Got The Radio On In Little Aleppo

America started buying radios in early 1922, and Little Aleppo started buying stolen radios in mid-1922. The McGlory Brothers ran them out of the Irving Club. Folks lined up to get themselves an earful of the future. You could even buy on credit; the McGlorys knew where you lived. Soon all the parlors on the Upside and kitchen/bedroom/bathrooms on the Downside had a set: hulking, dresser-sized baroquities with ivory knobs, or desktop plywood with bakelite. And then the world came in, like it had not through books or magazines or the Cenotaph, washing over the neighborhood with ripe sound from elsewhere. Foxtrots from Manhattan, and updates from Washington, London, Paris: it all came crackling out of those undersized speakers like a secret finally told. Little Aleppo couldn’t get enough.

The last squatch died in 1924, and in early 1925 the radio antenna went up on the first (if you’re looking east from the Main Drag) of the Segovian Hills, Mt. Lincoln. Gonzalez Hay paid for it, and the station on Dancing Street with all the complicated equipment, too, and then he named the whole endeavor after himself because he was American and no one could stop him. KHAY went on the air at some point in May, or maybe June. No one wrote anything down; it was the past.

At first, there were no commercials. No sponsors, either: the radio advertised itself–Gonzalez had a deal with the McGlory Brothers–but the neighborhood reached saturation levels quickly, and local merchants started buying time. They would purchase the whole hour, and name the show after themselves because it was America and no one could stop them. The Powdermilk Bakery Mystery Hour repurposed Sherlock Holmes stories and Bastin’s Paint Pays For A Guy To Read Mark Twain was just that. Arrow Beer Classiness Time was classy as fuck: the announcer had the Britishest accent possible, and there were strings, and–according to the press releases–the voice actors wore evening dress during the broadcast. The studios looked like theaters because radio was a truly new idea and had no metaphors of its own, and so borrowed from the previous medium. There was a live audience sometimes.

Backy & Reo were a hit on KHAY, straight from the Davidian Theatre where they did six shows a day. They did their routines in between the no-armed piano player and the gal who juggled with her face. Backy was tall, with a reassuring baritone voice and a broad jaw, and Reo was a stumpy runt who squeaked and invariably misunderstood situations and sayings. Tuesday nights at 8 on the Pennywhistle Trousers Power Hour. They played brothers who owned a radio station, because even when show business was just a baby it was up its own ass. They welcomed guests, many of whom came prepared to do a song or two, and extolled the virtue and durability of Pennywhistle trousers.

“They’re the finest trousers in the land, Reo.”

“What about the sea?”

“What?”

“What about the sea?”

“The sea?”

The audience would laugh to show they’d gotten the premise.

“The sea. What about the sea?”

“What about the sea?”

“Well, you said that Pennywhistle trousers were the finest in the land.”

“They are!”

“So that means I can get better pants from a dolphin?”

“No, no, no…”

And they would continue like that until it was time for the news. Backy and Reo spent the next 50 years breaking up, reuniting, farewell touring, suing one another, fucking one another’s wives, telling horrid lies about one another on chat shows. No one threw acid on anyone’s face, but everyone wanted to.

Swing! Swing! Swing! aired live from the Irving Club, and Trials of the Heart was a daily soap opera about a courtroom in fictional Valley Heights. It was one of those class-based dramas: judges and lawyers were upstairs, and cops and criminals and randy stenographers were downstairs. Where’s The Money with Ken Betters was a political show that aired every Thursday night. Ken would interview someone in local government. Each week, he would start off with the question, “Where’s the money?” and since it was Little Aleppo, there was always an interesting answer. Very occasionally, there would not be an interesting answer, and so Ken would follow up, “Well, if you don’t know where the money is, who would?” and that would invariably produce the correct effect.

Trusted Meese read the news each night. He moved to television in the 50’s, but started at KHAY. Six o’clock every night, here come those chimes BING bing bong ringing in the importance of the hour. Trusted Meese had a voice like hot honey; it just slithered across you, enrapturated you with the ball scores. He read wheat reports from Wichita, and box office totals from Milwaukee: Little Aleppo did not generate enough news on its own, so others’ was conscripted. The news was sponsored by Lou’s Lumber Loft, so Trusted would work that into the stories, especially car crashes.

“Should’ve been made from sturdy pine, maybe oak. Metal cars are a fad, you mark me. You want wood. And when you want wood, you want Lou. Go buy wood and make cars from it.”

