Bare Bones

by Bobby Bones

  It didn’t stop there. The next morning, it was on the front page of the Austin Statesman. “We are taking this very seriously,” police spokesman Kevin Buchman told the Statesman. “People at convenience stores, banks and other places of business are on heightened alert, and some business owners have been known to carry weapons. Trying to pull off a prank endangered the life of not only himself but anybody else who might have been in the store.”

  It must have been the slowest news day in the history of news, because the Associated Press picked it up. And anytime the AP picks up a story, it goes to everyone who subscribes to the newswire service all over the world. Dusty had to release a written statement: “KISS FM does not endorse behavior that may endanger the public or our employees, and we take these matters very seriously.”

  The story continued to grow as it hit CNN, Yahoo’s news site, and every outlet imaginable. While watching a late-night talk show, I saw a segment on stupid news—and there we were.

  It wasn’t just late-night audiences who were laughing at us. Every other radio show in Austin and beyond mocked us and spun the story out until it turned into Lunchbox robbing a convenience store while wearing a ski mask, and the both of us getting fired. Lunchbox hadn’t robbed anyone or worn a ski mask—and we weren’t fired. Not yet, at least.

  We were, however, suspended without pay until further notice. KISS FM’s management was furious with me. As one week of suspension turned into two weeks, I had no clue what was going to happen. There were court dates, attorney meetings, and backroom dealings with radio executives while I was left to spend all day sitting on my couch, growing what I could of a beard and contemplating what a moron I had been.

  It was a terrible idea. A terrible idea. Not because I was probably going to get fired, but because Lunchbox could have died. The convenience store clerk could have pulled a gun out and shot him. How had I not thought that through before? Had I been so concerned about stunts and ratings that I was willing to put another person’s life in jeopardy? What a selfish jerk.

  The truth is that most of the kinds of stunts done on the radio have an element of danger to them. Like I said, what makes something go from being a funny bit to a bad idea is if something bad happens. That’s it. Years after this, some radio DJs I know at the local station in Sacramento held a contest in which selected listeners competed to see how much water they could drink without peeing. Now, this is a bit that a thousand radio stations have done. But in this case, the twenty-eight-year-old mother of three children who won the contest was found dead of water intoxication a few hours later. Her husband was eventually awarded $16.5 million in a wrongful death lawsuit he brought against the radio station.

  It’s never anyone’s intention for someone to get hurt in these gags. I knew it wasn’t mine. But even if Lunchbox didn’t get hurt, I’d probably ruined our careers. During our suspension, we knew it was bad while playing golf. (Now that I was making a smooth 50K a year, I felt like I needed to learn golf. You know, like the other millionaires.) While Lunchbox and I were playing, we overheard one of the men teeing up before us say to the other, “Did you hear about those radio DJs that robbed the store?”

  Lunchbox and I looked at each other in disbelief.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Even old people know about this?”

  My mistake spanned all audiences and all platforms.

  In that time, I went to a really negative place. It was awful. I slept on the couch when I slept at all. In one stupid move, I had gone from a celebrated young radio personality on the rise to a typical twenty-three-year-old doing the kind of dumb thing twenty-three-year-olds do. I was convinced I was going to be fired and truly believed I would never get a job in radio again.

  I was so depressed that for the first time since my grandma passed away during my junior year of college, I finally mourned her. I didn’t have any family members I could talk to about what was going on. My sister and I had fallen out of touch. She had her own personal drama happening as well as a baby, so we weren’t close at the time. And my mom continued to struggle with her addictions. If I ever did speak to her on the phone it was because she needed something from me. Plus, my grandmother and I had been closer than my mom and I ever were.

