chapter 1: ILLEGAL RADIO IS MY LIFE (work in progress)
“You know how they say? They say grass always greener on other side. So it’s like that ya? Except instead of grass it’s that flower, and by other side I mean other side of the planet. It’s like that, youknowwhatimean?” He exhaled upwards towards the wooden floorboards above them. A decade or two ago that wood would've carried the weight of monogenerational families huddling over plastic tables for a late breakfast of the world’s remaining swine, but now the only people who came to these empty suburbs were lost boys and pigs of the federal variety.
The wide brown eyes that looked up upon that figure studied the cherry flame he held between his hairy, long fingers. The boy nodded even as his face twisted into a smiley confusion, working on instinct instead of reason. The hand reached down towards the sitting child and the boy took the rolled flame and inhaled himself, letting himself go into the smoke. The older boy had explained nights ago in this very same spot that it was their nature and blood to handle the smoke better than the other children in the school system, that it was important they remember this characteristic. Returning the fire to the standing figure and focusing on the flame turning red, the little boy’s mouth opened into a smile, revealing little gaps between his brittle teeth.
The older boy laughed with a deep and husky snort. “Alright my friend, let’s go back ‘upstairs’ and act like they want us there.” He motioned for the boy to follow him under the lamplights that greeted them as they exited the porch and slinked onto the street. They walked through the abandoned backyards, in between garden sheds and underneath treehouses. When they made it to the lonely street beyond the gate the older one stopped and turned towards the younger boy.
“Tell me, friend.” He leaned in close and widened his eyes, as bloodshot as bullet wounds. “Do I look okay?”
-
Hello bastards,
I wrote this today after waking up in the bathtub.
I hate speaking english.
I hate it with my tongue
I’d rather sing with the throat
I’d gobble gibberish in a thought.
Hahaha, well suffice to say listeners that’ll be the last time I go to sleep listening to bootleg concerts on repeat…
First on today’s broadcast, this show has been brought to you by absolutely no one cuz fuck an advertisement and fuck makin money man, this shit rides on pure soul power and that ain’t too bad comin from a mixbreed man such as myself… Ya see, I was bred to mix these audio files for you, the loyal consumer, to download for absolutely free. If it killing the industry then hey it can’t be that horrible right?
But before we dive into that shit, let me give a shout-out to the motherfucker who mailed me sumore death threats and photos of his plastic-ass guns man cuz this bitch honestly flatters me. This cac tells me go back to my country, be all peace like other buddhists man, why be a bitch n send me threats man let’s do it like men. The government thinks I’m broadcasting from the netherlands but that cuz I buy VPNs all day, lemme know when you in abacus county florida man i hit you up. We see if you talk that shit facing a proud ass brown man instead of on media n mail. Whatever man, you think the police on your side? Be my guest.
Alright… So this week’s piece of shit ass art that I fuck with is this ep from these bad motherfuckers from waukesha wisconsin called cops vs. thugs. They sick, they spit fire, they make me wanna punch an old man who stares at me for too long, check it out. Single is called slaves to an image, and i'll leave it up to you what that's about… Of course I got permission from these guys to post their music, don’t worry boys. Lemme know what you think… All uh five of you listening, it looks like. Don’t worry folks, the other five will show up when I upload the recording. Let’s just give that album a test listen right here…
Ooowee, well that was the greatest three minutes of my life lemme tell you. Goddamn yall better show up when they play in your town or you officially fake. Moving on, I’d like to resume my live reading of elvis anaporn’s recent collection of essays called the water refugees: mass migration in the era of rising ocean levels…
-
As Dang typed away while listening to his performance he replayed the Cops vs. Thugs album once more before playing the ambient sounds of sunny, plastic beaches. He made the finishing touches on the transcript before leaning further into his chair and staring at his work. He hit play on the audio file and was greeted to the sound of his voice, down-pitched and overall screwed, and the occasional clicking ambient from his shit microphone. He’d recorded it days ago, and as every day passed he couldn’t stand the thought of it existing for any longer. The pangs of self-loathing piercing his mind, he closed his laptop and walked towards the window and peered through the blinds. A squinty eye in the apocalyptic sunlight spied the scene three stories below and saw nothing but parked, beat up cars and the empty combination electricity station-Indian grocery across the street.
