Two Days

Two days,” he thought to himself. Then he repeated the words again, “Two days.”

He said it as if he couldn’t believe it. And really he couldn’t.

It had all happened so fast. It had only been two days ago that he found himself in Dave’s office being blamed for a situation that was not his doing. He was not responsible for every little event that occurred at a live broadcast for KOZZ even though he was the promotions director for the station.

As far as Tommy was concerned the entire sandwich fiasco was a production of the sales department headed by Raina. She was the one who was the boss of that department. However she allowed her sales staff to have weekends off and she ended having to work Saturdays and Sundays herself.

It was just an unfortunate turn of events that she handed off the duties of getting a bunch of sandwiches to a live broadcast to the one person who had more emotional wreckage in his life at the time than anyone else at the station. She should have known better but having the weekend off appeared more important than getting her responsibility taken care of.

Tommy leaned back in the seat of the 737 and thought about the sum of the last four months and how the separation from his wife had nearly ruined him. It caused him to close his eyes and desire to fall asleep, his natural reaction anymore to the very idea of depression. It was feeling he found difficult to fight off. Sleep would spring itself on him without warning at the wrong times.

“That was how depression works,” the mental health doctor told him at the VA clinic.

Yet night after night he turned out the light, Tommy’s world found him wide awake, staring of into the darkness, unable to put away the frightening thoughts of loneliness and anger. Then as the grey stillness of dawn would appear sleep would approach and over take him. Sometimes it would be deep other times light, but rarely restful. It had become a habit that had led to near exhaustion.

That’s how it came to be on the Saturday that Tommy was supposed to pick up the sandwiches and take them to the live broadcast. He was late by twenty minutes and arrived just as the announcer was starting her first live set.

Tommy stayed until the sandwiches were gone. He left only because he had to be on the air back at the station himself at 2 p.m.

He sensed something was wrong once he came through the back door. Nobody wanted to look him directly in the eye. Tommy was already in a sour mood and this just added to the mix.

It didn’t take long for Raina to come and demand his presents in Dave’s office. It was just at 10 a.m. and Jim, who was the program director of KOZZ was off the air, so Tommy realized what was about to happen.

Deep down he felt a sense of relief that he was going to be let off the hook for this job. He had grown tired of being yelled at for one thing or the other.

As he walked casually down the length of the hallway he recalled how Jim had got up set at him for not get tickets to a show for on air give away when one of the sales staff did.

He thought to himself, “No more of that at least!”

“Have a seat,” Dave told him.

Tommy refused.

“Now if you’re canning me make it quick so I can go,” Tommy said.

Dave looked surprised as his eyes darted at Jim and then over to Raina.

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

Tommy just stood there silently. However, Raina was the one who could not stand the quiet. She launched into Tommy.

“You were late getting those sandwiches to the remote!” she shouted.

Still Tommy said nothing.

Finally Dave replied, “I told you that if you screwed up one more time I’d have to fire you.” He leaned back in his chair.

Tommy could tell he was uncomfortable with the silence.

“Do you have anything to say?” he asked.

“Can I go now?” Tommy asked.

Yet in his mind he was calling both the short little man behind the desk and his flunky Raina all sorts of names.

Then Jim spoke up, “I still want him on the air; he’s one of my best jocks.”

“Sure,” was all that Dave came back with.

“So,” Tommy asked, “are we done here?”

“Yes,” Dave answered.

“Good,” shot Tommy in response as he turned and walked out the door.

It did not take very much time for him to clear out his desk. He had already been moved to the smallest one in the three person office.

Tommy grabbed a postal box and started loading his personal possessions into it. As he did this, he thought, chuckling to himself, “No one is around to make sure I don’t steal anything.”

This thought tumbled into other thoughts.

He remembered how he had gotten into an argument with one of the sales persons for the companies sports station. The man had come up and demanded that Tommy make him a box for an on-air give away. This was on the same day that Raina had thirty of the same kind of boxes going out and Tommy was trying to put the finishing touches on a station concert.

He had absolutely no help and he felt frustrated. It did not help that this particular salesman refused to follow every direction ever handed down by the sales manager, station manager or corporate attorney.

So when Tommy said no to his demand, an argument followed.

Finally having had enough, Tommy looked him squarely in the face and said, “I’m not your nigger and I refuse to be treated as such.”

He had measured his words out in such a way that they would make this man understand how he was treating Tommy, for he knew the salesman was from some place in the southern part of the nation.

Shortly after having used the ethnic slur Tommy was called into Dave’s office and dressed down for being so inappropriate.

“It was not inappropriate,” he told Dave. “Using the “N” word is inappropriate. It only is had I used it on a black men. I’m white. I used it on myself to get that SOB to back off. Next time I’ll just smack him up long side the head.”

“You keep talking like that and I’ll fire you right, now!” Dave shouted.

“Yeah, but you won’t fire a guy who’ll put your stations legally at risk, right?” Tommy countered. Dave stared at Tommy.

“Get outta here,” he finally told Tommy.

Tommy pulled the three keys off of his key ring and slipped them into an envelope. As he did this he let his mind wonder back to the number of times he had gotten himself into scrapes with the sales managers and sales persons.

He reflected on how his supervisor Megan spent her days on the internet, emailing her boyfriend in California and how he had taken on the responsibility of acquiring on air give away for the country station.

He sighed as he placed the envelope in the top drawer of his now empty desk. He pulled the office door closed behind him since there was nobody in at the moment at he exited the building to his truck.

“Two days ago,” he thought one more time as he looked out the aircrafts window.

He was headed for someplace in Alaska, a place he could not pronounce or even find on a map yet.

It was just two days ago that he had grown fed up with the radio broadcasting business and retired. He called Jim at home right after his shift and told him he had accepted a position from his cousins and was leaving right away.

That’s how quickly it had come about for Tommy. He didn’t tell any one that it was a temporary position, just long enough for his cousins to visit everyone in the 48 continuous states.

He looked at the dark grey waters, “I hope I haven’t made a mistake.”

The gray waters suited his mood just fine.