This story is a fantasy based on real people and actual events. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
The middle section of this story is basically reminiscing about reminiscing and I hope it doesn't become too convoluted. I appreciate any feedback!
*
My first job out of college was working at an AM radio station. I worked what they call the "graveyard shift," from midnight to 8am on Friday and Saturday nights. I spent most of the time playing reruns of Rush Limbaugh's show. I wasn't really into politics, but I still found myself getting annoyed at some of the idiotic things that he said. I did the job for about seven months in all. The money was awful, and I became completely nocturnal, but it was a job in my field, and radio was a tough field to get into. You had to pay your dues, and I was definitely paying mine. So I was glad to be where I was, while hoping it would lead to something more.
About the only thing that the station manager said to me when I began the job was that I should do whatever I needed to do to stay awake. Many a night that was quite a challenge. The last hour on Sunday morning was reserved for a recording of a local church sermon. The ancient reel to reel tape would usually arrive sometime during the night, and pretty much once you hit play there was nothing else to do for that whole hour. My first week in training my trainer and I both fell asleep in that last hour. Some mornings I would nod off, and pick my head up just in time to see the news man standing in the booth on the closed circuit camera, preparing for me to cut away to the hourly news report.
The station itself was located on the outskirts of Baltimore, in an area dubbed TV Hill, because most of the local affiliates had their studios right along that street. We shared a building with one of the network stations, and there was an FM station across the hall from the AM studio. In the middle of the night there were usually only four people in the building, the security guard, the overnight FM disk jockey, the guy playing reruns and infomercials on the TV station, and me.
The job itself wasn't so hard. You started a new tape at the beginning of every hour, and you had to play the commercials during the breaks. If you paid even a little attention to talk radio you'd know that the breaks always come at more or less the same time, so it was pretty safe to wander around in between spots, knowing you'd have eight minutes or ten minutes or whatever. I would walk down to the cafeteria and get a snack, or into the production room right across the hall to mess around. Sometimes I would stop at the big window in the hall that looked out on the city of Baltimore. It was a majestic sight, the city all lit up at night.
I also had access to the "800" number that was used during the day for the call in shows. Fifteen years ago, before unlimited cell phone calling plans, this was a big deal. Long distance calls actually used to cost money! I would have family and friends call me during the night so that we could chat for free.
We had a computer set up by the radio console. At first it didn't do much. It offered the standard selection of games, and I got hooked on minesweeper. For my first few months there I would sit down, start the first tape, and spend the next eight hours playing minesweeper, pausing only when I needed to play commercials or change tapes.
A few months into my time there the computer was wired for internet. It was 1998, and it was kind of a big deal. I never really had unrestricted access to the internet before. I had played around with it a little bit on the library computers at school. Of course, being a pervert, and being too naïve at the time to really think about potential consequences, I quickly gravitated towards pornography. They told me to do whatever it took to stay awake, right? At least I was smart enough to delete the browser history at the end of the night. Internet pornography in 1998 was much different than it is now. Broadband was still a very new concept, and nearly everybody was still using dialup, which was slow and unreliable, so there were no streaming videos. If you were lucky you might get some thumbnail photos that may or may not load, but for the most part the websites had nothing to offer but stories. I would surf around looking for dirty stories to read, and I read them all night long. I never jerked off at work, though. Actually, scratch that, I think I did cum, just once, but usually I would wait until I got home to jerk off, my dirty mind full of the previous night's reading. I shared a crappy two bedroom townhouse off campus with a female friend. She graduated at the same time as me and was working in retail. We hardly even saw each other because I would be going to bed when she woke up most days.
I did have a girlfriend, believe it or not. What had started out as a wonderful dorm romance a year before had pretty much burned itself out. She had actually broken up with me a couple of months into the job, only to have us gravitate back together a month or so later. The sorry truth was our relationship was like a zombie, going on mindlessly, pointlessly, waiting for someone or something to finally put it out of its misery. I had issues, she had issues. Considering that I had an apartment with my own room and she lived in the dorm with a roommate, she never came to stay with me. That in itself should tell you all you need to know. I would wake up in the afternoon on Friday and Saturday, usually around 4pm, and head over to campus to see her. We would go out to dinner, alone or with friends, maybe watch a movie, and go back to her room to make love, at least as long as her roommate was away for the weekend. At 11:30 I would leave to go to work. It was a strange, strange situation.
My girlfriend used to have these elaborate fantasies. Many of them involved her being a damsel in distress, and her finding herself in life-threatening situations that were never going to happen in a million years. Another one involved visiting a disk jockey in an otherwise empty radio station at night. That seemed more possible, but as our relationship crumbled it seemed like it was never going to happen. In the beginning when I was on the campus radio station, well, it would have been impossible because I was on in the afternoons and the station was still bustling with activity. Several of our friends also had shifts on the station, and frankly we got enough of them barging in on us in the dorm. We had very little chance for privacy. Many times when we were together with our friends we would snuggle under the covers and fondle each other out of sight. I always wondered if our friends knew what was going on under the covers, but nobody ever said anything to us. Luckily, we were too aware of our surroundings to get caught doing anything more than making out.