When the Second World War Two broke out, Trusted reported from the rooftops of London during the Blitz, and North Africa, and–in one thrilling and award-winning segment–while hastily retreating from Paris as the Nazis swept in. He island-hopped, too, along with the brave boys in those floating tin cans, and sent back word from the Pacific Theater. (Trusted Meese never went east of the Segovian Hills or west of the harbor for the entire War. He had a sound effects guy and an intern named Wink who played all the soldiers Trusted interviewed. When he left the studio on Dancing Street each night, locals pretended not to see him. Otherwise, he would have to give the awards back, and everyone was proud of his victory. Later in life, Trusted would insist he had actually dodged German artillery fire, but he insisted a lot of things by then.)

Video killed the radio stars. Teevee came along, and the same McGlory Brothers that hawked stolen radios now switched to television sets. Gonzalez Hay thought it was a fad; Gonzalez Hay was wrong. He shot himself in ’61, the same day he saw his first color teevee. The widow sold to Faraday Conch, who sold everything: the bleachers and the music stands and the sound effect gear. All that was left were some record players and Wink, who was still for some reason an intern. KHAY went all-music.

Right now, they were playing disco music–Street Dancin’ by the Grant Green Orchestra–and Big-Dicked Sheila had the radio turned all the way up in her 1961 Lincoln Continental, which was triple black and convertible and had suicide doors because what the fuck is the point of a Lincoln Continental without suicide doors?

Fancy pants, I’m
Just entranced by
Your romance, let’s go
Street Dancin’ (Woo!)
Street Dancin’ (Woo!)

It was damn good music to drive drunk to. Sheila tossed an empty can of Arrow beer straight up, where it hit the rushing air and disappeared, and she laughed. Tiresias Richardson popped a fresh one from the cooler at her feet and handed it over. Sheila toasted her.

“Skoal.”

“Sure,” Tiresias said, and knocked her half-full can against Sheila’s. Fizz fizzled out, up, over Sheila’s black nails and onto her leathers. Skin-tight black leather is–if you can pull it off–the right look 99% of the time. The 1% being, obviously, road trips. The Continental’s seats were similarly-slippery cowhide, so she was luging all over the place, and leather doesn’t breathe at all so her balls were half-floating and she wanted no truck with whatever was going on directly outside her asshole.

The car was a skate; the tarmac was either water or ice, depending on which kind of skate you had pictured. Smoothness is the sensation, nothing at all vibrating and lumping and twanging suddenly, just a hum below and a thrum in front and the radio blaring disco music. They were doing 80 and the sun looked amused. This was the coast road. Sometimes, there were cliffs to the east. Once in a while, to the west. The Pacific was blue, green, non-existent, frugal, blue again. Scenic Drives preyed on looky-loos, devouring them whole and spitting out the chassis and hair like owl pellets. Redwoods had tunnels bored through them; these were traps.

“I hate this fucking road.”

“Don’t say that out loud,” Sheila said.

“The road can’t hear me.”

“Eh.”

Sheila wondered why KHAY still came in on Route 77. She would have to ask Precarious Lee. He had helped her buy the car. He stole it a little bit, but then he brought it back and declared the transmission sound. Sheila hadn’t owned a car before. You didn’t really need one in Little Aleppo, but she had to have it when she saw it with the FOR SALE sign on Hughes Street. Chrome framing the black swoopback of the topline, with a snub nose and an overbite, and a sloppy ass hanging eight miles past the rear tires; the trunk was large enough to raise a family in. Wire wheels with the little poky spokes radiating out all lattice-like instead of the whitewalls. The catalog called the color Presidential Black, and this particular vehicle was triple black: the paint and the ragtop and the leather upholstery. There were no headrests, just a low line horizontal across the cabin and above the bench seat–it was an excellent car to put your arm around your baby in–and the horn was a metal ring orbiting within the steering wheel. It was 18 feet long and 7 feet wide and had the turn radius of a small African village; it was a ridiculous car for the city; Sheila had to have it.

She had forgotten the name of the man who sold it to her. It was a boring name. John Brown. Mike Smith. He had a crewcut that he came into the shop to get tightened up. He parked the Continental outside. Sheila had been in love before, but never with a car and not like this. She got just a tiny bit hard looking at it. She felt weird about that later. Crew Cut was wearing a slim-cut black suit. Skinny tie. He was the most forgettable man. Sheila knew a little about cars, but not enough to crawl under the sucker right on the Main Drag, and so she called Precarious Lee, who came right down and looked the Continental over and talked to Crew Cut and took her out for a test drive. An hour later, Sheila conceded that he wasn’t coming back and paid Crew Cut’s asking price without negotiating.

But Precarious is not a car thief, just an overly-aggressive car borrower, and so he brought the Continental back freshly-waxed and with a full tank of gas and a brandy-new pair of fuzzy dice with black faces and white pips.

“We could have just taken the 5.”

