Radio RadioShack
Radio RadioShack
By Martin Franks
When I was asked to leave East Iowa Community College the fall semester 1983, I was lost. It was a dark time. My chances of getting an associate degree were, “in the shittter,” so to speak. There wasn’t a community college in all of Iowa, let alone the Quad Cities, that would admit me after the incident at EICC. My life ruined at seventeen years-old! An associate degree was a giant rung up the ladder to obtaining my dreams: a late-seventies American muscle car (or at the very least a gold Nissan 280ZX), a steady supply of decent weed, and a cool girlfriend. Without an associate degree I was on a one way trip to Losersville.
I’ve never told anyone why I left EICC because it’s a little embarrassing. When anyone asked, I would just say the college wasn’t right for me or the professors who taught me weren't cool. Which isn’t the truth because Mr. Kowalowsky was totally cool. He turned me on to jazz, which before that I had always thought was a bunch of guys fooling around. And there weren’t any lyrics which always freaked me out. Mr. Kowalowsky would throw these awesome parties at his house where he would blast Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, all the greats. He was also into Brazilian jazz like João Gilberto and even the more commercial Brasil ’66, which I still love today. Check out either of their takes on Bim Bom or Agua de Beber sometime. Both of those tunes smoke. Mr. K always had the greatest weed at his parties too. I asked him once for his connection and he said he knew a guy who came in once a month from Chicago but only dealt in quarter pounds. Man, I couldn’t handle that weight. Back then I was lucky enough to put together enough scratch for a half ounce. But at EICC it didn’t matter, because at Mr. K’s parties the weed flowed like water and he never minded if you took home the roaches.
Mr. K was Kool, that’s what we all use to say. I never knew a professor could be cool.
And the reason I couldn’t keep going to these great parties? The reason why I had been kicked out of EICC? The reason my dreams were slipping right through my fingers? I got busted for a bag of weed I got busted for a bag a weed. Yep go figure. And the embarrassing thing is, that it wasn’t even mine. That’s what really stings. It wasn’t my weed. It wasn’t. Now, on just about any other day the campus police could have looked in my backpack and found weed that was mine, but this particular day I had no weed, for real. I was completely dry. And so were all the Quad Cities as far as I knew. Look, when you haven’t had weed for a few weeks and a guy says he’ll give you a few joints if you carry his bag of weed around for a day, you don’t ask why, you just ask “How high?” Next thing I know I’ve been offered the choice of leaving campus on my own or having them call the real police to escort me out. I asked them if I could at least get the weed back if left quietly, but I guess the dean liked weed too because he kept it. After that I was added to the school’s “Do Not Readmit” list, which wasn’t exactly the kind of Dean’s List I wanted to make, but I let mom think I got on the good one anyway.” Mr. K, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that I never told anyone it was your weed. I took the pinch and I said nothing, and I will take that secret to the grave.
So, my part time job at RadioShack became full time. I was sad that I was no longer a college man, but I took this as a challenge and that 1972 GTO wasn’t gonna buy itself. When life serves you shit, you make shit-aid.
Urv Upland was the manager of the downtown Davenport branch of RadioShack. He loved me. He was either forty or seventy, I couldn’t tell. He was a slight man with greasy silver hair combed flat to his head and I wanted to tell him about a product called Head and Shoulders. He had the worst dandruff I’d ever seen, each shoulder a mini snow-covered Mt. Fuji. He also wore a houndstooth sport coat that was two sizes too big and made him look both thinner and
older than he was. I was the son he never had, although I think he did have a son that he never talked about. There was this young guy that came around once a month and collected an envelope filled with money. Urv didn’t know I knew, and I didn’t want to embarrass him by knowing that he supports his son. Heck, I wish my dad stuck around long enough to give me money. Urv was just a generous guy with everyone.
The number one selling products in our store were those police scanner radios. Man, we couldn’t keep those things in stock. We also sold a lot of parts, that I found out later you could make a cool stun gun out of, depending on your assembly.
