“It's Bobby Zee, Cominatchya”

Shit ... here we go again, Cyril thought. Bobby Zee was off on one of his tirades. The seven-minute version of The Doors's "Light My Fire" had just begun, and with the station identification jingles, the required public service spots, and the repeated three-hours old news and sports update - after all, what could possibly be news at two o'clock in the morning? - Cyril knew he was facing at least fifteen minutes of ranting before Bobby hit the air after the top of the hour.

Cyril sighed and shook his head. He had wanted to slip outside and catch a smoke. Now he had to sit there and listen, wishing he could yank off his headphones or turn down Bobby's mic, but he knew it would infuriate his late-night partner. He said, though without much enthusiasm, "And, so what's fucking you up this time?"

"What about Jennifer? The one who calls you, like clockwork, after the bars close every Friday night?" Cyril always made sure to have "In-A-Godda-Da-Vida" cued up so Bobby could indulge in seventeen minutes of simulated phone sex and foul-mouthed flirting.

"Well, I'd say she's pretty hot-looking," Cyril said. "I wouldn't throw her out of bed."

"Listen. Jen's good for one thing. But in person, she's another thing entirely."

"But I thought you got laid regular-like. Wasn't it you who said you 'got it' at least once a week?"

"Getting laid is getting laid." Behind the double-glazed control room window Cyril was leaning back with his feet up on the table. Every time he'd try to end the conversation, Bobby would find a way to keep it going.

"Listen, Cyr, I've got to take a piss. Hold the fort, will ya?" Bobby gave Cyril the finger, and picked up a two-month-old Penthouse to take into the bathroom. Cyril gave Bobby a double one-finger salute, and then went back to filling in the broadcast log.

"Jesus, Cyril. When you've gotta pay for it, it's not really real. Anyway, most times, it's only for a blow job."

"I don't wanna talk about it." Bobby could not possibly tell him the truth: that he could rarely hold out long enough to slip it inside. Cyril would never let him live it down.

"I don't know. It's just that I've been at this so long that something's gotta give."

"You mean this?" As Cyril stood up, his headphones dropped onto the console and he slipped them back on before continuing. "You mean all fucking this?" Cyril spread out his arms. "You mean playing music from the sixties and seventies and eighties on the midnight-to-five at a 500-watt station in the middle of Bum Fuck, U-S-of-A? Singers who are dead and gone? Look what we got on tap: Janis Joplin, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix ..."

Cyril eased back into his seat and they both waited in silence as the song ended. It wasn't enough for Bobby to inwardly taunt himself, but then he had to listen to come on baby, light my fire - Jim Morrison's incantation from the grave.

As "Light My Fire" ended, they segued into Willie Nelson's decriminalization spot from NORML back-to-back with "Addiction is a disease" from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Before they went on the air, Bobby and Cyril pulled cartridges out of the public service racks to set up their own PSA couplets. Spots from the National Cattleman's Beef Association and the American Heart Association, a National Guard spot followed by one for the Peace Corps, sports promos from the Southeastern Conference and "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" from the United Negro College Fund. At least Cyril and he got a kick out of their subversive juxtapositions, if no one else did. As if anyone were actually listening at one and two and three in the morning.

Bobby like taking calls on the air, but Cyril would then have to stay alert to hit the dump button on anything that was objectionable. They could hardly afford a fine from the FCC. None of the nine caller's lines were lit, but the one on 0499, on the private line, was blinking. Bobby pressed the button.

"Hello. You're on W-B-B-Z." He rarely announced the station's actual call letters, thinking it was somehow below him, especially with his steadily deflating dream of becoming another Imus, another Howard Stern, another Opie or Anthony. "It's Bobby Zee, cominatchya."

Cyril wanted to kick back and let Bobby do his thing, but this time, for the first time in a long time, Bobby looked stricken - with "mouth agape," Cyril thought. For once, he was speechless.

Bobby couldn't place the voice. He wanted to ask, "Who the hell is this?" Robert Zornberg was a name he hadn't used in years. Robert Merrill Zornberg was the name chosen by parents who loved both opera and baseball and because it was in Yankee Stadium where Robert Merrill sang "The Star Spangled Banner." He often thought of legally changing it, but he was too lazy to go through with the hassle. Everyone, anyway, knew him as Bobby Zee - from the college kids at Dunkin' Donuts when he picked up a large coffee and donuts special, to the kids at the central high school when he gave his fifteen-minute bullshit talk on careers in the radio industry, and to his public, his fans, when he made a promotional appearance at a store opening, a flea market or at the burn ward at Central General. The station, for public relations, insisted that he do that, so he couldn't refuse.

He gave the closed-fist hand signal to Cyril, who immediately started up "In-A-Godda-Da-Vida."

"Don't you remember, Bobby? Four years back, in California. Don't tell me you don't remember."

Robert Zornberg had spent two years at the state university majoring in sociology and barely maintaining a C average. Early in his junior year, when he changed his major to getting stoned and his grades careened downhill, he was invited by the dean to take a leave at the end of the term. Between a twenty-year-old's ennui, a don't-give-a-fuck attitude, and his parents' decision to get rid of a house which was "too big for us, Robert," he had no place to return to, and so he decided to empty his bar mitzvah savings bank account and wander cross-country in his father's hand-me down Toyota sedan.

During the solitary hours in front of the wheel, while AM and FM stations drifted in and out of range, while toking on a joint he had rolled with his knees controlling the steering wheel, Robert decided to change his identity and become the "new and improved" Bobby Zee. He drove the last leg of his journey through the night and finally took the Central Freeway exit from Interstate 80 and drove west until, just as the sun rose, he drove into Golden Gate Park. When he got his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, he felt reborn, and after he parked the Toyota, took off his shoes and socks, and ran into the freezing water, he felt like a new man.

