The Decadent Worker

Excerpted from Quent Wimple Notes by Kerry Wendell Thornley, this portion of which first appeared in Inside Joke:

(continuation)

Flinging wide the door to his shack and kneeling then, plug in hand, Quent announced, “We apologize for this brief foregoing interruption in our programming due to technical difficulties beyond our control… And now, as soon as I find an elevator music station, we’ll return to ‘Quent Wimpel Notes.’…”

In a tone of voice like old-timey commentators such as Walter Winchell, Paul Harvey or Howard Cosell Wimpel droned: “Quent Wimpel Notes: There has been an alarming increase in government snooping on innocent citizens guilty of no crimes except trying to expose the assassins of President Fitzpatrick…”

CLICK. On went the radio.

“Do not — I repeat — do not go near the elevator. Don’t even try to find it,” the D.J. said.

A second voice at the station added: “Yeah, it is pretty hot.”

First Voice: “Muzak is nice, but soft rock will do for background.”

Quent Wimpel sat paralyzed.

Second Voice: “Only problem is, it’s hot in this studio.”

First Voice: “Not like the elevator, though.”

Second Voice: “Yeah, I wish I was at the beach, man. I’d dive into a big wave.”

“The Big Wave,” Quent murmured. “That’s what they call one of the radio stations!” Billboards for KWAV-FM, a soft rock station, cluttered Southern California.

First Voice: “You catch on fast, man. That’s where you belong on a night like this.”

Feeling slightly foolish — after all, his radio couldn’t be talking to him unless things were much weirder than he suspected until now — Wimpel ventured to say, “My only trouble is I don’t recall where KWAV is on the dial.”

Second Voice: “Ninety-nine and a half! Isn’t that what the thermometer says?”

Quent twirled the dial to ninety-nine point five just in time for a station break: “This is Horny Eddie of Horny Eddie and the Toads telling you to keep it on the Big Wave, KWAV-FM, 99.5, for rock and roll — yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaawwu!” Following on the basis of that recorded spot was not rock at all, but an old pop song: “We’re havin’ a heat wave, a tropical heat wave…”.

Benumbed, he listened all the way through without so much as an aside to the FBI or whoever the hell his buggers were.

“That was ‘Topical Heat Wave’” — so help him, Goddess, that was exactly how she pronounced it — “and this is Sandy LaRouge at the Big Wave — in case you, ahem, just tuned in, I played that one for some guys a few doors down; I understand their air conditioning isn’t working yet this year. And now for a song I’ve just been itching to play for you, because, baby, you turn me on!” And that was the name of the piece, “You Turn Me On,” a cut from the Axis Powers Infer No Inferno album.

Discovering radio was disconcerting enough to shoot hell out of his own program format. From that night on, Quent became an avid listener to rock stations — incessantly pumping the D.J.’s for information, carrying on a torrid long-distance love affair with Sandy LaRouge, hatching plans with radio personalities for escaping his FBI captors, etc.

That, even more than the voodoo bag in Key West, was how it all started. How or if it will ever end is another question.

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