DENBERG FOR EKLEKTIKOS

“Your flight is booked.  It’s under RAT MEILLY.”
If you ever meet a radio personality, face to face, it’s a real trip.  Your mind tries to associate&link the voice you know intimately to the strange&unfamaliar face speaking to you.
“Got it.  3-4hours.”  My mind is sharp, a trap snapping shut w/the details of the mission.  Sealed forever, until now.

I rode my bike down.  The Texas sun hadn’t fully risen.  I was slick with a slight sheen of summer morning sweat.  It was good to be alive.  I locked my bike behind the old power plant, out back by the weeds&thrush.  I put on the hard hat, the gloves.  I smeared black dirt&gravel down my cheeks and down the front of my jeans.  I kicked up some dirt and dragged my boots around.
I came around the building and I heard the music.  It was like a movie.  Every movement felt watched&slow, deliberate.  Ravel coming from a black Mercedes.  Aho.  Good morning fuckface.
I grabbed the barricades.  I stomped up to the car.  I rammed the horse DOWN against the driver’s side door.  Rapped on the tinted glass.
He gawked his stupid nose&face out at me.
“Yaaaaaa…?” he drawled.
“SIR.  WILL YOU HOLD THIS.”  I handed him the roll of SAFETY fence.  Walked around shotgun side.  I rapped on the window there.
“SIR.  WILL YOU GIVE ME THAT.”  I jammed the other horse down.  Grabbed the roll.  He tried to get out of the car.  He tried to roll up the windows.  It was too late.  He was tied in.  No Escape.
The laborers and the foreman stared on.  But as I got closer-they were only looking through and just beyond me, with the bitter detachment afforded only daylaborers working in the hot sun.
I threw the helmet down.  The gloves.  The vest.  I walked away.
My route back was circuitious&serpentine of course.  But I really dug it, too.  I rode through the dome, under the Tower, the Frost Building, and down the drag.  I imagined the town where Steve Earle lived.  Mid-to-late 70s, beat sun, dive bar, donut shop.  Rock and roll.  Something happened to this town.  It got overblown.
I bombed round to 6th.  The Whole Foods megaplex rose up on me.  Beyond it, the condos.  I coasted down Judge’s Hill.  I was home.
I fired up the Yerba Matte.  Turned on KUT, Morning Edition.  The news was weird.  Cannibals in FLA and millionaires on the pundit.
I drew a hot bath.  Squeezed in some tea-tree oil.  Lit some lemon-grass.
Then I listened.
It was the voice.  The voice I  knew intimately.
Good morning, the voice started, I’m Jody Denberg and you’re tuned into KUT.  I’ll be filling in for Jon Aeli on this, most beautiful, first day of June.  I thought I’d start you out with something from the Decemberists.  From their excellent album  The King is Dead, this is the Decemberists on KUT.

It’s gonna be a great summer.