  That’s why when I was a little kid I was always terrified she was going to die. She wasn’t sick or even that old, but I was scared of losing her. Preoccupied with this thought, one day I asked my grandma what happens after you die. A very religious woman, she believed that if you were good you went to heaven; if you were bad you went to hell. She also said that the dead can reappear on earth as angels to protect the living. Now, it was hard for me to believe in angels running around, since I was the kind of kid who was told at five that Santa Claus was a fake just so I understood why there weren’t presents. But I would have believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and anything else if it ensured I’d never lose my grandma. So I asked her, when she was dying, if there really was some sort of system for reaching back to the living, could she please give me a sign. “You will know,” she said.

  There was a moment during my suspension in Austin when I didn’t think I could get any lower. I was in turmoil. Trying to figure out what I was supposed to do as a human being on this planet, I had never felt more alone. My entire identity was (and still is, for the most part) my job. And this is coming from a person who had spent most of his life alone.

  “Okay, Grandma,” I said out loud inside my empty apartment. “We had this deal that if you were out there, you would reach out to me in some way. And you haven’t.”

  All of a sudden (meaning anywhere from five to forty-five seconds later; I didn’t time it), my guitar, which had belonged to my grandmother and had been leaning against the wall, came crashing to the ground. It was an old cheap instrument that has since fallen apart, but I had inherited it as a keepsake from my grandma after she died. I’m a bad guitar player, but when I played on her guitar I was reminded of how she taught herself well enough to play in church. She wasn’t a musician but got to the point where everyone knew her as one. So if there was going to be one object that embodied my grandma, it would have been that guitar—and the damn thing fell over!

  The logical part of me doesn’t believe the ghost of my grandmother pushed that guitar over to send me a sign. (I have a weird thing about ghosts—whether it’s my grandmother or anyone else I have known who died, I don’t want them watching over me, because that means they’re seeing when I go to the bathroom, pick my nose, hook up with a girl—or, mostly, hook up with myself. If they see all that, I’d prefer they didn’t exist!) But wasn’t it really strange that her guitar fell over right after I called to her? The idea freaked me out so much that I inspected the apartment to see if there was something that could have tipped the guitar over—the air conditioner turning on or a gust of wind through an open window. But there was nothing.

  I completely don’t “believe” that it was her, but there’s a part of me that can’t write it off completely. There’s nothing to convince me either way, so I have to make peace with it. What I believe is that I’m going to do as much good for others as I can, and then we’ll just see what happens.

  A brief time after the panty hose incident, all the charges against Lunchbox were dropped. In the end, we were stupid but we didn’t break the law in any way. Shortly after the legal resolution, I got the call to come into the office to meet with Dusty, with no hint as to what kind of conversation was going to take place. The Imperial March music from Star Wars played in my head.

  “Issue an apology,” he said. “You’re not fired. You’ll start back on Monday.”

  We were back on the air.

  I was relieved, grateful, and deeply humbled. All of that took the show to a new level. I was a better person because of the huge lesson I had learned, and that made the show better.

  While we had been off the air, our getting fired was a news story. When it was announced we were coming back, the news story was we were not g
etting fired. Our show before the panty hose stunt had been only moderately successful—probably ranked ninth or tenth in Austin—but it was not anywhere near the top. On the day I came back on air, we had more listeners than ever before tuning in to hear me make an apology. People love apologies.

  They are crazy for them. It doesn’t matter what you are apologizing for—or if they know what you’re apologizing for. Much later, when I was already working in Nashville, I did a whole social media campaign of me apologizing. For what? Who knew. I told the people on my show, “Let’s do this bit. It’ll blow up.” I shot a video of me saying, “I just want to come on and say I’m really sorry for what happened. I should have never done that. I just hope you guys can forgive me . . .”

  This amorphous apology garnered thousands of comments. Thousands. Some people wanted to know, “What did he do?” “What happened?” But soon people were assigning great meaning to it. “That’s really great of you.” “It is much appreciated.” Taking responsibility for the bad things you’ve done by admitting you’re at fault is seen as a virtue, even if no one has a clue what you’re talking about.

