jeff fleischer
THE BUZZER
Every few nights, sometime around half past three, the buzzer for our apartment sounds. The visitor pushes the call button over and over, until he gives up, but I never answer. I know who it is, though I don’t know his name. Or what he wants.
Charlie has gotten used to the noise and just sleeps through it; it probably comes from working so close to the el tracks that blocking out noise becomes second nature. I’m not so lucky. The buzzer still gets me out of bed each time, alert just in case.
Our bedroom doesn’t face the street, and we’re too high up to see the entranceway through the trees from our living-room windows. The first few nights he rang, I didn’t know who was downstairs, or if it was definitely the same person as last time. I didn’t know if a neighbor had an overnight guest who never got the keys or had found a pizzeria with all-night hours, or whether it was a prank by some passerby. I wasn’t sure if the visitor was buzzing our unit specifically, or if he worked his way through the thin columns of buttons until somebody replied. I wasn’t even sure if he entered the building.
Those questions were all answered the first time I failed to go back to sleep after the buzzer woke me. Our building’s basement laundry is open all hours, and I thought I’d might as well put in a few loads if I was going to be up anyway. When I gathered my improvised bindle of sorted clothes and went to remove the latch from our front door, I smelled something unusual from the hallway. It had a fetid, swampy quality, worse than when some of the college-age renters downstairs smoked pot in the stairwell on cold winter nights. Fresh and stale at once.
I looked through our round peephole and saw a man in the carpeted hallway, either three or four units down — it was hard to judge which — across the hall from ours. His face was in shadow, under a broad-brimmed cowboy hat tilted at a sharp angle. The distortion from the peephole’s forced perspective made him look thin, but I could tell he was broad shouldered even without much muscle hanging on his frame. He just stood there, looking at the door like he was waiting to knock.
My first thought was that he might be homeless and looking for a warm place to spend the night. His clothes seemed too good for that, but I knew we weren’t alone in sometimes bringing nice articles to the charity box down the street if they no longer fit the right way. There was something else about him, though, that knocked that thought from my mind. Something I still can’t articulate, but that I just felt in my core. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but I didn’t want to be the one to make him leave. I gave up on my laundry plan and half watched a movie instead. I checked the peephole over and over during the night; he was still there the first few times, and then he was gone.
I told the building manager about it when I ran into her on the elevator the following afternoon. A few days later, she’d posted a flyer near the mailboxes reminding residents not to let strangers in the building. It was already a general rule, but our location a few blocks from a college campus means units are constantly turning over. Plus not everyone takes the rules seriously.
The buzzer rang again a few nights later. Unable to suppress my curiosity, I stayed up the rest of the night. Our hallway was empty, but I could hear someone moving on the level above ours. It’s a vintage building, and the new carpet only masks the wear on the wooden floorboards. They still creak like the pedals on an old piano, and the man takes heavy steps. I didn’t hear him the next time, but the mere fact that the buzzing stopped seemed to indicate someone let him in. After this kept happening, I called the police and reported the visits. The officer took a report, but admitted she couldn’t do much if the man didn’t commit a crime; it wasn’t breaking and entering if someone kept opening the door for him.
I could have grown nearly as desensitized to the buzzer as Charlie did to the train, what with it happening so often. But while working on a rare overnight deadline, I caught the smell nearby. Stronger than it had been any of the other times. It compelled me to check the peephole again.
The visitor stood right in front of our door. With the well-worn hat still covering so much of his face, I couldn’t tell for sure, but it felt like he was looking back at me through the round glass. With the reverse magnification, I must have looked as small as I felt.
I instinctively took hold of the doorknob, slowly closing my whole hand around it to prevent any noise while I did so. The smell got worse as we both stood there, separated by less than two inches of wood and a thin metal clasp. I couldn’t take my eyes off the peephole, trying to get a good look at the man, but he moved like a trick of the light. He could have been a phantom if he hadn’t grabbed the doorknob himself and tried to turn it, just enough that I could feel the rotation blocked by my grip. We stood like that for hours until around dawn. I briefly looked away to catch a glimpse of the sun through the kitchen window and, when my gaze returned to the peephole, he was gone. It was a few more hours until his scent went away.
