The building was immense and broodingly threatening at night, a square block of concrete and brick made more forbidding by the spartan attempts at gothic ornamentation at the edges. It only needed a moat and a gargoyle or two guarding the front entrance to complete the impression of a Medieval castle.
Giles stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up at that entrance and feeling all the angst of the quaking generations who'd passed up to their various uncertain fates.
"Stop it, Giles," he murmured to himself. "You've survived Oxford, been curator at the British Museum, served as Watcher to the Slayer for three years. You've dealt with Snyder for five semesters. You can handle one job interview."
He tugged self-consciously at his black leather jacket, doubting again the impulse that told him to dress in levis, flannel shirt, and leather jacket for this interview. The bulging, anvil-heavy case that he was carrying made his arms ache, and he suddenly felt ridiculous. But his watch said 8:38, and he had only seven minutes in which to find the office he was supposed to present himself at. Too late for anything but to press onward.
He mounted the steps up to the UC Sunnydale Communications Department building and pushed open one of the heavy wooden doors to let himself inside. A number of students milled about the hallway in varying degrees of self- importance or bewilderment. A large group were loudly, almost pugnaciously discussing something at the other end of the corridor. Giles consulted the letter in his hand. 'Room 208, 8:45PM' it said. Second floor, he supposed. Fortunately there was a stairway immediately to his left, he didn't have to go near the increasingly animated discussion at the other end of the building.
He paused at the top of the stairs to get his bearings. Immediately to his left was an open set of doors, and just to the side of that was a big sign painted in 60's day-glo colours: 'KURS FM Public Radio -- Where the Bopped Come to Rock!' and as an afterthought 'Room 207'. He looked across the hall at Rooms 211 and 212. Both were locked, the glass window panes of the doors dark. Room 209, next door, was also dark.
"I suppose this is the place then." Giles poked his head into Room 207. "Hello?"
Fluorescent light beat relentlessly down on a beat-up oak desk, which supported an unfriendly-looking computer, a scattering of copies of the campus newspaper with big holes cut into them, an exacto knife, and clutters of overturned soft drink cans and Little Debi doughnut wrappers. Nobody seemed to be around.
Giles stepped inside for a closer look around. "Hello? Is anybody here?" He rechecked the letter in his hand.
"Hey dude!" A young man poked his frazzled head out from what looked to be a closet in the back. "You here for the interview? Whomping! They're waiting for you." He pointed at a closed doorway to one side, grabbed a backpack off the roller chair by the desk, and made for the exit.
"Just one --" Giles began, but the student only ducked out the door and clattered off down the stairs. Giles turned to look at the door he'd been pointed to. There was a lit sign over it reading 'On the Air'. He checked his watch. '8:48' it read. He waited five minutes, then eased the door open as quietly as he could.
The horribly discordant guitar cords of some modern industrial heavy metal band -- thankfully muted -- assaulted his ears. "Ooh yeah baby," a feminine voice overrode the music. "A slow lick just underneath. Mmmm, you're so good at that, sweetie."
He was starting to back out the door again, when the redhead in the DJ's chair looked up at him over the shoulder of the svelte, dark-haired woman straddling her lap. "Don't you go anywhere," the DJ said sternly.
Giles froze, and the tousled brunette in the redhead's lap turned to look at him. "It's Rupert!" she said, and slid off the DJ. She tugged her blouse back into the waistband of her jeans, eyeing him appreciatively as she did so. "Wow whole different style. You look great!"
"Uhm, how have you been, Lili?" Giles said uncertainly. It had been a while, a year and a half to be precise, since he'd seen the young woman or her redheaded girlfriend. The last time had been at Jenny's funeral, and that whole period was a pain-filled blur in his mind. He remembered them both more vividly from that insane night on the town, the one where they'd first met two years ago, when he had been pursued to LA and back again by an incensed Spike and his minions. Lili went, in his mind, with all-girl country and western bands, cowboy hats, and confusing celebrity pool parties. She also had been a quite wonderful dance partner.
