Radio Tease #2: Branz

(What's a Radio Tease? Click here!)

Branz first contacted me during the summer of 1986. She told me she lived with her parents at Cannon Air Force Base and was going to start attending Eastern New Mexico University. I don't recall how the first conversation went, but she did call me after I had started my midnight shift. She would call me back from time to time and it seemed as if she liked me just a little bit more each time.

The only real bad thing about her was that it appeared that she made up stuff about herself, so I have no idea what was real and what wasn't. I don't even know that she told the truth about her age. (This issue was something that was actually typical of a lot of Radio Teases. They would just flat-out lie about stuff, and for no good reason.)

This is what she told me: Her father had previously been stationed in Las Vegas, NV. While she was there, she struck up a friendship with a radio DJ. One time, she ran away from home and stayed at his house. It took the cops two weeks to find her. She ran away again. This time, it only took them 30 minutes because she went to the same place. She swore there was nothing physical between the two of them.

One night we were talking on the phone and she claimed the DJ from Las Vegas was in her backyard. I tried to call her on that, explaining there was no way a DJ from Las Vegas was going to be able to get past Base Security. She kept insisting, so I told her to get off the phone and call Base Security and report it. She would not do that.

We actually did get to meet in person a first time. We had arranged to get together at Taco Box in the mall. I thought we were going to have lunch, that it was going to be an actual date, but she brought a friend along with her. On top of that, her mother had driven them there, so she could only sit down and talk for a little bit before leaving. She was actually very cute, with medium-length blonde hair. I hoped I would get to go out on a real date with her.

I know I'm not a good-looking guy, so it wouldn't have surprised me if she never called me again after that meeting. But she did. Things looked like they were progressing and we would soon be going out.

One night around 2am, she said she wanted to drive out to the station to see me. I knew I wasn't supposed to have visitors at the station, but I also knew that no one was going to find out as long as she left before 5am. I told her to go ahead and come out. I waited for an hour, but she never showed up. She later called and said the person working the front gate stopped her and made her go back home. And this was AFTER making her sit in the booth and talk with him for an hour. She wasn't being questioned, he just wanted to chit-chat. (But I don't know if ANY of this even happened.)

I kept trying to get her to go out with me. We would make plans to meet at the movie theatre, but she would cancel at the last minute. (More than cancel. She just plain wouldn't show up.) Then, she told me she started dating someone her own age who lived at the base. She said the reason why she got together with him was because he was there and I wasn't. I GOT SO ANGRY, but I didn't yell at her and let her know how I felt about her leading me on (just in case she broke up with that guy and still wanted to be with me). I thought that would be the last I would hear from her, but she still kept calling me and talking to me like we were boyfriend/girlfriend even while she was dating that guy. It drove me nuts!

On top of that, this arrangement continued even after I got a girlfriend. AND she even talked to my girlfriend from time to time. She also talked to a couple of the other Radio Teases I was trying to hook up with prior to that.

And I know that at any point, I could have just stopped talking to her and avoided frustrating myself. (That would have been a good idea.) However, it was nice that I was receiving some kind of attention from women, however sick it may have been.

But let's be certain about something: If I had been lucky enough to have gone through a few girlfriends in high school and college, I would have stopped all contact with her the second she told me she had a boyfriend. I would have told her to get lost and that I never wanted to speak to her again. A common theme with the women I became involved with was that I didn't know how long I would have to wait to get another girlfriend.

Eventually, I had to leave Clovis and move to Denver. I actually got to see her in person one last time before I left. She was able to contact the front gate at the base and get me a visitor's pass. (According to her, she'd never tried doing this before because she didn't know she could. I didn't know either, until someone else got me on the base once before.) We got to talk for about a half hour and she let me take a couple of photos of her.

I continued to call her for a few weeks after I'd moved to Denver. After I'd moved into my own apartment, I didn't have a phone. I never got to talk to her again. Her name is very common and I have been unable to locate her on-line.

The one positive thing I could take away from all this was that I was the only DJ in Clovis that she ever talked to. Later blog entries will show this was a problem with other Radio Teases.