  So lots of curious new listeners tuned in to The Bobby Bones Show and heard me say I was really sorry for the panty hose stunt, how it was very stupid of me, and that I’d never do anything like it again—and they wound up hanging around. In the next three months our show climbed to number one, where it pretty much remained for the next decade.

  It was amazing to think how close I had come to ruining my life at twenty-three years old. We had actually considered sending Lunchbox to make a deposit into the bank with panty hose over his head. To this day it makes me sick just thinking about that. Okay, truth time: Lunchbox was on his way to a bank, where he also planned to wear the panty hose, when he was arrested at the gas station! Thankfully, I had a great guy for a general manager. He didn’t take a reactionary stance and call for my head but instead gave me a second chance. For that I am forever grateful, which I showed by naming my dog after him.

  Now, anyone who has listened to my show for a minute knows my dog is the great love of my life. I love animals and wanted a dog, but it had to be small because I lived in a tiny apartment and had no money. The Staffordshire bull terrier breed was perfect because they are small, but unlike with a Pomeranian or Chihuahua I could still be a self-respecting man (at least in my mind) walking one. The dog I adopted was the runt of a litter of Staffordshire bull terriers from a puppy mill. He was really too small to take away from his mother, but because the breeders had been busted, all the dogs were separated. When I got him, he was so small he could fit in my hand. There was no doubt what his name had to be. “I named my firstborn after you,” I told Dusty. “He just happens to be a dog.”

  BONES BARED

  “Hey, are you the guy from the radio?” a pretty girl with a big smile said.

  It was a regular old Saturday in 2005 and I was in Culver’s, a burger and custard chain, eating dinner solo while I waited to have my tires replaced at the shop right up the street. To be fair, new tires or not, I’d have probably been eating alone anyway. I do most things alone. Eat. Go to the movies. Make love. You know, all the stuff you wish someone else was participating in.

  Anyway, the woman standing in front of my table said my name, startling me midbite, since—it might shock some of you to learn—I’m not used to pretty girls coming up to me.

  “Yeah,” I said in a reply that was typical of my eloquence.

  She then offered me some coupons for free ice cream, which at first I thought were something she wanted me to purchase. And I probably would have, if it included some of her company for the next few minutes, because even though I do everything alone, that doesn’t mean I want to. But no, she was offering them to me for free. And that was it. We exchanged nice-to-meet-yous, and I had some small pieces of paper that each promised me one free ice cream cone.

  That was Amy, now my radio cohost and one of my best friends. She is the person who, at this point in my life, probably knows more about me than anyone else in the world. She is quite possibly the friendliest person I’ve ever met. But to be fair, she did get those ice cream coupons for free, because her friend’s family owned the store.

  The next time I saw Amy, who I still didn’t know as Amy, was not long after at the Barton Creek Mall, where we were holding an event for listeners. The purpose of our being there was to see if we could find someone to add to the show’s mix. We weren’t really looking for a new cohost. It was more of a let’s-see-if-there’s-anyone-interesting-out-there kind of thing where tons of people usually showed up. As the night went on, we met a lot of cool folks, but none who really stood out. We were about to wrap it up when Amy, the same girl from Culver’s, appeared. She hadn’t been standing in line for hours and didn’t have some kind of bit planned. In fact, as I learned later from her friends, she had to be convinced to show up at the mall after her job was over that day. But she said hi again, and we talked for a little while. And then we went our separate ways.

  I didn’t offer her a trial on the show, but there was something warm and appealing about Amy that stood out from the crowd. The truth is, the event was sort of bogus, since I only ever hire my friends. If I’m going to spend as much time with other people in such a tiny space as you have to in order to do a radio show, I need to know them, like them, and trust them. Amy wasn’t my friend, but I wanted her to be. So I set out to see if we could become friends. Over the next five months or so, I friend-auditioned her. We went to dinner occasionally or caught a movie, including the latest Pixar release, Cars. Our outings were always something silly like that, so they wouldn’t be misconstrued in any way as a date. We were both single, but I was only in it for friendship business. Is that a term? Not sure, but Amy sure succeeded in it.

