Jack O'Connell - Wireless

“I’ve wanted to meet you for a year now. You know that?”

“Yeah, you fit the fan demographics.”

“I’m not a fan—”

“You say it like it’s an insult …”

“There’s a certain mentality—”

“As opposed to jammers?”

“Mizz, I don’t know what you’re referring to. I don’t know the meaning of that word.”

“You come here for the ambience? You’re into nuclear deco?”

“I’m just another blues fan.”

“Oh, a music lover—”

“Exactly.”

“But my show’s all-talk.”

“I make exceptions. And you’ve sort of got a bluesy style.”

“You know, Flynn, I’m not a radio cop or something. I just wanted to ask why, see if we could work out an arrangement.”

“An arrangement?”

“I’m not here to nail you or something. You know that, right?”

“I’m not the guy. I’m not the person you’re interested in.”

“Would there be any chance you’d know who I should talk to?”

He stares at her for a while until she breaks a nervous smile, then he gets out of the chair, takes a step away, and says, “This figures.”

She leans forward, reaches out, and takes his coat sleeve.

“You’re leaving?”

He stops, bounces slightly on the balls of his feet, steps back in toward her.

“I wait a year, keep myself from finding out about you. Concentrate on the voice—”

“You and fifty thousand others. According to last week’s book, anyway.”

“—keep you in the dream. But it won’t work. My luck. The dream has to mug me. From behind. In my own bar.” He takes a breath, lowers his voice, but retains the testiness. “I didn’t knock out your pathetic station. And I don’t know who did. And if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you. End of story.”

“Honor among thieves. How trite.”

“Who’s a thief?” Flynn asks. “What was stolen?”

“Airtime.”

“How do you own airtime ?”

“What do you mean, how do you own it? You purchase it. You buy a license. You sign a contract. Hey, Mr. Life Insurance, you familiar with these terms?”

“See, you can’t trust the voice. It never works. I took you to be smarter than this.”

“Moving right along. Is this the part where we start to insult each other? Tell me when to throw my drink.”

“Okay, fine. What can I say? I’m not your man. You got bad information. Hazard of our age.”

“I’m just curious, you know,” Ronnie says. “I mean, what’s the big attraction? Why would someone want to waste their time jamming radio stations?”

Flynn shrugs and shakes his head. “I can only speculate.”

“Please do.”

“My guess is there’s probably a lot of different motivations. Some of them probably feel powerless and frustrated and somehow they stumbled on this little hobby to compensate. You know, hit the big boys. Others are probably just old-time practical jokers. And then I’d guess there are the egos, right? They do it ’cause they can. ’Cause it’s complicated and technical, and they know how. I don’t know.”

She nods, lifts her drink to mock-toast him, gulps down the rest of the mescal, hands him the empty glass.

“Last question. I’ll frame it hypothetically since you’re not familiar with the people involved. If you were a jammer, why would you spare my show? What’s so special about Libido Liveline ?”

“You’ve got an army of horny adolescents at your heels and you’re asking me that question?”

“I need a more worldly opinion, someone closer to my own perceptions. A peer.”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions there—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just answer the question. Take a stab.”

Flynn shrugs. “For Christ sake, you heard the guy yourself. I’d take what he said at face value. He finds everything else on your station babble. That means he must find some value to your show.”

“I guess,” Ronnie says, “that’s what I’m looking for. How he defines that value.”

“You’d have to find the guy and ask him. And I can’t help you in that department, whether you believe me or not.”

Ronnie lifts her arms up over her head in a slow stretch. Flynn wishes he had a drink, then wishes that he’d never left the house tonight, that he’d told Wallace and Hazel to settle their own differences.

Her hands come down, run through her hair. She gives a smile and says, “Forget it,” and then adds, “Want to go for a ride?”

They end up at the airport, the old one, abandoned but undemolished for a decade now. They sit in Ronnie’s Jeep, passing her flask of mescal back and forth like a slow-motion Ping-Pong game. As they talk, they stare out at the ghosttown terminal, every window shattered, all doors missing. The landing strips are a gritty museum of frost heaves and potholes, brown weed shooting up through every cracked parcel of cement. In the deserted section of parking lot where they drink, dozens of giant spikish halogen lamps have all been dented in near the base, like someone with a drivable wreck and a lot of undirected hostility has rammed them at cruising speed, caused them to bend over as if eternally racked by shooting ulcer pain.

Flynn knows he’s getting more drunk than he intended, but that it’s necessary if the night is to progress somewhere, if some percentage of his fantasy can be brought back.

The booze doesn’t seem to hit Ronnie. Her voice stays constant, changeless in tone and volume. This could be a byproduct of her profession, Flynn thinks, but it’s more likely she’s got a high tolerance from some steady practice. She’s been telling him stories from her youth, vignettes sort of, little glimpses that may have a point or lesson that he’s missing. She’s let him in on her mother’s many husbands, her bizarre teenage crush on Walter Cronkite, and, most of all, her required research into the intricacies of human sexuality in all its varied masks.

“The thing is,” she says, pausing to take the flask from him and fire a double, “I realized early on, I just instinctively under-stood, the need for specialization. You want to take a guess how many straight talk shows there are out there? Answer — too many. And it’s been that way for a long time. They come and go. It gets boring fast. You know this. I’m not telling you anything new. So you have to zero in. You have to find the collective pulse and tap it, give it the jolt it’s waiting for. Whether it knows it or not. Okay, you can go politics, like old Ray at the station. Do I need to say more? Listen to Ray. No humor. No sensitivity. Literal-minded. No feeling for the audience. You end up exclusively with the fanatics. I know what you’re thinking. No fanatics like the ones you find in Libido-land. Okay, true to a point. But what I’ve found is that your fanatics in this department, and only in this department, cut across the whole spectrum. Race, creed, age. Economic, geographic, sociopolitical. The whole shebang. We’re all fanatics, Flynn. You are a fanatic, Mr. Flynn. We’re all pioneers, willing or not.”

Flynn shakes his head, holds back a laugh. “I’m sorry. I know you’re the expert here, but your thinking is dated. No one’s obsessed with sex anymore—”

“Hold up. Stop. You’re confused. You’re misreading symptoms. Our obsession’s gone back underground, below the skin. We’re back to the age of suppression. It’s cyclical, like everything else in history. We’re into appearance again. Governmental mores. It’s an epidemic mentality. Combined with backlash. You just have to take my word on this.”

“Well, like you say, Ray’s been getting bumped regularly, but you seem sacred.”

“My show. My show seems sacred.”

Flynn smiles. “Same difference, right?”