TALES OF THE SOUTHWEST: WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A NAKED CO-WORKER?

            I have returned to working in talk radio.  Last time I worked in that format was 23 years ago in Phoenix.

            If you're not in radio, to understand the job I had then..."board operator," think of the TV show “Fraser.”  You know the character “Roz?”  She’s Fraser’s board operator.  That was my job in Phoenix talk radio…I sat in the control room peering at the talk show host through a plate glass window, talking to them via intercom, operating the console, answering the phones and engineering the sound of the show. 

            It was pretty intense work.  There was no room for mistakes.  Board operators who couldn’t run a tight, error-free radio show quickly found themselves looking for another gig.  One of my favorite sayings, “Without mistakes there can be no progress,” was quickly quashed by stern looks and terse words warning of dismissal.  This wasn’t small town radio like I was used to.  Just like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” I would tell myself from time to time I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, or in my case, eastern New Mexico and west Texas.

            Phoenix is a hot crowded big city.  I like what the late. great writer Hunter Thompson wrote about it:  “If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix.” I had no concept of current events or recent history in “The Valley of the Sun.”  That’s why when Sally* came to work at the station to be part of the morning show I just regarded her as someone else who was on the air staff.  She was possessed of model-type good looks.

            I didn’t know a few years earlier Sally had caused a bit of a stir when she posed for naked pictures in a magazine.

            But I’m getting ahead of myself.

            After the morning show her first morning Sally came into the control room and introduced herself.  She was very personable and approachable, not at all like the other talk show hosts.  We talked about things co-workers talk about when getting to know each other; she lived in Phoenix, had been there a long time.  I told her I lived in one of the suburbs, Mesa, and made my daily commute on a Honda 150 scooter (hey, it got 85 miles to the gallon).

            A couple of days had passed when the late night talk host dropped by one afternoon.  Johnny Nyle the Nightfly was his name.  He was the last of the “old school” late nighters, old dude, still smoked in the studio when it had been banned in the building.  “What’re they gonna do, fire me?” he’d say. 

            “How ya like working with Sally?” he asked in his gravelly voice, wiggling his eyebrows to finish his question.

            “She doesn’t really do much, just makes comments.  Big Bill handles all the heavy stuff,” I said.

            “That’s not what I mean, man,” he said with this weird ‘wink-wink-nudge-nudge’ look on his face.

            “What, is she running around with someone here?”

            “No, man, she was in ‘Playboy.’”

            “Really.”

            I thought it was kind of funny.

            “Why’d she do that?”

            “Who CARES why she did, she just did,” he said.  “She used to be the newscaster on channel 10, she posed in ‘Playboy’ then she was gone from TV.”

            “I don’t reckon I’ll ever make a buck that way,” I said.

“So,” he said, cigarette dangling out the side of his mouth, smoke making him squint, “Didja ever see that issue?”

            “Well, I…”

            He opened his briefcase and tossed a magazine in my lap, “Check her out.”

            He left the room.  I set the magazine aside.  Did I want to see this?  I left the magazine there for a while until, during a commercial break, my curiosity got the best of me. 

I opened the magazine.

And lo and behold there was Sally in all her “nekkid” glory.  It was 5 years earlier, she had different hair, looked younger, but it was Sally.

A bit later I looked up and Johnny Nyle was back in the room. 

“Well?” he asked.

“Well indeed,” I said.  “Like they say back home in the mountains, ‘She’s a healthy gal.’”

I handed his magazine back to him.  He winked and gave me a thumbs up.

            From then on when I worked with Sally it wasn’t like I was thinking wild thoughts or anything.  It was like I was sort of embarrassed.  I kept wondering why too.  Why would someone bare themselves to millions of people.

            One day I was having lunch in the break room when Sally came in to kick back and have a cup of coffee.  We chatted about stuff and things. 

            And then…

            “So I suppose by now everyone’s told you about why I’m not on TV anymore,” she said.

            “Yeah,” I couldn’t look her in the eye and I had a hard time hiding a smile.  “You know, the thing that strikes me, though, is why’d you do it?  I’ve often wondered why someone would get naked for millions of people.”

            “Hell,” she said, leaning forward and thumping her finger on the table, “They paid me as much as I would make in 5 years working in TV.  If you’ve got it, use it.  Besides, it was sort of fun.”        

            I kept working with Sally until I decided I’d had enough of the big city and moved away.

            I heard Sally went to work for the city of Phoenix.

            Sally getting naked in a magazine is just another one of those things that people do that makes me wonder why.  I guess she gave me a pretty good answer, but still…

            I don’t remember many of the short stories Raymond Carver wrote, but I remember one single line from one of them: 

“Who knows why we do what we do.”

                                                -30-

*Names changed