How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  All bets are on. In a world where golf tees are incisors, where Garbler Pipe Fitters could be a front for bootleg synthetic larynges, and men can be equations, word can be whatever. “Wordplay is a gamble,” says whatever’s arch-enemy. “You think I ain’t playing with you right now. I am surgical with you. I will make sure everything counts.”

  In Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, “Synthi” pills provide dreams. Illegal counter-hallucinogens known as “Up’n’Atomizers” give the illusion that there are no illusions, unmasking citizens as necro-bots. “Nothing much was left of the face.… In his neck, in the opening of a tracheotomy, a vocoder had been inserted—carelessly enough—and it bobbed up and down as he talked.” (illustration credit 11.16)

  I hear the clatter of loose cassettes behind me. Rammel is now raiding an old trunk in his fireplace, looking for the “F-4000.” “I got that tape somewhere! I just wanted to play the vocoder because it’s a beautiful machine given to civilians. I have mythology. Let me do drag race stories. This is inside jets.” He turns from the fireplace. “A-ha! I bet the F-4000 is in there!”

  He is pointing at Rip Cord Rex, a mask with a tape deck built into the top of his skull. Once equipped with “Syncro Dubbing,” the tape deck is now part of a spare mouth. The silver nitrous tubes are eyebrows. I try the Cushion Eject, hoping that Rip Cord Rex’s brain will quietly release the “F-4000.” Instead I find a Polaroid of Rip Cord Rex in a Kimono, wielding an orange leafblower under a strobe light. I am told that he likes to steal engines.

  DAMN YOU, IMPERSONAL FORCE

  I’m a face carpenter.

  — Mobb Deep (misheard)

  During my last trip to the Battle Station, the building was in scaffolds and slated for demolition. My host was uncharacteristically somber. “They’re going to gut it,” he says. “It will be empty—a tooth with a cavity.” After twenty-two years, Rammellzee, Rip Cord Rex and all hell else will have to ship out. He’s being accused of squatting but calls it “hop-scotching,” which sounds better. When I ask how long he’s got, he says, “Later … Later we’ll find out what later is. I don’t know what later is.” For now he’s relocating to an apartment in Battery Park City, sharing a building with New York City Police Chief Raymond Kelly on the western tip of Manhattan, on a centuries-old plot of garbage and landfill. He’ll have access to 800 rich people’s trash and has already been through most of it.

  Outside his window, jackhammers continue arguing with concrete. Polyethylene pipes are stacked on the sidewalk next to a trench, waist deep. “They’re building some big drainage system out there and they’re putting up these phony-ass poles. They’re ruining my view.” Rammellzee closes the window. “I’m going to hate leaving this place. But the dust stays.”

  The Morse diver’s helmet is acting pretty stoic about the whole thing. Rammel thumbs back to the masks and the wooden trunks on wheels where most of his arsenal—the entire alphabet—is now packed. “Don’t let that motherfucker come to life. The Battle Station is closing. I’m packed in boxes.” (Quick to clarify.) “Coffins.”

  One assumes there’s a vocoder in one of those coffins. “You don’t worry about vocoder sounds. If one of your vocal cords went out, we’ll bring you a new throat. We don’t want to pack you away. These things are going to come to pass. We have no sense of passion for you to stay the way you are. You will breathe spray paint. You will die under the water. You will know your letters are going to race when they don’t belong to you. You will listen to Rammellzee. You will do as you’re told or you will be crushed.”

  He picks up the tulip fly-swatter.

  “I have to go back underwater. We’re turning buildings into spaceships but we’re not telling you.”

  “Without the masks there would be no equation.” Letter characters: Reaper Grimm (left) intercepted the Clergy’s dictionary before it got to the population. (Grimm’s Law includes the transformation of stop consonants into unvoiced fricatives). Barshaw Gangstarr (middle) and then Fletch (right), a galactic card dealer who nurses a sharpened grudge. (illustration credit 11.17)

  Where do they go when the arcade’s closed?

  — Little Toni Marsh, “Video Burnout (Dub)”

  They say amazing things to the tune of their time has come.