I called the police again the next day, but got the same speech about just making sure not to answer the buzzer. Charlie seemed to believe me when I recounted the story, but might have just been humoring me. The building manager definitely was; she asked a few times why I was up all night and how much I’d add to drink. The one question they all asked was what the stranger wanted, and I had to admit I didn’t have anything resembling an answer.
Some nights after I hear the buzzer, I smell the visitor and check the hallway, where he is standing in front of a different door, as if waiting to knock but probably waiting for someone to come out. Even when I don’t see him or hear him moving on another floor, I never go back to sleep on the nights the buzzer sounds. I always sit up worrying that someone has buzzed him in, that he’s roaming our halls in the early hours, and that he’ll be at our door again the instant I let down my guard.
A BEDTIME STORY
Some people fall asleep to their television, to the sounds of nature, or to dead silence at the end of a hectic day. Miranda Garvey always fell asleep to the radio. The music itself actually delayed her full sleep, but the disc jockey's talking between the songs served as a gentle sedative. The evening deejay on WRZP, Vic Fiorini, had a voice equal parts smooth and dryly monotonous. For more than two decades on the Indianapolis airwaves, he'd perfected that overnight jockey's skill of developing a vocal style unobtrusive enough to blend into the background but still animated enough to draw in interested listeners. With the advent of MP3 players and the trend toward automated playlists, only a few radio disc jockeys survived, mostly those who had developed a steady audience over many years. Vic Fiorini fit that description rather well.
Every weeknight, Miranda Garvey went to bed around eleven. On Saturdays, she went out as much as anyone, but the need to leave the house at six for her reverse commute meant early evenings during the week. Her job as a paralegal was fulfilling enough, but it did leave her with a certain amount of stress at night and a need to wind down. Early on, she got in the habit of putting on WRZP, the oldies station, which she found strangely comforting. Probably because it reminded her of her late mother, who never owned a television or a computer but listened to the radio throughout the night, from right after supper until she went upstairs to sleep. Five nights a week, Miranda and her mother listened to Vic Fiorini drop in a tidbit about Herman's Hermits or ask the ninth caller to answer a trivia question about the Dave Clark Five. Listening to him as an adult brought Miranda back to that easier time, before her mother's cancer spread, before she had the turn-of-the-century house all to herself. That sentiment was what kept Vic Fiorini and WRZP as a whole in business. Continuity combined with nostalgia.
Most nights, Vic Fiorini's between-songs material comprised the standard stuff. Trivia, interesting facts about the track or artist, reminders of how old a given song was and of what else happened the year it was released. Miranda Garvey was born too late to remember any of those events firsthand, but the reminders did remind her of stories her mother had told about her own teenage years. Sometimes, the deejay took call-in requests, usually from a husband in need of a last-minute anniversary gesture or a widow or widower wanting to hear the song that defined their missed relationship. Vic Fiorini didn't take as many requests as he used to, since most people owned their favorite songs on tape or compact disc, and those with computers could find digital files of even the most obscure songs for only slightly more than the cost of a phone call to a radio station.
Every so often, Vic Fiorini would tell the listeners stories about his own life. Stories that usually related to music in some way. Most centered on his early radio career, when commercial-free AM was king, when bands passing through Indianapolis would come by the studio to talk about their upcoming show or the single they'd just released. He wasn't much of an interviewer, but that hardly mattered, as a few minutes between songs wasn't enough time to get much insight out of the artists anyway. Still, in the early days of his career, he'd sat across a desk from Dusty Springfield, Eric Burdon, Graham Nash, and a dozen other musicians, and had the photos to prove it. By the time he took over the post-drivetime into overnight shift at WRZP, bands no longer needed to meet with every local station to promote their gigs, and Vic Fiorini was left with his stories.
