The term burnout means someone is just ready to quit. You’re worn out from head to toe from trying so hard to get somewhere or to accomplish things in life, and no matter how hard you try or how much progress you make, it feels like you’re standing still. No matter what you do, you can’t seem to find that peace of mind that would put your nerves at ease. Even with head starts, it seems like you’re always finishing last. Your candle is out, and your wax is melted down to the plate. You’re exhausted and too weak in spirit to even look for a new source of energy to get yourself started again. You’re hurt and depleted of creativity and your soul feels displaced, as if it has left your very body. You don’t even have the energy to scream, curse, or yell anymore. The energy that used to fill your muscles has worn thin, replaced by a dry, unmovable numbness. You just feel like lying down and never getting up again. But since you’re still alive, and dedicated to the task called life, your family, your job, your community, and your God, you get up again anyway.
I decided I was overdue for a vacation, and I wanted to get as far away from things as I could, so at the end of 1994, I flew all the way to Brazil.
•
Brazil was a beautiful, scenic place, filled with millions of brown people. They even had paintings and sculptures of brown saints at their churches. I never saw that in America!
I was ridiculously rich in Brazil. The value of the American dollar in Rio de Janeiro made me practically a millionaire, and the people were so openly affectionate that it made me sick. I guess it might have been okay if I had someone of my own that I cared enough about to be with.
I was down there for five days, and every night I thought about picking up a woman, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the energy for it. There were brown women walking around on the beaches of Brazil who could easily make a family man jump in the water and cheat on his wife. I was a single man with plenty of money, yet I didn’t even attempt to get wet. Something had to be wrong with me. I was burnt out. The only thing I got out of the trip to Brazil was a deep, dark suntan.
•
Big Bill had jazzed up his establishment by the end of the year. He said he wanted to bring 1995 in right, so Scotty’s was no longer incognito. It had a new neon sign outside and flashy disco lights with more space for a dance floor. In fact, the place was getting too crowded for me.
“You ever think about getting married, Bobby?” Mark Bishop asked me. It was a Thursday night in late January, a week after my thirty-first birthday. We had been sitting at the bar for an hour and a half already. I had downed two tall drinks and was working on my third.
“Yeah, I just ain’t asked nobody yet,” I responded to Mark’s marriage question.
“I’m thinking about making that move, man,” he said.
I let out some strong alcohol fumes, rumbling like hot steam through my chest. “BLUURRP! … ’Scuse me.” I didn’t feel like hearing any marriage talk from Mark. I dozed off and began daydreaming about Pearl Davis and New York City again. Once I realized I had drifted off, Mark was frowning at me and shaking his head, pitying me. I took another sip of my drink, a screwdriver, heavy on the vodka.
“You know why you’re lonely, Bobby?” Mark asked me. “You’re afraid of taking a chance with a sister and falling in love. I mean, how are you gonna have a radio show that tries to inform and uplift black people, and behind closed doors, you can’t give your total trust to a sister?”
I simply smiled at him. Mark had no idea what I had been through with women. I said, “Mark, Hecht’s is having a sale on the men’s style of Wizard of Oz, click-your-heels-three-times-for-a-black-woman shoes. Why don’t you go down there and buy me a pair and I’ll pay you for them when you get back? Sale ends Saturday.”
Mark looked at me and laughed. “I’m convinced, man. You’re thrown the hell off.”
I had nothing better to do with myself. My jokes had become my salvation. I slammed the last of my drink to the back of my throat, feeling it burn as it went down. By your third drink, it burns much less.
“Where are you going?” Mark asked me.
I balanced my head and torso on two unsteady legs. “I’m going to Hecht’s,” I told him.
Mark grinned and shook his head.
I carefully swerved through the glittery bouncing crowd of suits, ties, boots, and skirts all attached to brown faces. Before I could make it to the staircase, I was sideswiped off balance and then quickly held upright again.
“Hey, Bobby Dallas! How you doin’, brother? When are you gonna have me on that show of yours?”
My hands flew up to my head, attempting to soothe a zapping headache. “Talk to my producers,” I mumbled.
“Come on, man. Every time I call they say you’re booked.”
I kept moving toward the staircase, protecting my head. “I am.”
Jerry Willis, a D.C. government employee, faded from my blurred vision and melted into the background as I made it to the stairway. Each descending step sent shock waves into the eggshell that had replaced my skull. Shit! My head is killing me! I remember thinking.
“Bobby Dallas!” an anonymous voice yelled at me once I reached the bottom floor.
I waved without looking and continued on my way out the exit door, where the January wind threw open my unbuttoned sports jacket. I looked south and then north on Eighth Street to find my car.
“You got any extra change on you, brother?”
