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078

At the exact moment you entered into my life (1994, February twenty-ninth, maybe six and a half minutes before the top-hour link into the commercials and the ten o’clock news), I was raring to slap down Louis from Modesto. Louis believed we all had worms in our heads that controlled how we behaved and would one day force the human race to exterminate itself.

Louis wasn’t what I’d call my typical caller to KVOC. Most of the callers were tight.

Louis was already pretty heated up by the time the producer ushered you into the studio. You didn’t so much as glance my way. You had a Winona Ryder complexion and owl glasses, and a tweed jacket that probably belonged to someone else. Kinda scatty; kinda hot. Within the hour you’d sock me in the mouth.

Down the line, Louis was demanding, ‘So how do you explain war?’

‘How do you explain war, Louis?’ I said. ‘Oh, I’ll bet it’s worms again, right?’

‘Yes sir.’‘No such thing as free agency out there in Modesto?’‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Once it’s inside your head,

you’re locked into doing what it says.’‘Louis, do you have a worm inside your head?’‘Yes sir.’‘What kind of work do you do, Louis?’‘I’m a security professional.’‘You stand in front of a store?’‘Yes sir.’Ordinarily, new guests to the station made a performance of

settling down – getting tangled up in the headphone leads, mostly, or playing with the mic arms like safari monkeys – you didn’t do

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that. You paused to check out a framed black-and-white photo of the station owner meeting Salvador Dali – you smiled at it like someone recognising an old friend; then you pulled a book out of your bag, threw yourself on the couch, and made it clear you could give a damn what the rest of the world thought about that. An old bald-headed professor came in, and then a jock in a blazer: my interview crowd. You didn’t look up once.

‘OK, one thing, Louis, stop calling me sir, save that for your mom. You carry a gun, professionally, right?’

Once I’d reassured Louis I was only kidding about his mom, he admitted to the gun.

‘And this worm of yours is in control?’Louis agreed that it was.‘Be honest with me, Louis,’ I said, dropping my voice low.

‘Mano a mano. You think that worm might make you do some-thing crazy, one day?’

Louis deliberated. We were four minutes off the news. The clock was counting down. While Louis spoke, I tapped on the glass screen that separated you from me, and you started out of your reading. I pointed at my phones and you put yours on. Like the jacket, they were too big for you. You were twenty-seven and you smiled at me like you were ready for me to be very, very stupid.

‘Carry on, Louis, I’m listening,’ I told him, and on the internal circuit I said to you, ‘Hi, I’m John Knox.’

‘Sorry?’‘I’m John Knox.’‘Yes, I know that,’ you said.‘So you’re my historian?’‘I’m an historian. Art history. Postgrad.’ There was seasoning in

your accent I couldn’t place.‘You don’t look like one.’‘I beg your pardon?’I said, ‘That was meant as a compliment.’Your smile was starting to look like it was hard work.‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I mean, I meet a lot of historians in this job

and most of ’em look like the ‘before’ for some kinda procedure, whereas…’

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We stared each other down for a moment; and then we both looked at the bald-headed professor of history, who regarded us disapprovingly over his half-moons. You nearly cracked and laughed, but kept up the professional face.

Louis kept talking. He sure believed in that worm.You asked if this was gonna take long. Not that it seemed to

matter: you’d unselfconsciously brought the world’s biggest book, with a butterfly on the dust jacket – Papillon, you told me, when prompted. I named the author, Henri Charrière, saying his name the French way. That made you take the time to look at me, through narrowed eyes.

I imagined what you’d be like to kiss.There was one minute left on the clock. I apologised with a

gesture and put my fader back up.‘OK – Louis, I tell you what I’m hearing. I’m hearing there’s a

dude in a uniform out there, he’s been given a weapon and right now he isn’t sure whether he might one day spray bullets into the good citizens of Modesto. The worm you describe – no, shut up, man, you’ve had your say – the worm you describe was identified ninety years ago as your id, Louis. Not Satan, not some worm – the part of you that, as a human being, you have a responsibility to keep in check, dude. Don’t construct some belief-fantasy why it could be OK to act like a whack-job. It’s never OK just to feel and do. Common sense is not a disease. Dan Quayle is not the norm. Pull your shit together, Louis, and face life like the man you are. We have news next; later we’ll be remembering our guest from last year, the mighty and dearly missed Bill Hicks, but first I’ll be talking to the smouldering student of history Rachel McAllistair and a couple of other folk about America at war and propaganda imagery. This is John Knox, telling it exactly like it is, on KVOC, the Voice of the Bay, 1510. We’re on the airwaves because you guys buy stuff from our sponsors, so thank you for keepin’ us talking. Here are some messages about the great products we’re proud to endorse. Stay with.’