No, not today, he thought to himself. He felt himself snort and deduced he was coming down with something ill. He’d spent too many days locked in these rooms, chain smoking hand rolled cigarettes in between smoking legalized mid and withering away in his hand-me-down sofa chair. Just like they wanted boys his age to. The thought disgusted him, so he dashed it from his mind and pulled on a decently clean (yet shredded) pair of jeans from a pile in the corner. He unlocked the three separate locks he’d added to his apartment door, stopping midway with a frustrated sigh and pulling off his pants and underwear while he walked back towards the bathroom. Stepping into the damp shower he pressed a small button above the faucet handle after closing his eyes and holding his breath. Several quick shots of cold, oily sunscreen splattered his naked body and he threw his underwear and pants back on as he went out the door to his apartment.
-
He’d made it three steps past his door before a familiar shout came from behind. Dang bit his tongue and turned to the man indignantly waving a hand at him. The landlord was built like a solid brick of cheese, simultaneously flabby and solid with a sickly pale-yellowness to him, and dressed in his security uniform. Cheap bastard wouldn’t hire security so he stitched up his father’s postal service digs to give an air of authority.
“Dang! I need my money man, what the fuck?!”
“What you talkin bout Hunt? You got it!”
“No I fucking don’t!” The man loomed over Dang, shouting parcels of pretzels all over the place Dang had to turn his face towards the stairs. “You’re always a day late! One day late, it ain’t okay man!”
“Hol up-”
“No one else allowed to be late here-”
“Holupholupholup, I’m always a day late right? I’m- I’m always a day late right? You always get your money, why you having a heart attack here in front of the kids man?”
“Don’t start, don’t start that Buddhist mumbo-jumbo shit, you give me the fucking money when it’s fucking due.”
“You’ll get your money man-”
“Right now.”
“You’ll get your money-”
“Right now. Go get it.”
“Right now?”
“You speak fucking English don’t you?! Yes right now!”
“I just locked up my room, Hunt.”
“Unlock it.”
“You want me to unlock it?”
“I want you to give me the money that’s due.”
“I’ll be right back boss, and I know you ain’t going anywhere-”
“Everyone else pays on time but you. Why? Why the fuck you always trying to fuck me? You a fag? You wanna fuck me, is that it?”
Dang stared at the man from behind his shades. “I’ll get your money boss, I’ll unlock this door and get that money, but lemme tell you something I gotta pray for your soul man. When the revolution comes, I’ll pray for you!”
“Yeah yeah, get the fucking rent Dang.” Hunt's eyes bulged out of his head like cones of spite, his face twitching and producing a slight spell of mucus above his gelled stache. Dang slightly recoiled, and Hunt only increased the intensity of his glare. "See this shit right here? That's what I think bout you!"
When he made it to the ground floor of the complex, ducking past the geriatrics watering synthesized plants and the kids on the stairs huddled around an outdated tablet, Dang looked both ways down the hallway before pulling out a dismantled coat hanger from his tattered backpack. It’d been a week since he checked the mail, and it was frankly an ordeal in itself. Walking up to the rows of mini-mailboxes, he gently sifted the thin wire through the rectangle numbered C217 and slowly dragged it around the edges of the tin before unlocking his mailbox with his freehand. Two quaint letters greeted him from the darkness of the box, and Dang wiped a bead of sweat from his head as he put the letters in his bag. He closed the locker and saw a boy about half his height and dressed in a single sleeveless shirt that came down to his knees staring up at him. The boy’s skin was tanned by the sun and hair bleached by the chemicals from the nearby river, and Dang wondered if the boy ended up like the many new agers who’d baptized themselves in that open sewage pipe of water. Still, the boy’s eyes resonated some innocent humanity that was often stolen by such a place and Dang decided to leave the subject alone before brushing past the boy and heading for the parking lot. Once he stepped outside, he bathed in the sunlight for a moment. His eyes closed behind shades, he thought it must’ve been a full day since he’d last gone outside. What was the world coming to, where people could feasibly work, eat, sleep, and shop from their domiciles. Was he becoming like them? Dang shuddered at the thought before throwing his canvas bag over his shoulder.
