Jack O'Connell - Wireless

Enough, Brother John, with the asinine alliteration. God, it’s infectious.

Which brings us to today’s topic — infectious diseases. Like Doubt. I said it — the dreaded D-word. And I’m sorry, but keeping silent about our growing problem only makes everything worse. Our sources tell us that since we last spoke, more and more of you, who for the past five years pined for our return to Q-town, are walking around like some spike-haired minor league existentialists moaning, “O’Zbon is dead and anarchy is absurd.” It’s an interesting turn of events — in our absence, our cult grows and flourishes; upon our return, the number of true believers starts to dwindle. I guess faith is easy to maintain from a distance. But when the brothers’ voice is heard on the home front, belief turns into a greased pig. Goddamn hard to hold onto.

Yeah, and it’s weird ’cause this is the opposite of what we always thought. I guess absence does make the heart grow fonder and familiarity will sometimes breed a very hip contempt.

Now, there are two roads that Jimbo and I can navigate in this situation. We can pull up stakes tonight, get back on the interstate, and never give another thought to the hometown and the past. Or we can try to understand this backlash, do a biopsy on the locus of the doubt, work with the doubters, put ourselves at risk, and try to make you all certain that we are who we say we are.

Amen, bro. We am who is.

It’s got to be one road or the other, ’cause like Elvis said — and I mean the dead one — we can’t go on together, with suspicious minds.

I was thinking our problem over at about four A.M. and I started to wonder why we were such a hit last time ’round. Was it the freshness, the typical rush that greets any new idea or product? Yeah, it was that, but it was more than that. Since the collective we crawled out of the bubbling, primordial ooze, slapped on a bearskin, and moved into a cave, we’ve been hooked on the one narcotic that never fails to fix. Absolutely addictive on initial contact. I’m speaking, of course, of the big M. Myth. That loop of an all-too-human story that was birthed in the slime and slop and salty blood of primeval consciousness. We listen to it waking and sleeping. We suck on it with each breath we pull in. We live it out in each minute step of our inconsequential lifetimes.

When we first passed Go with our initial broadcast, my brother and I put a new spin on a specific section of an old story and bounced it down to the playground where it would be most appreciated, sustained, enjoyed — Quinsigamond’s little bohemia, the Canal Zone.

And you guys grabbed the ball and ran. What we thought was a harmless and onetime prank was entirely something else by the time it hit your unconventional ears. We were the classic rebel and madman visionary, the bad boys with the lineage that stretched from the nameless shamans of the foggy past down to St. Ti Jean and his misunderstood wanderlust. We called black white and up down and underscored the patter with a backbeat you could dance to. We were anonymous and that meant we could be anyone. We were unlicensed and that meant we were the enemies of authority.

And so, though we never planned it this way, we appealed to a wide variety of local subsets here in the city. Little groups, hybrids, cults. Small families that had nothing in common with one another, other than the fact that they felt excluded from the mainstream. And that now they had a voice that would speak for them.

Do I need to say that that kind of faith scared us as much as the Feds coming to town?

So, we ran. Picked up an AAA atlas and eased up the on-ramp. Injected ourselves into the interstate asphalt veins of this great land.

And an odd thing happened out there on the road. We started to miss being needed. That mantle of spokesman that was hung on our pirate signal started, in retrospect, to feel good and warm. So, after a time, we rolled back home.

But doesn’t life have a way of stacking events into ironies? When we left, we were the Kings of Anarchy. When we returned, we were impostors to the throne.

But we never changed, folks. We never altered a thing. It’s the same James. The same John. And, mostly, it’s the same goddamn equipment.

You’ve got us rattled here, people. You’re making our dreams chaotic. We’re having historic nightmares—

Almost time, John-boy.

Now, the way I hear it, not only are you doubting the O’Z, but you’re fighting among yourselves. I hear a little schism brewed up back at the ranch while we were on tour. Little bird tells me that some internal dissension is on the wax. I hear from the underground vine that some of the charter members who want “jam for the sake of jam” are butting heads with a cadre of liberation-technology greenhorns.

Time, Johnno.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s not forget, people, that all the biggies, from Rome on down, tend to collapse from within. I’d like to say, “What the O’Zebedees have joined let no sibling savaging put asunder.” But your future is not up to us. We could end up back on the road by tomorrow. One phone call could have us highway bound. We’re commentators, not progenitors. You built up your family yourselves. And you can tear it apart from within if that’s what you want to do. I know that right now it may seem like there’s no solution to your dilemmas. That petty jealousies have turned into momentous ideologies. Simple squabbles into complex campaigns. All I can advise is to find an arbiter and latch onto any common ground, even the most craggy. Because if you sever the blood knots and burn down the family home, you walk alone. And what happened once will happen again. Your subgroups will divide into more subgroups. Community cancer, folks. Until each is just a group of one. And then you’ll divide within yourself, within your heart.

Look, it’s James again. One arm wants to carry on the tradition unchanged, keep things pure and on a completely artistic and comedic and symbolic level. The other arm wants to start lobbing bombs at antennas, injecting viruses into the stations’ mainframes. I agree that those are pretty divergent goals. But you’ve got to look inward, find the common vein that flows back toward the brain. Now we’ve really got to run.

Okay, we’ve got to cut out. Listen, where I come from we used to have this trick. It went like this — when you lose faith, act like you still have it and it will come back. Don’t try to figure the logic of that. Just give us a break here, huh?

C’mon, Juan, I’m cutting the signal.

Okay, okay. Flash to the orphaned entrepreneur. Something’s rotten in Denmark. Our sources say to watch your step. Things aren’t what they seem. Wish we could get more specific, but we’re just giving it as we get it and—

John, for Christ sake.

All right already. We’re out of here. You’ve got our future in your ears, friends. Believe in us as the one, true O’Zebedee Brothers Outlaw Network or be prepared for our demise.

The Choice is always yours.

Hic Calix .

Ronnie has just started to doze when the alarm goes off. Flynn comes bolt upright with a surge of panic. Ronnie lowers the volume on the clock radio with one hand and with the other eases Flynn back down onto the pillows.

“Just the alarm,” she says in her most soothing voice. “I’ve got to shower. I’m on in an hour.”

Flynn watches her slide out of bed. “You could call in sick.”

She stops in the doorway, turns back to him, covers her breasts with her arms, watches him roll his eyes.

“You want Ray Todd on the air for the rest of the night? We can’t do that to the city.”

“You’re too public-spirited. Makes for a lousy hedonist.”