I finished school that fall semester and graduated. I had plans to stay in the Baltimore area, but as spring arrived it became clear that my two overnight shifts weren't enough to support myself. I looked around for a second job but I came up empty. I was going to have no choice but to leave when my lease was up and go back home, 250 miles away. My hopes of staying near my college town were dashed. I was going to have to give up this radio job, and moving away meant I might never get the disk jockey job I hoped for. Also, after a brief and surprisingly emotionless conversation with my girlfriend, it was also going to be the end of our relationship. Neither of us had any interest in keeping things going long distance.
Needless to say I was seriously depressed as I headed to work that night. Instead of starting my customary web browsing as soon as I was settled, I slumped into my chair, started the first tape of the night, and started thinking about my girlfriend.
I was a 21 year old virgin, shy and introverted, starting my fourth year of college. It was freshman move-in day, and a friend of mine and I were sitting by my dorm window watching the chaos unfold below us. I had chosen a room that was on the fourth floor, facing the quad formed by the two other tall dorms and the dining hall. It was an ideal viewing location for moments like this. We were enjoying ourselves so much we didn't even notice there was a stranger standing in the doorway.
I have always mused that I felt a special little jolt when I saw my first love for the first time. It was probably only my memory playing tricks on me... as if to say... yeah... of course I knew she was going to be special the first time I laid eyes on her, but how could I? She was 5'9, long brown hair, barely 18, not skinny but not fat, and had a pretty, cherubic face with big brown eyes. She was outgoing; within five minutes she had brought over a video of her and her mother on one of those daredevil types of rides at Six Flags. We grudgingly gave up our perches at the window to watch. Her name was Patty. She was living across the hall with a friend of mine, who she knew because her ex-boyfriend was friends with her roommate's boyfriend. That's why she was with the upperclassmen and not the freshmen.
It was my second year on the fourth floor of Tower D, and I had set things up so that I was friends with over half of the thirty-two residents of our 16 room, co-ed floor. Whether it was holdovers from the previous year or friends from around campus that I had coerced into taking rooms there, this was my dorm, and I was proud of myself for being able to surround myself with so many of my friends. This Patty, she was one of the wild cards.
I say it was a dorm full of my friends, but in truth it was a complicated tangle of relationships. The friend that I was watching the chaos with, he lived next door and was dating another friend of ours that lived down the hall. She was loud, obnoxious, and overweight. They would shout at each other from their rooms so that everybody knew their business. At the time I had a crush on one of our female friends. One of our other female friends had a crush on me. My roommate had a crush on her. It was a mess.
Patty showed up in the middle of all of this. Whatever it was she saw in me, she decided that she wanted me all to herself, and set about trying to make it happen.
At first she kind of played along and let herself be invited into my group of friends. We were a large, overly friendly bunch, and always welcomed newcomers. She started hanging out with us, but had her sights on me the whole time. After a while she was able to single me out. I'll never forget one Saturday afternoon when she came to my room. We ended up watching movies and eating pizza. It was the first time we were really alone, and we were having a good time together. Eventually my friends came looking for us and had a hard time understanding why we wanted to be alone together. It was a very strange moment.
At the time I was completely oblivious to Patty's intentions. For me, she had become a refuge for all of the craziness that went on amongst my friends. I was still hung up on the friend that I had a crush on, and Patty had to sit patiently and endure me going on and on about it all. Finally a month into the semester it all came to a head; the girl just wanted to be friends, blah blah blah. It seemed like the end of the world for me at the time. I had no idea yet about the opportunity that was waiting for me.
I needed a "break" from everybody else and started spending all of my free time with Patty. Looking back, I'm amazed at how naïve I was. We stayed up late one Saturday night, talking and laughing. I put on this tape of oldies music that I had, and the instrumental "Sleepwalk" by Santo and Johnny came on. We slow danced in my room. Then we went back to her room and snuggled into her bed to watch a movie. It was already 2am, and I eventually dozed off. I woke up, surprised to see her face just inches from mine. I smiled at her, and politely excused myself to go to my own bed. Good lord, what was wrong with me?
The very next day we made plans to walk into town to see a movie. I sensed that Patty wanted us to go alone, but one of my friends (the one that had a crush on me, no less) caught wind of our plans and invited herself along. So the three of us walked into town to watch a matinee and have an early dinner. What an awkward date it was. We stopped on the way home for Chinese food. Patty had to excuse herself early because she had a study group back on campus, so I finished dinner with my friend and we came back to the dorm.
