Ghost Radio Read online

  He gathered up his belongings and walked out of the room, losing and recovering his balance with each step.

  The instant he left, I returned to one central fact: this interview would tell the story of Gabriel’s death. A story I wanted to keep to myself. This was bad. This was very bad.

  But what could I do? I couldn’t stop the magazine from publishing it. It was true.

  Then the obvious solution revealed itself. I’d steal Newsweek’s thunder. I’d beat them to the punch. I’d tell the story myself on the American premiere of Ghost Radio.

  chapter 15

  THE CONFESSION

  There were only ten minutes left in the show. It was now or never. So I took a deep breath and began:

  Listeners, I know we’re new to each other. But I’m going to end this broadcast with a story. A very personal story. I hope it draws us closer together. I hope it makes you understand that you won’t be mocked here on Ghost Radio no matter how wild your tale. Because I have wild stories as well.

  It felt good being in a studio again. Alondra seemed to be enjoying it as well, and Watt, well, he was in his usual loony self. Maybe this would be okay. The show had gone well. Most of the callers wanted to talk about politics. But I still felt good. I knew this final story would change things.

  It was a nice to be calm after the unpredictability of the last few days, when I wasn’t fully in control of my emotions or thoughts. Now I was in the place where I always felt in control. And doing what I loved: telling the truth in the dead of night:

  When I was a kid, my friend Gabriel and I had a group called Los Deathmuertoz, a Latin rock, punk, experimental, progressive band. Maybe some of you still remember us. We had a following back then in the Houston area. Our music was strange, but I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that it was also intoxicating. We used “found” noises that we had recorded. Sampled sounds from the most varied sources. Initially we only wanted to jam, to explore every possibility offered by our crude instruments and equipment. But beyond these experiments, our musical world was colored by tragedy. That was perfectly understandable. My parents, and Gabriel’s as well, died in an automobile accident, the same accident. The car I was in crashed head-on into the car carrying Gabriel’s family. Only he and I survived. After the accident and the time we spent in the hospital, our lives became increasingly intertwined. I went to live with my grandmother in Houston a few blocks away from Gabriel’s aunt, who took him in for a while. We shared our time together in a strange limbo, a quasiabsence of authority.

  We were both pretty wild, but Gabriel was always more daring. Nothing intimidated him. He was always eager to experiment with a new drug, make danger where there was none; get into all kinds of trouble. In short, he was a hellion. Every time we got toasted, he would disappear. Usually he didn’t remember where he had been or what he had done, so he started documenting these sprees with Polaroids. The photos he would find in his pockets the following morning were placed in what he called his “Diary of Lost Days.” I always wanted to keep up with him, but his escapades were so personal, at times I didn’t feel welcome. Besides, Gabriel didn’t care where he spent the night: in jail, in the bed of an elderly prostitute, in a wealthy person’s swimming pool, or in the monkeys’ cage at the zoo, it was all the same to him. I always went home to sleep.

  Gabriel’s aunt couldn’t cope, so he took on a nomadic existence. He slept anywhere, my house, his other friends’, a girlfriend’s, a stranger’s, even the occasional park bench. In time he became a squatter, living in abandoned buildings. I soon followed him; we shared the most bizarre dwellings.

  As I spoke, Alondra and Watt grew more disconcerted and irritated. I could tell my decision to confess publicly clearly struck them as idiotic. If I had told them what I was planning to do beforehand, things would have turned out the same. We would have argued, and in the end, they would have allowed me to do whatever I wanted. It was not their decision. To spring it on them, though, was insulting. I knew that. It implied that I didn’t give a fuck about their opinion.

  And, when it came to this, I didn’t.

  We devoted ourselves to our ambitions, two musicians on a mission. We thought of ourselves as a kind of fusion of Stravinsky and Dr. Frankenstein, making hybrid creations combining melodies and organic noise, like the amplified sound of a spider devouring an ant or a praying mantis as it ripped off its mate’s head. We recorded everything we could imagine and took it further, mixing those sounds with the static from our homemade “radio telescope,” an antenna we had built with old circuits that received and distorted radio signals. With a modest sequencer, we mixed these tracks into patterns and added guitars, percussion, synthesizers, and other instruments, not to mention a lot of other noisy junk. It was all part of our experiments. Later, we added computer programs, MIDI samplers, and vocoders to our sound repertoire.

  Alondra and Watt seemed to drift further away. I knew they wondered why I would unmake the character I’d created for Ghost Radio. They liked that creation. It worked. He worked. Explosive at times, composed at others, sometimes sinking into a hermetic reserve.

  But whatever he was, he wasn’t a confessor. He eschewed the maudlin world of the personal. He wasn’t the star of the show. The callers were. He was a conduit. A welcoming voice. He lit the campfire and told the world to gather ’round.

  I liked him too.

  But tonight I had to set him aside.

  This wasn’t only about the Newsweek article. I realized that now. This was about truth. If I launched the American version of Ghost Radio with such a bold declaration of truth, maybe the show would become what I needed it to be. Maybe it would give me the answers I sought.

