1 00:00:15,000 --> 00:00:16,680 Harlan: Good evening, Riverside. 2 00:00:17,830 --> 00:00:29,830 Harlan: Eleven o'clock of a Friday night. If you found your way here, you found your way here, and I ain't gonna make you explain how. 3 00:00:31,380 --> 00:00:48,020 Harlan: I used to run pictures in this house. Real ones. Four cans to a feature, and you carried 'em up them stairs one at a time, because a fella who carries two is a fella who drops one. 4 00:00:49,170 --> 00:01:06,530 Harlan: Best of the job was never the picture. It was the ten seconds before. Lamp comes up, and you've got a white screen and a room full of people, and not one of 'em knows yet what they're in for. 5 00:01:07,580 --> 00:01:20,460 Harlan: Now what I've got tonight ain't a picture. Nothing was shot, there's no can on it, and if you went lookin' for a poster you'd come home with your hands empty. 6 00:01:21,610 --> 00:01:27,050 Harlan: It's a tape. Somebody talkin'. That's the whole of it. 7 00:01:28,100 --> 00:01:38,900 Harlan: I don't know who. I don't ask that, and I'd tell you if I did. It come in, and it's my job to put it up. 8 00:01:40,050 --> 00:01:43,810 Harlan: I'll tell you the one part that got me, and then I'll hush and let her talk. 9 00:01:44,860 --> 00:01:48,460 Harlan: She ain't performing. She thinks there's nobody on the other end of it. 10 00:01:49,710 --> 00:01:56,910 Harlan: So settle in, and let's you and me lose ourselves in another story. 11 00:03:00,260 --> 00:03:08,660 Janet: Okay. So — this is a test, I guess. Of the — of this. 12 00:03:09,810 --> 00:03:21,890 Janet: I found it downstairs in the equipment room under a tarp with about nine years of dust on it, and it works, which honestly I did not expect. Nothing else in this building works. 13 00:03:23,040 --> 00:03:26,880 Janet: I've been here a year. In November it'll be a year. 14 00:03:27,930 --> 00:03:35,930 Janet: I'm not allowed to talk about any of this. That's the first rule and they were extremely clear about the first rule. 15 00:03:37,180 --> 00:03:48,380 Janet: So. This isn't talking to anybody. This is a machine in a room. I've thought about it a lot and that's where I landed. 16 00:03:49,430 --> 00:03:58,630 Janet: Things I'm allowed to say to a machine in a room. My name's Janet. I'm twenty-three. I didn't apply for this. 17 00:03:59,680 --> 00:04:13,760 Janet: I'd never heard of it. There's a — it's a lottery, is what I understand. You get told. That's the whole process, you get told, and then somebody explains what happens if you don't. 18 00:04:15,310 --> 00:04:17,870 Janet: I'm not going to say what happens if you don't. 19 00:04:23,020 --> 00:04:25,180 Janet: Second rule's the Fridays. 20 00:04:26,330 --> 00:04:40,330 Janet: Eleven o'clock, I'm up here, door locked, and I stay until it's finished. Every Friday. That one they didn't explain at all, they just — that was on the sheet. 21 00:04:41,380 --> 00:04:51,780 Janet: I don't know what happens downstairs. I've never seen it. I hear it a little, through the floor, I think — I might be making that up, I've thought about that too. 22 00:04:53,330 --> 00:05:02,130 Janet: It's not a scary building most of the time. That's the thing nobody would believe. It's mostly just a big empty building and I'm the only one in it. 23 00:05:04,280 --> 00:05:09,240 Harlan: There's a particular sound a person makes when they've decided nobody's listening. 24 00:05:10,290 --> 00:05:27,090 Harlan: You've heard it. Somebody in the car next to you at a light, singin'. Fella in a hardware aisle workin' out loud what he come in for. They ain't putting on a thing, 'cause what would be the point. 25 00:05:28,240 --> 00:05:42,000 Harlan: I've spent my whole working life putting things in front of folks who came to be put in front of. This is different, and I want you to know I know that. 26 00:05:43,050 --> 00:05:53,290 Harlan: She's careful with it, though. You caught that. She's got her levels set and she ain't rambling. She's making it good for somebody. 27 00:05:54,840 --> 00:05:56,840 Harlan: Couldn't tell you who she thinks that is. 28 00:05:58,990 --> 00:06:03,630 Janet: So I found something and I've been going back and forth on whether to put it on here. 29 00:06:04,780 --> 00:06:11,820 Janet: There were people before me. Obviously — I knew that, they told me that. But they left stuff. 30 00:06:12,870 --> 00:06:27,110 Janet: Downstairs, in the — there's a room off the old newsroom that's just filing. And in the bottom of a cabinet there's journals. Handwritten. Eleven of them so far, I haven't been through the whole cabinet. 31 00:06:28,160 --> 00:06:34,960 Janet: This one's Alma. Alma Petrie. She's got her name in the front in ballpoint like a kid does a schoolbook. 