Miranda Garvey enjoyed the deejay's stories, though they usually eased her into sleep well before their conclusions. She didn't know that Vic Fiorini had first started telling them frequently while she was away at college, when the declining number of call-in requests, a sense that his fun facts had all been overused, and a need to justify keeping on-air talent in lieu of an unpaid autoplay list prompted him to start telling his listeners more about his life in music. The first was about a contact high he experienced at a Quicksilver Messenger Service show in 1966, when he had just moved up from Bean Blossom and had yet to smell the potent musk of copious marijuana. He told his listeners about the time he drove up to Chicago to see the record-exploding promotion that devolved into a riot, the night he waited for hours in vain before realizing Sly Stone had bailed on another gig, and the evening he went to the Slippery Noodle Inn to see a local bluesman, only to catch a surprise set by John Mayall. Vic Fiorini was never much of an active participant in these stories, but he'd been a passive observer to several worthy tales.
Part of what made WRZP so comforting to so many people was that the oldies never changed. The station didn't add hits from the late seventies or early eighties, even as those songs earned the title of oldie on other stations. It never let its playlist deviate into other genres or album cuts that didn't chart. It stuck with hit rock songs from one specific era. For listeners like Miranda Garvey, that entrenched a nostalgia for a specific time in their own lives. For Vic Fiorini, the continuity kept him feeling young, though he'd gone bald long ago and had the considerable belly typical of a man his age. He'd stopped paying attention to new music before his fortieth birthday. The only concerts he attended anymore were nostalgia tours in which several bands from his golden era, usually missing a fair percentage of their original members, played a few hits each. Like his station, and himself, those songs had taken the status of institution, as listening to them eventually became less about the music and more about tradition. The tradition of passing them on to the next generation, just as Miranda Garvey's mother had done. Just as the audiences at the concerts Vic Fiorini attended saw Boomers bringing along their adult children, encouraging them to sing along and, in a few cases, succeeding.
All institutions, despite their best efforts, had to come to an end, and all traditions ultimately faded through time. So it was for Vic Fiorini when the station told him it would soon be changing formats, becoming a de facto jukebox programmed by a computer in New York.
In his last week on the air, Vic Fiorini told some of his most personal stories, the ones he'd kept in reserve throughout his long career and now felt like sharing. On Monday, he talked about his one encounter with a Beatle, when Ringo Starr sent him a handwritten letter thanking him for a fan letter he'd sent after the band's breakup. The next night, he talked about his great musical regrets, the artists he had chances to see live but didn't, with Otis Redding and Gram Parsons the most regretted examples. Wednesday's story involved even more regret, as Vic Fiorini told his listeners about the woman he met during a Jethro Tull set at an outdoor festival, the woman he dated the entire summer of 1971. He knew at the time she wanted to marry him, but he still had oats in need of sowing. He'd meant to look her up many times since, but never knew quite what to say. His stories on his final two nights were more upbeat, with Thursday a recap of the best concerts he'd ever seen, and Friday a heartfelt thank-you message to his loyal listeners, the declining but still significant number who valued consistency and nostalgia, and he implored them to keep the tradition of the music he had devoted his career to alive by passing it on to their children.
As he took off his studio headphones for the final time, Vic Fiorini had no way of knowing that he'd done so himself. He'd never known that the woman he'd left that summer had given birth to his daughter, nor that she'd never told Miranda Garvey who her father was. He didn't know that his old lover listened to him night after night, thinking back on their joint missed opportunity. He had no way of knowing that for several years now, he'd inadvertently read his adult daughter a bedtime story nearly every night, his smooth but monotonous voice fading into the background as her eyes closed, the last thing she heard before drifting off to sleep.
Jeff Fleischer is a Chicago-based author, journalist and editor. His fiction has appeared in more than sixty publications including the Chicago Tribune's Printers Row Journal, Shenandoah, the Saturday Evening Post and So It Goes by the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. He is also the author of non-fiction books including "Votes of Confidence: A Young Person's Guide to American Elections" (Zest Books, 2016 and 2020), "Rockin' the Boat: 50 Iconic Revolutionaries" (Zest Books, 2015), "The Latest Craze: A Short History of Mass Hysterias" (Fall River Press, 2011), and the upcoming "A Hot Mess: How the Climate Crisis is Changing Our World" (Zest Books, 2021).
© 2015