Passing the Torch
After graduating college at the University of Binghamton I moved to California. A year later I returned to Binghamton in the summer to visit many friends still there. I slept on the couch in my former house and jammed with my old band Green Eyed Monster. We even played an impromptu 10 minute set after seeing our friends Psquelch perform live at a local club - they let us borrow their gear as we pulled out a few of the old "hits." The soundguy complemented me on my mic technique.
It was a fun hang for a couple days, but it would not have been complete unless I checked out the status of WHRW, the campus radio station where I was tech director the previous year, and basically lived inside its walls. To this day I still claim that most of my college education happened not in classrooms but WHRW's record library, discovering and digesting many amazing albums hidden within its seemingly infinite collection during my all-too-brief four college years. Plus, let's face it, I was never ever cool in college, and nobody at the station gave me too hard a time about it, bless all their hearts.
However now the station, while live on the air, was pretty much empty. The control room was on auto pilot - the current deejay probably put on a long song and went to go to the bathroom or smoke out. So it was just me gazing at the flyers and posters still on the walls and smelling the same old musty couches. It was like a dream - returning to the past even though my new reality was 3000 miles away, and everybody had disappeared, just like I did. I felt incredibly lonely.
The spell was suddenly broken as Ron Drumm appeared from the record library. Ron, a fixture at the station, was an aging hippie dude who volunteered for decades organizing the library. Upon seeing me he made some snide comment about the emo music currently being aired and then he disappeared before I could say hi. I realized he probably assumed I hadn't graduated, that I hadn't had this other life the past year. Like in his mind time hasn't passed and I was simply just still there. In a way this made me feel even more lonely.
Well, this visit was a bust. I took one last look at the place and split. As I closed the door to the station I saw a very young kid timidly snooping around. It was quickly clear that, since this was the middle of the summer, he was probably an incoming student who was feeling out of place so he broke away from his orientation group to check out what's up with the campus station. A younger me, basically. But he stopped, thwarted by the closed door, and possibly scared by all the photos in the window of the countless hairy deejays of yore.
"It's cool," I said to him, "Go on in. Check it out."
He shyly and silently accepted the invitation, nodding in a manner to say, "okay thank you" and he disappeared inside the sonic sanctuary of WHRW. I turned around and left the student union for the last time, realizing immediately I had just now lived out the end of the cheeziest after school special.