“When we come back from a commercial break.”

Author's Note: I'm in the process of sorting though what may be the biggest written mess of the new century. Below is an excerpt that may or may not be historically accurate.



November 2nd, 1995.


I press the illuminated button called "VTR" that activates the commercial feed tape roll. The lights on the set dim and I am at the control board, making all the things happen.

As is usually the case, I am on way too much caffeine. Crouched in front of the video switcher, I stare into the monitor, waiting for that moment to restart the live feed. I have a sheet to my right that tells me when we come back from break.

The talent is getting warmed up now, adding powder to distinguished noses, rouge to hollowed-out check bones.

When the lights are up and illuminated, they resemble skulls lit up by lightening, ready for the cue from me, and when I'm not on the verge of laughing, I get it right.

I still can't believe I ended up here, immediately after college. I'm the overnight guy here at this little ABC affiliate in Charleston, SC. The sports guy comes in with a wet cigar and berates me for my timing from the last package of the night. He does this after the news cast has ended, and the talent (three of them if you include the weather man, who doubles as sports and current affairs coordinator.)has left for the evening.

The guy who taught me most of what I know is a real TV aficionado. I know this because when I was shadowing him (interesting term used to describe one night shift guy watching another night shift guy) the way he would watch TV showed his undying dedication to it as a medium. His face would relax a little bit, and he would sit back, taking in each frame of video (there are two frames for every one second of video that you see, scary to know that each second is split into polar extremities of good and evil eh?) and savoring each transition and right-on-the-money cut.

He’s always on the verge of saying "I love this stuff.” He's a devout prince fan.

He's not as fun as Jimmy, the morning guy. He performs his act (very few master control operators actually perform their job, they let the job perform a number on them, knocking out posture and accuracy of sight.) like a conjurer. He fondles the switches on the board like Hendrix at Altamont. This guy is always “rocking and rolling”.

He always ate Hardee’s breakfast biscuits, the deluxe ones with the spicy sausage interspersed with American cheese, and he savored it as much as Damon savored each frame of video.

Jimmy worked the Saturday morning shift, watching cartoons and infomercials. He was a family man, and he’d watch the same programming his family did.

He was a magician, sitting at the board like an organist, an organist of bones.

But I digress. After the 10:00 news, the night would settle down, and I’d let the automated show picker reach out its robotic arm and pluck another video cassette out of the slot, like the union stock yards in Chicago, watching video cassettes plucked from their ranks like pigs ready for the slaughter.

If I was on enough caffeine, I wouldn’t let the sports guy get to me, tapping his cigar, talking about games and teams I had little interest in.

But I did not lose faith in Television. There were times, when after working a shift, I would come home (at 6:30) and crack a beer to WKRP in Cincinnati, staring at it in my one bedroom shack. No really, it was a one bedroom shack, a bedroom with four walls and an ineffective space heater.

The TV had wood paneling. I picked it off of the street just a few months earlier, prior to moving in. Staring at it was like calling up memories from childhood, and I reveled in it, despite my flaming hatred for the commercial pabulum of currently I was currently doing or performing, depending on the mood I was in when you asked me.

Periodically I would get called into the General Manager's office, himself a radio DJ of an oldies stati50s He had that 50s radio voice, like the DJ in Grease. DJ’s in his days were beacons of positivity, and he took the same aesthetic into dealing with people.

This was almost always bad. Whenever I’d miss a commercial spot, I’d hear about it. If I missed a commercial, forgot to air it, aired the wrong one, an email would be sent to the traffic coordinator who would use this data to talk to the client, who was steaming mad, because his phone sex ad didn’t air at 4:35AM like it was supposed to.

So in that pleasant radio voice, he’s scold me for missing another ad, locking myself out of the building while out on a smoke break, for locking myself out of the station, wandering outside until the first morning news person arrived at 4am, freezing wondering if that’s what failure felt like, cold and stinging.

”We need to find out why you’re having trouble concentrating.”

Trouble concentrating? Gee, I wonder why, maybe it was the hours, or that sinking feeling I got whenever Roy, the other overnight guy walked in.

To him, television was his lover, a constant companion that he’d highlight with his favorite “rolling tape” saying.

”Looks like I’ll have to roll tape on this”

He’d say that staring at a half-naked buxom woman, selling car insurance. He’d say it when, during “Maximum Exposure” a Bull lanced the torso of an infamous Matador.

He’d say it during “Politically Incorrect”, when Bill Maher would insult Jesse Helms for the twelfth time that season.

I ran into him at a bar years later. He stared at a TV in the bar too, and he looked exactly the same. I was working at a different TV station, public this time, and I saw the whites of his eyes go hollow for a few minutes, seeing how one person moved on while he stayed in the same place, rolling tape on each employee who walked through the doors.

At night on smoke breaks, looking out at the TV towers, I thought of how few people witnessed the work that I did, until I made a mistake. My profession was like so many others in those days, of a subservient role that was barely noticed until all hell broke loose.

There was another guy, Steve, who slept at the station. He wasn’t a workaholic, just lonely I guess.

The first time I saw it, it was a window into a world of loneliness I’d never witnessed before.

I periodically took walks into people’s office, sat back in office chairs, reclined looking at the pictures of unfamiliar family vacations. There’s the fish that Dave’s boy caught last year in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There’s another fishing shot taken at Fawley Beach.



Walking down the hall, my heart dropped dead to the floor when I saw the shadow of a figure walking across the blue shadow made by the TV in the lobby. It was always on, letting the visitors see the result of all the branding and scheduling the corporate office had made.

Looking just past the TV to the couch, I made out the figure of one of the cameramen. Not working, not sleeping, and just staring out at the TV, the same channel he contributed to.

I managed a nervous “Hi” when I walked past. He seemed comfortable with the idea that I was there, and he barely even flinched. I stopped taking walks after that point.

And rolling tape on another promo reel back in the control room, I found a new found respect for my own loneliness. Now sure I was single, twenty two and not much going to write about love wise. But I had friends to spend time with. On nights off Id have friends over to shave the ice off of my not too often defrosted freezer. We’d drink beer and watch TV, listen to music, talk about wave form monitors, cathode rays and dead-end jobs that would castrate men like Roy and leave them without a guide, light or love.

I had a new found respect for the depths of solitude. And I turned the satellite to MTV2, watching the video for Superdrag’s “Destination Ursula Major”.

I needed a job that made more of a difference, that more people bore witness to. I needed to be applauded, lauded and not chastised.

Respect and jobs done with consideration for the rubrics of quality and frequency were a few years off, but I still regarded Television with high esteem.

I quit the job just after two months. The schedule changed me a little bit more each day. I believe in myself more than ever, and I knew there was a better job out there, one that paid more than five dollars per hour.

Still throughout it, I believed in friends. Back when I needed them most. They may not have always led me to the right places in this world, but they did give me everything they had when I felt like I was watching myself watch my life on Television, editing the same roll for the next ten to fifteen years.

It wasn’t going to happen, not with my fundamental beliefs in the Unreal, the possibility that I might one day find my own happiness in places where my work was visible to all just by the cut of my jib or the way that my laconic wit would roll out of my after a few drinks on my evening off.

It was all a matter of degrees.