Hellooo, this is Kaj... That was your girlfriend? She sounds nice... No special reason, just I'm bored... No, we finish that game. I got my Boardwalk hotel but Ragu still won. I think he was cheating. We go to start another game today, maybe I have better luck... Yes, I use to go to the beach when I am in our house in Colombo. But the other two houses are in Kandy and near Jaffna and not close to a beach... My family has tea factory in Kandy... We grow the tea also. Yes, a plantation. So now you know my family is rich. But look, don't tell Ravi and Ragu. I keep it a secret. The reason I needed the good paper to write to my mother is because she doesn't know I'm in jail. She is thinings I work and live in an apartment with some Tamil guys... No, Boston was not the plan. I was trying to go to Toronto. Lot of Tamils there. First I went to India, to Madras. Then I get a false passport but when I go to buy a plane ticket the flights to Toronto are all booked up for two weeks. But there is one to Boston and when I look on the map I think it's close to Canada and I can get to the border. And Logan is the name of Boston airport and that is my brother's name. So I think maybe it means luck for me. Well, it was not lucky and here I am.
1987, third week of October
Ennis got home from work after Jay that evening even though he hadn't gone to the detention center. After cycling over the BU bridge he'd cut through East Cambridge so he could return some videos to the Indian shop in Central Square and get new ones. On the way he'd ridden past The Good News Garage and spotted Tom Magliozzi closing up so he'd stopped to say hello. Tom was as garrulous as ever and joked that if Ennis ever wanted to work the phones again, he was welcome. He claimed that once in a while they got a caller who remembered Ennis from the old days when, for his work-study job in college he answered the phones during the Car Talk on WBUR, who asked what had ever become of him. That had kept him smiling all the way home.
Jay was in the living room working out with barbells. She had to carry more equipment working for the Herald than when she was at the Cape Cod Times; when her back started giving her trouble because of it, she decided to start lifting weights. She smiled at him when he walked in but didn't speak; her face and shoulders were shiny with sweat. She'd been working out daily for two weeks and he could see the difference already, and feel it in bed. It didn't really inspire him to join her, though. He'd grown up working hard on the farm and couldn't really see the appeal of lifting chunks of metal for no good reason.
He sat down on the ugly couch and flipped through the mail. There was another reminder from the New Yorker to renew the subscription, the third one since August. It had been a Christmas gift from Jay and the issues arrived relentlessly week after week. Maybe he should mess up the stack of them that was sitting on the side table so that Jay could tell he really was reading them. She thought he only looked at the cartoons but he always read the short story and the movie reviews.
"Did you wipe your key?" Jay smirked after she'd set down the barbells and rolled them into the corner with one bare foot.
"You bet. There's such a thing as too much lubrication."
Mrs Ono had attached a small white rag to a nail driven into the doorjam downstairs with a note above it. For wipe key. Oiled lock. Their landlady was maniacal about maintenance.
Jay sashayed over to him, her hand on her hip, and he grinned. She looked funny doing that as she was wearing black spandex bicycle shorts and a blue tank top. She straddled his legs and sat down on his knees, bracing her hands on his shoulders. He flared his nostrils at the pleasant musky, sweaty smell wafting from her skin.
"So. You wanna join me in the shower?" she purred, sliding her thighs along his. The slick spandex made a whispery, slithery sound as it glided over the denim. He sat up straight so she could slide closer and felt his body respond when she kissed him langorously. He combed his fingers through her damp curls. With her new muscles her body felt the way it had when they'd met, when she had swimmer's shoulders and hair cut like this. The memory of those weeks of euphoria and relief prompted a sudden surge down below.
"Why not?" he murmured after she released his lips.
"Hey, I forgot," she said suddenly. "Joe called."
It was like a jet ski had just whined past, its white, churning wake disrupting the rhythm of swelling waves pushing toward shore. Mentioning Joe didn't exactly kill the mood, however. Not at all. Ennis didn't like to dwell on why that was, so he didn't. He sat back and Jay followed, nestling into him and letting her fingertips lightly knead the bulge in his crotch, like a cat's paws on a soft blanket.