“Nah.”

In the next lane was a drag race in spectacular makeup lip-syncing. Tiresias pretended not to notice. She had grown up in Little Aleppo; she was a local girl; she had seen worse. Humans are just reaction strategies in trousers: some Little Aleppians turned into the skid and embraced the weirdness and magick, and others struggled against it in a desperate attempt to reinstate the laws of causality, and some refused to acknowledge that anything odd was going on even during the weekend in ’88 when all the bricks in the neighborhood turned vegetarian. There was enough bullshit in the world, she thought; why seek it out? Tiresias did not care for Route 77. It was asking for trouble, she figured.

Sheila just wanted tacos.

Gordo’s was made of plastic and metal–it was easy to hose down–and the menu above the counter was in Spanish, and the women behind the counter spoke only Spanish, and there were pitchers–plastic–of Pacifica on the tables whatever time of day. They made Mexican soul food–brains and tongues and tails–and shrimp tacos for the gringos. Everything came with beans and rice, even if you just stopped in to use the bathroom. There were murals on the walls of great heroes, and neither Sheila nor Tiresias recognized any of them.

“I can’t believe you wrote her a letter,” Tiresias said. She had a chicken taco.

“It’s romantic,” Sheila said. She had a chicken taco, too, and slightly resented Tiresias for copying her order.

“You’re disappearing,”

“I’m withdrawing strategically.”

“You’re the worst fucking girlfriend in the world, dude.”

“It’s romantic!”

Tiresias took a big chaw out of her taco, and dabbed at her lips with a wad of paper napkins. She was her usual shlubby self, in rust-colored sweatpants and a blue hoodie. The ride had had the effect of a giant hair dryer, so her curly brown hair was massive and surrounding and cumulonimbal. She was wearing no makeup, and her nails were black. She swallowed and said,

“It’s cowardly.”

“I know.”

And Sheila poured herself another cup of pale beer from the pitcher, and waited for the head to die down, and downed half. She thought of cruel things to say, and then did not say anything; they were back on the road, back on Route 77 heading south or at least intending to–Route 77 was the kind of road where you needed to have your intentions in order–and the spedo needle pegged way to the right of the radius. The miles fucked off behind them. Going faster miles an hour. Los Angeles in front of them and KHAY on the radio.

Deejays. That was the new thing. After the dramas and serials and ball games and comical variety shows. Throw some longhair in the booth with a stack of records and let that be the end of it. KHAY featured ’em all. The Juice, and Beefeater Bo, and Slinky Tasteful, and Werewolf Tommy, and Liz Balance the Night Bat. Everybody had a gimmick. The men had smooth voices and the women had raspy ones. The bands that had made the records the deejays played would visit the studio on Dancing Street, and they would be just as outrageous as their press agent promised they would be. On-air, at least. Off-air, the bands would share their cocaine with the deejays, and pretend to be their peers. Then the red light would flash back on, and the bands would regain their surliness and blasphemy.

The Program Director was supposed to pick the records, but the position had not been filled. Faraday Conch had a practical approach to staffing, and he let the deejays pick whatever the fuck they wanted to play. When advertisers called him to complain, he fired the deejay. Then, he let the new deejay play whatever the fuck he wanted to play. Or she. Faraday Conch was not progressive; he just didn’t give a shit. The deejays picked their records, talked in between them, took calls if they felt like it; hung up on whomever they wanted.

Nighttimes nowadays was Moonpipe, who played European punk and really sad country music. Bert Judge did overnights; he spun prog rock demos and ballet overtures, and he took calls about the Apocalypse and Areas 51-64. Frankie Nickels did the morning shift and she played both kinds of music: rock and roll. Scott Meery took over at nine. He’d been around since Little Richard was tiny, and Chuck Berry was just a seed. Told stories about the old days, some of which would veer unexpectedly into pornographic conjectures about the interns. Noon was Lady Halberd. She was so British you wanted to dump tea in a harbor, and she insinuated that she slept with Rod Stewart once or twice a week. Drive-time was Limpet & the Stooge. They took a lot of calls.

The sun was high and plump, and the top was down. Sheila’s short-cropped hair didn’t pay attention to the slipstream around the car, but Tiresias’ mane did; it flapped about around her head and she paid it no mind. Sipped her beer, elbow on the door jamb, thought about having a cigarette but just turned her face outwards to collect the breeze and the California sun that came swirling in around the windshield. There was rock and roll playing on the radio, crunchy and stupid and thick-dicked and giddy, and Sheila clockwised the volume knob. Harmonies and guitars and then the drums went was-SHWAM and the two women sang along at the top of their lungs and into the bright sunshine and along with KHAY, which broadcast out of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.