Bobby rented a rundown room in a deteriorating neighborhood not far from the gentrifying Haight-Ashbury district. Free at last to do whatever he wanted - or so he thought - he worked odd jobs and picked up just enough money to get by and get high. Of that time, Bobby couldn't remember many of the specifics. Most of it was a blur.

"Are you still there?" Her voice was no longer tentative; she began sounding insistent.

"Bobby, we really had something going. That's what you made me believe. Being with you made me so hot ... the way you talked to me, the way you said my name. You called me 'Lissa, and you pronounced it the same way that Anthony Hopkins did, when he was Hannibal Lector ... when he said "Clarice" - when he stretched out that "s" sound ...

"And when you asked me to wear a short skirt all the time when I was with you. You said it turned you on ... and turning you on turned me on. You said you could even smell me ... and that's what you wanted.

"And when you had me lie face down on the table in the kitchen, with your pillows under me, and I was already so wet, and you pulled my panties down, and you slowly, ever so slowly, pushed one finger into me, and then a second, and slid them in and out, in and out, and I was so wet, and then you licked your thumb and then slid that in my ass, and kept your other two fingers pressed up against my clit, and it was like your whole hand was inside of me, and I would be ready to explode ... and then ... and then I would cum, I'd be riding your hand and when I was done, and after you'd pull out your fingers, you would nibble and bite on my ass cheeks, and only then would I squeal ...

"But you'd hold me down, and say, 'Now, Lissa ...' with that long 's' sound, 'Now I'm gonna fuck you from behind' and the thought of it just about made me cum again, and then you'd get behind, and push yourself into me ... I wanted it ... I needed it so bad, and I loved the way it felt, so large and so full, almost bursting. You were so close to cumming ... I could feel you pulsating, and you'd push it in and stretch out over me, and your body'd hold me down and your sweat would drip down onto me and your hands would be stretched right next to my face, and I could smell myself on your fingers, and when I was close and you were close, it'd be like we were both, like one body, ready to cum, and I'd feel the tightening, that almost feeling ... and I remember the time I bit down on you, right on your hand, right near your wrist, and I came and you came and I came and you came ... it was like it went on forever ...

"And then your body became limp and you lifted off of me, and you almost couldn't stand and you looked down at your hand, and you were bleeding, and you smacked me on my ass, and I wanted you to do it more, I wanted those smacks, and then you yelled, 'Look what you've done!' and I said 'I'm sorry ... I couldn't help it' and I started to cry and you got back on top of me, and your cock was between my legs, and I must've still been dripping, and I held your cock between my legs and your hand was back next to my face, and I started licking and swallowing your blood, and we lay like that for a long time ... do you remember any of that, Bobby?"

"And, Bobby, do you remember telling me you didn't wash those pillow cases for so long 'cause you loved the smell. You said it turned you on, and it turned me on knowing it turned you on, and how you liked doing me on the table a lot more than doing me on the bed, and how you kidded me about me being your own special bowling ball, with all your fingers inside of me, and how I got angry the first time you teased me about it, and I said I didn't want to think of our making love like that, even though I was secretly proud of your thinking of me that way, and you started to pout, and you finally said, 'I'm sorry, 'Lissa,' and it took so much for you to apologize, and I loved you even more than ever ...

"And then you started doing more and more drugs ... poppin' and snortin' and smokin' whatever you could get your hands on, and drinkin' cheap wine when you couldn't score. It was like you had a new girl friend and I didn't mean anything to you anymore.

"And then there was that Sunday, when the 49ers were playing the Oakland Raiders and you were telling me how great Jerry Rice was ... that he was once a 49er and then became a Raider in 2001 ... I remembered all that stuff because it was important to you, Bobby ... and you told me to sit and watch how he'd go just far enough to catch a pass and get a first down, then slip under a tackle and not get hurt ...

"And it was such a beautiful day, and I didn't want to waste my Sunday afternoon sitting at home in front of the TV ... and I wanted to be with you, and all I asked was is we could, maybe, take a walk after the game, and you told me to 'shut the fuck up' ... and I wondered where'd that come from? ... and I realized that you had changed, changed a whole lot, and that you weren't the same Bobby Zee who I had fallen in love with ... who I wanted to be with ...

Some of it was filtering through the smoky haze of memory. He looked at Cyril, who was watching him intently through the glass. It hadn't occurred to him until then that Cyril was listening in on his conversation. Some of it actually sounded right. About Jerry Rice, about the "s" sound, about how he fantasized having sex on a table when his eyes were closed and a poorly-paid woman's hot mouth was wrapped around his throbbing member for the few moments it took him to get release.

"I walked home that day and you didn't come after me. You didn't call. You didn't care. And I waited until the next Sunday, and I went over to your place, and you weren't there. Somebody said you moved out ... that you took off in the middle of the night. I even walked around the neighborhood looking for your car 'cause you said you had slept in it some of the time.

"We really had something special, Bobby. But you were so pathetic, and I ... I was even more pathetic for wanting you as much I did."

None of it was at all clear and none of it made any sense. It was as if an entire segment of his memory had been erased and eradicated, like a hard drive in a strong magnetic field. He felt robbed, naked and vulnerable. Despite all the drugs and booze, he wondered how for the life of him he could remember almost nothing about that San Francisco time.

"In-A-Godda-Da-Vida" was nearing its end and Bobby shrugged his shoulders. When Cyril started laughing, he wondered if Cyril had somehow put someone up to this.

But just then Bobby Zee glanced down, and noticed the two semicircular, bite-sized indentations on his right hand, right near his wrist.

Rev 6 / January 12, 2007

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January, 2007…Copyright © 2007, Lloyd B. Abrams

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