"How is he?"
"Excited." Squeeze. "He's jilting Barney for Dukakis."
"Olympia Dukakis?" he gasped.
"Mike Dukakis, dummy," she retorted, sitting up and shifting her weight onto his thighs. She mock smacked his cheek when she saw his grin. The governor of Massachusetts had recently announced he was a candidate for the nomination in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries in 1988.
"Wait, Joe's going to quit Barney? I thought he really liked working for him."
"Actually, he's just going to take a leave of absence to do advance work for the Dukakis campaign."
"I bet he'd be really good at that. But it seems like a lost cause. Nobody'll vote for a guy with a weird ethnic last name like his. That reminds me: can you find a photo of a tornado in the Herald photo files?"
She stared at him blankly. "Reminds you?"
"Sorry. Ethnic names. Tamils. They don't know what a tornado is and I want to show them a picture."
Jay's shoulders slumped and suddenly she felt like a big sack of flour in his lap. "You know, sometimes I wish I'd never gotten you into this thing. It's like you hardly think about anything else – and that guy is always calling."
"He just wants to talk to someone different. It's so boring in there for them. So what about that shower?"
They continued in the bathroom what they'd started in the living room but the flimsy white curtain in the tub-shower kept clinging to their bodies so they finished up in the bedroom, their skin still wet.
Later, while they were changing the damp sheets, Jay told Ennis they'd had an invitation to a Halloween party on Saturday night, one with a theme.
"So you might be forced to wear something other than a cowboy costume," she teased. "Phil said to come as someone or something that's been in the news in 1987."
"Something? That's easy. I can dress all in black and say I'm Tammy Faye Bakker's mascara."
"Or call yourself October 19th," Jay laughed. The stock market had dropped 22% a few days before and was being referred to as Black Monday. "Or wear a white wig and be Andy Warhol." She touched his hand as she spoke the name. The artist had died in February, which had come as a shock to both of them. He and Jay had had a brief but memorable encounter with him not long after they'd first met. Ennis wondered if Warhol had kept that scrap of paper.
"I can still go as a cowboy and call myself Ronald Reagan," Ennis said after a moment. "I'm pretty sure he's been in the news." He couldn't explain to her why he was so attached to that cowboy outfit. Every year he came up with an excuse to wear it. "So what are you gonna be?"
"Probably a paparazzi. Paparazzo? I can annoy all the famous characters at the party."
"Guess it's paparazza for you. But that's kind of cheating."
"I have to work that day so I'll be coming right from the Herald. I'll be too tired to change into a costume."
"Did Joe say when he'd be coming to Boston?"
"The weekend after Halloween," Jay said. She straightened and smiled at him affectionately, her blue eyes twinkling. "That's right, November 7th."
Chapter 10BFirst half of September, 1980On Sunday, the day after the beach outing, I'd recovered from my bout of sunstroke though my face was still red. I called home at noon and told my mother about the day but she didn't seem excited that I'd seen the Atlantic Ocean, which disappointed me. I would have to send her a picture, I decided, to make it real for her.
In the afternoon, Joe wanted to go to a movie and had one in mind.
"Urban Cowboy?" I said. "Isn't that kind of an oxymoron?"
"Man, you take things too literally, Ennis! It's got John Travolta in it and he's supposed to ride a bull but I bet there'll be dancing. Didn't you get into that whole Saturday Night Fever disco thing when you were in high school?"
"Um, not really." Did I ever not.
We went to see it that afternoon anyway, at a theater at the bottom of Beacon Hill, and Virgil came along at the last minute. Afterwards, he and I agreed the movie was idiotic but Joe was inexplicably taken with it. He even talked about going as Bud Davis for Halloween.
"Look, he's wearing a shirt just like your blue one," he said, pointing at the poster. "Now all I need is a black hat."
