It was about 2 a.m. on a cold, December night, and I was talking on the phone to this girl Julie, who called the radio station just to chat. She thought I was Smokey Morgan, a country music disc jockey.
I was not Smokey Morgan, but a college student home from school for the holidays working one of the many part-time jobs I’d picked up to make a little Christmas money. I was pulling the graveyard shift at Kickin’ Country, one of my hometown’s radio stations, and my duties were to write a few news stories for the morning newscast, update the recorded temperature announcement, and replace massive reel-to-reel tapes when they finished playing.
On those tapes were songs, commercials and the smooth, resonant voice of Smokey Morgan, a man whose enunciation and command of country music trivia was enviable, but whom I’d never met and who’d never been to our radio station and who’d probably never even heard of our little town. He recorded those tapes somewhere in Nashville or Los Angeles or Montreal, and they played on country stations all over the, well, country. But Smokey never let on that he wasn’t right there with us, living in our town, sending his kids to our schools, playing our song requests. He had us all faked.
Julie called on my very first night on the “studio line.” I answered the phone and I could hear Kickin’ Country playing in the background.
“Yeah. Can you tell me what time it is?”
What time it is? She had a phone, a stereo, and enough intelligence to operate both of them, but she had no watch? No kitchen appliance with a digital clock? How could anyone conduct the business of daily life without a timepiece? I told her it was 2:00 a.m., Tuesday morning. She thanked me and was gone.
The next night, she called again. Same time, same question. I thought about what it must be like for someone to always have to ask what time it is, even when in one’s own home. I could see Julie on Christmas morning, opening her present and saying, “Thanks for the espresso maker,” while thinking, naturally, it has no clock.
The third and fourth nights she called again, and the questions grew from inquiries about the time to the temperature to the day’s forecast. By the end of my first week, our little 2:00 a.m Q&A had stretched to a five-minute conversation. Julie became what I like to think of as my first and only groupie. It was during one of these conversations that Julie asked a question I hadn’t expected, but should have.
“Is this Smokey?”
I panicked. When I took this job it was never my intention to impersonate someone twice my age with a voice several octaves lower than the left end of a piano—but duty called. Kickin’ Country was Oz, and from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. I was the Wizard.
The truth is, for as long as I could remember, I wanted to be Smokey Morgan, or at least some version of him. It was not a desire of mine to be a deejay; it was an obsession bordering on psychotic disorder.
As a young boy, while the normal kids were outside playing army, I was sitting on the floor of my room with three portable cassette players, one for recording and two for playing songs back and forth while I provided such groaner segues as, “I’m Your Boogie Man! No, not me! That’s K.C. and the Sunshine Band, and here’s Elton John!”
When I started driving, my friends drew straws to see who would get stuck riding with me. I had a “no tolerance” policy on talking while the deejay talked. I would shoosh passengers mid-sentence and reach over and turn up the volume on the car radio, not during the song, but afterwards, so I could hear the artists’ name and the song’s title perfectly timed and eloquently shared over the fade by those pilots of the airwaves.
Whenever I was forced to transport my younger sister to school, she would sit in the passenger seat with her fingers pressed into her ears, begging me to stop talking. I would mercilessly give her weather forecasts, time and temperature updates, and ad-lib promotional announcements for revolutionary cleaning products. My car was my own personal radio studio, and she my adoring, albeit captive, fan. She tells me her therapy is going well.
Being asked if I was a deejay was as close as I’d ever gotten, and maybe as close as I would ever get, to actually being one. It was only in the past few years that people on the phone had stopped addressing me as Ma’am. And now someone actually wondered if I was Smokey. My pulse quickened.
I caved. I gave in to the temptation and did my best to sound like a 40-year-old, golden-voiced cowboy, a stretch for my 19-year-old pipes, but I sounded a little groggy anyway, it being in the middle of the night. I cleared my voice and gave Julie all the Smokey I had.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, my voice cracking, sounding more like Pooh than Smokey. There was no way she would buy it.
Julie as always was listening to the station, and through the phone I could hear Reba McEntire assure us that she’d Be Home for Christmas, when suddenly Reba faded and I heard Smokey, the real Smokey—well, the real recorded Smokey—come on the air in Julie’s living room and announce, “That’s a holiday classic from Reba. Hang around for another Kickin Country 10-in-a row coming up! Also on the way, Shania …”
Busted. The real, taped Smokey and the 19-year-old imposter were talking at the same time! To the same person! I had to recover; I had to convince Julie that nothing shady was going on in Kickin’ Country Land.
But Julie didn’t even notice; she just kept right on talking. She told me her name, asked questions about my life, asked what it was like to be a famous deejay, was Smokey my real name and—was I married.
Was I married?
We had progressed far beyond a time-check now. Whether or not God intended it, that last question jolted me out of Kickin’ Country Land into reality. It was time to come clean with Julie, who from my perspective had transitioned from a watch-less insomniac to potential stalker. I was already tired of being famous; I longed for my regular life again.
“Look, I’m really sorry. I’m not Smokey Morgan,” I confessed. “I don’t even know who Smokey Morgan is. I’m just a college student doing a part-time gig over the holidays. I have no idea what Smokey’s marital status is, but maybe I can get you his address.”
I spilled everything about how the deejays’ weren’t really at the radio station, that their voices were on tapes that had been recorded far away from here and that Smokey was being heard at that very moment in about 30 cities across the nation. I was now Toto pulling back the curtain. I felt cleansed.
“Oh,” she said, slightly stunned with so much revelation at once. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
Because I’m a complete moron, I thought. “It’s a long story,” I said. “But you’ve helped it have a good ending.”
We said our goodbyes and went about our middle-of-the-night activities, which for me included thanking God for His perfect plan for my life, whatever it was, and for a girl named Julie, who didn’t have a clock, but whose timing was perfect.
