The Voice of the Master

More about The Voice of the Master

We were in high school—time thick as dust on a turntable needle—me with the beard I hadn’t quite earned yet, and McCoy Kichar the Third grinning like he’d smuggled something sacred past the border guards of boredom. He held up the record like a relic. Not music, exactly—an audio artifact. A voice pressed into vinyl, a man announcing himself as something larger than flesh.

We dropped the needle.

Static first. Then the voice—thin, rubbery, almost absurd. Not thunder. Not prophecy. More like a carnival toy possessed by philosophy.

“I am… the great beast… 666…”

We looked at each other and broke. Laughter—real laughter, the kind that collapses whatever seriousness tries to stand upright. McCoy said it sounded like a satanic squeeze toy, and that was the final verdict. The occult reduced to a joke you could carry in your pocket.

But that was the trick of those years. Everything came in disguised—cosmic ideas wearing cheap jackets, heavy symbols pressed into plastic grooves. You didn’t know if you were handling revelation or just another thrift-store oddity.

We played it again.

Same voice. Same squeak. Same number.

Somewhere in there was intention—ritual, ego, theater—but what we heard was the gap between what something wanted to be and what it actually sounded like when it hit the air. That gap was everything.

Later, the record moved on. McCoy traded it—no ceremony—for a quarter bag of weed. Fair exchange, really. One kind of altered state for another. The beast reduced to currency.

And that’s the panel I’d keep.

No grand conclusion. No warning. Just two kids brushing up against something that claimed to be immense—and finding, in the end, that it fit inside a joke, a trade, a memory.

No one could fault us for not being novel and eclectic.

We just didn’t believe the voice when it tried to be larger than the room.