Sunday, May 6, 2018

Pique

pique
verb, transitive. To stimulate interest or curiosity; to feel irritated or resentful.
Also a noun, as "a fit of pique."

Alice was at a loss to recall what had piqued her interest in the late-night talk show first: had she tuned into it by accident one night after the NPR affilitate stopped broadcasting jazz and went off the air at midnight? More likely, she had walked to the back of the shop and heard the warm baritone voice issuing from the pressman’s radio: “I’m Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast A.M.” She had heard that name; heard about the show. After she brewed her tea, she had returned to her desk and fiddled with her radio until she found it, then sat down, resumed her work, and listened until she finished her shift and left the office.

That was when she still worked graveyard shift. By the time she discovered Bell’s show, she had been working those hours for about ten years. Sometimes she had the company of the pressman, sometimes not. He was the boss’ brother-in-law and had a lot of freedom. He was also even more of a recluse than she was.

Alice loved her hours. She wasn’t very sociable, and preferred to be able to arrive at the shop, clock in and spend the next eight hours producing something. The phone rang rarely, and when it did, it was usually for her. She ate at her desk. She kept the radio on all the time she was there. At midnight, she had been in the habit of changing from NPR to a rock oldies station. After she found out where Bell’s show aired, she began to switch to it instead. The third night she did so, a caller regaled him with a story about a terrible date she had had. When she finished, Art asked her a few questions, then thanked her and announced, “Everyone who is on hold, hang up. I’m only going to take calls from people who want to talk about ‘Dates from Hell!’”

And he did. What followed was two hours of the most outlandish and frightening stories Alice had ever heard. The most riveting was told by a woman who had probably gone out with a serial killer, who had kept herself from panicking and thereby gotten away from him. After that show, Alice was hooked.

Since she kept the same hours on weekends, she would listen to Coast to Coast A.M. on Saturday and Sunday nights at home. It was the most entertaining era of her career. She listened avidly to Art interview callers about hauntings, alien abductions and a vast array of other topics that skirted the fringes of science and ordinary experience. She visited the show’s website regularly. After the first few weeks, she had to bring herself up short and remind herself that everything she was hearing couldn’t possibly be true, and should be taken with healthy skepticism. She was well-educated and not prone to dismissing her learning casually, but Art made those arcane subjects so much fun to think about!

Art Bell made the last few years Alice worked graveyard shift a delight, even though she had enjoyed it before she had found him. It was with deep sadness when she learned, nearly twenty years after she had first listened to his show, that Art passed away on April 13, 2018. Friday the thirteenth. As she uttered a silent prayer that the next phase of Art’s life would be as wonderful and fulfilling for him as his stay on Earth had been, she couldn’t help thinking how ironic the date of his death was. It was almost as if he had planned it.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

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