Every year was hotter than the last; the few who could opted to move north and keep their heads in the sand, the rest began the fashion of less. Dang rarely wore tops except on days when high SPF sunscreen was out of stock, and he wore cut-out sneaker bottoms tied around his feet with laces. He’d wear no shoes at all if certain people didn’t decide in one fell swoop to cover all the land and grass of the Earth with concrete, blacktop, and gravel. Walking under palm trees planted along the sidewalk, he instinctively followed his routine walk through the outskirts of the malls, shopping plazas, and restaurants while daydreaming of pleasures these places couldn’t offer him.
-
His stitched-on pockets were full from an impulsive shopping spree along the shantytown bazaar. It was miles from where he began, on the southernmost edge of the city far away from the visual noise pollution that post-post-post industrialization came with. With every step came the shaking of cigarettes, powdered foodstuffs, and CD’s wrapped in plastic (imported mostly from New York and New Delhi) and Dang squatted by an overturned garbage bin to light a cigarette. He thought about pulling out one of the letters he’d pulled from his mail before realizing how exposed he was. Anybody could be watching; just pulling out those letters in public could be what ends him. Blowing smoke in front of his eyes, he wiped the sweat from the back of his neck and moved some of his groceries into his backpack before he began people watching. People of the sun, sand people, boat people, new and old. People who’ve always been here. Good people, bad people. People with places to go or people looking for places to stay. All selling something for someone else’s sake. Selling whatever they could: handmade trinkets, hats with the names of hundreds of countries stitched on, discount children’s toys, plastic swords with meaningless kanji inscribed on their dull blades. Of course, sex and food too. Always sex and food. He couldn’t talk to nearly any of them, but he knew it to be better this way. English couldn’t communicate anything that mattered. He used to want to speak to people, always stricken with the desire to speak. He’d always muttered to himself, anyone who stared at him long enough could see that. Whenever he spent more than a week in his apartment he regressed into babbling to himself. This sun tanning his exposed back like leather was the only cure a boy like him could get. That and people watching. Watching people who, vaguely, looked like him.
-
It was about four hours since he began his small journey to the bazaar and back, but it was just as bright outside as it was at noon. When he stepped onto the familiar blacktop of the apartment parking lot, he stopped and poured tap water held in a plastic bottle over his head. Dripping wet, he pulled the hair from his face and noticed a hive of teens that seemed to have poured out from a pissyellow van double parked in front of the complex. To Dang they looked like pigeons. A pale faced middle schooler stared at Dang for a noticeable beat before being scolded for bogarting the joint she was holding. Scowling to himself, Dang stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked into the lobby of the building. That tan boy with the big brown eyes was sitting just where he was all those hours ago, and he looked up when Dang stepped in and stood under the AC vent.
“Hey! Hey you!” Dang opened one of his eyes and looked over to the boy. “Yeah, you, Mr. Half ‘n Half!”
Dang groaned. “What.”
“Watch this.” He tapped at his wrist and made his mouth into a circle. “You got mail!”
Dang looked over at the kid. “How’d you do that shit? Sounded just like fucking AOL, bruh.”
“New update to the voice altering app. Don’t you update your wrist, mister?”
Walking over to his mailbox, Dang shook his head. “Like I give a fuck bout some app designed to make me forget how horrible my life is.” He took out the coathanger and began sliding it through an opening in the locker before stopping and looking over his shoulder at the boy. The kid’s eyes were wider than usual, watching him perform this odd ritual he usually did in private. He sighed before continuing his usual dragging of the wire before opening the locker and being greeted with nothing. Dang did an about face and stared at the child with his arms akimbo.
“Just wanted to see you do it again.” The kid said innocently. Dang lifted his chin, but his expression softened.
“What’s your name kid?”
“Dante. You?”
He paused for a moment, looking the boy up and down. “Dang.”
