It was a little past midnight in East Orange, New Jersey, when everything went dark. Seconds before I’d been cuing up a record, an actual piece of vinyl, on a turntable in the WFMU radio station on the campus of Upsala College. It was 1988 (maybe 1989? Those years felt fuzzy and blendable), a Saturday (or maybe a Sunday) and I had been given an 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. spot all my own based on some guest-spotting I’d done on another show called The Hound. His three hours spanned a sensible Saturday afternoon time slot but still…it felt pretty rad to have my own dead air to fill up. I would be given free license to play whatever I wanted. Maybe there were FCC rules? I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I didn’t bash any boundaries.

This was my third week lugging stacks of records out to the Cadillac I borrowed from my at-the-time boyfriend, A, driving the forty-or-so minutes to the station from the Lower East Side, then hoisting in the milk crates of vinyl from the parking lot into the studio. I’d get there early enough to paw through WFMU’s music library, then sit on the ratty couch waiting until the DJ ahead of me signed off and I’d take my place behind the microphone, dials, sliders, and turntable to fill up 180 minutes of airtime. I would try and act like I was just having a conversation with friends but speaking into dead air is a very strange experience not to mention that aside from the few people I knew were listening and Andy, who would, if he remembered, tune in during his bartending shift down in Alphabet City, who was I talking to? I also took the occasional request calls, which weren’t always requests for songs. This was unnerving and why, when the lights went out and the soundboard stopped looking like a spaceship and I began feeling like Major Tom as the turntable needle slow-spun Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” so that he sounded weird and taffy-pulled, I instantly thought Klute, but only based on the movie poster with the dangling phone and the fact that it was some kind of psychological thriller. I did not feel tough-ass like the DJ in that classic gritty-NYC film The Warriors.

In that pitch-black, windowless space where I was 100% alone, the person who’d called the week before inviting me to some sort of parking lot rendezvous, was my first thought. Of course, at the time I’d laughed it off, moved off the line as smoothly as I could, then practiced putting my keys in between all my fingers for full jabbing capabilities after my shift was done. There was a security guard at the edge of the parking lot, so I did know there was a human out there but still, would he hear me yell? If I had to yell? Or even had time to yell?

As my mind shut down around what I should do next, a boom, boom, boom came through the door. Between the time of the pounding and a voice, an Ice Age happened, Vesuvias exploded, Mars was breached. Finally, I squeaked Yes? (Or not although I do remember thinking Idiot, why did you make any noise?) Then the voice: “We’ve had a power outage. It’s [fill in security person’s name]. Do you need a flashlight?” or some-such like that. I may not have believed said person, but then the sudden upswing of all the lights and sounds back in full force. Prince carried on with his corvette. The fan began whirring and lights began blinking on the soundboard. I cracked open the door where security-guy was standing, not scary, friendly. He handed me the flashlight just in case, telling me to leave it in the studio just in case.

The adrenaline rushed me through another few hundred minutes of playing music, with maybe five of them spent explaining to the void, or rather, listeners, about the power outage. The phone did ring, but only once. I picked it up and the voice on the other end told me that the whole of East Orange had experienced a blackout. Well, there you go. No murderers or creeps outside the door, just faulty electrical issues. The next overnight DJ came in, I lugged my milk crate back out to the car, waved at the security guy, and drove straight to the bar so Andy could give me some drinks before the gate came down. Then we’d put the Cadillac in a lot three blocks from our apartment because…parking. In New York City. And in no universe would it be smart for me to walk alone those three blocks in the early morning hours in the neighborhood we lived in.

My dad loved that I lived in New York City and that I was doing what I loved. Also that I had a radio show. I’d sent him a tape of it, which he played and played, even tolerating the massive Iggy and the Stooges set of songs I’d included. He was proud that I’d found a way to become a music journalist, waitressing until I got a job at Rolling Stone, becoming a writer at SPIN. I didn’t tell him about the relentless bill collector phone calls although I did occasionally borrow the odd buck. He’d made his career as an independent graphic artist and knew what it meant to make money doing what you loved while knowing it was unlikely to make us rich doing it. I didn’t tell him that if you turned left out of my apartment building, you’d step by a crack house two doors down. I mean, the man read the papers so was aware that New York City in the mid-to-late eighties was no sparkling-safe city. Gritty, he knew. Yet still, he trusted me to be smart in this place where I felt magic—hectic magic for sure, but still some tarnished tinsel. I wasn’t always smart, of course I wasn’t. And I didn’t tell him about those times or about the phone-call creeper at the radio station.

One time, after he’d read one of my blog posts about inappropriate behavior in the music industry, he’d said, “Well there are some things you learn about your child later on, and maybe that’s good.” And I agreed. It’s complicated, this letting go and trusting a person you love to figure it out without your help. Having found myself stepping deeper into his space these last three years, I recognized the fierce individualism he held to, which explained a lot: How it was in his nature to let me figure out what I needed even though in my heart I knew he would be there to catch me if I needed catching. He wanted that same respect, which was why when things started to slip: his memory of how to shave, for instance, the startling nature of that loss of independence shook him. For 96 years and a bit, he trusted the choices I made and he knew that I returned that sentiment a thousand times over. I carry that on.