  Alondra nervously applied Chap Stick to her full lips. I know she would have willingly given a liter of blood to escape, but she didn’t dare abandon me, especially after her fervent requests to discuss this very subject.

  We did a lot of crazy things, but we were genuine. At school, when we actually attended, people treated us as freaks. But when we made music, everybody’s perception of us changed. It was encouraging to see surprise, fascination, or bewilderment on the faces of those who usually ignored or slighted us. We lost our virginity easily; we had plenty of opportunities with our growing crowd of groupies.

  Watt, enshrouded in the wires, handles, and buttons of his sound equipment, forced out a smile.

  Our parents’ deaths brought us together. Relationships that develop in situations like ours are so profound that they’re difficult to explain. We created our own world, and offered the audience visions of it during our performances. They were like a musical

  Grand Guignol; onstage we presented our fantasies as well as our nightmares. This was before the concept of flash mobs, those instant crowds that gather using text messages to relay the time and place, but we used low-tech methods like flyers, the loudspeakers of a run-down ice-cream truck, or spectacular street signs inviting people to semispontaneous concerts and performances held in unique locations.

  I took a long drink of water. Alondra gazed at me with a mix of hostility and compassion. But Watt looked resigned as he cleaned his nails with a pocketknife.

  At every concert or performance, we tried to outdo ourselves. We still listened with passion to the great noise groups and bands of the industrial era but thought, ingenuously, that our music was a step beyond what those legends had accomplished. We compulsively read William Blake, Aleister Crowley, and Eliphas Lévi. We were obsessed with all types of death rituals. During one period we wrote songs in honor of the deceased, chosen randomly from obituaries in foreign newspapers, our lyrics inspired by their stories. We often found profoundly poetic passages in those obituaries.

  The telephones were ringing. There was no way of knowing whether the callers wanted my head, if they had a generous comment or just a question, if they wanted to share similar experiences, or if they wanted to ridicule me. I ignored them.

  Once, we connected our guitars and equipment to the
school’s loudspeaker, sparking a revolt of legendary proportions that ended in a fire and dozens of arrests. We played in public places, abandoned buildings, old churches, pretty much anywhere we could cause chaos and confusion. We were constantly in trouble and spent a lot of time running away, hiding, or under arrest, which only increased the number of our followers. We made CDs that we sold ourselves, and with the money, we bought more equipment and expanded our sound system. It felt like being on a train going at full speed. I guess anybody could have predicted that we were hurtling toward an abyss.

  A strange expression fell across Alondra’s face, like a mother whose child is clumsy at soccer: an expression of humiliation and empathy that you never want to see on a loved one. But I couldn’t stop. I was almost at the end.

  One night we went to an abandoned radio station at a Mexican university, close to the border. We set up an improvised—and undoubtedly historically inaccurate—altar for Teoyaomqui, the Aztec god of dead warriors. We connected our equipment to the transmitter and managed to get our music on the air. Afterward, I learned that many, maybe even all, of our fans were listening with euphoria. Eleven minutes in, at exactly two in the morning, there was a sudden power surge. I’m not sure how it happened since there was never an investigation, but it’s clear that our equipment caused a short circuit. It was raining that night and water was everywhere. We were more careless than usual and it appeared to outsiders that we had intentionally caused the disaster. Sometimes I wonder if Gabriel had wanted it to happen, consciously or unconsciously. I am sure of the time, because the digital clock at the studio, perhaps the most modern piece of equipment in the entire station, was blinking, flashing 2:00. The last thing I saw, before I flew eight yards in the air, was Gabriel.

  In a deliberately anticlimactic tone of voice I recounted being saved by the paramedics and how Gabriel was already dead when he arrived at the hospital. I turned off the microphone and took a drink of water, wishing it were tequila, then I stood up and left the studio. Alondra and Watt didn’t follow.

  A few moments later, I heard Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” coming over the monitors. A DJ spouting nonsense on the air is bad, but dead air on a live program is unforgivable.

  The studio door opened. Watt came out to join me.

  “What the fuck did you just do? What are you going to do next, describe your masturbation fantasies? Talk about hemorrhoids? You’re going to destroy us.”

  “I had to do it.”

  “Why?”

  I gave him my car keys. “Give these to Alondra. I’m going to walk back to the hotel.” And I left.

  chapter 16

  MY OTHER GIRLFRIEND

  The walk left me feeling liberated and elated. There was a spring in my step as I unlocked the door and entered the hotel room. Alondra was sitting on the edge of the bed; she greeted me with a cold stare, remaining silent for a long time.

  “I don’t understand you,” she finally said. “I don’t understand you at all.”

  I told her about the Newsweek interview.

  “That doesn’t explain it. Not really. You said we could never refer to that story on the air.”

  “You’re not mad at me,” I said.

  “I’m not?” she said, jumping to her feet and shooting me the maddest of mad girl faces.

  “No, you’re not. You’re jealous.”

  “Jealous? Jealous!” she screamed, her face reaching a new level of ferocity.