He glanced at her girlfriend, who was studying him as she munched on a carrot stick. "Copper. Do you know that your broadcast microphone is open?"
She reached to flick the mike switch off. "Yup. I've got the station's top-rated show too. You think anybody actually likes the music?"
"Uh, yes, well," Giles said, acutely aware of an incoming blush. He held up his interview letter. "I have an appointment?"
"Oh yeah. Trent told me to interview you for the job." Copper settled her glasses at a professional angle on her freckled nose and reached back to pull a tweed jacket over her 'Cowlicks' t-shirt. "So, let's see what you have."
Giles glanced uneasily at Lili, who was standing close to him, looking up into his eyes with a goofy smile on her face. He eased past her and set his case on the table at the side of the tiny room so he could open it. "I drafted a sample playlist, as requested." He passed it over to the DJ.
"Mmmm," said Copper over a mouthful of cucumber. She skimmed over the playlist with one glittery purple fingernail. "Did'jou bring any of these with you?"
"Y-yes," Giles said, sorting through the various jacketed albums in the case and damning himself for the stammer that was reemerging. "A good part of my collection is on vinyl, I'm afraid --"
She waved her hand dismissively. "Vinyl's cool. There's a turntable on the left there. CD player's next to it. Cassette deck is here." She leaned forward to tap it. "Soundboard's rinky, but at least you don't need a big instruction manual for it." She tugged down a stained, mangled, and heavily annotated sheaf of papers from the top of the cassette deck and pressed it into his hands. "That covers everything. Try to talk to them every twenty minutes. Read 'em Burroughs, or rant at them between songs, or something. Trent should be in at midnight to relieve you."
"What about my interview?" Giles said, beginning to feel alarmed.
She sighed. "All right: Beatmatching? Favorite girl band? Scotch whiskey? MP3s?"
Giles barely restrained himself from shuffling his feet like a stressed schoolboy. "I-I've been practicing. The Bangles. Lamphoraig. And I don't know much about modern firearms, I'm afraid."
"You've got the job. Lili will hang with you a bit until you're up to speed."
Lili bounced. He took a step away from her.
"Lil, you don't mind showing him the ropes?" Copper said.
"Oh no!" Lili grinned. "It'll be fun!"
"Okay then." Copper grabbed some keys off of the soundboard. "Only I don't want to hear you guys snogging up here in the booth. If you've got to do that sort of thing, keep it off the air."
"Hypocrite much?" Lili stuck her tongue out at her girlfriend.
"Just --" Copper shot a look at Giles. "Euwww!" She slammed out the door.
"Don't mind her," Lili told him. "She doesn't get what I see in men. She'll be busy doing other things in an hour."
"Um, yes." Giles was looking about the broadcast booth in a mild panic. Probably he should be more worried about her than he was at the moment, but the clock on the wall read 8:58.
She watched him fumble through his album case. "Hey, this's a fun job. Relax!" She grabbed him by the shoulders and steered him into the DJ's chair, then pulled herself a chair out from one corner, insinuating it flush against his. "You've got a dampening voice and the audience is pretty much dead drunk by now. Let me steer. I'll get you around the corners."
"'Dampening voice'?" Giles said numbly
"You know . . ." She squirmed in her seat and grinned at him lasciviously.
The overhead clock's minute hand hit the 12, and Lili grabbed the microphone. "That song was so freaking -- loud!" she gushed to the Outside. "Wow! I'm juiced! It's 9 o'clock though, and time to put the toys away. This is the Retro 70's Show, and our new DJ Rupert Giles is hot enough to lick butter off of. Say hello to the people out there, Rupert. And remember they're all losers, else they'd be out having fun rather than sitting around on their butts listening to public radio." She shoved the mike at Giles.
