Bill Shaffer, a twice-divorced, retired philosophy professor living in a small Florida town, gets the news that the best man at both of his weddings and the current husband of his second wife, is getting out of prison. This news propels him on an introspective journey back through time, beginning in 1967, his senior year in high school, and for him, a perilous, traumatic year of emotional, political, and sexual awakening, leading to his exile from the rural Georgia town of his birth, and his separation from the yellow-haired girl who changed everything.
From there, My Secret Radio follows Bill and a richly diverse cast of charactersâwives and lovers, family, friends and foes â through five tumultuous decades, from the Deep South of his youth to present day Florida, weaving humor, violent tragedy, love and unsparing self-examination into a multilayered, eloquent masterpiece. My Secret Radio brilliantly explores questions confronting us all: How do we forgive the past? How do learn to embrace what we have become?
Bill Shaffer, a twice-divorced, retired philosophy professor living in a small Florida town, gets the news that the best man at both of his weddings and the current husband of his second wife, is getting out of prison. This news propels him on an introspective journey back through time, beginning in 1967, his senior year in high school, and for him, a perilous, traumatic year of emotional, political, and sexual awakening, leading to his exile from the rural Georgia town of his birth, and his separation from the yellow-haired girl who changed everything.
From there, My Secret Radio follows Bill and a richly diverse cast of charactersâwives and lovers, family, friends and foes â through five tumultuous decades, from the Deep South of his youth to present day Florida, weaving humor, violent tragedy, love and unsparing self-examination into a multilayered, eloquent masterpiece. My Secret Radio brilliantly explores questions confronting us all: How do we forgive the past? How do learn to embrace what we have become?
Micanopy, Florida, 2016Â
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Carl Decker, the best man at both of my weddings and current husband of my second wife, Linda, is getting out of prison. Or at least thatâs how I interpret Lindaâs nervous, halting message. She and I have been divorced for twenty-five years but have yet to recover our interpersonal equilibrium. Carl will be released soon, she says, but heâs notâ She pauses, reconsiders, then decides to leave it at that. âCall back Monday morning, Bill,â she tells me finally, and hangs up.
Carl has served about half of his one-year sentence for consumer fraud shenanigans. I speculate that Floridaâs penal system is clearing space for more hardened criminals or, more likely, other inmates found Carl too annoying to endure. This last remark might sound tongue-in-cheek, but you donât know Carl.
No one knows Carl, I wager, as well as Linda and I. My father wouldâve said I owe Carl several âhorse whippingsâ for past betrayals. Still, if you squint a little looking at the same circumstances, you might imagine I owe Carl for my daughter Ramona, my career, my house, and even my illusion of freedom. Either way, itâs for the best that a reasonable distance separates us on the days Carl isnât in prison. Once heâs set free, heâll return to Tampa, 140 miles from my home in Micanopy (mick-a-NO-pee, not âmy canopyâ), a small town near Gainesville. Beyond its remoteness from Carl, Micanopy enjoys the virtue of nestling next to Payneâs Prairie, a 21,000-acre nature preserve whose flourishing fauna include a bison herd, wild horses, sandhill cranes, countless gators, and, on rare occasion, those touchstones of my distant Georgia childhood, ruby-throated hummingbirds.
As magical as the Prairie is, however, living next door to a natural wonder had little to do with how I ended up in Micanopy. The town, you might say, came with the house, a sturdy, wood-framed relic I acquired when Linda and I divorced. To be clear, Linda and I spent our married years in a different, far more valuable house in Gainesville, but we sold that house to satisfy Carlâs debts. Why did I allow that? Letâs just say for now that my ex-wife possesses a genius for putting me on the spot.
More to the current point, when Linda and I divorced, our daughter Ramona was eleven. She is now in her mid-thirties, unhappily married herself and mother to sixteen-year-old Olivia, whom she finds moody and intractable. I, on the other hand, see Olivia as feisty, amusing, and appropriately alienated. Right now, I stand in my yard raking up spent cassia blossoms, waiting for Ramona to drop Olivia off for the Labor Day weekend. Dylanâs sneering masterpiece, âIdiot Wind,â seeps out through my open front window, the verse about ending up as a bloody corpse in a ditch catching my ear.
Thanks for the warning, Bob.
