Barry Boister was once a pretty big deejay around the time that FM was overtaking AM. For a guy who was steeped in the revolutionary politics of his day, he was surprisingly funny on-air. One day he said something that he shouldn't have, lost his job, and suffered a breakdown. He was left with a partially restored '55 Chevy and his ex-groupie girlfriend, Lyla. She cut hair to support them both. She would send him for carryout in the Chevy, and often, he also picked up meds. The doctors were always trying new pills on him. None of them worked, they just tricked him into normalcy. Tricked, only.

He was in his car at the bank drive-thru, waiting for the long suck that would deliver a clear plastic tube containing his cash. When it came, he emptied the bills out onto the Chevy's white, roll and pleat upholstery. The car's body bore a grey camouflage from several poor attempts at primering. Barry drove to the shopping center where his carryout and prescription bags could be retrieved. It had rained and the parking lot's depressions were full of oily water, each pink and blue surface reflecting a re-emerging sun. He got his goods and made for home and Lyla.

Lyla! He first saw her on the arm of Phil Dagen, the big radio magnate, at an RCA label party. She was a wide-eyed blonde with a 60's flip hairdo, olive skin, an Iggy Pop T-shirt, and thoroughly ripped-up jeans. Dagen could be the jealous type, but he seemed unconcerned as Lyla got chummy with practically every guy there. Barry couldn't stop looking at her. Would the much older Dagen be willing to give her up? Surely she was just an arm ornament to the coot, a flavor of the month, and no more.

Barry kept asking about her at the party, and finally got an answer. She was a groupie, basically. She hung out at Dagen's flagship station, making herself popular with the deejays. That wasn't good, because he was thinking about her for keeps. At least for a few months, maybe more if the sex was as good as he thought it might be. Finally, he got his chance. A metal band started a game of chicken fights, and Barry became Lyla's mount. They fell laughing on top of each other, over and over. He wanted her in his life, bar nothing. He was sure he could tame her.

And Dagen! He hated rehashing their time together. One night, Barry was trying to get backstage at a club where supposedly the label had hired some ladies. "Christ, teeth!" said Dagen as he appeared through the curtains. "Barry, you don't want to go back there, trust me. Amateurs, they'll nick you." He led Barry to his El Dorado and kept the door ajar so the dome light remained on. It seemed as the moon upon a silver sea, the mirror on Dagen's knee. A rapacious god formed the waves of white with his American Express Platinum Card. "Barry, I read an article in Rolling Stone last week, it was about groupies aging gracefully. What do you plan to do with your future, my friend?"

"I don't know, collect a pension and fuck groupies aging gracefully, I guess."

"Now you see. You see. That is why you're perfect for what I'm going to let you in on. I want to put you on in the morning and turn you loose like you've never been turned loose. You can't say fuck. But anything else goes. This will be brand new, and some people are going to get offended. You can do skits, rants, whatever you want, so long as they're edgy. Not that old Imus crap, screw that. Barry, when I get a good idea, my nuts tighten up and tingle. And this is a good idea. I want you to do the deed. Whattaya say?" At one time, Barry would never have said yes, but the Revolution seemed dead and his countercultured self had been fading. They did it and it worked. Barry's Arbitron ratings were off the chart. He got so big that he even did a little television. "I'm happy for you, and for Lyla, too," said Dagen. "Honestly (and no offense), I didn't even know her name that night at the RCA party."

The returned sun upon Barry's windshield was blinding in the early evening, but already a translucent crescent appeared in its part of the sky. Shifting (gears) with thought, he crept up the pike in the flow of the last straggling commuters toward home. His mind went back to the drugstore. He wondered if the clerk had recognized his name, and after she gave him the bag, he froze. A rubber-tipped cane tapped silently at his feet, then the wood was at his knee as the elderly wielder's impatience heightened. He finally left, grateful for the facelessness of radio.

If only he hadn't pushed to do television. That was what got him doing Valium, which he complained was making him lose his edge. Yellow dust and halved tablets lined his pockets at the end of each day. He didn't like to fly, but he didn't want to turn down a chance to be a panel judge on The Ridiculous Revue. The touchdown at LAX was bumpy. The makeup man walked away from him when he couldn't decide if pancake was too phony for a guy who was once active in the SDS. He thought he might be gaining weight, and the camera adds ten pounds, so everybody says. For every dark cloud that arose, he placed in his brewing sky a half-moon of benzodiazepine.