“Dang, eh? What are you anyway? You some kinda Asian, like a sand Asian or some shit? Oh, you from Guam?”
“Hahaha, no." Dang said flatly before turning back to the kid. "Why you wanna know anyway? Palefaces always ask dumb shit like that, but you ain't no paleface.” Dang chuckled before turning to see his words hit the child harder than he anticipated and he looked back into his empty locker. He gently shut the door and made his way up the stairs when he passed by Dante.
“Where you going?”
“My room, genius.”
“Can I come?”
“Fucking… Yeah, come on.”
They walked up the first few floors in silence, stomping past the old men betting on dreidel and tiptoeing past the landlord’s room.
“So where are you from?”
“I’m from here, kid.”
“Florida?”
“America.”
“Mr. Mystery, ahh yes. Very interesting, you look very cool right now, did you know that?”
“Don’t make me call yo fuckin mama slick, I’ll tell her yo ass tried to sell me porno tech.”
“Ain’t got no mama man.”
“Oh yeah?”
“No mama, no papa. I live with my grandma but she crazy. I think she got dementia, she’s nice but sometimes she shouts out old memes or shit.”
“Huh.” Dang stopped in front of his room and began unlocking the several padlocks he’d added to the door. “Sorry to hear that, dude.”
“Whatever.” Dante brushed past him and invited himself into his apartment. “Why you got so many locks? Scared of robbers?”
Dang slid off his shoes and began doing the locks on the inside of the door. “Not robbers… Just don’t want anyone digging through my shit while I’m gone. Why you ask so many fuckin questions? You some kinda calculator at school or something?”
“What?” Dante jumped on a sofa, his sandy boots dropping dirt deep into the cracks of the couch. The teen picked up a pamphlet from the ground and began flipping through it.
“Like is you one of them savant type characters. Y’know, a brain.”
“A retard?”
Dang rubbed his eyes. “Sure, whatever.”
“Nah, I ain’t no retard man. What is this anyway? What’s… ‘anarcho-syndicalism?’”
Dang didn’t answer and took a seat on the other end of the couch, snatching the pamphlet from Dante’s hands and tossing it on a pile of other zines and articles on the floor. “Alright listen to me, little man.” Dang looked at Dante from behind his shades. “You can hang out here, put your fucking shoes all over my couch ‘n carpet, touch all my stuff, bug the shit outta me in a way that I haven’t been in years, but if we’re gonna have conversations we’re gonna have some rules.”
Dante, to Dang’s begrudging admiration, didn’t react to the scolding other than with his blank stare. “Okay, what’re they?”
Dang stared, trying not to show the gears turning in his head. “One question, one answer. Then the other person gets to ask a question, then vice versa and et cetera.”
“Okay, what else?”
Dang’s face went blank. “Well that’s it for now, but if you break that rule you’re outta here.”
“Okay.”
Dang nodded. “Well, alright then.” He sat there staring at Dante before slowly sinking into his couch and scrolling through the latest developments in the American intervention of Guam on his wrist.
“So…”
“So.”
“So are you like an Indian?”
Dang stood up and walked towards his office. “That’s it, I’m getting high.”
-
The windows offered a decent view of the city at the edge of dawn. It wasn’t the most luxurious sight, but with his vision blurred around the edges Dang knew it was the right decision to pull off the wooden bars blocking out the outside world for this smoke session. With a sickly smile on his face he closed his eyes and nodded away to the chopped and screwed sounds of the 70’s booming from his CD stereo system. Across the table littered with fruit skins and crumbs of weed Dante was lost in his own world, nodding while scrolling through mind-numbing content on his wrist.
“Maaaaaaan, Dang.” Dante said in between his giggling fits. “You’re soo ooold, hombreee. Hehehaaaaaaa!”
“Man, I’m only… twenty-four… I’m pretty sure I’m twenty-four… Fuck, how old am I?”
“Old as gas cars and cable TV, I bet… Who the fuck listens to CDs? Bro… What is this music?”
“Do you dig it?”
“Ay! Hey!” Dante held up a finger while leaning on the wooden kitchen table. “One question… One answer.”
