I found an old transistor radio on the street. It looked like the kinds I had when I was a kid. A transistor radio became an essential kid accessory when Beatlemania hit. One Saturday night back then I was going through the stations and I heard this guy doing a kind of stand-up act at a nightclub, only he wasn’t telling jokes, he was telling stories, stories that were real and believable and weird and relatable and hilarious. I learned it was Jean Shepherd, broadcasting from his weekly gig at a club called The Limelight in Greenwich Village. It became a Saturday night ritual for me to listen to Shep with the radio under my pillow.
I often pick up books on the street, but electronics I generally pass by. This time, however, something, a pang of nostalgia, maybe, inspired me to take the radio. It was a Zenith.
I wondered if it would work. First I’d have to get a 9-volt battery. I wondered how easy it would be to find one. It used to be easy to get them at any newsstand, pharmacy, toy store, etc. I stopped into a small local pharmacy, but they didn’t carry them. I struck paydirt at my next stop, a CVS.
I put the battery in the radio and turned it on. At first I heard static, then I started rolling the station dial. I heard a deejay. The voice sounded familiar. Then I heard the jingle: “Seventy-seven, WABC!” The top 40 station of my childhood. Then, “This is Dan Ingram bringing you number two, ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy,’ by Manfred Mann.”
That was really weird. They were playing an old broadcast from when I was a kid.
I changed the station. The news was on: “In today’s top stories, the Nobel Prize committee has announced that this year’s peace prize has been awarded to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Now weird things happen to me all the time, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to have found a radio that only played broadcasts from my childhood, and I wasn’t surprised, just annoyed. Yes, annoyed. Annoyed because it was such a cliché, finding a radio that broadcasts the past, like some Twilight Zone episode. I deserve better than that. I write stories about the weird things that happen to me, but I couldn’t use this. Nobody would believe it. People would say I’m off my game, that I’m relying on hackneyed old plots. What a waste of my time. I was tempted to break the radio, I was so angry. I considered throwing it to the sidewalk and stomping it into oblivion. But why break a perfectly good old radio? So I decided to keep it, even if I couldn’t milk it for a story.
That Saturday night I listened to Jean Shepherd with the radio under my pillow, even though at my age I could have played it as loud as I wanted.
Called “one of the innovators of the short short story” by Publishers Weekly, Peter Cherches has published seven short fiction collections since 1986. His writing has also appeared in scores of magazines, anthologies, and websites, including Harper’s, Bomb, Semiotext(e), FENCE, North American Review, and Fiction International, as well as Billy Collins’ Poetry 180. His latest book is Things (Bamboo Dart Press, 2023), a collection of experimental short prose and poetry. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he is also a jazz singer and lyricist.
Image: nutsvolts.com
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Heavy Feather Review 