CHAPTER 14 Dallas, 1963

KVIL-FM was a 119,000 watt powerhouse stereo station, one of the first in the nation of it's kind. It had a fantastic sliding-pot stereo control board with a number of gadgets to make it even more fun. Lost inside my stereophonic world, I began to hone my musical radio skills to perfection and after about a year, I reached my apex. I created long sweeping concertos, mixing three or four songs together. I would choose thematic sets of music recorded in the same key with similar tempos. It developed to the point where you couldn't tell where one song left off and the other began. I had no idea who was listening but I knew I was reaching someone, I could feel it. One night the phone rang and I found out about one of them. The stories you may have heard about disc-jockeys being sexual superpowers are absolutely true - from the DJ's point of view. We are as horny and normal as any factory worker or truck driver. Long hours alone late at night with nothing but a telephone to link you with the outside world can give rise to very erotic fantasies. The legends about DJ's being great make-out artists with women however, are generally a crock. It happened to me a few times but my first harrowing experience of that kind (aside from my relationship with Carol) made me extremely cautious for the rest of my radio career. My caller was quite mature, very seductive and slightly drunk. She sounded like Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot rolled into one. There was no mistaking her intent and we engaged in telephone foreplay for about three weeks before establishing a rendezvous. Each time she called, she was a bit more drunk than the time before. Objectively, I rationalized that an experience with an older woman would be good for me. There seemed to be no doubt that it would be good for her.

One of God's greatest jokes on mankind must be the obtuse sexual peaks of men and women. It happens for males about the age of eighteen, beginning around the age of twelve. For women it happens around the age of 35, beginning about the age of 24. There are variations to this of course. Sex and the urge to reproduce is the driving force for most of us who are not able to ignore our most basic desires or sublimate it into ambition and achievements. When you are very young it seems that sex is ALL there is. If you are one of those very young readers, hang on. Life gets better....... and funnier.

Since the departure from Eden we as males have come to praise and appreciate the blossoming of virginity, fully to the point of worship. Our Original Sin as men, has been to pick the fruit of that virginal beauty long before it is allowed to ripen. Virgins are like peaches. They look deliciously pink and juicy. Indeed they may be as juicy as they look, but when you really bite into such a lovely unripened fruit, the flesh is tough and the taste is bitter. We seem tangled by our worship of virginity and driven by our egos to crave younger and younger fruit until it reaches the point of madness. It is that maniacal stupidity that causes some of us to sadly, destroy the lives and personalities of very young women and even children. We do it in the name of manhood and demean our manhood in the very act of conquest. Green peaches can make you really sick.

Mature women conversely, would be most equally matched to much younger men than what our society allows. Somewhere between the two sexes, there has been a shift in the very fabric of time. Men and women are about one full generation - twelve years apart, in our respective optimal sex drives. Why this condition exists is either a perversion of our society or a curse of God. Perhaps both. Then again, it may represent a generation that is entirely missing. Perhaps the similarities between men and women are closer than we care to admit. A young man of eighteen matched with a woman twice his age would be regarded as a horrifying spectacle in public - at least in the 1960's. In private however, such a love match can be a most satisfying experience for both. Fulfillment is the keyword here, not conquest.

I have to remind myself that the advice you are reading here is like all other free advice. Free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it. Fools will pay no attention. The wise don't need it. Having paid the price of this story - or having it given to you, perhaps you can appreciate the intrinsic value of the advice. As for myself at the age of this adventure, I would be listed amongst the fools. There are exceptions to every rule and extremes to all moderation. I had just turned twenty-one. My would-be consort became insistent on the phone. It finally reached a point where she was pleading, and I couldn't stand it any more. I decided to meet her one morning after my shift.

