Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

  I’d thought about variations on Dr. Dark, but I didn’t have the credibility or the confidence, not to mention any experience or technical smarts to pull even that off. So, when I got alone behind the mike, I got flustered. But my choice of “mask for the airwaves” may have had some truth in it.

  As you’ve probably gathered, I’d developed a major drug and alcohol problem in those days. Still, I wasn’t so stoned or drunk not to realize that I was just a jerk-off white boy in my last year of high school with no training in radio and no business working for an underfunded soul station one step away—one writ, one lien from being classed a pirate and not a “vital voice of a dynamic multicultural community.” Maybe Mr. Very Late Night was dead on the money—of which, of course, there wasn’t any. At least not for me.

  Did you pick up that mention of Sand City? I bet you’ve never heard of it or think I’m making that name up. There’s some truth in that too. Sand City is like a figment of the imagination of the California town of Seaside, which you may have heard of because it’s right next to Monterey and its peninsula of wealth and golf courses. Carmel . . . Clint Eastwood . . . Arnold Palmer country. One curve of bayside highway away from cypress trees and millionaires.

  Seaside isn’t like that now and seriously wasn’t like that then. In my day, it was where the black people lived. Hispanics. Islanders. It was the home of Fort Ord, once one of the biggest military bases on the West Coast. It was where the maids and gardeners who serviced the sprawling Pebble Beach estates took the bus home. It was where prostitutes worked out of massage parlors and the backs of tattoo joints—sometimes cars. It was where the drugs got dealt and shots got fired. Working girls from the Bay Area would come down on the Greyhound to do army paydays and weekends out of leopard-print-bedspread motels with names like the Sea Foam and the Bay Inn (no way out). There were turf wars where black, Guamanian, Hispanic, and Filipina hookers would openly duke it out on the pavement, while local pimps looked on, ready to unload if anything moved from the catfight to the knife blade.

  To be sure, there were many working-class people of all colors—along with some old Italian couples who bolted their doors and pulled their shades down early—but there were many, many streets like those in Compton that have a first-glance look of calm and seeming prosperity—that could then erupt in gunfire out of a single sweep of headlights.

  Those living in the fog and ice-plant clapboard comfort of Pacific Grove or grotesque Del Monte Forest Tudor mansion extravagance would’ve looked hard for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy nearby in those days. They’d have had to drive to Seaside—and I bet they still do. Liquor stores, dark women, China White. Certain things just sell themselves and folks come hunting. When I knew the place, there was never a night when there weren’t pimp-mobiles and lowriders cruising . . . white people on the prowl . . . searching . . . magnetized whether they knew what they were looking for or not. It was, simply put, East Oakland on the beach. And the strip of beach that bounded the highway, where Fremont Boulevard flowed down out of the fried chicken and burger joints, the panther girl motels and checks-cashed pawnshops—that was Sand City. Blink and you’d miss it. But in some places, you just know to keep your eyes open.

  An abandoned army rifle range . . . the ruins of the White Surf Drive-In, the screen long collapsed or washed out to sea, only a few of the speaker poles remaining, buried in sand . . . and a complex of khaki green Quonset huts from World War II days that an enterprising former bodyguard, dope dealer, community organizer and failed Burger King franchisee named Brock McDaniels had peddled into some bleary-eyed semblance of a marginally real commercial radio station on the back of a government grant and a whole lot of chutzpah—that was the Sand City I knew.

  How I got the late-night radio gig is a very long story that involves fried chicken, a failed dope deal and a night with a hooker, trying to prove I was a man. I don’t think I need to go into all of that. The only thing I’ll say by way of explanation is that I was then on the surface an honors student . . . with a stepbrother I loved who’d turned into a major car thief and who I’d crossed some lines with myself, jeopardizing my whole brilliant career. The kicker was, not only am I the son of a minister, but I come from a long line of religious people. And I don’t mean just religious; I mean famous evangelists, who could pack tents and churches from Boston to Minneapolis via Alabama. My great-grandfather was enshrined like a conquering hero by the Baptist Society.