And yet the taping began well. The first contestant, a blonde in an American flag mini skirt, played the Star Spangled Banner by squeezing her hands together to form fricative notes. Barry gave her a seven and got a good laugh when he said she was a fartiste. He buzzed six old ladies with wheelchairs, walkers, crutches and canes who did a Maypole dance. Then a black bodybuilder came out, lumps upon oily, twitching, molasses colored lumps crowding each other for space on his bones. He did a posing routine to music. Barry turned over his scorecard and blurted out "I know who that is. It's Arnold Schwarze-nigger." A hollow token of laughter died. After the taping, an assistant producer calmed Barry down and assured him it would be edited out. Even the bodybuilder gave him the soul handshake and said that he thought it was funny. But Grapevinyl broke the story, then the newspapers ran it, and in two weeks, Barry was off the air.

The last arc of evening sun was now blocked entirely by Barry's windshield visor, but it still set a matrix of turquoise and coral streaks in the sky aglow. A VW bug ahead of him bore his old bumper sticker, BARRY IN THE MORNING, written in brown velcro. He passed it and turned into his apartment's parking lot.

Inside, their stereo played The Clash muffled though headphones upon a brown leather couch. The receiver was illumined by a cluttered panel of amber numbers. On the coffee table, a sucking, battery-driven ashtray pinched in its teeth a single cigarette. By the ash's fragile length it appeared that the motor had smoked most of the butt. Flat, ivory-colored stones Lyla called runes were spread across the table next to a box of Fiddle Faddle. The sliding glass door to the balcony was open, the screen door's shifting, silver moire whorls revealed no Lyla on the other side. Outside, crickets played their maracas-like chatter on the evening breeze. He heard the latch and turned to see the front door wedged open by a yellow plastic laundry basket, behind which was her.

"Hi, I wanted to get a load in real quick while a machine was empty. Am I starved." In motion, she fascinated him. She bounced onto the sofa and grabbed the box of Fiddle Faddle. Her hair was shorter now than when they first met, swept back and seemingly held in place by some kind of horizontal gravity. Likewise, her upper lip seemed to be tugged gently upward by a benificent force. Her eyes were exotically wide. And that skin - so Mediterranean, though she never sunned. In cutoff jeans and T-shirt, she quickly became cold, asked Barry to close the sliding glass door, then bundled her legs up and stretched the T-shirt over her knees to her toes.

She was in a rare good mood, talkative, but he was drugged by her presence; something she said about the runes on the table hit him several seconds afterward as being significant. And why did she keep eating the Fiddle Faddle when he had just brought her their carry-out? That was Lyla.

"I might have to give you a haircut tonight," she said through a mute of caramel popcorn. Barry made the coiled cord of the headphones ripple across the carpet. "Oh no, what's up?"

"Jerry Liss called, he wants to interview you for the overnight position at his station."

"That's crazy! I'm, I'm not ready. And, and besides, it's one of Dagen's stations."

"Barry, is there anything better in the world that could happen than for you to get back on the air, no matter what? I know late-night is a big comedown, but it would be a start. Jerry's number is on the breakfast nook, he wants you to call him tomorrow."

"Something about this doesn't sound right. I'm an untouchable, you know."

"I read it in the runes. So let's eat and then let me cut your hair in case Jerry wants to meet with you tomorrow."

"Actually, I'm going running." He changed quickly into shorts and a T. "Do you have any quarters left from the laundry?" She placed three in his hand.

"What do you need quarters for?"

"Mad money," he said, and was out the door.

Doctors kept pressing Barry to run, it being the Big Band-Aid for everything that ailed you. He had gained weight from the meds and couldn't afford new clothes, so he tried his best to run regularly. And the belly he had grown put her off of making piggies - that was no small matter. But what Lyla told him, this new and unusual shape of things, startled him. He had to run it off, the anxiety. Much more than that, an awful possibility gathered in his mind. There was a gas station with a pay phone three miles away, one call would tell if his paranoia served him.

He started his run along a curved road that led to the pike, past the pool and its elongated vees of submerged light. The young lifeguard was vacuuming with a pole tall enough to reach every spot of dirt on the bottom. A girl in a lime bikini top and white shorts longingly watched him work. Barry turned onto the pike, which still bore staggered waves of traffic. For now, he had sidewalk under his feet, but that would end soon. Each set of headlights in the lane next to him seemed to intensify as it caught up, then extinguish as it passed. The feeling was like flashbulbs going off, the whoosh of created wind enhancing the effect.

He pinched his neck to check the jugular throb against his wristwatch. 35 beats in 15 seconds, 140 per minute. Sweat tapered down the front of his T-shirt and branched off, forming a wet corona around the bulge of his belly. On his right, dense rows of evergreens crowded two churches, one very large Episcopal campus and a much smaller one that billed itself as Full Gospel. Ahead of him were the plotted points of artificial light by which civilization charted the night. Gas on every corner, fast food for the famished, drug stores with their tricky tablets. Frog and insect crescendos picked at the things going on in his mind.

