Night Sound*
Bradley called his nightly radio show “Night Sound.” Sometimes he played a strange song. I knew nothing about it other than it was strange and mournful and no other station seemed to play it. Bradley didn’t play it much. As with all his music he chose his spots. I came to believe it signaled some watershed in his mercuric moods. Since he was a friend I paid attention.
This one night I was filling in for the Chronicle police reporter, driving his VW because he had a police-band radio under the dash. I muted calls for service when Bradley spun up the house song. He hadn’t played it since he and Cyndi had become an item. His cryptic words when it was finished made me U-turn from Fifteenth, park the Bug at the Krispy Kreme next door to the station and grab two black coffees. I punched the side-door button that lighted a blue bulb above Brad’s board. He came back to let me in. “Thought you’d be about ready for some coffee.”
“You thought right, thanks!” He grinned and beat it back to spin up the next record. I came in and leaned in my favorite corner. Brad introduced a new record and shut off the mike.
“You played that house song tonight,” I said.
“How’s ambulance chasing?” Brad said.
We spoke at the same time, laughed, sipped coffee. “Ambulance chasing is slow. A fatal out on U.S.1. That’s it so far.”
“I’ve played that song ten times,” he said. “Once on the air.”
“You having trouble with Cyndi?” That was why I was here.
“Not a bit. Cyndi is wonderful. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.”
“A natural-blonde go-go dancer with legs up to here, and a Mensa? What’s not to want?”
He smiled fondly. “She’s home listening now. Called after her last dance-set at the club.”
“Then what brought on the house song?”
“It just felt right.” Brad could freight the simplest phrase with a Barrymore’s worth of drama.
“Those words,” I said. “A house goes on sale this morning. Taken off the market in the afternoon. Be careful up the stairs a few are missing…Do those words speak to you?”
“Don’t they speak to you?”
“I hear despair. A world of despair. Kind of a rough song to turn loose on young lovers and bar-flies out there isn’t it?”
He shrugged, keeping an eye on progress of the needle across the record of the moment. “Young lovers don’t feel the despair. They’re immune. They think they are. They probably feel an emotion they can’t identify and think it’s pity. They won’t feel the words until they’re not lovers anymore. Or just not young.”
“That’s a lot of bitterness,” I said.
“Mine, or the song’s?” He put his finger to his lips, flipped the switch and leaned in murmuring to his faithful.
“Let me ask it, Damon Runyon-like,” I said when the mike was cold. “This song you refuse to give up, it brings you back no fond or not-so-fond nostalgia? It was not, once upon a time, yours and someone special’s special platter?”
Bradley cocked his head professionally at my attempt to sound Broadway. “Crackers should stick to typewriters. Trying to sound like Runyon in that drawl ought to be against some kind of law.”
“A nice avoidance. Why not answer the question?”
“The reporter bores in. No, it’s too new to have been our song.”
“Ah,” I said. “Ours. But it triggers no memories?”
“Just a very strong sensation.”
“A sensation of what?”
“Pain. We never had a house together. We could have.” He spun another platter, slowing the mood to sentimental. Said maybe I was right; he shouldn’t inflict personal pain on the audience. He was making up for it the only way he could, smoothing out the night.
“Personal pain sounds bad,” I said. “Did I know this one?”
“It was before the South. Back when I was headed for the big markets. When Claudine and I were together”–his smooth voice roughened — “all songs, all, had a special meaning. And the meaning was we were forever. That’s how I know lovers out there are immune. We were immune. I was sure we were. But we weren’t.”
He said this like a veteran of a bad war speaks of combat but doesn’t want to. It’s hard to imitate that knowledge of mortality. “She told me to stop being afraid to love.” He gazed up at the stacks of records. “She was everything I ever wanted in a woman. So I stopped being afraid. And loved her. Completely. I had dreams, plans. Such plans! I was going to be” — he broke off to insert an eight-track cassette with a commercial for pickup trucks, introduced with a cleverly ironical twist.
“Going to be…” I prompted.
Bradley cupped his pasteboard coffee container in both hands, reading the dark liquid like a reverse crystal ball into a dismal past. “A major success.” His lips twisted the words. “This was before politics. I sing, you know. I did once. And play. And wrote my own songs.”
“For god’s sake. Is this house song one of yours?”
He shook his head. “It could have been. If I used the pain when she left me instead of going to pieces. And the thing is — anything I wrote truly would have been as successful as this one. Which is to say no success at all. The music scene is changing, Balkanizing, getting rock-n-rolled to death. I guess I play the house song out of solidarity with the man who had guts enough to write it. In ten years — less — it won’t even find rotation space on a country station.”
This was strong stuff. I drained my coffee. “How do you decide when it’s time to play it?”
“I just go along and don’t even think of Claudine very often. Off somewhere globetrotting like she did before we met. She won’t have been without male companionship long. Not her.” He scrunched up his eyes. “Think I should play ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’?” he said.
“Sure,” I said, “since you’re in such a sentimental mood.”
He blinked. “Tough guy. Wait until it’s your turn.”
“It’s been my turn,” I said. “You know some of it.”
Bradley nodded. “It speaks to everybody who’s had their turn. Tells you to own your pain, grow big enough to grow around it and make it part of you forever, stop fighting it.”
“The Zen of broken hearts,” I suggested.
“Damn. You are cynical for one so young and Southern. This has nothing to do with metaphysical Hippie bullshit. This is a lacing of tears in your wine of life. Tells you drink it down and don’t flinch.”
“Pretty good for this time of the morning.”
“It is, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll work it into the broadcast.”
“Say hello to Cyndi.” I tossed my cup in the wastebasket.
“Time to get back to work?”
“Yeah, Police blotter, fire dispatch, stop by the sheriff’s office about the drunk who killed the guy on the highway. You know the drill.”
“Say hi to Chloe. We should get together again soon.”
“Chloe likes Cyndi. So do I.”
“Cyndi is fine isn’t she? Everything I ever wanted in a woman.” That again, three times in the same conversation about two different women. “Brad…” I stopped. Didn’t really want to say it.
“Yeah?” He caught my tone in one word; we knew each other pretty well.
“Brad, three months ago Joan was everything you wanted in a woman. Then the crash. You played that house song a lot.”
His expression went flat. “Joan is a world-class bitch. You’re welcome to her. I know you had the hots for her.”
That really hurt, because it was true. I liked her a lot, jealous of the way she couldn’t keep her hands off him…But no way I would hit on a friend’s forever-love. I kept my feelings to myself. Thought I had. Should have let Brad have the last word. But hated seeing him running his emotional life off a cliff over and over. And he pissed me off about Joan.
“Before Joan,” I said, “Susan was all you ever wanted in a woman. Joan helped you get over Susan. Joan was everything you wanted in a woman. Tonight it’s Cyndi. Before Susan — before the South — it was the mysterious Claudine.”
“You leave Claudine out of this!”
“Hell, leave all of them out of this. Just maybe be a little cautious.” I left with tension still between us. Didn’t know how to fix it. Felt rotten. Wished I hadn’t stuck my nose in.
A week later Cyndi ran away with Brad’s roommate, a Chronicle sports reporter whose dad owned a Kansas City trucking firm and offered her an office-manager job if she would marry his son and drag him out of the benighted South. Far as I know Bradley never played the house song again.
Take the grand look now; the fire is burning
Is that your reflection on the wall…
Careful up the stairs a few are missing
I haven’t had the time to make repairs
The first one is the hardest one to master
The last one I’m not really sure is there…
— Waylon Jennings, The House Song