Meanwhile, tourist trafficâantique and pottery browsers mostlyâ already creeps slowly up and down Cholokka Boulevard, which is not only my street but Micanopyâs lone commercial artery. Long ago, I could throw a baseball far enough to break the nearest storefront window. That storeâ the unfortunately named Harryâs Potteryânow affects a vaguely nineteenth-century vintage ambiance, though I well remember it as a hippie head shop with a Peter Max paint job. And before that, Iâm told, it served as an actual general store. And before that, something else or nothing else, but the point is that one tends to feel Micanopy moving backward because everywhere else lusts for the future by comparison.
William Bartram tells us in his illustrious Travels that he arrived at this precise location on the cusp of the Revolutionary War, visiting an Indian town called Cuscowilla to gather flower specimens for his patron in Philadelphia. His traveling party had a different purposeâto ratify the treaty of St. Augustine, establishing terms of peace âonce and for allâ between whites and Indians in Florida. We know how that turned out, but Bartram didnât. He happily collected his specimens, praised the âfriendshipâ shown by Seminole women to white traders, feasted with his hosts on the choicest pieces of barbecued bullocks and tripe soup, and observed that the town stood âon the most pleasant situation that could well be imagined or desired.â
Quite a claim, but who am I to say? These days, if not âthe most pleas- ant situation,â Micanopy is still pleasantâquite a feat in its own right. Local websites tout us as âthe cutest town in America.â As long as no one believes that, I will probably stay where I am.
My name, by the way, is William Davis Shaffer. My father had Jefferson Davis in mind, but I tell people my mother named me after Bette Davis. I am a slightly paunchy, retired teacher of philosophy (as opposed to a philosopher). My beard suggests an underfed Ernest Hemingway, and my voice conveys a faded deep-South twang salted with pretentious neo-hippie overtones. If you were to describe my academic career in baseball terms (what with the World Series coming up), I hit .239, mostly in the minors, except for a cup of coffee in the big show with a last-place team. What the âstatsâ donât show is how much I loved to play.
So far, I have lived about twenty-four thousand days; the first five thousand spent in the small south Georgia town of Hoppertonâpine countryâgrowing up in a well-respected, loving family. Despite these advantages, I acquired tastes and beliefs despised by almost everyone I knew. As for why I count my life in days, it helps me to imagine singular milestones for my otherwise prosaic existence:
âPhilosopher William Shaffer Announces Discovery of Realityâ
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Conversely, lesser events, such as âLocal Man Discovers His Hair Is Falling Outâ never make the dailies at all. You will understand this explanation better if you know that I often regard my past as a terrible fire I have set, and from which, as this narrative will attest, I have deliberately rescued nothing but a few passionate love letters.
But back to Oliviaâs weekend visit. It frees Ramona to prepare for a court hearing Tuesday, the latest episode in the interminable dispute between her and her soon-to-be ex-husband, Antonio. Naturally, Iâm sorry for Ramonaâs troubles, even a little sorry for golf pro Antonio, lately fired from a country club for (as I heard it) bedding one trophy wife too many (he claimed his only crime was disparaging the wrong backswing). However this tidbit strikes you, I have seen too much to consider Ramona or Antonio the definitively injured party. I focus my loyalties on Olivia, who, of course, would rather die than admit she needs anything from me. When Ramona pulls up in her overbearing Lincoln Navigator, whiter than anything in the natural world except perhaps bleached bones, she lowers her window but keeps the engine running. Olivia, bearing up Sherpa-like under her bulging backpack, climbs out and stalks past me on her way to the house, slowing down just enough to roll her eyes and emit a conspiratorial groan intended to remind me that her mother is an obsessed pain in the ass.
As are you, my dear, I say to myself.
As far as I can tell, both of them emerged from the womb thinking this isnât funny and still await a decent punch line. My first impression was probably this isnât real, which is no more likely to be accurate but at least permits me a laugh or two.
I watch Olivia disappear into the house, then look down absently at a pile of yellow cassia flowers into which a hint of amber sun has seeped, transmuting them to gold. Nearby, chameleons skitter in and out of the bromeliads that line my front walk.
âDad, can you come over here?â
A bossy tone has overtaken Ramona since she became a critical care nurse, but I donât mind. Iâm glad to see her, something I try to convey, hoping to undermine her wintry view of people. I drop my rake and walk over to her hulking vehicle.
âHi, honey,â I say. âNice to see you. You look lovely.â Cool, leath- er-scented air drifts from the Navigatorâs cabin.