  “Relax and think about it for a second. You’ve wanted to talk to me about Gabriel for days. And look what I go and do? I talk to my ‘other girlfriend’ about him.”

  “The listeners,” Alondra said, her anger fading.

  I nodded.

  “Pretty crazy, huh? Being jealous of a bunch of anonymous people.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some of them sound pretty hot.”

  Alondra laughed.

  “Come here.”

  Alondra walked over to me. I put my arms around her and pulled her close.

  “You know what is crazy?” I said gently. “You thinking you could be second to anyone.”

  She melted in my arms, and together we collapsed onto the bed.

  Even before we received the first ratings, we were picked up for an indefinite run. The station moved us into an expensive, though impersonal, condo, and ads for our show began appearing on billboards, in magazines, and on the sides of buses. For a time, everything looked bright and shiny and normal. But I knew it wouldn’t last.

  It didn’t.

  chapter 17

  CALL 1288, 12:22 A.M. SANDY’S MUSIC

  “Is that me? Am I on?”

  “Yes, caller, you’re on the air.”

  “Oh God, I’m so nervous. I didn’t know I’d be this nervous.”

  “What is your name, caller, and where are you from?”

  “My name is Sandy, and I’m from Amarillo.”

  “All right, Sandy, where are you going to take us tonight?”

  “I’ve never told anyone this, because I thought people would think I was crazy. But listening to your other callers…well…I just have to tell someone.”

  “That’s what we’re here for.”

  “Oh, I’m so nervous. Am I really on the air?”

  “Just take a deep breath, Sandy, and tell us what happened.”

  “Okay…okay…well, this was when I was in high school. Some of us had gone to a party. Nothing wild, just kid stuff. But it had run pretty late. It must have been like one, maybe two in the morning by the time we were driving home.

  “Now, there were four of us in the car. Me and my boyfriend, Jake; my best friend, Tawnie; and her boyfriend, Carson. The party was, like, in this weird part of town. None of us knew it very well. And on the way home we got lost.

  “And not just lost. It was weird. We ended up in this big area with all these industrial buildings. You know, like warehouses or something. And it was like we couldn’t get out. Or like the complex went on forever.

  “No matter how long we drove, or which corner we turned, we still found ourselves driving down these empty streets, past these big empty buildings. They looked weird, scary. Not like any buildings I’ve seen before. And it started to creep us out pretty quickly.

  “Jake and Carson tried to make jokes about it. But I could hear in their voices that they were scared. You know what I mean, what that sounds like, especially with boys that age?”

  “I do, Sandy. And then what happened?”

  “I think Tawnie heard it first. Or maybe it was me? No, I think it was definitely Tawnie. Because I clearly remember her saying, ‘Sandy, do you hear that?’

  “Those words, the way she said them, I remember it like it happened yesterday.”

  “What was it?”

  “Well, I couldn’t tell at first. But when I listened real close, I heard it too.”

  “Sandy, what did you hear?”

  “Well, you know the music an ice-cream truck plays? I don’t mean the song, but the way that music sounds. I don’t know what it’s called. But you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, it was like that. But sad. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such sad music in all my life. It made me want to cry and scream at the same time. It made me want to run and run and never look back. And Tawny took it worse than me, she began to scream about how she wanted to get out of the car, how she had to get out of the car.

  “But that was crazy, where was she going to go? We were lost. We didn’t even know where we were. So we just sat there silent and frightened, driving and driving, with the music playing and Tawnie screaming about wanting to get out of the car.

  “I don’t know how long this went on, but the sun was coming up when we finally found our way out and got home. When I climbed into bed, I heard that music again. Just briefly, for, like, ten…um…twenty seconds. Like it was trying to reach me one last time. Like it was trying to say good night.”

  “That’s quite a story,
Sandy.”

  “Wait, there’s more.”

  “I’m coming up on a break, Sandy. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

  “Okay, I tried to find that part of town for years afterward, those warehouses or whatever, and I never could. It just wasn’t there.”

  “Phantom industrial parks and the saddest music you’ve ever heard. This is Ghost Radio live with you till five. And if you want to join us, I’ll give the numbers to call after this break.”

  chapter 18

  THE PRISON OF CONVENTIONS

  I write these words in ink, in a composition book. No cross-outs. No backtracking.

  Just one big vomit of truth.

  But where do I start?

  I don’t like talking about myself. I don’t even like thinking about myself. But sometimes you need to dig around in the garden of your past, rummage through the weeds and grubs—searching for that main root.

  I guess the root of my life, and all its problems, sprouted when my father decided to marry my mother.

  He came from a family ruled by social convention and appearances. A family for whom it was less important what you did than how you did it. My father hated this attitude. And, by marrying my mother, he made that crystal clear. He was ostracized by the family and erased from his father’s will.

  To his family, my mother would never be anything more than a squaw. A nobody. A nothing. Marrying such a woman “just wasn’t done.”

  They had someone else in mind. Her name was Marlene Koenig. She was everything they wanted. Cultured, bright, well turned out. She even had some vague connection to the British aristocracy. Dad’s family loved that!