The AM Radio

I have a particular fondness for the radio, as you may well know. From classic country evenings to late night jazz to Guy Noir on sunday afternoons, there’s just something special about tapping into a network of sound that isn’t confined to one particular set of speakers. It’s audio communion, at it’s purest, and the act of sharing anything in equal portions with others makes the experience that much more enjoyable.

The AM radio band has one station that plays music, and it features an assortment of such from the crooner years all the way on through the early 60s. It’s diverse enough in it’s scope so that I am perpetually surprised by what I hear, both in songs I have never heard, and songs I wouldn’t expect to hear on such a station…but regardless of what is playing, there is one thing that all music from the AM band has in common– the vast distance in which it can travel.

Yesterday I was on my way to the gas station to refuel, listening to the oldies station on the AM radio. My car wasn’t warm yet, in well below freezing temperatures, and I could barely see through the ice crystals that were covering my windshield. In fact, I had to keep my window rolled down, so that my thick white breath would be sucked out of the car, and not plastered onto the glass in front of me in a soon-to-freeze-fog. I was grinding down the snow covered road, gazing out my window at the choppy gray water of the bay, and suddenly a song I recognized began to play on the radio.

I reached down to turn it up a little, but my hand had shrunk, and there were suddenly two nearly identical dials, on either side of the radio, when before there was just one. They were silver, and as I debated which one to turn, my old man reached down and twisted the one on the left; uptown got it’s hustlers, the bario got it’s bumps. "That one’s the volume, the other one’s the tuner," he said. We were in the old white truck, the first truck I remember, and we were on our way to cut down trees to heat the house for the coming winter, just he and I (though he would be doing all the cutting, and I’d just be pretending with the blade guard). The radio was one of the old-fashioned kind, with the five blank metal buttons under the knob-rotated dial that one could use to pre-set stations. The seat was the shape of a bench, and the belts were badly abused. My father drove shirtless with a beer between his legs and an elbow out the window…and everything smelled of rotten leather, musk, sawdust, and aftershave; you don’t tug on superman’s cape…you don’t speed into the wind. The truck rattled loudly down the summer dirt road, and I took a sip of the Squirt soda I had between my own legs, while lamenting the empty snickers bar wrapper that lay twitching around on the floor of the cabin in the warm breeze. Just me and my dad. Before the siblings. Before he was old. The song ended and another one began, and he reached down and turned it up even louder with a sly smile. "You know who this is?"

"Johnny Cash," I said…but I wasn’t in the truck anymore. Back in the drivers seat, my breath flowing out in thick clouds. I felt a strange prickling in my nose. Moments later the prickling hit my eyes, and I realized what it was. Two warm droplets escaped their corners, and evaporated instantly.

The music in my car wasn’t Johnny Cash at all in fact, but rather something by Frank Sinatra. I was never much of a Sinatra fan, and always found most of his music rather generic, and similar…but there is one particular connotation that I have with him, that allows me to enjoy it from time to time– the scent of vanilla.

The first girlfriend I had in high school was the only one between the two of us that had a car– a massive 1978 blue Caprice, which ran just fine, but only had AM radio. Consequentially, we ended up listening to a lot of that station over the course of a few summers…parked in the darkness of the hidden Roaring Brooke beach, gazing out at the twinkling lights of the city across the bay.

My advice to all men is to date the most beautiful woman possible first– so that he might learn the insignificance of physical appearance, and know that to a certain extent, all women are very much the same, no matter how long and flexible their legs are, how large their breasts are, or how supple their mouths are. No matter how "perfect" she may be, you will eventually know and appreciate her the way you would know and appreciate any woman. It is good to learn this early, so that one doesn’t fall into the pitfall of constantly wanting the "better" choice, always chasing after that phantom cat in the moonlight. I always find myself in that old Caprice of her’s when I hear Sinatra on the AM…tangled up in the back seat with the smell of her hair and perfume. A sweet scent that would almost be sickly sweet, were it not for the scent of her underneath it.

The AM radio travels a great distance, you see. You can hear it in the tones. It travels decades across time and space…pulling all of the sandy machinery and eroded memories along with it.