"And a wicked big belt buckle," laughed Virgil. "And cowboy boots. Where ya gonna get all that shit around here?"
"We've got all that stuff at home," I said. "My dad spent some time in Texas before he married my mom and did a little rodeoing."
Joe looked at me like I'd said we had buried treasure in the yard.
"I suppose you wanna borrow it," I sighed, rolling my eyes at Virgil. "Okay, I'll ask my mom to send it with the rest of my clothes."
Classes started the next day, and as Joe and I had no courses and virtually no free time in common all week other than at lunch, we saw little each another until late afternoon. He had his first stint at WBUR before I did and told me what to expect, which wasn't much. Just refiling albums, taking Associated Press articles from the telex machine and general gofer work.
That was all I did, too. The station was very small and it didn't seem like they really needed help. I had the feeling the station manager had had work-study students imposed on her. But she told me the Sunday night work during the call-in show would be different. The two brothers who gave advice on cars were kind of crazy, she said, and went off on tangents, taking forever to answer a question. She wanted to try a new system in which someone else answered the phones and wrote down the name and question for them. She hoped that seeing the names of the callers waiting would spur them to get to the point.
Ten minutes before the show was to start that evening, the two hosts had yet to arrive. My stomach turned over when the engineer asked if I knew anything about car repair, in case they didn't show. But he was grinning and the station manager explained that in the three years Ray and Tom had been doing the show they'd never arrived more than 10 minutes before airtime. She installed me by a phone next to the engineer and told me I was to take each call in order, ask the caller's first name, town and the nature of their question. Then I was to write that information as briefly as possible on a large index card, along with the line number and prop it in the window separating us from the studio, wedging it into the crack between the frame and the glass.
An announcer was sitting in one of the two chairs, reading the hourly news. The buttons on the phone were blinking already with calls coming in early. The station manager punched the first one and said "BUR, please hold" into the receiver, then did the same to the other two.
Just then I heard loud voices in the hallway and the door behind me flew open as the news finished and the show was announced. The engineer flipped a switch and some banjo music filled the air. Two men in stained blue work shirts – one about 30 and the other a bit older and bearded – rushed in, yanked open the door to the studio, scrambled into the chairs and jammed headphones over their ears as the announcer jumped out of the way.
"Whew, made it, " panted the older man. "Hello and welcome to Cah Tawk." He had a very strong Boston accent. "I'm Tom here with my brother Ray and we're gonna attempt to give semi-intelligent answers to your automobile questions. Now, you won't believe what we saw on Memorial Drive on the way over here..."
They launched into a long story about an a fender bender but I didn't hear the rest because the engineer pointed to the phone, signaling that I should pick up the first line.
"Hello Car Talk. What is your name, where are you from and–"
A guy with a high voice and a thick Boston accent who spoke very quickly cut me off and gave me the information. I wrote it down on the card and put it against the glass. Then I punched the button for the second line, gave my spiel and took the information, which I struggled to understand, and went on to line three, which to my relief had a caller with a normal accent.
Now I could relax because Tom and Ray were talking to the caller on line one and the other two were on hold. Just then the engineer started laughing and I realized the hosts were too.. When he saw my puzzled look, the engineer turned up the sound so I could hear the broadcast.
"Well, Barrrrb, we gotta explain that our esteemed program manager decided we needed a slave... Sorry! an assistant to answer the phone, thinking that would force us to be more efficient. Haha, fat chance! Anyway, the nice young man who took your call is a BU work study student—"
"And obviously not from Boston cause he thought your name was Bob!"
"Yeah, and so when he... what's your name, kid?" Ray was grinning at me through the glass.
"Ennis," I said, but he couldn't hear me.
"His name's Ennis," the engineer repeated, because the men could hear him through their headphones.
"Ennis? Your folks leave off the D? Haha! So whereya from then, Ennis?"
I wrote KANSAS on a card and held it up.
"Oh my gawd, people he's from Kansas! Hey Ennis, have you ever– Yes? How'd you know I was gonna ask about tornadoes?"
