Robert and I ate dinner at Biga Pizza, I drank a huckleberry-vanilla Italian soda. I bought a ring from Betty's Divine, asked if it looked cheesy - no - asked how much it was - five dollars - and haven't taken it off yet. Clark picked us up in the bus and then went on a mission to clean it from front to back. I sat exhausted on his futon, Robert showing Ben and his wife talk-over music for his new show, Erik sitting next to me. We were both glad to have each other so we didn't feel like losers sitting alone.
"You haven't seen Star Wars? That's blasphemy. What about the Matrix?"
What is it with guys.
In seven hours, the bus sat outside my dorm, and we set off garage saling around Missoula. Kyle bought his dog a bald eagle stuffed animal and within a matter of minutes, the face was chewed off. I bought two blue mugs for a dime and gave one to Clark, who doesn't use mugs. We found a box of thirty French erotic novels, the oldest from 1889, the newest from 1923, at an estate sale. The box, along with the old view-finder with slides of a creepy boy named How-dee-do smiling back at you, the record of FDR fireside chats, and the hand-wired cowhide AM radio made me wonder who died.
Kyle, Brandon, Chris, Erik, Robert, Whitney, me, and Clark sat around a table in a dark casino and ordered breakfast food - except for Kyle, who pounded down a whisky and coke. Clark said something harsh to Chris and the table fell silent.
I thought back to Robert's advertising campaign for KBGA. It's right behind you, it's penetrating the minds of your children, it's inside your wife while you're at work, it's in your food. I wondered then if Clark felt tired of these radio waves he can't escape. The same group of twelve people, the same sleep deprivation every week.
Last week, he laid out two bottle caps on the table at The Bridge, a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and a paper plate with a slice of pizza on it.
"KBGA," he said, "is more like a cult." He used his diagram to explain what he meant, his fingers tracing from one object to the next.
You take an FM transmitter, a low power, say, 600 Watt - costing maybe 1,500 dollars - and you take an FM tower. The tower has an exciter on it. It's not as sexual as it sounds, although with KBGA, you never know. The exciter amplifies the radio signal. That's what we do. We amplify ourselves across the city.
"1000 watts in Missoula will not be the same as 1000 watts in Arizona," he said. FM signals depend entirely on landscape. It may reach a wider distance, it may do just the opposite. It's like line of sight more than anything. It's infatuating.
We ride around in the bus, pick up a couch on the side of the road with half a pizza box sitting on it, black Sharpie reading FREE. It has an ominous stain on one cushion, which I automatically assume to be vomit, and don't sit anywhere near it. We scavenge yard sales and tell people this is our job. All wearing the same hoodies, in four or five different colors.
Stop saving the picture frame for something that only might happen, and use it for something that's already happened instead.
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