All Skanks Considered

NPR is so goddamn sexy. The dusky voices of overly educated women roll their sensual love of words around subjects unabashedly obscure or inaccessible. The breathy and bordering on pornographic alto modulation of Terri Gross, the icy cold business tones of Michelle (MEEchelle) Norris, the rolling and kind tomboy lilt of Melissa Block, these are the voices that play when I drive my Scout into the desert or when I have noise in the background while I slave away on homework. I haven’t seen pictures of them. I don’t want to.

It started in elementary school. I would listen to NPR while I built things out of legos to be taken out back and blown apart with a semi-steady supply of recreational explosives brought in from family out of state. Their voices colored my perceptions of what a woman should be at least as much as the hyper self sufficiency of the Old Church’s women did. These women used big words and abstract concepts. And they said it all in a slow and sensual way that would never fly on the screaming loud morning shows of commercial radio.

I listened to an NPR Neils Halstead session a while back. You probably don’t know who Neils is if you’re not into footgazers-turned-folk singers, but the female host of the show sure did. She may have been doing dirty things to herself while she flirted consipcuously with Mr. Halstead. I shared the session with a used to be carnal friend of mine who heard the same ridiculous lust in her voice. So me and the friend discussed our mutual fantasies about these soft spoken nerds free on our FM dial. Then of course we got into the subject of role playing.

See, I have heard from reliable sources* that some women, if they are comfortable with the guy and themselves, love role playing. Some women get off on the teacher/student relationship simulacrum. Some women enjoy the picked up in a bar relationship simulacrum. Some women enjoy those Rennesaince Fairs for pretty strange reasons. Take it from a guy known to wear a kilt**.

So, my role playing fantasies (created with help from aforementioned friend):

1. I am an eclectic jazz crooner with a beard. She is a postgrad with a job her parents wanted her to pass up. I have an old pawnshop Eko archtop, beaten and weathered by age and by love and by the rounded hard sound of Italian oak trussed by nickel wrapped ribbon wound steel. She tells me she is a big fan, from back in those college days she misses and the student loans she ran up before a few years of responsibility had found her. I tell her I dropped out of highschool and hitchhiked and stowed away to Spain and slept at the tomb of Andres Segovia, freezing and clutching at a bottle of Rioja. When I awoke, an old maestro took me in his tutelage/ninja coven. With steel resolve and the ghost of Django, he taught me how to kill a man with my bare hands and what the Dorian and Phrygian modes never could about guitar. The host would gasp as I hit the third inversion of a C#Maj7 with a chromatic walk up to simplistic suspended sixth of the Iberian take on the F major. And of course she would know some huge word to use to describe it to loyal listeners on listener supported WKSC (of course this is back East somewhere).

Scene.

2. She accidentally knocked her car into park while driving. She had to get help to push it into a parking lot. The car halts and now she cannot get it to start. She is terrified to call her old man. He is an asshole about simple mistakes. So she calls car talk, where I have taken over for the day. So I tell her: It’s fine. Mistakes happen. People have done worse. I have done worse. I tell her: disconnect the battery. The fuel pump safety cutoff has been activated by the jarring, more than likely. She tells me she will. She hesitates to get off the phone. I know why. I know she wants to keep listening to me talk and not think about the old man she has to go home to. The one with the beer gut and the expectations of her she can’t match. She wants to hear me tell her about her machine. She wants to hear about all these complex components she has never considered before. We joke and laugh. Then she turns to see that she is, in fact in the parking lot of my NPR branch. I tell her I know where she can get some coffee.

Scene.

3. The book I am actively not writing gets me onto Fresh Air. With Terri Gross.

Scene.

*Six thousand guys on a boat in middle of nowhere for months at a time eventually run out of normal people things to talk about. Trust me ladies, if you are married to a sailor, his shipmates know all about your closet freakiness. And your husband knows about all the other girls’ quirks. I’m sure that goes back as long as men have went down to the sea.

**I can wear the hell out of a kilt. And there are a lot of women with some odd Highland fantasies they probably wouldn’t admit to. Or don’t even know about.