The Chinese Bandit Law

—1—

Five

The Chinese Bandit Law

It was the firebomb, not the music, that rocked the first radio station Charlie worked for professionally. That he was actually accused of being behind the incendiary attack wasa libel contradicting his mostly passive nature. He did, after all, stand up to bullies—some of them mine.

Firebombing aside, that first paid radio gig introduced him to the unadulterated world of commercial broadcasting, abitch of an experience that might have discouraged a less ambitious ego. Charlie, however, was never short on resolve.

It came to pass that the letters C-H-A-R-L-I-E S-P-E-E-D would flash on marquees from Boston to DC. Variety headlined his best deals, the public ones, the good ink he called it—but he was hardly a marquee name as he launched his career in the dingy factory town of Anacosta, PA.

It wasn’t that the station was totally sleazy—there was lots of sleaze in radio, and both Charlie and I became part of it—but that the station so shamelessly promulgated virtue on the cheap. He described his experience to me in detail, so when I took a job at the same joint a few years later I knew what I was getting into but did it anyway, not so much a simple-minded misjudgment on my part as an unhesitating impulse to slavishly tread the ground he’d walked on. In high school, Charlie’s friends often ridiculed me as his shadow, calling me names like spaniel, puppet, and dummy—but never when he was around.

One Sunday afternoon shortly after he took the job, Charlie and I tippled Iron City on the grass in Highland Park, the aroma of elephant shit drifting on the gritty breeze from the zoo. It hadn’t taken Charlie long to realize he’d made a mistake by accepting the gig, not that beginners had much of a choice, then or now. As Charlie contemplated his alternatives, I sensed a chill in the autumn air that would soon bring snow, an esthetic that often made exquisite a city otherwise tarnished by decades of neglect.

“Spencer, if my mom and dad had their way I’d have gone into classical music.”

“You would have been good at it. As a clarinetist you were no fool.”

“Remember when they’d take us to the Pittsburgh Symphony at the Syria Mosque?”

“Yeah, you fidgeted in your seat more than I did.”

“It wasn’t Fritz Reiner’s picture I tacked up on my wall, Spencer. It was Artie Shaw’s.”

Reiner, the symphony’s conductor, had done the unthinkable. Because of the manpower shortage due to the war he bravely hired women musicians, and by the time the conflict ended half the orchestra was female—at no detriment to quality, a surprise to those who thought it unlikely a woman could master a bassoon.

“Spencer, my dad always dreamed I’d become first chair in the woodwind section.”

“You’ve always admired women who blow into flutes.”

“But a symphonic career just wasn’t for me, no way.”

“Then what made you enroll as a music major at Pitt? I told you at the time—”

“I was browbeaten into it. Spineless. Dad was one of my professors. But I couldn’t take all that academic stuff. And you know I wasn’t good in school anyway on account of those ear infections, which put me behind. I got through one semester at Pitt, but after that I had to tell my folks I was dropping out to become a disc jockey…”

“Ouch.”

“… and that I was gonna work at WDUM in Anacosta.”

“Garden spot of the Ohio River.”

“A mill town, like all the others. No better, no worse. It’s even got a tourist attraction: the remnants of some utopian commune called Old Turnblad. But,more important, the townactually has a radio station.”

“Guess your folks went crazy when you told them about your nutty radio venture.”

“Not crazy, not even surprised. Disappointed. They knew I’d been hooked on radio all through high school, and that I was shuckin’ the jive with my own dance band, which broke up after we graduated. Naturally, they tried to talk me out of taking the job. If I wanted to work in broadcasting, well, the Pittsburgh Symphony was on the radio—and with a real sponsor, Pittsburgh Plate Glass. Yack, yack, yack. They mean well, but… Jesus, Spencer, being one of a hundred anonymous musicians in a vast concert hall would never be the same as being Charlie Speed, by himself, in the boxy intimacy of a radio studio. I know about this. I know.”

Of course he knew. He’d once hosted “Charlie’s Tunes for Teens” on the radio, and by referring to himself in the third person he was laying the groundwork for his own legend.

He sipped his Iron and said, “WDUM’s built over a Goodyear store, Spencer. Not exactly Thirty Rock.”

The call letters officially stood for Wholesome, Divine, Upright, Moral—but later Charlie began regarding them literally, DUM without the W.

“Over a tire store, Charlie? An awkward juxtaposition of radio and rubber, I’d say.”

“Juxtaposition? What’s that mean?”

“To place side by side.”

“Then why didn’t you say side by side?”

“Because juxtaposition’s a better word. Didn’t you tell me when we were kids to expand my vocabulary and use the best words so I sounded smarter?”

Had to rub it in.

He raised his beer in a kind of salute. “Okay, you’re the writer, but I’m the star.” Charlie became pensive. “It’s only a two hundred-fifty watter at fourteen-sixty on the dial, so no one hears it beyond a five-mile radius of the transmitter tower, which is on some weedy hill overlooking the smokestacks. I climbed up there on my lunch hour, and from the top of the hill you can see all the way to the Golden Triangle. But they can’t hear me there.”

Neither did the station’s sickly signal register in Sliberty on my dad’s big console job. I’d attempted and failed to pull it in by adjusting the dial with the painstaking precision of a jeweler squinting through his loupe, the way I searched for the ever evasive “To Be Announced.”