Still not looking, I painfully tossed my head in the direction of the bar and lied. “Big Bill got my last.”
“Oh, okay. You gon’ make it, brother?”
“Yeah, I’m all right. I just need a jumbo bag of ice and some Tylenol.”
I remember a squeal of laughter that scrambled my eggs for brains even more. “I know exactly what you mean.”
I squeezed my six-foot-four frame into my convertible BMW and reclined my bucket seat as far back as it would go. Elephants were stomping on my brain, refusing to let me drive. They let me smoke, though. I took out my pack of Marlboros and started to sing that crazy song I made up about Pearl:
“Pearrrll Day-vis. What have you been up tooo, girrrl?”
I knew I was in no condition to drive. I folded my hands behind my head and listened to the cars drive up and down Eighth Street.
Pearl Davis, pregnant! I thought. And she was happy about it, and thinking about marriage and family! It was too much for me to take. When I was with her, Pearl talked about kids like they were a curse rather than a blessing. She never had a strong sense of family like I had. Men were used for entertainment, to further her career or for sexual gratification. So with even the Wicked Witch of the Northeast being able to find a lifetime partner before I could, despite all of my recent successes, I felt like a caveman without a club.
•
I drove back to my new apartment complex in Takoma Park, Maryland, once my head had cleared. I would have surely gone to jail if I had gotten pulled over, because I was still very much loaded.
I had moved out of the Adams Morgan area for a change of scenery. My new place was as elegant as I was willing to pay for at the time. It was another single-bedroom with hardwood floors on the eighth level of a fourteen-story building. It was more spacious than my Adams Morgan apartment. I figured the next move I made would be into a private house.
I checked my answering machine from the night before. I had twelve new messages. A lot of them I ignored. My mother called and reminded me of the family get-together in North Carolina for Black History Month. I smiled, feeling delighted about another opportunity to see my niece and nephew. They were always a bright spot in my life.
While in the shower that morning, I began to think about the beginning of my roller-coaster ride. I thought about my good friend Faye Butler and my initial infatuation for Pearl while at Howard University. It was nearly a decade ago, but you never forget the decisions you make early on that affect your entire life. It makes it even harder to forget when you don’t have anything to take the place of those old memories. I began to wish that I could go back and start all over again, with me still winding up with my show, of course.
By the time I got out of the shower, I didn’t even feel like going to work. Yusef had been doing a good job on the show whenever he substituted for me, so I decided to give him another opportunity to make himself known.
“Yusef, you feel like doing the show today?” I called and asked him. I caught him right before it was time for him to head out the door. Yusef lived in Hyattsville, Maryland, just five minutes away from Takoma Park. It took him forty-five minutes to get to the station on the Metro system. Most of the time I gave him a ride.
“You’re not gonna make it today?” he asked me.
“It doesn’t look like it. I had a little too much to drink last night, and something that I ate didn’t agree with me too well,” I fibbed. I didn’t want to give Yusef the impression that I was getting lazy or anything. I rarely called in sick for work because I loved my show, I just needed a longer weekend to regroup.
“All right then,” Yusef said. “Did you let the station know already?”
“I’m about to do that now.” I hung up with Yusef and informed someone at the station. It was no problem with management. Yusef could hold his own as long as I wasn’t quitting on them.
I sat up in bed, thirty-one years old, and wearing nothing but my boxers, thinking back to the beginning of my career. Then I listened to Yusef pull off my show that morning. He had a style of his own. He wasn’t quite as on edge as I was, but that kind of thing comes through life experiences. Yusef hadn’t been through much yet. He was still pretty patient and happy with himself while seeing his one girl. I even got him a seven-thousand-dollar raise. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep him too much longer, though. Yusef had big dreams, he was focused, confident, and very driven—successful characteristics that had taken me years to develop. My strong points had been persistence, loyalty, humility, and hard work.
After my show, I turned my radio dial to Howard University’s WHUR-FM and caught the beginning of an old Aretha Franklin song, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.” WHUR’s format was for the older black crowd who loved the classic stuff. They had done away with most of the lust-filled contemporary music teenagers preferred.
I listened to that Aretha Franklin song and smiled. I had been trying to be a “Do Right Man,” it seemed, for years, and I just wasn’t succeeding at it. I was a busy scientist mixing different chemicals in my secluded laboratory and never coming up with the right formula.
I spent my thirty-first birthday alone with my thoughts. That’s when I first began to think of my radio career as a metaphor for my life, the roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, twists and turns, climbs and rapid free falls of my days, nights, and weekends. “The Bobby Dallas Whirl.” And it was no sense in dragging any more sisters on that unpredictable ride with me. It would only make both of us sick.