I shrugged and rolled my eyes, which threw them both into another fit of laughter. Suddenly, we heard the sound of a dial tone.
"Uh oh, Barrrb hung up. Sorry Barrrb! Well, lets go to the next caller." Tom squinted at the second card in the window. "Hello and welcome to Car Talk... Calla in... hahahaha! Ennis wrote SUMMAville. Now Ennis, when you hear summa–"
"–or anyword with ah in the middle..."
"–or at the end, you gotta assume there's an R in there."
"But that's only if they got a Boston accent."
"Or an English one. Don't forget the Brits talk funny too."
"Right! So Calla here... wait, is your name actually CARRla?"
"That's right. And I have a question about..."
"It says your Ford Mustang has a radiation leak. Wait, don't tell me you have an atomic car!"
I didn't hear most of this exchange because I was busy answering line one and the engineer had switched off the sound in our booth. Later, when I got back to the dorm, I would find out that Joe had taped the show and that's when I heard how badly I'd screwed up. But while I was there I was too preoccupied with getting the names and car terms right. Which I did less than half the time. Even when the caller had a comprehensible accent I still got town names wrong. Gloucester became Glawster, Leominster Lemonster, which Ray read differently anyway and it set off two minutes of joking about the Honda from Le Monsta. The worst moment for me, but also the one that saved me, was when I took a call and just couldn't figure out what the guy was saying so I wrote exactly what I heard:
Antinny
Gnaw Wood
Toyoter exhausted
When Tom and Ray saw that, the show was pretty much over. They laughed so hard and made so many jokes about me, Norwood, Kansas, Japanese cars, gnawing rodents, ants and lobsters (because I was blushing that hard under my sunburn) that Anthony eventually hung up and the other callers were left on hold until the end of the hour.
Mortified doesn't begin to describe how I felt, especially after I heard Joe's recording back in the dorm room that night. I sat on the edge of my bed with my face in my hands, Joe beside me with the Walkman's volume turned up high so we could hear Tom and Ray's voices without putting on the earphones. He skipped forward again and again to the highlights, nudging my shoulder with his and chuckling whenever they talked about me. Virgil wandered through the open door in at one point; he'd listened to the show and offered to give me a tutorial in understanding his people but I couldn't even laugh. I was sure I would be fired.
When the door had closed behind our neighbor, Joe draped his arm across my shoulders and reassured me, saying those guys obviously liked having a foil to play off. But the warm weight of his arm on me bumped my thoughts from the groove they were wearing out onto a different track, one playing a melody both excitingly new and vaguely familiar. We sat like that for a too short moment, gazing at the lights of downtown Boston, until Joe drew his arm away and stood up.
He was right: Tom and Ray declared that I had to stay. Eventually I refined my "act" and during the four years I was at BU I became very much a presence on their show without ever speaking a word on air.
I threw the cassette in the trash that night, though; I just wanted to forget what I believed then was the worst hour of my life. But when you're young, every humiliation is the worst you've ever suffered, every new love "the one." By the time I returned home for Christmas I would already have learned that everything is relative.
Some years ago one of the staff at WBUR found the "gnaw wood" index card under a cabinet during renovations, proof at last that the anecdote Tom and Ray told over the years whenever someone called in from Norwood was not just one of their tall tales. The station asked Tom and Ray to autograph the back of the card, which they did after insisting that I sign as well. It was laminated and sold at a fundraising auction. I heard someone paid $500 for it.
The following Christmas, Joe sent us a joint present for the first time, instead of just to me. Inside the box was the index card and, most stunning of all, that old cassette tape. He'd kept it all those years without telling me. I invited Tom and Ray over and played it for them and Jack and the kids. We all had a good laugh. Later, when we realized the double tuition payments were going to drain our bank account, Jack put them both up for sale on eBay, describing them as the "Original recording and memento of the very first day of Ennis Del Mar's broadcast career".
It paid for our anniversary trip to Europe this fall.