I looked to see what you’d made of my flattery, but you were reading your butterfly book.

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In honour of Louis, I put on a Nirvana song just before you came on air – the one that starts with loading guns. The shine was gone off grunge (this was way post-Badmotorfinger and Dirt and Never-mind), but playing it still felt right. While I joined you and the jock and the professor from the war museum in the discussion part of the studio, a digital clock counted down to the end of the song. Unlike real life, radio is all about knowing how many minutes and seconds you have left.

The professor was old-school – he existed in a cloud of chalk dust. You, on the other hand, looked like a girl playing dress-up; beneath the outsize tweed with the Dynasty shoulder pads, you wore a black shirt buttoned low, the way only flat-chested girls can, and a zillion pendants, and Doc Martens. You shook my hand. You had a soft, hot hand. I wanted to hold on to it.

‘So you’ve listened to the show, right?’ You hadn’t. ‘Callers call in, I give them a hard time if they say something stupid, which some will; you guys get an easy ride. The idea is we just stir up the topic, get into the angles.’

‘I heard this is filmed,’ said the professor.‘Yes it is.’Yes it was. It was taped on a single camera, in a resolution basi-

cally unsuitable for broadcast. We had a hook-up with a low-rent satellite outfit in Santa Monica. They used to get OK ratings off the back of our show – that was before we got the FM licence for the Bay area, before we knew what simulcasting and syndication were.

I still have the tape. It’s getting old, now. Sometimes, when I want to remember you the way you were right at the beginning, I drag the old VHS machine out of the spare room and put it on. I get scared in case the thin tape might tangle or snap. One day it will. One day, without warning, you’ll be gone.

In the tape, we sit around the studio table in 1994, headphones on: a pretty random quartet of human beings, set against a back-drop of my autograph written in blue neon. Your long hair is down as though you want to hide behind it, and you seldom look up, until I say the word Chomsky, at least.

Until that point, the debate has been measured and academic – the kind of brain-food I got famous for making famous. We’re

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discussing mustard gas. It’s part of your specialism. The fucked-upness of World War One has been sketched. For Americans that war was a one-year nothing, but in Europe it was four long years of every known thing getting blown away, and gas drifting across fields, and I still have enough Canada in me to recognise the names Passchendaele and Somme. We talk about the image of a butterfly sitting on the muzzle of a cannon from the Great War, and the flowers in gun barrels in Washington in ’67. But whereas the older two guests are talk-circuit pros and know the hand signs that mean speed up and hand over, and know how to be inter-rogated, when I coax you to be more specific you say, ‘So annoy-ing,’ and when I invite you to develop the conversation in a new direction you throw a total shit-fit, claiming discrimination on the grounds of age, or because you’re a woman.

‘As listeners to this show will know,’ I warn you, ‘I love every-body, and especially women.’

‘That’s great, I love men.’‘I’m happy to hear that.’‘You gotta love ’em, don’t you? Otherwise they’re fucking

intolerable.’Inside the first three minutes, it’s clear to me, the other guests

and everyone listening in that you hate my guts.But I catch the swear with the mute and the delay, and we labour

on through that show: the show I can recite verbatim, the show I play over and over again in the dark: my only moving pictures of you. The best time, the time when you are most you, is when you riff on Woodrow Wilson’s response to the sinking of the Lusitania. God, you’re on fire. The smoke signals say this is what I believe. That was his moment to respond, you scoff, but all he did was send diplomatic notes. It should have been his Boston Tea Party, his Pearl Harbor – the point of no return, the first step in a ballet of revenges. You actually use that phrase: a ballet of revenges. I don’t know what about you to fall in love with first. The Great War, you pronounce, sent one half of the poets looking for refuge in an imagined golden past, while the rest tried to craft a language beyond violence with which to report the apocalypse. You say that without notes, and without blinking, and you are beautiful.

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We talk about how some things never change; how history doesn’t just repeat, but crosses over and tangles up. Nineteen and a half minutes before you channel Mike Tyson, Iran–Iraq from the eighties comes up. The same trench warfare; the same mustard gas; the same eventual US involvement after provocation. The Ivy Leaguers reel off facts like they’re teaching class. You call them cowards. Everyone sucks their teeth. We’re at war. At twenty-eight minutes exactly, I try to turn the conversation, but you resist. You want the academics to grow souls. Yeah: the atmosphere is strained, OK, but the discussion carries on, because we’re professionals.