  Still, the pure and the tainted are ever close. I first went out exploring in Seaside not to be another white boy looking to buy drugs. I went to sell them. I had attitude, even if I couldn’t think of a very good name to call myself when a half-assed dream opportunity came my way. I wasn’t expecting my dream to come true—I didn’t even know what it was. That’s one of my points, by the way. Maybe if you know what your dream is, it actually might become real, for a moment at least.

  I only got the gig because Brock couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to work those hours—he’d called all his markers in—and in order to maintain funding and keep his broadcasting license, some kind of programming had to be offered in that time slot. So, for the prince of darkness sum of $10 each shift, and maybe a napkin of sticky spare ribs, little white me got the chance to be something like a DJ on a black radio station one night a week, in the graveyard hours, playing records, thinking I was someone. The only person I told was my girlfriend Sal, who I’d picked up when my main squeeze, who I used to wait for on Pine Street in Salinas in the rain, dumped me because her mother came on to me when we were all drunk one night and I’d nodded out on their back summer porch after the county fair, when the mayor rode into the rodeo grounds on a buffalo and the beast got spooked by fireworks and stampeded through a cotton candy booth. After six Schlitz tall boys, how was I to know whose tits I was feeling? But it didn’t look good when the girlfriend found us in the morning, I admit. I’m just glad her father Roy wasn’t there to see too.

  Anyway, of course I had to keep my parents—my mother and stepfather—fooled, sneaking out when they thought I was in bed. I was after all, Mr. Very Late Night.

  Sal was known by many of my male friends as a slut. She may be the only true nymphomaniac I’ve ever known. She needed it constantly—and would finger herself on our drives to places like the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz. But she was also the kindest person I’ve ever known. A teenage alcoholic worse than I was, she’d had some sort of terrible life in her childhood, which she could never talk about even when crying—until she’d been adopted by a very wealthy judge and his wife. They were old for parents and lived in one of the monstrosities of Pebble Beach luxury that I mentioned earlier. One night, when Sal and I had been making out at Fanshell Beach, thinking the parents were gone, we drove back to her house to go hog wild.

  We found the place entirely lit up and Perry Como on peak volume. Her mother was back east—but the judge had come back early from his conference in L.A., knocked down a full bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch and then hanged himself above his pool table with what looked like a throw line from a sailboat. Made me think back to my mother’s uncle and that hay hook somewhere lost in time in Upstate New York . . . and the reason Marti had been getting “counseled” by my father. (I didn’t tell you that the girlfriend before Sal, who tasted like salt and melon . . . whose dim-witted brother like shoving firecrackers up cats’ butts and whose father was a fireman who got into a punch-up with me in their driveway once late at night when he caught me siphoning his gas tank so I could get home and have another fight with my stepfather for being so late . . . her name was Marti too. Unusual name for a girl. It’s strange how things connect in life . . . in death.)

  To make a long, brutal-soft story short, Sal broke as many windows of that great house as she could with the billiard balls and then fucked me in the room next door with Perry Como still on full bore. There’s no other polite way to put it. It was a night and an accident that you couldn’t just walk away from. I have a hard time explaining what it’s like
having sex with a girl when her adoptive father is suicidally silent in the next room, so I won’t even try.

  The next night, I had my show. My chance. My little moment at the mike. The thing I lived for then.

  I didn’t think I was going to make it. I was all swept up in the bizarreness and tragedy of the dangling judge, his toes inching the billiard balls, me and Sally screwing in the next room—or me trying, actually getting inside her and coming anyway—Sal coming too in a fit of anguished release and tears . . . all the doors and windows in that big house open or smashed, the smell of the sea . . . night shore mist drifting inside the house, mingling with the dead man’s last cigar smoke.

  It got right on top of me and I drank a bottle of vodka alone in my room, falling off the balcony sneaking out, almost spraining my ankle—then swerving through the forest nearly hitting a deer with the Isley Brothers’ “Harvest for the World” at max volume, all my windows rolled down, hotboxing a Newport, sheets of term papers and Taco Bell wrappers blowing out onto the road like bits of scarecrow stuffing I could no longer contain.