32 00:06:36,110 --> 00:06:44,350 Janet: So I'm going to read some of these onto here. Because they're falling apart, the paper's — and also because — 33 00:06:45,600 --> 00:06:50,480 Janet: Because nobody else is ever going to. That's just true. 34 00:06:52,030 --> 00:07:06,670 Janet: Okay. Alma's got the same rules I've got. Same two, word for word, which I found — I don't know what I found that. And then about a third of the way in she starts writing about the radio. 35 00:07:07,720 --> 00:07:16,920 Janet: There's a receiver in the equipment room she kept on for company. Most nights it's nothing, it's static and the Longview station bleeding in. 36 00:07:18,070 --> 00:07:31,350 Janet: And then she says every so often, in the middle of the static, a station identification plays. Clean. Professional. Full announcer, the whole — 37 00:07:32,400 --> 00:07:33,360 Janet: Like a real one. 38 00:07:34,910 --> 00:07:46,670 Janet: For a station that doesn't exist. She says she wrote the call letters down and checked them against the FCC listings at the library in Marshall. Twice. Years apart. 39 00:07:47,820 --> 00:07:52,380 Janet: She doesn't put the call letters in the journal. She just says she checked them. 40 00:07:53,930 --> 00:08:00,970 Janet: I've been up here two days trying to decide if that means she was scared of them or if it means she forgot to write them down. 41 00:08:02,120 --> 00:08:05,800 Announcer: We'll return to tonight's presentation after these messages. 42 00:08:06,850 --> 00:08:11,650 Announcer: The Riverside Grange pancake breakfast — Saturday morning, eight o'clock. 43 00:08:14,200 --> 00:08:19,800 Harlan: I want to stop a second, 'cause there's a thing you can't hear and I don't want you working at it in the dark. 44 00:08:20,850 --> 00:08:29,170 Harlan: The reel don't run straight through. There's a stretch after this where it goes quiet for eleven minutes. 45 00:08:30,420 --> 00:08:37,540 Harlan: Not blank. It's recording. You can hear the room in it. Nobody says a word for eleven minutes. 46 00:08:39,090 --> 00:08:53,170 Harlan: I've listened to that stretch more than once and I've got nothing for you. I don't know what she's doing. I don't know if she stepped out or set there. 47 00:08:54,220 --> 00:09:05,180 Harlan: Anybody sells you the answer to a thing like that, count your change on the way out. I'm gonna run past it, same as I would a leader, and we'll pick her up where she starts again. 48 00:09:07,330 --> 00:09:11,010 Janet: I need to put this on here in order or I'm going to get it wrong. 49 00:09:12,260 --> 00:09:29,060 Janet: Tuesday I recorded about ninety seconds. Nothing — the roof, the guy who leaves the boxes, that's it, it was nothing. And then I rewound to check the level and there's forty seconds on there before it that I didn't put down. 50 00:09:30,610 --> 00:09:31,650 Janet: It's me. 51 00:09:32,800 --> 00:09:44,480 Janet: It's my voice, it's this machine, it's this room, I can hear the — the hot plate's on in it, you can hear it clicking. It's this room. 52 00:09:45,730 --> 00:09:48,370 Janet: And I'm saying a thing I have never said. 53 00:09:49,920 --> 00:09:56,160 Janet: I've had it four days now and I've listened to it, I don't know. A lot. 54 00:09:57,210 --> 00:10:13,610 Janet: I know what it sounds like when somebody splices a tape. My uncle had a — I know what that sounds like. This isn't that. There's no seam. The room tone runs straight through it, it's one continuous — 55 00:10:14,860 --> 00:10:21,100 Janet: It's forty seconds of me talking to somebody, in a room where I have not spoken to anybody in a year. 56 00:10:22,250 --> 00:10:26,890 Janet: I'm going to put it on here. Both machines running, straight across. 57 00:10:28,440 --> 00:10:30,440 Janet: I don't want to be the only one who's heard it. 58 00:10:31,590 --> 00:10:35,590 Janet On Tape: — no, he's very kind. He's been kind to me the whole time. 59 00:10:46,540 --> 00:10:53,900 Harlan: And that's the end of the reel. Not the end of anything else, I don't imagine. Just where it run out. 60 00:10:54,950 --> 00:11:07,830 Harlan: I'd have liked to give you the rest. The part where somebody tells her what it was, or she works it out, or somebody comes up them stairs and sets with her a while. 61 00:11:09,380 --> 00:11:12,100 Harlan: I don't have that. It didn't come to me. 62 00:11:13,250 --> 00:11:25,490 Harlan: What I've got is a young woman making a good clean recording for nobody, in a room, being careful about her levels. 63 00:11:26,740 --> 00:11:42,500 Harlan: First Friday. There's a house of seats out there and I couldn't tell you how many are full, and I'll be straight with you — I never have much cared. It runs at eleven whether or not. 64 00:11:43,650 --> 00:11:51,730 Harlan: I'll be right here next week. Same hour. And we'll do the only thing worth staying up for. 65 00:11:52,780 --> 00:11:55,260 Harlan: We'll lose ourselves in another story. 66 00:11:56,410 --> 00:12:03,930 Announcer: This is TV 17 Riverside. That's all for tonight. Drive safe, and we'll see you next Friday.