Our location was robbed at least twice a month. In fact, expect for a few stores in Chicago, we were the nation’s most often robbed Radio Shack. We never had much money in the register, so they mostly robbed us of the police radios and stereo speakers. Somehow the robbers knew when we would get shipments. Maybe they saw the delivery truck pull up, I don’t know, but two days after every delivery, four guys in ski masks came in with shotguns and took everything they could. It got to be a routine and Urv didn’t mind at all. In fact, he would joke around with the guys and he always offered them coffee. After the third or fourth time we were robbed, I stopped being terrified of having a shotgun two inches from my brain and usually just took a little nap on the floor while they cleaned the place out.
The store was located in a kind of a rough area of Davenport, on East River Drive right near the Mississippi River. Ladies of the evening walked the streets in front of the store. The problem was they weren’t just there in the evenings, they were there all day, so we didn’t get much family traffic. Urv didn’t mind though. He was even nice to them. He always offered them coffee and a place to get out of the rain. Often, he would have them in his office, sometimes two or three of them at a time.
I got to know a few of them and they all had tragic stories to tell, but they all had hearts of gold, even the real scary ones and one that technically wasn’t female, which wasn’t as accepted then. But hey, I didn’t care then and I don’t now. Whatever your deal is, it’s okay with me. Whenever they hung around the store they would always tease me about being a, “college boy.” I didn’t want to tell them I didn’t go to college anymore as I liked them thinking I was smart. Without reliving too much, let’s just say I ended up making love with a lot of them. Okay, all of them. Even the scary ones and the one that wasn’t technically female. It all happened in the break room in the back of the store, and I never paid a dime. I’m not bragging, I was just broke and they never asked for any money anyway, so it seemed like no harm, no foul. They taught me a lot about the art of making love and I taught them about the different kinds of batteries there were. A lot of them didn’t know that an AA battery was a totally different animal than an AAA battery.
That little break room behind the store was my home away from home. I had fixed it up real nice. It had couch that turned into a bed, a worn out leather Lazy Boy and a coffee table. I always kept a bong or pipe within arm’s reach and I even hooked up a little stereo system back there. Urv knew about it and couldn’t have cared less. He even said the ladies could hang back there as long as it was just for pleasure and not business.
At 6’2” in heels, Lola could stop traffic and most nights she did, from around four in the afternoon to whenever she wanted to quit. An absolute stunner, gorgeous. A super model in the flesh. And she dressed the part too. Always in a super tight dress or a tiny skirt and tube top, Lola dressed for summer all year round.
Born as Marvin, Lola told me that, from an early age, she never felt like a Marvin. She didn’t look like a Marvin either, but I’d never met a Marvin. There was Marvin Gaye, the singer,
but he looked like a Marvin Gaye, not just a Marvin. There was Lee Marvin, the actor from some of my favorite movies like The Dirty Dozen and The Big Red One, but Marvin was his last name. Marvin seemed like a Jewish name, although I had yet to meet a Jewish person and I didn’t think it was important to ask Lola if she was Jewish. After all, what’s in a name? Lola said she chose the name Lola after the Kinks song. When anyone asked her name, she delighted in saying it, spelling it, saying it again, just like the song did. When I first met her, I was unaware of the song, the Kinks, or the fact that she was born Marvin.
It was a real kick the first time she played that song for me, back in the break room, and told me that the song was totally about her. To be honest, I wasn’t really listening to the words as I’d just had a hit of some average weed and was just sort of looking into Lola’s eyes. The world seemed to kind of melt away when you looked into those eyes. She had that effect on everyone. I asked her to play the song again, but the words were still kind of hard to hear because the stereo system was so bass heavy. So we went for a third and then a fourth playing. Well, she got a little tired of hearing it over and over, so finally she just grabbed my hand and put it on, technically, her man part. I wasn’t exactly surprised, since I was still looking into those beautiful eyes and was totally under her spell. That’s also when I heard about her being born Marvin and how she dreamed of going to a big town someday to get into show business. She was also starting college the next morning. A very busy person, but she always had time for me. She introduced me to a lot of blues music like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and groups like Savoy Brown. I’d been listing to jazz since college and Mr. K, and now I could add blues to my collection. Sad blues and a bottle of booze. Lola loved disco a lot too, which I hated, but I would put on my boogie shoes and become John Travolta any time she asked. Anything for L, O, L, A, Lola.