Second wind found his pace, and the gas stations were at a discernible distance. One slight hill and he was upon them. Each on its corner proffered a totem of prices, atop which a ghostly, luminous pillow shape bore the instant in-your-eye emblem. The one he slowed into was a newly built Citgo. He leaned upon the fin of an old Dodge to catch his breath. A greaser in a jacked up Firebird, all blinding rims and bloated tires, ran its wheels back and forth over the rubber hose bell, its sound like a target being hit again and again in a shooting gallery. On the clean, vanilla wafer-colored brick wall of the station, a pay phone was mounted in a U of brushed metal. Bursts of astonished laughter came from the girl on the phone. Three sustained honks from the Firebird made her hang up and scamper for the passenger door.

Barry put a quarter in the soda machine, banged the Mountain Dew insignia, then put a quarter in the phone. After dialing, a quick voice said "92 Rock, hold," giving him some time to catch his breath. Then again: "92 Rock."

"Lenny, it's Barry Boister." He got it out.

"Barry! I was thinking about you last month. The CBS guy came by and dropped off some new releases. One of them's the new Les Dudek, have you seen it? No? Guess what it's called? It's called What this World Needs is More Rock and Roll and Les Dudek!"

"Yeah, that was me, I told them they could use it, gratis. Listen, I need to ask a favor. Yeah, I appreciate the kind words, Len, thanks. I need to know if Lyla has ever been up there to see Dagen, like in his office with the doors closed, if you know what I mean. Look - we're on the outs anyway, I just want to know for sure. Level with me, Len, I used to take care of you pretty good in this business. Okay. Okay. Once or twice a week, huh? That's what I figured. Yeah, yeah, we'll do that sometime. Take care, Len."

Her talent for head, she had put it to good use. Or so she had thought. Did she really think at some point after her goal was met, she could just back out of her heinous infidelities and everything would be fine? It was so damned obvious, it hit him while she was popping those molecule models of Fiddle Faddle in her mouth. Of course she had no interest in Dagen, it was just business. The currency of her subculture. She was back in the marketplace again, trading from that obsequious position of paradoxical strength. He could kill her.

As he began his run back against the grain of the headlights, the urge to throw her down and have her, bang some sense into her head, dominated him. Not the station that he had just left but a Mobil caddy-cornered to it, found him and Lyla behind it one evening. The thrill of public sex. She told him to pull around to the air pump. She backed into the concrete wall and slipped her tiny panties down to her knees in a cat's cradle. He pulled the air hose off its hook and cranked the number to an estimated erotic pressure, jetting their hair and skin. Later, he saw her ass was scratched up and applied mercurochrome. "Hey, the scratches spell zoso if I add a swoosh here and here."

His return run passed quickly. From this angle he could read the marquee of the Full Gospel Church: The Gift of Tongues. Under the lights of the Episcopal rectory, a cop car was parked. A small dose of reality slipped into his wild mixture of thoughts. He really did mean to do something to her. Hold her down and ride her hard, maybe when he finished no breath would be there, an honest accident of passion. Time was distorted to him, but as he neared the apartment, his watch showed that almost two hours had passed.

She had left the door unlocked for him but had turned out all the lights. The drapes had been drawn, the smoke doors of the stereo cabinet had been closed. Barry pulled his T-shirt off and ran its few dry spots over his chest and belly, then splashed himself all over with ice water from a pitcher that was in the fridge. But there was no cooling him down. She had eaten and gone to bed early. She had kicked off her clothes going down the hall toward the bedroom and was lucky to get the blanket over her before her eyes shut. It was her way of avoiding him.

He entered the bedroom and saw her on their futon, her back toward him, the satin trim of the blanket resting across her throat. He imagined his hands there. He got on all fours on his side of the futon. He looked and looked at her, as he had often done. And then, a phantom of himself rose and hovered over both of them. It looked down and said nothing. He stared up at it and said, "What are you here for? Are you here to stop me, or encourage me?" Slowly Barry became uncertain which was himself - the one above or the one below. He was being torn apart. Then his arms and legs gave way. He fell to his side and cried softly for several minutes. The phantom faded gradually, then was gone. Lyla still slept sweetly.

Barry laid awake for what seemed hours. His mind ran through all the good and bad of their life. He felt excruciatingly weak, yet he knew all too well now, how easily that particular coin could flip. Finally he took some medicine, and it tricked him into sleeping. Tricked, only.