  Remarkably, I made it to Sand City with only one unplanned lane change.

  But my mood didn’t lift as it usually did when I got into what we called the canary seat. Brock, the heavily leveraged station owner, my boss and sponsor, was there with his girlfriend Charlene, getting high with Little John. (Brock was actually living in the studio illegally at the time because he couldn’t pay the rent on his apartment and was about to lose his car. Of course he was there.)

  Brock got higher than you would believe—and I don’t blame him. You might too if as many people were chasing you for money. I said hey and went in to do my show, popping a benny I’d traded to the Weasel, Little John’s brother, for a lude from the show before. The last thing I needed then was a downer. For people who like to drink, uppers are the only way to go. Before my crystal meth days, I went with as pure Benzedrine as I could get—black beauties in a pinch (Biphetamine). I liked to break the capsules open, razor clear the powder and snort it, wishing it was cocaine. Drugs had better names in those days. White crosses, yellowjackets, redheads, blue velvets. Always reminded me of the names of my father’s fishing flies, which he tied by hand before he got the trembles.

  I’ve never subscribed to that nonsense about not mixing drinks and drugs and proceeded to hit my stash of Jim Beam under the console, adding it to black coffee, waiting for a second wind from the speed while I played some Al Green and then James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” I got sort of blurry and sloppy for a bit and then the crank kicked in. It was what we called a Rooster, one of the homemade brands of white lightning amphetamine cooked up by the greaser biker gangs in the valley.

  Pretty soon I had a neck full of needles and was on a roll until I made the mistake of playing Isaac Hayes’s version of “Walk on By,” which got me thinking of my stepbrother again and the night the cops did us in the parking lot outside Solomon Grundy’s at the Berkeley Marina (they made a great black bean soup at that restaurant, and when the pot smoke cleared, I could smell it in the fog coming in when the uniforms shook us down about the stolen motorcycles . . . little did I know how seriously his crime wave had really escalated). That was the song that had been playing when we got thrown down on the hood and cuffed. Such sadness on top of Sal and the billiard-ball-broken windows uneased me into murky psychic terrain.

  All these crises I’d been party to but had managed to wriggle out of when others hadn’t. What the hell was I doing with myself, ripped to the gills out at some sand-dune chicken-wire dope-haven excuse for a nada black radio station when I should’ve been home asleep getting ready for exams and real life? I was virtually the only white person who ever walked into that dismal set of Quonset huts with the stink of seal shit and dead seaweed all around—and certainly the only one who didn’t have a felony conviction—and I was working on that.

  On the wall in front of me was a list of emergency phone numbers . . . a pinup of a sizzling chocolate chick with a big bubble ass . . . a poster for the Monterey Jazz Festival . . . a flyer about a rally for farm workers’ rights . . . a thumbtacked, faded and creased $50 bill that had on it in smeared felt pen the number of a call girl famous for giving great head before she OD’d. I felt the ghosts all around just like the fog.

  Something odd and unprofessional, even unnerving happened then. Metaphysical, I hate to say. I had on the Five Satin’s classic “In the Still of the Night,” because I was feeling nostalgic, simultaneously hyped and burnt out, drunk yet wanting more drink—but on the other, off-air studio turntable, I had going a very obscure version of “Amazing Grace” by Blind Jack Wallis, essentially an old black hobo with a good voice, who died on the trolley line down in Memphis one rainy night long before I was born. It’s a take like you’ve never heard on that famous song. He’s not singing about something he’s found—he’s out there looking for it, clawing for it, pleading for it. It sounds like it was recorded in an asylum or an emergency room. He at one point just frankly screams.