This is not a kiss and tell confessional, but I do want to say she knew more about love and everything else than all those other girls combined.
One morning, in the winter of ’83, my dreams of cars, weed, and women took things into their own hands. It was one of those really cold Iowa mornings, and of course there was no hot water. Mom had forgotten to remind me to pay the gas bill. Another thing for the to-do list. I hate to-do lists. They never seem to end. You cross one thing off and somehow another thing gets added. It’s like the magic trick where the guy keeps pulling rabbits out of cake. You wonder why the rabbits are in the cake in the first place. like, whoever eats rabbit cake?
The RadioShack job didn’t pay much, but enough to help mom out with rent, pay the utilities when I could remember, and put a little away to get my own place. On mornings like those, I dreamed of my own place in San Diego, California. I heard that it was always 72 degrees there and you could grow really good weed right in your own yard. Who was I kidding? The “get my own place” fund was constantly being raided for ditch weed, beer, or gas, so that morning I just got dressed and headed to work. Damn, it was cold and I had a hole in my boot. After much struggle, I got van door open and sure enough it wouldn’t start. The battery was as dead as my dreams of California. I thought the day couldn’t get any worse as I rode the bus to the store, but if there’s one thing I had learned, it’s that things can always get worse.
As the bus rounded the corner on Third, I pulled the cord to alert the driver to stop and I stood up to exit. That’s when I saw the crowd on the street, gathered in front of where the RadioShack once stood.
The store had been burned to a crispy crunch and charred beyond recognition, and firemen were spraying water on the pile of rubble that was once home to the world’s best break room. The water froze almost as fast as it came out of the hoses and there were strange popping sounds coming from the ruins as batteries and other electronic stuff continued to explode. The ladies just getting over their night shift huddled around Urv. It was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. For a change, they had bought him coffee. My first thought, as I got closer, was not that I was out of work and once again heading to Shitsburg Shitsylvania, it was about poor Urv and his store. And the poor gals. Now they had nowhere to hang out during slow times. And Urv would have nowhere to make coffee and joke around with the guys who robbed us twice a month. I guess maybe I was worrying for nothing, since Urv oddly wasn’t all that upset. He actually seemed relieved somehow. He smiled, yes smiled, when the fire chief came over and declared the fire was an accident and definitely not arson. I guess those batteries can sometimes just blow up, and we had a ton of batteries in the store room.
Sitting on the little porch outside my mom’s apartment, smoking a killer joint that Lola had given me, I felt that my life glass had once again been drained to 1/10empty I don’t like feeling sorry myself but the weed was taking me to a dark place. Three degrees below zero, dressed in only my boxers and my Eagles T-shirt, I felt absolutely numb inside and out.
I don’t know if they pay you unemployment for things like when the place you work burns down and I guess I’ll never know. I was eating some mac and cheese with mom later that very night when the phone rang and neither one of us wanted to answer. Surely it was a bill collector who was intent on yelling at us for some perceived late payment. Why do they always have to yell? Yelling never makes money appear any faster. Well, after losing two of three at rock paper scissors, I picked up.
To my complete surprise it was Wayne DeSelvestro, the district manager of RadioShack, calling personally to tell me how sorry he was about the store burning down and wanting to know what my plans were. I couldn’t tell him I was about to finish the joint I had started earlier and then drive over to Robbie Kregen’s a former RadioShack stock boy, to smoke even more. So I said I had no plans at all. Sometimes a half truth is better than the whole lie. Fate is a funny deal. I don’t know why it only hits me when I’m at the lowest, but here it is—fate again. Right then and there, Wayne offered me a job. He asked if I would be interested in being the assistant store manager at one of their flagship stores in Chicago. Fucking hell yes, I was interested, but I managed to just say, “Yes,” and not the, “fucking hell,” part.