  — David Allen, in the car, Concord, Massachusetts

  CROSSTALK CAN SNEAK

  Ralph Miller says the letter Z is a noise, not a sound. I first met the retired crypto-engineer on March 20, 2003, the morning after “Shock and Awe.” According to CNN, the desert is green and the US has been spitting Tomahawk missiles into Iraq for the past twenty-four hours. Ralph is profoundly opposed to the war. His wife, Peggy, sits on the couch with a newspaper folded in her lap. The news is on mute. “The most precise machine of destruction in history” moves in silence. Ralph’s not sure why we’re in Iraq nor why I’m in his apartment in a retirement community in Concord, Massachusetts, asking about the vocoder. Any confusion on his part has less to do with being 96 than my showing him a photo of Michael Jonzun wearing an orange space suit. “I guess they use the vocoder for entertainment now,’ he shrugs. “That’s funny business.”

  To him, “Pack Jam” would be speech compression. “The vocoder is your mouth,” he’d once told me. Having spent World War II correcting pitch malfunctions for SIGSALY, Ralph Miller has, in a sense, heard it all before. He cannot be expected to cotton to the T-Pain sound. Auto-Tune’s philandering pitch scale might generate nightmares of headless Eisenhower chipmunks singing. Generals can sound like robots; just keep the vermin out of it.

  At the end of the war, Ralph designed a mobile eight-channel vocoder version of SIGSALY (called “Junior X”) that fit inside a van, but was never deployed. By the early Fifties, Ralph was carrying his underwear in a steel briefcase and periodically disappearing down to Guantanamo Bay to work on acoustical surveillance for nuclear submarines. Later, he returned to Washington and exorcised his pitch demons at an anniversary party for Alexander Graham Bell. “I got up in front of Constitution Hall and sang ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ through the vocoder—in three different pitches. I went from a woman’s soprano to a male tenor and bass. Believe it or not, I’m no singer.” Ralph’s wife snorts. “I heard about it the morning after. Of course he’d come home and I’d hear something about it.”

  We finish up in the dining hall downstairs, which is ghost-chaired this late in the day. A woman in the corner stares into her soup. Shadows eavesdrop on the suggestion of afternoon sun. Ralph works on the chicken, chuckling about the vocoder’s insubordinate pitch. His wife has probably had enough of this by now. It’s time for me to catch the train back anyway. Before leaving, I shake Ralph’s hand and thank him for his time. “Something to remember,” he says. “Crosstalk can sneak in between the pulse.”

  Bell Labs vocoder engineer Ralph LaRue Miller at age thirty-two. (Courtesy Ralph Miller) (illustration credit 12.1)

  DR. PHIBES GOES RECORD SHOPPING

  A week after my first visit with Ralph Miller, I’m back at Grandmixer DXT’s apartment up in Harlem. More muted war highlights in green darkness. More precision bombing, more fuzzy resolution. We’d been talking about John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” who defected from California to Afghanistan in 2001. As every mouse-click from Lindh’s past came under scrutiny, it was revealed that he’d conducted an online Talk Box inquiry in 1997. Lindh’s post read:

  Can anybody tell me exactly what a talk box is, how it works, and how it’s different from a vocoder? I’ve heard that they’re dangerous in some way, but I’m willing to risk bodily harm in order to get my voice to sound like Roger Troutman.

  We consider the acoustic possibilities of talk-boxing a call to prayer from a cave in the Hindu Kush Mountains.

  “Pretty bugged, huh?” says DXT.

  DXT then does an impression of Dr. Phibes shopping for Talk Box records. “You know, they caught Phibes in the record store buying Billy Preston records.” He starts talking through his nose: “Dooo
o youeewwwe haaaave Billllly Pwwwweeston? TONNNNTO’s Exxxpannndinnng Heeead Band? Howww aboouut Rrrroger Trrrroutmannnnn? Morrrre Boouunce to theee Ooouunce.” (Roger Troutman, wherever you are, we tip our toad helmets to you.) DXT laughs. “All of that sounds like torture.” I mention what Ralph Miller had said to me about the sneak pulse. DXT looks at me like I should know. “ ‘Crosstalk can sneak in between the pulse,’ huh? You know what he’s talking about, don’t you? This stuff is really fresh.”

  This stuff is really fresh? “Yeah. This stuff. Is really fresh. The vocoder was pulses. Crosstalk can occur as feedback. ‘This stuff is really frrrresh’ is feedback. It’s signal leakage. He was holding your wrist, right? The pulse. Feedback is the crosstalk. From one mad scientist to another, you tell him I know exactly what he’s talking about.”

