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Prologue: One night Jean Shepherd instructed his listeners, "Okay, open the window, put your radio on the window sill and turn the volume way down." Then you could barely hear him whispering, "Now, when I count to three, turn the volume all the way up. One, two, three...". I was a rebellious adolescent, and gleefully followed his instructions. Everything became quiet. Suddenly he shouted at the top of his voice: "YOU FILTHY PRAGMATIST!!!" Shepherd had hurled an epithet. And, with all our help, it reverberated around the whole neighborhood. What a fine, cheap thrill that was. What a strange sense of invisible community.

Jean Shepherd, who died last October at age 78, was a frequent contributor to Playboy and an author -- In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (an actual sign he'd seen near a cash register); Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters. His work appeared on PBS, and his boyhood memories of Christmas graced the big screen. But it was his program on WOR in New York City, starting in the late Fifties, airing five nights a week, from midnight to 5:30 in the morning, that kept me awake and stimulated my imagination.

He would free-associate with humor and style, totally scriptless, spinning stories -- playing all the characters -- and commenting on social issues, accompanying himself on a kazoo, intertwining his enthusiastic tales with jazz records, like Bessie Smith singing Empty Bed Blues. He would constantly explore his own motives, trying to extend those motives to understand why other people did the things they do. This was my real education, and I treasured it.

Photo by Vernon Smith

Sometimes I would doze off, only to wake up at 3 a.m. and hear Shepherd discussing how you would explain to a Martian the purpose of an amusement park. Or how you think your life is going to change for the better when you buy a new pair of jeans. Or describing his friend who could taste an ice cube and tell you the exact make and model of the refrigerator it had come from and what year that refrigerator had been manufactured.

My idea of a hot date in those days was to find a girl and lay in bed with her all night, listening to Shepherd.

"One of the secret desires that all kids have," he would be saying in his charismatic Indiana twang, "is to be invisible and to, you know, to sneak somehow, nobody would see you, see. And, well, of course, not only kids want to do that. But this is a kid thing and leads to all kinds of things. For example, there used to be a thing advertised in the back of Popular Mechanics, and also Boy's Life, when I was a kid, and it said, 'See-Through X-Ray Eyes.' Ever seen that thing? It said, 'See through bones,' and it shows a hand that says, Look through and see your very own bones. This see-through X-ray eye device enables you to see through anything at will. Send ten cents to Johnson & Johnson.

"And about three months later, this thing came back, this little round tube, you know. And it's got what looks like frosted glass or something on the end of it, see. And the instructions came with it, a little smudgy piece of paper that showed a kid, you know, looking through this thing, holding his hand up, and you can see the bones. And it says the see-through X-ray eye device is very simply worked. It is worked by placing it to your eye, as shown in diagram A, and then holding your hand up to the light, as shown by diagram B. Then if the light is properly adjusted, one will see the bones through the eyepiece marked C in diagram D.

"I've been had. All my life I'm going to walk around seeing the bones of my left hand and my right hand, nothing but the bones in my mitt. It does not look through flowered print dresses. So kids, don't believe everything you see. Don't believe every ad you read."

One time, he called for a "milling" of his listeners across the street from the burned-out Wanamaker's department-store building to take place on a certain day and time. Police came upon the scene, but nobody among this horde of citizen-stragglers would tell why they were congregated there. One cop complained, "This is like trying to break up a pack of friendly dogs." Finally someone spilled the beans (the dirty snitch) and police began to herd those who were milling around into an empty parking lot, asking each passerby, "Are you waiting for Shepherd?" Of course, he didn't show up. He never said he would.

Indeed, one of the basic threads that ran through his show was the concept that everybody is waiting for something. In that context, I once asked Shepherd what he was waiting for. He replied, "I don't think anybody is waiting seriously for anything concrete. I think everybody's waiting for something -- and I say that in capital letters -- SOMETHING -- it's what Samuel Beckett was saying in Waiting for Godot. I don't know what I'm waiting for. I don't think you know what you're waiting for."

Epilogue: Somebody in my own apartment building had opened the window and put his radio on the window sill, and I tried to determine from which apartment I had heard Shepherd hurl that epithet: "YOU FILTHY PRAGMATIST!!!" It turned out to be a 17-year-old bursting with acne and spouting fascist rhetoric. My neighbor was a teenage Nazi. And he liked Shepherd the most when he would read aloud from the German philosopher Nietzsche. It made me realize that everyone listened to Jean Shepherd through their own individual filters; that everything in life is perceived through a totally subjective lens. This was the greatest lesson of my unofficial education.

Paul Krassner's latest book is Sex, Drugs and the Twinkie Murders; his latest CD is Campaign in the Ass.