I was on my way to the flagship RadioShack in Chicago and one step closer to my dream of having a nice car, a steady supply of good weed, and then, in turn, a cool girlfriend. California, here I come. Although Chicago was technically in the opposite direction.
By Martin Franks
When I was asked to leave East Iowa Community College the fall semester 1983, I was lost. It was a dark time. My chances of getting an associate degree were, “in the shittter,” so to speak. There wasn’t a community college in all of Iowa, let alone the Quad Cities, that would admit me after the incident at EICC. My life ruined at seventeen years-old! An associate degree was a giant rung up the ladder to obtaining my dreams: a late-seventies American muscle car (or at the very least a gold Nissan 280ZX), a steady supply of decent weed, and a cool girlfriend. Without an associate degree I was on a one way trip to Losersville.
I’ve never told anyone why I left EICC because it’s a little embarrassing. When anyone asked, I would just say the college wasn’t right for me or the professors who taught me weren't cool. Which isn’t the truth because Mr. Kowalowsky was totally cool. He turned me on to jazz, which before that I had always thought was a bunch of guys fooling around. And there weren’t any lyrics which always freaked me out. Mr. Kowalowsky would throw these awesome parties at his house where he would blast Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, all the greats. He was also into Brazilian jazz like João Gilberto and even the more commercial Brasil ’66, which I still love today. Check out either of their takes on Bim Bom or Agua de Beber sometime. Both of those tunes smoke. Mr. K always had the greatest weed at his parties too. I asked him once for his connection and he said he knew a guy who came in once a month from Chicago but only dealt in quarter pounds. Man, I couldn’t handle that weight. Back then I was lucky enough to put together enough scratch for a half ounce. But at EICC it didn’t matter, because at Mr. K’s parties the weed flowed like water and he never minded if you took home the roaches.
Mr. K was Kool, that’s what we all use to say. I never knew a professor could be cool.
And the reason I couldn’t keep going to these great parties? The reason why I had been kicked out of EICC? The reason my dreams were slipping right through my fingers? I got busted for a bag of weed I got busted for a bag a weed. Yep go figure. And the embarrassing thing is, that it wasn’t even mine. That’s what really stings. It wasn’t my weed. It wasn’t. Now, on just about any other day the campus police could have looked in my backpack and found weed that was mine, but this particular day I had no weed, for real. I was completely dry. And so were all the Quad Cities as far as I knew. Look, when you haven’t had weed for a few weeks and a guy says he’ll give you a few joints if you carry his bag of weed around for a day, you don’t ask why, you just ask “How high?” Next thing I know I’ve been offered the choice of leaving campus on my own or having them call the real police to escort me out. I asked them if I could at least get the weed back if left quietly, but I guess the dean liked weed too because he kept it. After that I was added to the school’s “Do Not Readmit” list, which wasn’t exactly the kind of Dean’s List I wanted to make, but I let mom think I got on the good one anyway.” Mr. K, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that I never told anyone it was your weed. I took the pinch and I said nothing, and I will take that secret to the grave.
So, my part time job at RadioShack became full time. I was sad that I was no longer a college man, but I took this as a challenge and that 1972 GTO wasn’t gonna buy itself. When life serves you shit, you make shit-aid.
Urv Upland was the manager of the downtown Davenport branch of RadioShack. He loved me. He was either forty or seventy, I couldn’t tell. He was a slight man with greasy silver hair combed flat to his head and I wanted to tell him about a product called Head and Shoulders. He had the worst dandruff I’d ever seen, each shoulder a mini snow-covered Mt. Fuji. He also wore a houndstooth sport coat that was two sizes too big and made him look both thinner andolder than he was. I was the son he never had, although I think he did have a son that he never talked about. There was this young guy that came around once a month and collected an envelope filled with money. Urv didn’t know I knew, and I didn’t want to embarrass him by knowing that he supports his son. Heck, I wish my dad stuck around long enough to give me money. Urv was just a generous guy with everyone.
