little stuff that gets really mean.”