  THIS STUFF IS REALLY SCHRAFFT’S

  This is graveyard stuff.

  — FDR

  The Museum of Cryptology in Fort Meade, Maryland, was once a motel dinner theater. In 1994, the NSA converted the Colony 7 Motor Inn into a museum due to concerns that guests had been conducting surveillance. Rooms used for “logistics,” to spy on the spies, have been leveled, and the swimming pool is now tarped and fenced. A replica of the German ENIGMA machine broken by Alan Turing is on display in the motel lobby. Part of the dining room now holds a replica of the wooden presidential seal that Leon Theremin used to bug the US Embassy in Moscow.

  The SIGSALY decoy stands over in Schrafft’s Cocktail Lounge, a massive wooden vocoder façade, once unspoken now unreal. After the war, the equipment was either cannibalized by other projects or destroyed and chucked into the Chesapeake Bay, waiting to be salvaged by some decompressed gangster duck. The vocoder that sang “Barnacle Bill” could now be serving as a synthetic reef. Meanwhile, the last oscillator sits in storage behind a repurposed motel in Fort Meade.

  Across from the wooden turntables, a golden dummy SIGGRUV rests on crushed blue velvet. The 16-inch disk next to it is a real record, rumored to have been taken from a Lutheran Hour Sunday Service in Kansas City, Missouri, now playing the role of SIGGRUV.

  Frank Gentges on the HY-2 vocoder, NSA Museum of Cryptology, 2009. “Intelligence is people who sit quietly in little rooms, listening.” (illustration credit 12.2)

  Gentges dismantles the HY-2 vocoder, a speech digitizer deployed during the Vietnam War, at the Museum of Cryptology. Gentges and his late partner Dave Coulter designed vocoders independent of the NSA, causing some consternation. (illustration credit 12.3)

  I’m at the museum with Frank Gentges, retired vocoder engineer for the Navy. Frank has a droll, owlish disposition and could pass for a crypto-Santa. He once defined intelligence as people sitting quietly in little rooms, listening.

  After Dave Coulter passed away in 2004, Frank became the sole principal of Metavox, Inc., a laboratory in Great Falls, Virginia, located next to an indoor Go-Kart track. He is now working on an ultrasonic dental scooper—to penetrate dry wall for hostage simulation training—and a device that teaches you how to read with the left brain while distracting the right brain with music. There was something else about a hotel that’s going to be launched into outer space, but I didn’t catch it all.

  Frank acknowledges the SIGSALY exhibit with a curt sniff and moves on to Vietnam, where everything is real. “Now, this is a heavy, dude,” he says, pointing at the HY-2, the main vocoder used in Saigon. The formant vocoders that Frank and his friend Dave Coulter designed for the Navy are now mothballed in a classified NSA warehouse, along with the speech-synth EVA. I ask what my chances are of seeing any of it, and Frank asks if I remember the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark—the Nazi face-melt. “They won’t even tell you where the warehouse is.”

  Frank Gentges listens to dead air while getting reacquainted with the HY-2 vocoder. Gentges would occasionally respond to sensitive questions by saying, “I can answer that using zero sentences.” (illustration credit 12.4)

  (illustration credit 12.5)

  We move from Vietnam to an encased display of office phones—the STU-II and STU-III—both of which are a Pentagon standard. The display includes a photograph of George W. Bush receiving a call at the Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, on the morning of September 11, 2001.

  Does the STU-III still have some vocoder in it? “You’re getting into an electro-political situation here. It’s a vocoder, but they can’t call it that. Vocoders have a bad reputation because nobody wanted to listen to a damn robot. Some people’s ears are built different than the rest of us. We call them Vocoder Haters. It’s maybe ten percent of the population.”

  Frank still calls a vocoder a vocoder. Last Halloween, he aimed his massive theater speaker out toward the lake behind his house and articulated some dungeon-rack moans through a vocoder. Scared the neighborhood to death. “Kids thought the lake was haunted.”

  Frank is now addressing a wall of phones, an interactive exhibit where one can listen to Secure Voice clips throughout history. We run through the loop several times, facing each other on the phone. I’m excited to hear that the KO-6 sounds like the F-4000. Frank is disappointed with the HY-2, a problem with the transformation from voiced to unvoiced.

  I hang up and he says, “Quick! Pick up! Pick up!”