  Months later I invited Amy to sit in on the show. This time, though, I was inviting my friend, a Texas A&M alum and granite salesperson whom I met after she offered me coupons for free ice cream at Culver’s. She nailed it and I offered her a job.

  I wasn’t wrong about my instinct: listeners took to her instantly, and our rapport was so good, many began to speculate that we were in love with each other. Okay, here would be a good place to clear up any misconceptions. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANYTHING ROMANTIC WITH US, EVER. NOT ONCE. After Amy started on the show, she got married to the dude she was actually in love with—a pilot who served twelve years in the air force. (So yeah, even if I did like her like that, I wouldn’t have had a chance anyway.)

  Amy and I are just good friends. That’s really it. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t know it was true, because she and I are the exception to the rule about male-female relationships. See, a girl can be a friend to a guy. No problem. She can have an absolutely platonic friendship with a guy who is good looking, bad looking, funny, nerdy, foreign, blond. Doesn’t matter. Women have the awesome ability to just be awesome. And friendly. They can be your friend.

  This is not the case for guys. Guys cannot be legitimate friends with a female who is attractive to them. Now, guys, you may be reading this saying, “This is such crap, I have a female friend.” Before I continue writing, let me remind you that I have a penis. Not anything to brag about, but I am a dude. So I know how we work, how we think, how we’re wired. At least I know how I think and how all my friends think. The evidence for my next proclamation is rather substantial—and it’s not pleasant, but here it is. If a guy isn’t attracted to a girl, he can be her friend. If a guy is attracted to a girl, he is just waiting for her to have sex with him. There can be friendship inside of that. It’s not just about sex. But every dude with a female friend who is hot is just waiting . . . and don’t buy it if he refuses to admit it. If you’re married, it’s all good. He’ll wait. If he’s married, cool, he’ll still wait (or he won’t). If you’re both in a relationship, the time just isn’t right yet. Or it may never be. But eventually, just maybe, it will be.

  As soon as Amy joined the show, everyone loved her. I mean EVE
RYONE LOVED (LOVES) AMY. It’s annoying sometimes. She really is that great. Asdlkfhal;sfjdslf;ja. That shows you how annoyed I am.

  The only person who did not take to Amy was Lunchbox. He really didn’t like her. And she really didn’t like him, either. Just as he’s an incredibly loyal guy, Lunchbox is equally territorial. He couldn’t stand someone new—particularly a girl—homing in on his turf. It quickly seemed like his new job description was to be mean to Amy. If he wasn’t making misogynist jokes, then he was trying to block her out of segments on the show. Literally, not letting her talk. If Amy got anywhere near one of his beloved subjects—like sports—he verbally trampled her. He didn’t want someone barging in on his turf, which I understand because I’m pretty touchy myself about that kind of thing. But Lunchbox took it to such an extreme that Amy was miserable. In the early period of her joining the show, she cried a lot and almost quit a few times—including right after the now-infamous candy incident.

  It was Valentine’s Day 2008 when someone sent a tube filled with chocolates to the office. We started chatting about who the box was addressed to, with Amy saying it was for all of us and me arguing that it had my name on it. But what started off as friendly banter about a harmless subject quickly morphed into us ganging up on Amy. Then Lunchbox went into an area of particular vulnerability for her: food. A number of times on air, Amy had openly discussed her history with bulimia earlier in her life.

  “Do you see how angry Amy gets when you take food away from her?” Lunchbox said, taking the conversation into hostile territory.

  It was one step too far. And we go too far sometimes on the show; we are normal humans. Sometimes things get out of hand. But this was just really mean.

  “Eat the stamp,” Lunchbox said to Amy. “Eat that address label so you know who it was really sent to.”