"I-I-I," Giles said, and glared at her. "I wasn't exactly -- uh -- prepared to-to --"
"Doesn't he have the dreamiest accent?" Lili said to the mike. "And the more he stutters, the sexier his eyes get. And his mouth has the cutest way of turning up at one corner --"
Giles grabbed the mike from her. "T-this is the Retro 70s Show," he managed, "and this is th-the Rolling Stones, 'Sympathy For the Devil'." He switched on the turntable and fingered the mike off. "What are you doing to me?" he snapped at Lili. "Are you trying to make me appear a complete moron?"
"Don't worry, I know what I'm doing. All the college girls are mad over a British accent. And with a dollop of little boy shyness? They'll start skipping parties Friday nights just so they can hang around their rooms and listen to you."
"I applied for this job because I happen to know a little about 1970's rock and roll, and it looked like it might be fun," Giles told her. "I'm not looking to pick up a following."
Lili leaned towards him, intently looking into his eyes. "This is public radio. Nobody's going to be stalking you to pull your underwear off. Unless you want it pulled off. Would you like me to try?"
He scooted his chair away from her.
"You don't know," she persisted, scooting after him. "You might like it. You've got the greenest eyes."
"They're hazel," he said, and put his glasses on.
Lili stared at him, rapt, and then he remembered about her fetish. He hastily pulled the glasses off again and tucked them into his coat pocket.
"Oh come on!" she pleaded. "Put them on? You look so serious and smart and cute with them on."
"I don't need them," Giles said, turning to squint at the rows of CDs on the shelves behind him.
"Here!" She reached around him to pluck the glasses from his pocket. He snatched at her, knocking the mike over. She slipped them onto her own face. "If you won't put them back on, tell me how I look with them on?"
She looked unutterably cute, if myopic. Giles stared at her, then caught sight of a green light on the soundboard. He slapped at the switch to take the mike off the air again.
"Got to watch that switch," Lili told him solemnly. "It keeps getting turned on at the least little thing."
Giles took his glasses off her face. "Ms. -- uh --"
"Lili," Lili said helpfully.
"I appreciate your staying to show me the ropes. If you'd like to leave now, I think I can wing it for the next three hours."
"Two hours, fifty two minutes," she said. "Your song's over. Dead air's a no-no." She turned on the mike again. "Whee!" she said. "How about that for a quickie, guys? What've you got for the main course now, Rupert?"
Giles snatched the mike from her. "This is my show, and we're going to act like proper rockers here, not like a bunch of tossers."
Lili grinned at him.
"The lot of you out there sit down and listen to Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2'." Giles turned the mike off. "If this is your idea of helping --"
"Got you pissed off enough to kick some booty, right?" She fluttered her dark lashes at him.
A tap sounded at the door. "Great," he said. "Five minutes into my show and already I'm getting the boot."
"Oh, don't be such a worry wart," Lili tsked him. She rolled her chair about to kick at the door handle with her Adidas. "Com'in!"
The door swung open to reveal Oz and Devon. "Hey, Giles," Oz said and moved on in. Devon followed him, struggling not to drop a large box that was loaded to the brim with CD cases.
"'Lo, man," Devon mumbled to Giles. "'Lo, ma'am," he mumbled to Lili.
"Hi, Oz, Dev!" Lili said brightly. "Gee, not more demos?"
Devon let the box crash down onto the table next to Giles' albums. "Seein' as the Oz-man here knows the new DJ and all, we thought you'd be copacetic enough to put in a good word for the Dingoes on the show, maybe play a track or two."
"I've only been on the air for five minutes," Giles protested.
"Eight minutes," said Lili.
"No rush," said Devon and hopped up on the table. "You can, like, wait until halfway through. Hey, as long as we're here, you can interview us!"
"Or not," Oz said. He'd found Copper's stash of veggies behind the soundboard and popped a radish rose into his mouth.
"This is a retro 70s show," Giles told Devon.
"S'okay," Devon said. He picked up a CD case off the top of the box and showed it to Giles. "Track three, man. 'Breakfast At the Watergate Hotel'. Heavy duty guitar riffs and political protest."
"Devon got miffed in that one," Oz agreed.
"You guys already got Copper to play that one on her industrial heavy metal show," Lili said indignantly.