  So I pick up.

  “Shhh!” he whispers. “Listen. I can make that voice better.”

  As Frank Gentges tells me this, I notice that his hand is covering the receiver.

  (illustration credit epl.1)

  EPILOGUE:

  I WAS LIKE

  You couldn’t fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.

  — Homer Simpson

  Bart! The larynx is not a plaything!

  — Marge Simpson

  In the spring of 2005, I visit my niece’s fifth-grade class in upstate New York. Since she’s eleven years old, hers is a world where speech is highly destructible and better off for it. The word like has become a speaking mechanism itself, a mimetic filter. Everything is like something. Nothing is what it is. This chatty substitute, its “likeness,” is often compressed through cell phones as a digital replica of the vocal tract, a binary of buzz and hiss.

  Today we’re going to play Telephone and build a scrambler out of twenty-two kid brains. I number each student and ask them to write what they hear, or what they think they hear, so the words can be traced through the homophonic wash. Attention spans are somewhere between Mars and dinosaurs. The controls are shaky when the objective is gibberish.

  Number 4 wears ladybug sandals. Number 7 chews on a clipboard. There’s a picture of a meteor above the head of Number 11, who happens to have a pencil up his nose. Number 13 has a calculator on his watch. Number 5 is in a Colonial hairnet and Number 6 looks like she just rollerskated through the Phantom Tollbooth. Number 22 is new and genuinely not suspicious. My niece, Berenice, is Number 1 with tangled mermaid hair and a purple giraffe shirt. Her dad once tried to change her brain with a TV remote and she told him to walk away from his weirdness, slowly. She thinks the vocoder in “Pack Jam” sounds like Golem (Precious Golem, not the Yiddish man-of-clay Golem).

  At a dinner the weekend before, I consulted some friends on how to record the experiment without the class knowing. Suggestions ranged from hiding a minidisk player inside a banana pudding to wiring myself in a bear suit. “If you walk in there wearing a bear suit, they’re going to jump on you,” said my friend who wanted to bug a stuffed penguin. “It takes them eight hours to write a sentence,” said another. “When do they realize things happen when they’re not looking? Little kids can’t whisper!”

  When the big day comes, the class insists on being allowed to “call Operator” once and have the phrase repeated. I start them off easy with “This stuff is really fresh.” It scuttles from ear to ear, a new invention in each smile. Even when kids are thinking, they make noise. The rasp of paper, erasers tapping teeth, tongues walking on roofs, popping double-time tocks, f
aces cracking up into fingers grazed by stray ink. A purple formula for Space Rock fizz.

  7 calls Operator. 10 apparently thinks his clipboard is a trumpet. The pencil has now completely disappeared into 11’s nose. 6 says, “Don’t sneeze!” 9 calls Operator. 8 goes back to 9, forgets “stuff” and just says “fresh.” 15 thinks she heard him. 17’s antenna is up. Security leak in a thought balloon. Now half the class is mouthing “stuff” and “fresh” to one another. Teacher says, Shush. The code is broken. “Even if you know what it is, write down what you hear,” says 22, sticking to the program. Good ol’ 22. We like 22. I collect the scraps of paper and read the results. This stuff is very fresh. This stuff is very red. This stuff is really sad. In fact, 14 through 21 all think this stuff is really sad. Then it’s 22 to the rescue with “diss snuff” and “flesh.”

  Ladybug Sandals thinks this stuff is really easy. 15 asks if she’s supposed to spell out the sputters. Now they’re into it, ready for Round Two. I whisper to my niece. Crosstalk can sneak in between the—“Operator!!” Oh, good grief.

  Pulse. She looks at me. Are you serious? Just go with it. Whatever!

  This time the switchboard goes Lite Brite. “Shhhh!” “I bet that’s not what he said.” “That’s what I heard.” “Like it’s not supposed to make sense!” “Well, maybe it does.” “It’s soooo random!”

  I scan the bookshelf, trying not to spy. Time Warp Trio, A Light in the Attic, Bitefinger Baby, The War with Grandpa. I check back with the circuit. They’re now flashing messages on the backs of their clipboards, mostly anti–Red Sox propaganda. 22, bless his bed-head, still takes the game seriously. His message reads, “Shhhhhhhhhh. Don’t say a word!” after a drawing of a three-eyed rabbit.