I spent many of my formative days navigating the tumultuous waters of grade school social alliances, hiding from my mother and stepfather, and growing increasingly unsettled with my education. As I drifted in and out of phases of being alone and being lonely (They are NOT the same), I actively pursued an alternative education. I developed my own true ally that would carry me through the confusion. You see, I value the radio as much as any of the teachers and learning tools I've ever had, and I have a lot of them.
The fact I assign that level of significance to something not human is probably telling to any psychoanalyst, but that's the way my life was.
For upwards of three hours each and every day, I was tuned into a cheap, sea-foam green radio, for hours and hours, every day, for years.
Sometime in the middle 1980s, a backward-thinking genius bought a radio station in East Lansing, Michigan with the station ID of WIBM, 94.1 on the FM dial. It was the nation's first true oldies station, playing music from the earliest Rock and Roll tunes to the Ooh Oohs of Doo Wop. It was wavelength heaven for this kid. I got the rhythms of Motown and the gritty sounds from way down in Memphis. I got the first glorious wave of the British Invasion. I got the Brill Building sound. I got monumental pop music all the way up to but not including the Psychedelic Era. I got the saccharine joys of The Beatles' Love Me Do, but not the elephant funk of Jimi's Purple Haze. That was a bridge too far.
I fell in love with a woman named Ronnie Spector when she sang to me and me alone that she wanted me to be her baby. I felt the ecstatic release of Tommy James and the Shondells Mony Mony, even though I had absolutely no idea what the hell it meant. I sang garbled words into many hairbrushes as I tried desperately to understand what The Kingsmen were talking about in Louie, Louie while simultaneously reveling in the pureness of it, the eager simplicity.
For me, a rail-thin, frighteningly shy boy with a kinky head of curly Jewish hair, I could be whoever I wanted as I listened to that sea-foam green radio. I desperately needed reassuring human connection, but it happened with such infrequency, and WIBM provided reassurance that I was not alone in those in-between moments. I aped and strutted like a cocksure Mick Jagger, I howled and wailed like a love-struck Otis Redding. I danced in the mirror, on my bed, and in the shower. I was liberated and joyous and all the things I frantically wanted to be outside the walls of my house. There's a direct line to be drawn from that escape through the radio to the massive online role-playing games to which the Internet would later provide convenient access. I understand, wholly, the urge and compulsion to be someone else, some THING else.
Those pop songs illustrated for me in perfect, rhyming terms that other people felt the same way. Neil Diamond understood me. Simon and Garfunkel too. Their Sounds of Silence was the first song whose lyrics I transcribed. It struck me as so haunting and beautiful that I absolutely could not ever forget those words.
I grew to believe that whenever I was suffering from trauma and pain, some real, some imagined, the radio knew exactly what I needed to hear. Sometimes I still believe this. Once, after being physically and verbally battered for something I'd done, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and cried. From that vantage point, I could only see my head in the bathroom mirror. I recall thinking how stupid I looked while I cried. I remember turning on the radio and what came through, like a divine gift, was John Lennon. "How in the world are you gonna see, laughing at fools like me? Who in the world do you THINK you are? A superstar? While RIGHT you are. Well, we aaallll shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun." I cried harder. John sang harder. The song leaned forward, directly into me, cutting into me when I needed it most, the huge crescendo rolling over me and sweeping me up. John was telling me that I was going to be okay, that the joke was on them, that I wasn't alone. I wasn't going to hurt anymore, and what's more, I was gonna shine, bright and deep and true. This phenomenon happened to me on and on through the years. Whenever I needed it the radio provided. Those songs, literally thousands of them, came back to me over and again, as my life story began to take shape. They revisited me in moments of triumph and in moments of sorrow.
I value the radio more than any schoolbook I ever had, more than any institution of which I was ever a part. With that in mind, and it physically pains me to write this next clause, I also know the radio prevented me from growing. The comfort I took in those songs was so warm and so consuming that I didn't experience the healthy social growth so crucial to those formative years. I developed a taste for things much older than me, and I was out of touch with my more contemporary-minded schoolmates. I didn't share common interests and I didn't have a taste for the zeitgeist or trending pop culture.
This left me stranded and wanting when those important social moments arose between classes, on the playground, or after school. I learned my interests would be my own in small-town Middle America, but I didn't learn to be comfortable with that until relatively recently. I found myself staring at the names of large cities on maps, daydreaming about life in those locations, out from and far away from the Real Big Empty.
On paper, I'm an introvert, just barely, but it counts. Canceling plans is often like morphine for me - the ideal painkiller. I can work a room, meet total strangers, and be remarkably charming, but it's physically exhausting for me. I need time away with my things, in my space, with my time to recuperate.
The radio has been an ally for me in my desperate and most dangerous moments. It's been a great friend, but it's also handicapped me. Realistically, I'm projecting my feelings onto an inanimate object. That’s a lot to expect from a fucking radio. I handicapped myself. Or I was made to feel anxiety and isolation, made to reject imperfect thoughts and hide important feelings away to the point where stark, naked truth became most painful. There is no panacea for that disease, no Rosetta Stone toward understanding the inner mechanisms of my self-loathing.
I don't regret the hours with the music. What I regret is that my life is more ill-rhymed and ill-timed than any of those songs, except for the moments when I reveal the bright lights of my soul rather than merely describe them, and then I'm carrying on, beatifically in the face of my own precarious mortality, embracing the reckless aspects of myself and smiling inwardly as a result. Then my own song is both prayer and deliverance and delightful mischief. The result is hard-won wisdom, or foolishness, or maybe a bit of both, and the seclusion I feel in the world drifts away, and my own instrument is back in tune.