"That was the extended heavy metal version," Devon insisted. "This one is the acoustical one. Track three."
"It sounds 60's to me," Giles said.
"If you want to get technical, yeah," Devon admitted.
"Oh go away," Lili said. "Can't Rupert and I have a quiet night alone up here without you musicians hounding us all the time? We had some serious sizzlies under way, and then you come in and --"
"I'll try to work you in," Giles said to Devon and Oz.
"We can come back later." Oz passed Lili a cauliflower floweret.
"Dead air, Rupert!" Lili chimed, and bit down on the veggie.
Giles grabbed the microphone. "Pink Floyd's 'Another Brink in the Wall, Part 2'," he snarled into it. "An alienated man's protest against the crushing forces of the educational system obliterating the human psyche. I hope everybody is industriously studying tonight. The studio guests tonight are two slackers who are obviously neither studying or working: the head singer and lead guitarist of 'Dingoes Ate My Baby'."
"Cool, gladtobehere," Devon said.
"Hey," said Oz.
"They were in nappies, possibly, during the very last part of the 1970's, but what the hell." Giles gave the microphone to Devon.
Devon chewed furiously and swallowed the bit of carrot he'd just bitten off. "Like, well, we're inspired by those 70s guys. Elvis, and Presley, and Zappa, and the Pistols, and all those dudes. They're our heroes."
"Hey!" Lili said. "What about the girl bands? You know, it wasn't just the men who rocked hard back then."
Devon smirked at her. "Right! I for one would love to have more ladies rocking, preferably right on top of --"
Giles reached over and plucked the microphone away from the singer.
"You're a pig, you know that?" Lili said to Devon.
Devon snorted at her.
"Guess it's time for some music," Oz said.
Giles turned to flip the CD player on with the Dingoes' cd.
"You're not helping with the promotionals any more, Dev," Oz said.
"They love us like this, don't kid yourself," Devon scoffed. "You don't want us to get a reputation as an art band do you?"
"No danger of that." Giles reached to mute the studio sound. "Sorry, Oz. That particular track --"
"Sucks the big lemon," Oz agreed.
"Are you guys done?" Lili said. "Or do you want to debate the role of women in today's music industry, Mr. Devon? Huh? I'm game!"
"Okay," Devon said. "That's a quickie. I can state my case in one word 'blow job'."
"That's two words, you big dummy," Lili said. "Let me sum up my position in zero words." She yanked a baseball bat out from under the table.
"Bloody hell, not in here!" Giles grabbed at her arm as the tip of the bat almost took out a shelf of CDs. "Stop waving that thing around, you're going to whack someone upside the head with it."
"He's sensitive to that sort of thing," Oz said, and plucked the baseball bat from Lili's hands. He set it in a corner, well away from her.
"I wasn't going to use it," she protested.
"Damn!" Giles noticed that the CD track had already played to the end. "What are you plonkers playing these days, haiku?"
"It's okay," Lili reassured him as she plopped back into her chair. "The mike's open, so no dead air."
Oz told Giles, "Devon passed out in front of the QVC one night, and when he woke up he wrote most of the songs on the back of a bounced check."
"It's a conceptual album, man," Devon enthused. "But commercial. Genius, huh?"
Giles shut his eyes and counted to five. "Don't you have anything longer?"
"There's a track where our drummer plays the 'In A Gada Da Vida' riff on Dairy Queen cups," Oz said.
"Which. Track?" Giles said.
Oz held up five fingers, and Giles hit the '5' button on the player.
"Wow," said Devon. "We never conned anyone into playing that one before."
"There goes your reputation," Oz said to Giles.
"All it took was fifteen minutes with you guys," Lily said. "We've played two of your tracks now. Okay?"
"Well . . ." Devon began.
"Enough," Oz said. He stood and reached for the door, but before he could open it, a knock sounded. He completed the action. "Hey." He turned to Lili. "It's the groupie wagon."
"I'm in!" Devon pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. Oz shrugged and swung the door open.