âOkay, Dad,â Ramona responds, continuing to grip the steering wheel and making it clear that she is hip to my game. I donât consider it a game, and in fact, Ramona does look lovely. In contrast to her mother and daughterâboth dark-haired moon childrenâRamona gleams like a surfer girl beneath a butterscotch-and-honey mane. And today she is very much put together in a satiny melon-green suit.
âListen,â Ramona says, pressing on, âIâm sorry to dump Olivia on you at the last minute, but this is the endgame. Antonio leaves for Spain soon, and when heâs gone, heâs gone. Weâve got to convince the court to freeze his assets before itâs too late.â
âWeâ comprise Ramona and her divorce lawyer, a handsome older man (according to his brochure portrait) who lives in Ocala and keeps racehorses who donât race. Ramona will spend the long weekend there, and I donât doubt they will discuss the case at some point. I wave her apology away and smile to myself at her use of the term âendgame.â She and I played countless chess games before even that pastime became too frivolous for her sensibilities.
âIt will be nice to get this behind you,â I say.
âOnly if I win.â
âSpeaking of winning, howâs your mother?â Linda was once a shrewd property lawyer who only took slam-dunk wins to court. Ramona visited her in Tampa recently during a nurseâs convention.
âFine, if you overlook the fact that sheâs nearing the end, at least according to her.â
âMy God, is she sick?â
Ramona gives a cynical chuckle.
âNot exactly. Mom insists sheâs a âcroneâ now and must accept a croneâs destiny, which, according to her, means to speak a few prophecies and die. She swears one prediction has already come true, proving she might be close to her final days.â
I thought back. In our very first conversation, Linda had claimed to be part witch. At the time, I chalked this up to the banter of strangers. But she was in earnest, as I would learn soon enough. Now, I donât want to imply she mixed potions or cast hexes; her âwitchcraftâ consisted, as far as I ever saw, of claiming âsecond sightâ to demolish my interpretation of events. I wonder now if cronehood means further demolition is at hand.
âYou mean crone as in an ugly old lady with a wart on her nose?â Another weighty sigh from Ramona.
âYes, absent the wart.â
âWell, letâs examine the premise. Does your mother look like a crone to you?â
âSheâs a little bit on the skin and bones side, but otherwise, no. Of course, she says the mirror tells a different story from what I can see with just my eyes.â
âI hope sheâs a nice crone.â Ramona returns a rueful smile
 âDad, you and I both know sheâs whatever kind of crone she wants to be."
 I nod. As to whether magic or motive accounts for my ex-wifeâs newly acquired crone persona, I have my suspicions, but Iâm confident she hasnât lost her mind. Her stellar defense of her miscreant husband Carl earlier this year marked her first and only case as a criminal attorney, undertaken some years after concluding her career in âimmovable propertyâ lawâwrangling over easements, title clouds, rights of foreclosure, and boundary disputes. While nothing Linda knew about âopen and notorious possessionâ as a trespassing defense could help her beat Carlâs open-and-shut identity theft rap, she argued with rational grace before a female judge, making the best of a bad hand. Carl, of course, carped about his one-year slap-on-the wrist sentence, but as I heard Linda chide him afterward, âThe sisters of mercy have spared you. Show some speck of gratitude.â
Ramonaâs cell phone makes a goofy jingle-jangle. She looks down, then up at me, her expression pleading for understanding.
âI know you have to get going,â I say, âbut Iâm curious. What was your motherâs prophecy, the one that came true?â
âYou mean the one that didnât come true? Mom said, quote, âCarl is on his way home.ââ
âShe said that to you in person, what, two weeks ago?â âThose very words, Dad, I swear.â
Ramonaâs tone suggests resignation to an unfortunate new truth about her motherâs mental state. I am merely teetering into confusion.
âInteresting. I got a call from your mother this morning. It was a little cryptic, but I think she said Carl is getting an early release. It could be a coincidence, or she is an oracle, or sheâs pretending to be one for some weird reason. I take it you havenât talked to her since visiting Tampa?â Ramona shakes her head, her face a portrait of the last straw.
âShe called me last night. Not a freaking word about Carl; just a wacky question about how much longer she would live, hypothetically, if she quit smoking right now.â Ramonaâs exasperation with her mother persists like a low-grade fever. It gives me no joy and Ramona no peace.
