Bare Bones by Bobby Bones

said. “I’m standing on the toilet so no one sees my feet, so no one knows there’s an extra body here.”
    Gilligan hid in the bathroom and waited. So did I, by the road where people at the station drove out of when they were done. At a little after 11 P . M . I saw T. J. Mack drive right out. Gilligan did what he had been taught to do—he went into the radio station while it was on air, got on the radio station phone, and called my cell phone. Then he took their music three-quarters of the way down (if it goes silent, the engineer gets a call or alarm) and he turned me all the way up on the air. Lastly, he locked the door and left the station.
    True to the original plan, I didn’t start talking until I was back in front of the station and he had jumped in the car. Then the fun began as we cruised around Little Rock, broadcasting live from my cell phone on our competitor’s radio airwaves.
    â€œYou don’t mess with Bobby Bones at Q100,” I said over a Celine Dion song that had been playing. “Everyone listen to Q100! Everyone listen to Q100!”
    â€œLet me talk. Let me talk,” Gilligan said, grabbing the phone. “You don’t f—”
    I tried to pull the phone back in time before he could say what he wanted to, which was, “You don’t f— with the Bobby Bones show on Q100.” But I didn’t get it back before he dropped the F-bomb on a Top 40 station.
    Finally someone working in the building got a key and back into the radio station, but not until after we had broadcast for a while. “For a while” felt like three hours while we were driving around. It was probably only a few minutes until they turned the music back up, and Celine Dion drowned us out. Three hours, three minutes. It mattered little. Victory was ours!
    Until the next day. I was called into the program director’s office at Q100 first thing in the morning. I was told I should be fired and that if I ever did anything like that again, I would never be able to work anywhere in this industry. I didn’t get fired, but I got in a whole lot of trouble—trouble that took me beyond my little dreams of living in Little Rock and to a bigger job than I could have ever imagined.

STUPID PANTY HOSE TRICKS
    Six months after arriving in Little Rock, I was moving again. This time, though, I was moving out of Arkansas for the first time in my life.
    Hijacking our competitor’s radio broadcast might have put my job in jeopardy, but it launched my career. It didn’t make any waves in the general media, but the trade magazines for the radio industry picked up the story with splashy headlines like RADIO ENGAGES IN GUERRILLA WARFARE . All I did was wait in the car for Gilligan, but the articles made me into the Che Guevara of radio.
    There was one man, it turns out, who read those pieces and decided, “That’s exactly the kind of person I’d like to work for me.” Jay Shannon, who programmed KISS 96.7 FM in Austin, Texas, called me up a couple of weeks after the now-infamous incident and, without an interview, offered me nights at the station.
    That’s how I found myself heading to Austin for a new job. I was nervous, because I’d never even been to Austin before I moved there. I hadn’t been anywhere. The sum total of my travels were that vacation I took in high school with Evan’s family, my summer roofing with Uncle Bub in Kansas City, and a road trip I took in college with a buddy to Chicago to see a baseball game. We were both huge Cubs fans, so we saved up money, drove thirteen hours to watch a game at Wrigley Field, and then turned right around and drove thirteen hours back to school. That was the farthest I’d ever been. I’d never lived outside of the state—in fact, I never lived more than an hour away from Mountain Pine.
    When Jay called to offer me the job, he explained that his night guy was leaving and that although I