  Well, somehow (possibly because I was smashed) the broadcast feed intermingled the two songs on air to astonishing effect—at least to me. I was suddenly seized by some spirit of rebellion and reprieve. Both songs ended in perfect synch and I was left with empty space. Nothing planned, no neat transition. So, I improvised. I just started talking. Or rather . . . testifying. As I’ve said, I come from a crooked line of men of the cloth, some who died in rags, and for whatever reason I started witnessing . . . with some unexpected conviction . . .I am the Sinister Minister of the Meta-Midnight Chapel . . . a benign sign for those over the line. I am the leader and the breeder of the Choir of Ghosts gathered by the river of streets and the streets of casual slaughter. I am the Prophet of Loss and the Keeper of the Flame in the Rain . . . a fast passing light on the Coast Starlight train. I’m a preacher and a screecher and a graveyard shift teacher. Whoever is near to me better stay out of my way. Whoever is far . . . better come close. So you can hear me whisper of time and the blood and the family of orphans . . . and the Fire Road forward to the home you’ve never known—the long burning highway to the place of peace you’ve yet to find . . . but will . . . in me.

  Put your hands on the radio people . . . and be healed. All will be revealed. If you’re at the end of your rope, don’t give up hope . . . I’m at the end of your dial . . . and I’ve run the dark mile. Not a cigarette butt falls that I don’t hear. I know what you fear . . . and how you can be free. Put your hands on the radio and your faith in me. We’ll get through this night together. One step closer to a morning we want to remember. Behold, I am with you always . . . even unto the first rays of dawn.

  For those of us on the edge, Today is now and we’re doing all right.

  So sayeth . . . Mr. Very Late Night.

  Well, I was so mushed and wired I didn’t know exactly what I’d said, but I knew I’d had to say it—and that it meant something. I think. Maybe it was my twisted nod to my father’s or my great grandfather’s famous sermons. Maybe I was just very high. Whatever. What the hell—I felt I was among real family . . . or all alone (which hopefully, when you think about it, is the same thing). Beyond the music I blasted, the silence was usually deafening by that hour. Who was out there listening really anyway?

  Hmm. Well, I found out. Within two minutes of my impromptu homily, I thought the broadcasting authorities were running a raid on the station—or something worse. I half suspected some drug-related neurological crisis. The whole dashboard (that’s what we called the switchboard) started lighting up like a pinball machine. Not that there were hundreds of lines, but still—soon every single light was bleeping and the phone was ringing.

  Brock came bursting in from having been banging Charlene in the control room. He smelled openly of pussy and barbecue, with Kool cigarettes spilling out of the pants he was trying to pull up. “What the fuck you done, boy?” he yelled. “Answer that damn phone!”

  So . . . I answered the calls. And found another world. Of s
oiled angels and shining devils . . . the bored and the belligerent . . . only the lonely and the undefeated . . . memories of the dead and requests for the loved . . . soldiers and security guards . . . a black cop going off duty . . . a Samoan baker just coming on . . . working girls and the permanently unemployed. I realized that there really had been an audience out there, just waiting to be tapped. Waiting for a change. Something different.

  Over the course of that night I spoke to people too drunk to talk, who wanted to talk anyway. There were prayers for mercy, pleas for money and blessings, offers of money and blessings, people high out of their minds—and people just out of their minds. But there were others too: a priest who couldn’t sleep, a trucker passing through on the way to Hayward, a gas station attendant in Soledad . . . the Mexican dishwashers at Golden West Pancakes. Late at night or early morning, I’d never really known how far the station’s signal reached—and that’s maybe something for us all to think of in our own ways. The revelation was amazing to me.

  Forget good grades or applause on stage, or cheers when you score a touchdown—I was suddenly, directly in touch with not just an audience, but a congregation. A congregation of strangers maybe, but my people. I’d put my finger straight on a vibrating harmonic nerve of the red taillight central coast California vampire redemption hour. For the next hundred minutes I raved—off the top of my head. I preached, I sang, I mixed—I made a mess of the record library and spun for all I was worth. I did everything I could think to do with that studio until the first blue light outside began to bleed. I took calls from motel desk clerks, nurses, ambulance drivers and an all-night pizza joint. It was the best morning of my life and the sun hadn’t even come up yet.