âLetâs hope weâre just missing one little puzzle piece that snaps everything sanely into place.â
âYou need to get out of the sun, Dad.â
âPoint taken. Just trying to be open-minded. By the way, what did you tell your mother about cigarettes and death?â
âWell, first of all, Mom said she didnât see any point in quitting if it would only extend her life a few months on the average.â
âAnd what did you say to that?â
âThat she sounded like Carl, that averages didnât work the way she thought they did, and I had no intention of getting dragged into her bullshit.â
âAll of which she graciously accepted, no doubt.â
âShe told me to simplify my thoughts and have a good night. She wondered if I had a number for the Cancer Society. I said, âno,â and we hung up.â
I give a meaningless nod, suddenly longing for a stiff drink, groping for some light I can shed. âWhen I met your mother, she campaigned quite hard to convince me she would die young from diabetes and didnât care. The prospect of blindness, I imagine. Then she got pregnant and went to war against everything that was trying to take her down. Not a single cigarette for many years.â
âCarl got her started up again.â
I smile and shake my head. âI think she wants to deny life the satisfaction of finding out she cares all that much. Call it spiritual bravado in the face of, wellâŚâ
âMaybe thatâs what attracted you to her.â
âYou mean like she was a falling peach blossom in a Japanese poem?â
âPretty much nothing like that.â
As I fumble for more words to send her off in decent spirits, Olivia shouts through my front window, asking if she can eat the leftover spaghetti. âAbsolutely not,â I shout back.
âIâm eating it,â she screams, upping her volume, âand Iâm turning off that shitty music.â Then sheâs gone.
âAh, youth,â I say, trying to convey worldly tolerance. Ramonaâs having none of it.
âItâs the opposite of youth. Olivia is a grumpy old lady. And I swear⌠Listen, Dad, she skulks around like sheâs up to no good. If she tells you something, youâll tell me, right?â
âIf itâs dire, sure.â
âSheâd rather live with you and visit me,â Ramona observes as she cranks up the Navigator.
âThatâs what your mother said about you when we divorced. Pretty much word for word.â
âAnd she was right.â
âApples and oranges. Oliviaâs just a typical teenage contrarian. She has a cushy life and the luxury of hating it. Who wouldnât want that deal?â
Ramona stares ahead as if looking out through some private window. âNobody, until the bill arrives. Listen, Dad; I need to get going. Howâs the book coming, by the way?â
âItâs getting there,â I say.
âThatâs what you said a year ago.â
âAnd itâs even truer today. If thoughts would quit occurring to me, I could finish it tonight.â
âSpoken like the slippery sophist you are. Anyway, Iâll be back on Monday afternoon. Check on Mom, okay? I know you donât want to, but look at it as a chance to rise above.â
âAnd Iâve done such a superb job so far.â
Ramona, lovely Ramona, peers out with a wry grin and shakes her head.
âQuit fishing for compliments, Dad; itâs beneath you.â
My Secret Radio relates the story of a man on a lifelong journey to find meaning. It touches many genres with themes including 1960s establishment racism, casual drug crime, and long-buried family secrets. A shifting Southern political backdrop frames the adolescence of the protagonist, Bill Schaffer, whose adult life as a philosophy professor is riddled with complications.
Bill Schaffer is well-read, affable, and noble. If he is pedantic, it is characteristic of this meticulous novel. No event is without deeper meaning; references to music, literature, and philosophy proliferate. Bill is the type who looks below the surface. But he lacks personal grit and determination. Moved only by the actions of the supporting cast (themselves two-dimensional tropes), Billâs meandering path feels static. With 468 pages of his journey to follow, My Secret Radio may be a steep hill for many readers to climb.
While Bill, at every stage of his life, presents himself as reasonable and well-intentioned, he is little more than a sounding box for attitudes reaching the mainstream in the mid-20th century. Though he counts himself progressive in his hometown, Bill doesnât take part in meaningful social change, content to intellectualize and condescend. Present day, Bill doesnât notice equivalent modern movements. He is a saint when he keeps a promise not to out a gay classmate. Heâs gormless when he covers up for a double-murder committed by a friend.
Hallock buries much of what might shine in My Secret Radio. He combines genres into a mash-up of crime, mystery, romance, and philosophical treatise. Bill Schafferâs story loses the fight against a barrage of period details, philosophical affectations, and gossipy women. Billâs intellectualism makes him as intractable as the worst Hopperton, GA hypocrites. His personal life of disappointment and divorce are as inevitable as his abetting a murder is inconceivable. Billâs tragedy is that a lifetime of knowing better than everyone else doesnât comprise a fully functioning novel.