After the show, everyone chills – everyone but you. We all take positions for a living; you do it because you believe. Papers are gathered up; you won’t shake anyone’s hand. Off-screen, the pro-ducer escorts the others out. You shovel things into your bag at the edge of the frame, in a flurry of tweed.

‘Could I talk to you?’ I say.‘What, so you can patronise me some more?’‘Nah, man, the opposite. Sit down, will ya? Just for a minute.

Please?’The shovelling is arrested. You look at the picture of Dali again,

and then you come back to the debating table, and sit.‘Look, I know you’re new to this whole thing,’ I say, with great

caution, ‘and I can see you think that didn’t go well. I just wanted you to know you were actually brilliant.’

‘Don’t. Just don’t.’‘No, I mean it. That was some impassioned shit. Really inspir-

ing. You don’t believe me? Man, words are cheap; it’s something else to hear people talk about things they believe in. You were great.’

This type of talk is visibly pissing you off.Oh, Rachel.‘And that whole “ballet of revenges” thing …’The counter in the upper left of the screen reaches 47.45.00:

time for me to say the Chomsky thing. It’s just a name-check, mostly to show I read Chomsky. I say, ‘I totally believe in you. And Chomsky’d love you.’

That’s all. For all the years I’ve spent trying to figure it out, I have no clue what outrage you thought those words contained. On

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the tape, the whole thing’s over in three seconds: the flailing tweed arm, my startlement as I realised I’ve been hit and that I’m falling backwards off my chair. Then the moments afterward, where you sit with both hands over your mouth, begging to know if I’m OK; my eventual re-emergence from under the table, stemming blood from my nose with a bunched-up shirt. I’m remarkably well man-nered about the whole episode, considering. I only swear a little bit. I remember the taste of blood in my mouth and I remember being surprised by wanting nothing more than to tear from your body your too-big jacket and your big skirt; to meet violence with vio-lence; to feel you struggle under me and submit. I wanted to fuck you and as I fucked you, whisper in your ear that I was a pacifist.

That was some strange shit going on.As I bat away your apologies and show you the thumbs-up,

and you leave, I’m starting to sway. I gotta hold on to things for support. The last thing I do is lurch towards the camera. The timer stops, and the world goes dark.

I was, it turned out, mightily concussed. Not from the punch, but because careening backward off my chair had made me hit my head on some furniture. I didn’t notice the blood in my hair until I got home later that day, by which time I couldn’t see straight. I bundled myself into a cab, in mounting, stabbing pain, to a place where a doctor who’d seen worse ran me through tests I thought were reserved for drunks on the highway. Touch your nose! Count backwards from one hundred in sevens!

‘No computers or TV for at least three days,’ he warned me. ‘Preferably seven, otherwise you’re risking damage. No loud noise, either. No radio. Radio’s bad for you.’

‘Got that,’ I said.It was still bright enough in the city for shades, but the cotton

wool up my nose needed explanation. Everyone from my barber to the kids in the neighbourhood tried to winkle out what I’d done finally to earn a punch (yeah: they all assumed I’d been hit. It wasn’t whether, but who). My busted nose even got twenty-seven words on page 14 of the Bay Chronicle, from whose offices a dys-peptic hack called me, in the afternoon.

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‘You got in a fight in a bar over Noam Chomsky?’ she repeated back to me, sceptically. ‘You filing against them?’

I said, ‘Do you know how long I’ve wanted to see someone throw a punch over Chomsky?’

‘C’mon, John. Aren’t you angry?’And that’s when I realised that no, I wasn’t angry with you, not

even a little bit.Enduring cosmic migraines, yes. I genuinely felt that removing

my shades was to risk the two halves of my skull dropping off, one each side, leaving my exposed brain sitting there damp and proud like an avocado stone.

At home I listened for as long as I could endure to cassette tapes of whale-song, left behind by Fi when she’d shipped out; aban-doned with good reason, as it transpired. Whales are all warm-up and no set. There was a ziggurat of review copies sent in by pub-lishers who wanted a plug on the John Knox Show. I picked up one called The Celestine Prophecy. A few pages in, I was already hoping someone had locked up the guy who wrote it. I tossed it in the trash at page 10, fearing prolonged exposure might prove fatal. Instead, I rang Barney to ask if I could come be an invalid at his place on the bay in San Diego, and he said sure and asked what was wrong, and when I told him he asked if I was angry and I said no, I wasn’t angry. I really wasn’t angry.

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