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came to SF in the late fifties.”
“Right on,” he said, then added, “though that’s also pretty familiar turf.”
“Yeah, of course, sure,” I said quickly. “You’re right. I’m still looking for the angle.” It had been a while since I’d floated a creative idea to Brady, or to anyone, for that matter, and I was breaking rule number one: Know your story before you pitch it.
“You might just want to give this some time,” he said. “Let the dust settle.”
“What dust?”
“Um, your dad dying? You might be, you know, too close to this material?”
I could hear him picking his words carefully. I felt transparent. “No, it’s not like that,” I said. “This has been a long time coming. I already have distance on it.”
“Well, let me know what you come up with. You know I can’t wait to start something up with you again.” Brady and I had always worked together effortlessly, the way automobile drivers merging into a single lane know when to pause and when to proceed, but over the past six months, we’d been on completely different paths. After City Snapshot , Brady, a station employee, jumped right into another show; as a contracted employee, I was let go. We had big hopes for our next collaboration—national hopes, This American Life hopes—once we, once I, figured out what shape this might take. Before we got off the phone, Brady told me how crazy-busy his life was, not just at KQED, and not just because he and Annie were looking for a place to live, but also because of a new side project, working with some guys I’d never heard him mention before, helping them set up a music website. “Streaming audio content. Indie stuff from all over North America. It’s very right now,” he said. “It could be huge.”
That next morning I woke feeling the weight of every bone, zonked-out from smoking too much of my new purchase the night before. Getting myself out of bed took some convincing. The world was expecting exactly nothing from me. I lumbered around my kitchen, spilling a bag of coffee beans on the floor, jarring my elbow on the countertop as I swept up the mess, later knocking my first filled mug across the table. I remembered AJ laughing when I knocked over my oatmeal. I was a one-man danger zone.
My apartment was only four small rooms (one with a couch and desk, one with a bed and dresser, a kitchen with a table, a bathroom with a good-sized tub), but I found endless distractions within these walls—one of my curses as a freelancer. That morning, I watched an hour of housewifey TV. I unpacked the luggage still parked outside my closet. I pruned and repotted houseplants, looking neglected after my time away. I made myself balance my checkbook, the pathetic bottom line reminding me that my last freelance job, producing a few promotional spots for the smaller of San Francisco’s two public radio stations, had ended before Christmas.
So I called Bob Flick. When I was hard up for money (that is, more hard up than usual), I took temporary assignments with a company called New World Transcripts. Bob was the manager there, a gregarious, efficient dork. I liked him, but I hated the work—transcribing videotaped interviews for various market-research firms, listening for hours to earnest consumers trying to put into words exactly what they sought in a cordless phone, a breath mint, a cheese-flavored cracker—but since I typed ninety-five words a minute, it was easy money. Bob said he would send some work my way—a new client who had combined shampoo and conditioner in one bottle. “You rinse out the first application,” Bob explained, “and leave the second one in.” Woo-hoo! Well, it was something to tide me over until my brother-in-law sent that ten-thousand-dollar check my way.
The clock read 11:50 when I finally remembered Colleen. Friday at noon was our standing lunch date. We would meet at Café Frida, in the Mission, where neither the food nor the coffee was especially
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