Her address was in a fashionable North Dallas neighborhood. There was money here - lots of it. I was ushered into an elegant sitting room by an aging drunk dressed in a kimono. This indeed, was my Lady Faire and I, her Sweet Prince. The smell in the room was very personal, tainted by liquor and cigarettes. I was overcome with the same feeling I had experienced in Temple, Texas when I realized a mistake had been made involving a member of the opposite sex. I wanted to leave, and in a hurry. Trying to control the situation, I suggested we sit and talk. I was hoping for a graceful, dignified exit. As for the lady in question, it was Showtime. Suddenly there was Hawaian music on the stereo and my liaison was swaying in a crude hula before me. There were wrinkles where there had once been a lovely face. She was just my side of fifty and the years had written their story all over her while adding a few years she hadn't earned. Youth had slipped from her like a shadow in the night and she hadn't noticed its passing. An abandoned hag now, she was caught between her memories and her old age. I felt sick and wanted to cry - partly for myself, partly for her. I kept trying to make her stop her dance and at least talk to me but the alcohol in her had control. It was apparent that I was watching a dance that she had carefully rehearsed. It was most rude of me to interrupt and even more rude that I was not responding as she expected, at the appropriate points in her dance. I set my jaw and decided to tough it through. She pulled the kimono down to her waist. Once many years ago, it had been a lovely body. Not now. Not ever again.

I stood up to leave and reality came crashing in on her. She rushed over, begging me to stay. Within that movement, her demeanor changed from failing burlesque performer to one of a tired old dog that had been kicked around the yard many times. Nonetheless, there was a sudden dignity about her that revealed some of a personality inside. I asked her to raise her dress to cover herself and she complied. After a few tears and a cigarette, we managed to strike up a conversation. She was abandoned, not divorced or widowed. Her husband was in oil, in money, in another part of town - and in love with a much younger woman. He was granting her a place to live and enough money to stay drunk on, not much else. I was given a tour of the house and the pictures of her past. She had been a cute lady fifteen years ago, very cute indeed. Some of who she had been was still left in her face. The memories she shared with me lent grace to our meeting and we finally parted as strangers. We had met to say goodbye.

I had moved from one place to another until I finally settled on a tiny efficiency apartment about a mile from the station. There was no kitchen but it was perfect for my budget, if not my daysleeper habits. The French Quarter Apartments were right in the flight path to Love Field and just over a mile away from the end of the runway. There were huge jets passing overhead at less than 100 feet in altitude, about every eight minutes. I was a nervous wreck for the first month. The only comforts I found in life were my work, Carol and the zaniness of The Steve Allen Show. I became accustomed to the jets and managed to get in my eight hours of snooze time without interruption, despite the eight minute intervals when the walls and windows would shake.

Scott had taken a job at the Statler hotel and a girlfriend in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, not too far from Carol's house. The four of us would occasionally party together and it almost always resulted in practical jokes or pranks played on the rest of the world. I was usually the instigator, being inspired by whatever resources were available. There were the clothing dump jokes, for instance. We would take a complete set of old clothes including shoes, socks, underwear, pants, shirt or sometimes a bra and skirt and arrange them as though they were a set of clothes that someone had just taken off. They were great to leave in elevators, deserted hallways and phone booths. Once, I managed to find a plastic foot that was a store model for men's stockings. Filling the hollow part with rocks and placing an old sock over it, I stuffed the end with pizza and sank it in the apartment swimming pool at Scott's place. It looked for all the world like an amputated foot. I was told there were screams later in the day. Life was fun.

Summer drifted by and the beginning of Autumn was announced by cool breezes. The sixties were just under way and there was a feeling of pleasant anticipation for the coming years. The Beatles sent us all themessage from England; "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah". I was grooving on my job at KVIL but wishing I could play some rock'n roll somewhere. It was not to be. I had become a Master of the KVIL format, complete with a singing-jingle stereo clock. I was almost ready to become an "important" DJ with a daytime shift.

The really significant events in history must most often be marked by silence. I woke early on a cool autumn afternoon with the sense that something was desperately wrong. It was very quiet, as though it were three A.M. There was an absolute hush around the apartment and the continuous sound of the coming and going of jets was nonexistent. There was no drowsiness to my awakening, I was completely alert and aware of a feeling of fear in the air.

The balcony at my front door gave an excellent view of the neighborhood around and it was completely silent. Out on Lemmon Avenue the major thoroughfare in the area, one single car seemed to slither hurriedly around a corner as though it didn't belong there and might be seen. There was no other traffic or sound. None at all. This giant city of Dallas and this bustling, busy Oaklawn neighborhood had suffered some kind of seizure. Death and the fear of death was in the air, as though we had been given a three minute warning of a nuclear attack. Across the courtyard at the Manager's office I heard a door being opened. It was the only sign of life nearby. The TV inside was far too loud and the sound was too distorted to understand. I made my way down the stairs to where the manager and his wife were standing dumbfounded before the television set.

It was November 22nd. John F. Kennedy had just been shot.