Was That 87 ★ Instant

Even if you don’t know the answer, you’ll understand the feeling. David L. is a writer based in Portland. His first memory of channel 87 was a 1986 Buick commercial that turned into a werewolf.

In the pre-internet underground, channel 87 (or, more accurately, the mid-band around 87.75 MHz on analog cable) was the fabled home of the Z Channel , Playboy’s Night Calls , or regional independent stations that ran R-rated movies after 1 a.m. Because broadcast standards varied by city, channel numbers became oral folklore. In Boston, it was 68. In Chicago, 44. But the mythic “87” stuck as shorthand for any forbidden frequency. was that 87

You turn to your friend or your sibling. Heart racing. Voice low. The Code of the Scrambled Signal “87” wasn’t a year. It wasn’t a score. It was a legend. Even if you don’t know the answer, you’ll

By morning, the question became unanswerable. You couldn’t rewind live TV. You couldn’t search a database. You could only replay the 1.5 seconds of grainy footage in your mind until it turned into something else entirely. His first memory of channel 87 was a

If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, you know the scene. It’s 11:30 on a school night. You’ve twisted the TV’s UHF dial to a fuzzy channel—maybe 33, maybe 56—because you heard they sometimes show movies uncut. Static hisses like rain. Then, through the snow, a glimpse: a car chase, an explosion, or (if you’re lucky) a silhouette removing a blouse.

To ask “Was that 87?” meant: Did we just see what I think we saw? Or did the static fool us? What makes the question so haunting is its built-in ambiguity. You never got proof. The signal would fade, and with it, the memory would soften. Was that a nipple or a shadow? A gunshot or a car backfiring? A curse word or a cough?

In the chaotic, low-resolution world of late-night VHS tapes and scrambled cable signals, three words captured a generation’s collective anxiety: “Was that 87?”