The number one selling products in our store were those police scanner radios. Man, we couldn’t keep those things in stock. We also sold a lot of parts, that I found out later you could make a cool stun gun out of, depending on your assembly.
Our location was robbed at least twice a month. In fact, expect for a few stores in Chicago, we were the nation’s most often robbed Radio Shack. We never had much money in the register, so they mostly robbed us of the police radios and stereo speakers. Somehow the robbers knew when we would get shipments. Maybe they saw the delivery truck pull up, I don’t know, but two days after every delivery, four guys in ski masks came in with shotguns and took everything they could. It got to be a routine and Urv didn’t mind at all. In fact, he would joke around with the guys and he always offered them coffee. After the third or fourth time we were robbed, I stopped being terrified of having a shotgun two inches from my brain and usually just took a little nap on the floor while they cleaned the place out.
I got to know a few of them and they all had tragic stories to tell, but they all had hearts of gold, even the real scary ones and one that technically wasn’t female, which wasn’t as accepted then. But hey, I didn’t care then and I don’t now. Whatever your deal is, it’s okay with me. Whenever they hung around the store they would always tease me about being a, “college boy.” I didn’t want to tell them I didn’t go to college anymore as I liked them thinking I was smart. Without reliving too much, let’s just say I ended up making love with a lot of them. Okay, all of them. Even the scary ones and the one that wasn’t technically female. It all happened in the break room in the back of the store, and I never paid a dime. I’m not bragging, I was just broke and they never asked for any money anyway, so it seemed like no harm, no foul. They taught me a lot about the art of making love and I taught them about the different kinds of batteries there were. A lot of them didn’t know that an AA battery was a totally different animal than an AAA battery.
That little break room behind the store was my home away from home. I had fixed it up real nice. It had couch that turned into a bed, a worn out leather Lazy Boy and a coffee table. I always kept a bong or pipe within arm’s reach and I even hooked up a little stereo system back there. Urv knew about it and couldn’t have cared less. He even said the ladies could hang back there as long as it was just for pleasure and not business.
At 6’2” in heels, Lola could stop traffic and most nights she did, from around four in the afternoon to whenever she wanted to quit. An absolute stunner, gorgeous. A super model in the flesh. And she dressed the part too. Always in a super tight dress or a tiny skirt and tube top, Lola dressed for summer all year round.
Born as Marvin, Lola told me that, from an early age, she never felt like a Marvin. She didn’t look like a Marvin either, but I’d never met a Marvin. There was Marvin Gaye, the singer,
but he looked like a Marvin Gaye, not just a Marvin. There was Lee Marvin, the actor from some of my favorite movies like The Dirty Dozen and The Big Red One, but Marvin was his last name. Marvin seemed like a Jewish name, although I had yet to meet a Jewish person and I didn’t think it was important to ask Lola if she was Jewish. After all, what’s in a name? Lola said she chose the name Lola after the Kinks song. When anyone asked her name, she delighted in saying it, spelling it, saying it again, just like the song did. When I first met her, I was unaware of the song, the Kinks, or the fact that she was born Marvin.
It was a real kick the first time she played that song for me, back in the break room, and told me that the song was totally about her. To be honest, I wasn’t really listening to the words as I’d just had a hit of some average weed and was just sort of looking into Lola’s eyes. The world seemed to kind of melt away when you looked into those eyes. She had that effect on everyone. I asked her to play the song again, but the words were still kind of hard to hear because the stereo system was so bass heavy. So we went for a third and then a fourth playing. Well, she got a little tired of hearing it over and over, so finally she just grabbed my hand and put it on, technically, her man part. I wasn’t exactly surprised, since I was still looking into those beautiful eyes and was totally under her spell. That’s also when I heard about her being born Marvin and how she dreamed of going to a big town someday to get into show business. She was also starting college the next morning. A very busy person, but she always had time for me. She introduced me to a lot of blues music like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and groups like Savoy Brown. I’d been listing to jazz since college and Mr. K, and now I could add blues to my collection. Sad blues and a bottle of booze. Lola loved disco a lot too, which I hated, but I would put on my boogie shoes and become John Travolta any time she asked. Anything for L, O, L, A, Lola.