“My house,” Dang pointed at himself and leaned over the table, looking at Dante’s bloody eyes with his own. “My rules.”
“Man, you’sa fascist!”
“How the hell do you know what that is?”
“Saw it in a war movie. Some cracka put a gun to some other cracka, called him that, and then bam!” He pantomimed the act of killing himself with a pistol, slumping over in his chair in an odd fashion. “Haha, man it was pretty… Well, pretty creepy now that… I-I dunno.” He chuckled to himself some more before lying down on his arm and staring out the window.
“Yeah, man.” Dang leaned back in his chair, watching the young blood stare at his hands in front of his face. An idea came to him, and he stood up shakily before walking over to the kitchen wall and pulling off a photo that hung between a taped-up postcard from San Salvador and a portrait of Thomas Sankara. “Check this shit.” He brushed aside the banana skins on the table and leaned over Dante, holding the photo in front of him.
“Yooo…” Dante took the photo and held it up to his face. “Where is this?”
“Somewhere below Guangxi, we think. Details got lost along the family tree I guess. One of my ancestors took this, and uh, we just kinda pass this photo down in our family.”
The two took in the image of the young men looking up towards the camera on a long-tail boat, all shirtless, smiling, and surrounding a pile of durians for sale. The water underneath the boat was as blue as the caps of Dante and Dang’s bottled water, and the fruits appeared strong in their shells.
“Cool shit dude.” Dante put the photo down gently before laughing again. “See I knew you was some kinda Asian! Mr. Half ‘n Halfs, they always part Asian!”
Dang sighed and sat down in his familiar seat across the table from the boy. “Just one piece of tha puzzle mane. What’sa Latino know bout Asians anyway?”
Dante looked up from the floor into Dang’s eyes with his familiar doe eyes. “I’m Filipino bro.”
“Brooo.” Dang ran a hand through his hair. “I’d apologize but you’s also an asshole.”
“Are we friends now man?”
Dang stared at Dante for a moment. “I dunno, feels pretty fucked up for a twenty-four year old man to be friends with a little kid.”
“You a chi-mo?”
“Nope.”
“You get me high so you can fuck me?”
“Nah man.”
“Then it ain’t that weird.” Dante leaned back in his chair and began peeling another banana from the center of the table.
“How old you anyway?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen, what the fuck?” Dante burst out laughing, much to Dang’s chagrin. “Half the time you actin like a twelve year old, the other half… Shiiit, man, sixteen? Swimmin in that river musta fucked you bad.”
“What?” Dante’s voice grew softer, his eyes squinting into sleep.
“Yo hair. You blonded bro, and that ain’t no dye job either.”
“Ahhh shit, yeah you noticed that earlier.” Dante leaned over and rubbed his blonde peach fuzz head. “Yeah man… They got me, haha.”
Dang was staring out the window as he spoke. He turned back towards Dante. “Got you? Whatchu mean ‘got you?’”
Dante’s head began to lower itself onto the table, his arms pushing away the banana peels and ashtray. “Yeah uhh… They said jump in, I did. Big laugh, man…”
Dang studied the boy falling into slumber, and once he did fall asleep he watched him for a few moments more before turning down the funk beats and sharp synthesizers on his stereo. He paced around the room in a semi-lucid state, trying to stay lost in the music and the old world blues it invited him into, before being struck by the urge to close his window. He grabbed a pair of binoculars lying on a pile of junk mail and peered through his window with them. The orange sky was disappearing behind the skyscrapers and Dang turned his attention to the parking lot. The teens surrounding the yellow van moved their party to inside the vehicle, the smoke blocking out the windows. An odd pang of jealousy struck Dang in the upper left corner of his heart, and he looked up towards the street where he noticed a black electric car stopped by the curb. He put the binoculars down before looking through them again. He barely got a few digits into its license plate before it silently sped away and disappeared into the concrete jungle. Dang stood there leaning against his window, his brow furrowed and his eyes darting back and forth between the street and the sky, the street and the sky. He got to work boarding up his window, quietly hammering the nails in their familiar places.
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