This is not a kiss and tell confessional, but I do want to say she knew more about love and everything else than all those other girls combined.
One morning, in the winter of ’83, my dreams of cars, weed, and women took things into their own hands. It was one of those really cold Iowa mornings, and of course there was no hot water. Mom had forgotten to remind me to pay the gas bill. Another thing for the to-do list. I hate to-do lists. They never seem to end. You cross one thing off and somehow another thing gets added. It’s like the magic trick where the guy keeps pulling rabbits out of cake. You wonder why the rabbits are in the cake in the first place. like, whoever eats rabbit cake?
The RadioShack job didn’t pay much, but enough to help mom out with rent, pay the utilities when I could remember, and put a little away to get my own place. On mornings like those, I dreamed of my own place in San Diego, California. I heard that it was always 72 degrees there and you could grow really good weed right in your own yard. Who was I kidding? The “get my own place” fund was constantly being raided for ditch weed, beer, or gas, so that morning I just got dressed and headed to work. Damn, it was cold and I had a hole in my boot. After much struggle, I got van door open and sure enough it wouldn’t start. The battery was as dead as my dreams of California. I thought the day couldn’t get any worse as I rode the bus to the store, but if there’s one thing I had learned, it’s that things can always get worse.
As the bus rounded the corner on Third, I pulled the cord to alert the driver to stop and I stood up to exit. That’s when I saw the crowd on the street, gathered in front of where the RadioShack once stood.
The store had been burned to a crispy crunch and charred beyond recognition, and firemen were spraying water on the pile of rubble that was once home to the world’s best break room. The water froze almost as fast as it came out of the hoses and there were strange popping sounds coming from the ruins as batteries and other electronic stuff continued to explode. The ladies just getting over their night shift huddled around Urv. It was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. For a change, they had bought him coffee. My first thought, as I got closer, was not that I was out of work and once again heading to Shitsburg Shitsylvania, it was about poor Urv and his store. And the poor gals. Now they had nowhere to hang out during slow times. And Urv would have nowhere to make coffee and joke around with the guys who robbed us twice a month. I guess maybe I was worrying for nothing, since Urv oddly wasn’t all that upset. He actually seemed relieved somehow. He smiled, yes smiled, when the fire chief came over and declared the fire was an accident and definitely not arson. I guess those batteries can sometimes just blow up, and we had a ton of batteries in the store room.Sitting on the little porch outside my mom’s apartment, smoking a killer joint that Lola had given me, I felt that my life glass had once again been drained to 1/10empty I don’t like feeling sorry myself but the weed was taking me to a dark place. Three degrees below zero, dressed in only my boxers and my Eagles T-shirt, I felt absolutely numb inside and out.
I don’t know if they pay you unemployment for things like when the place you work burns down and I guess I’ll never know. I was eating some mac and cheese with mom later that very night when the phone rang and neither one of us wanted to answer. Surely it was a bill collector who was intent on yelling at us for some perceived late payment. Why do they always have to yell? Yelling never makes money appear any faster. Well, after losing two of three at rock paper scissors, I picked up.
To my complete surprise it was Wayne DeSelvestro, the district manager of RadioShack, calling personally to tell me how sorry he was about the store burning down and wanting to know what my plans were. I couldn’t tell him I was about to finish the joint I had started earlier and then drive over to Robbie Kregen’s a former RadioShack stock boy, to smoke even more. So I said I had no plans at all. Sometimes a half truth is better than the whole lie. Fate is a funny deal. I don’t know why it only hits me when I’m at the lowest, but here it is—fate again. Right then and there, Wayne offered me a job. He asked if I would be interested in being the assistant store manager at one of their flagship stores in Chicago. Fucking hell yes, I was interested, but I managed to just say, “Yes,” and not the, “fucking hell,” part.
I was on my way to the flagship RadioShack in Chicago and one step closer to my dream of having a nice car, a steady supply of good weed, and then, in turn, a cool girlfriend. California, here I come. Although Chicago was technically in the opposite direction.
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