“Spencer, if the guy who runsDUM had his way, he’d eliminate all the humans at the station and use robot voices—except for him and his so-called sermons. He doesn’t even let us use our names on the air. He prefers anonymous voices, and I sure as hell don’t want to be anonymous. Toss me another Iron, old son. I need it.”

“Don’t laugh, Charlie, but I read they’re actually trying to develop an automated system that can be stopped and started by electronic pulses on tape or something. If that happens they won’t need live announcers at all.”

Charlie dismissed the idea with a wave of his beer.

“Radio listeners count on having real people behind the mic. They need the reassurance, the humanity. Yeah, human beings, not robots.”

“You can’t even say your name on the air, Charlie, where you are now. Isn’t that dehumanizing?”

“Forty bucks a week, Spencer. I gotta start somewhere. But this lousy job ain’t gonna last forever. Wait and see. When I land in New York maybe I’ll takeyou with me. You do want to go to New York, don’t you?”

“The city or the state?”

“Maybe I won’t take you after all.”

When he had driven to his audition at DUM, Charlie, humming, was exuberant behind the wheel of his first car, a beat up ’39 Ford coupe his father had bought him for sixty-five bucks. He’d gotten laid in the front seat the night before, a feat requiring a certain amount of acrobatic innovation, the car’s gearshift mounted inconveniently on the floor, so the poor girl may not have known precisely what was getting into her. But he also felt an unambiguous measure of relief because he’d made a firm decision about his future, although not the one his folks had contemplated.

He maneuvered over the Sixth Street Bridge across the Allegheny to the North Side, where he made his way to Ohio River Boulevard, and as he saw the girders disappear in his rear-view mirror he realized how his hometown was a city of bridges, more than seven-hundred of them, spanning water, railroad tracks, roadways, or sensibly connecting one hill to another. Soaring steel arches, stark concrete spans, railway trestles, suspension bridges, trusses, cantilevers, pedestrian walkways. He’d read somewhere Smoky City had more bridges than any other city in the world except Venice, the place in Italy, although here the local bridges were ugly and utilitarian, without a shred of majesty or grandeur. Everyone he knew took the city’s spans for granted. Functional, convenient, and there. Most of the bridges were rusted, marred by graffiti, rarely appreciated, grudgingly maintained. Not there to be admired but for practicality: to cross. But Charlie knew they could also be used for escape.

Escape to where? Anacosta?

Plunked on the river’s weedy bank, the borough was named for the local behemoth, Anacosta Steel and Foundry, which shaped, bent, angled, riveted, and bored raw steel into components for everything from girders to skillets, the labor of six thousand men, their Eastern European surnames reeking of honest sweat, but not a black face in a hundred. Along with piercing whistles and puffs of steam, the smokestacks belched astonishing chromas of whites to grays to blacks, and no matter where in Anacosta he was, day or night, Charlie observed volcanic flashes of fire and the liquid red of molten steel.

Then, the town boasted a population of twenty thousand, with every expectation it would multiply. Now, if I read right, so many years later, the mill is boarded up and the local census is a mere four-thousand. God knows how those who remain earn a living or why they stay. A place few would choose to retire to. The corpse of ASF is now skeletal, rusting, dark, haunted, and to my way of thinking a landmark to conscienceless capitalism, obsolescence, incompetence, and the American Way—opinions Charlie, a vocal patriot, wouldn’t have shared.

Over the years the two of us began to diverge in our convictions, Charlie to the right, I to the left. If Charlie were still alive he’d no doubt lay the blame, not on the incompetence of American capitalists, but solely on the despised Japanese for undermining the U.S.steel economy, a perfectly understandable attitude since we were trained in our youth to abhor the Nipponese indiscriminately. Not even the horror of the bomb Truman dropped on the innocents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would change his mind. Those of us who grew up during the war, with our radio and comic book heroes guiding our hate, loathed the Japanese, which became ingrained. My own attitudesare more liberal than most, but even I don’t excuse the actions of our former foe, misguided and so daft. What were they thinking of? Like Charlie, I hated Japanese when we were kids, but now I despise Truman even more for what he did, and challenge those who call him a great president.

The station was the most sanitary place Charlie had even seen, not a scrap of paper on floor, never a dust ball, cleaner than his mother’s kitchen. And quiet. So hushed it seemed unnatural, as if bald-pated monks were poised to break into a narcoleptic Gregorian chant. As a former honorary teen deejay, Charlie was familiar with air-monitor babble, typewriter tapping, teletype clacking, people chattering, so DUM wasn’t what he’d expected.

He was greeted by the station’s manager, Maurice Magnuson, tall and somber, with a certain parsonical manner that was more than condescending. Once an actual cleric, Magnuson was now an entrepreneur, small businessman, proselytizer, and holder of a priceless first-class radiotelephone ticket, which meant he didn’t have to shell out a salary for a full-time engineer, a small station’s biggest single expense.

There was also this odd bulge in his suit jacket.

Charlie sailed through his audition, and Magnuson hired him on the spot. The other announcer, Greg Hopson, was deformed by arthritis, his hands knots of boned flesh, legs bowed, feet turned inward, a walk agonizing to watch. He made Charlie think of Quasimodoin the movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame. As an announcer, Hopson was run-of-the-mill competent, but paled compared to Charlie, at least as Charlie saw it. Then who in the worldcould be better than Charlie Speed?

Lacking a network affiliation, the station’s only connection to the broader world was a United Press teletype hidden in a dark, soundproof closet. The place was rip-and-read except for the commercials, which were so bloated with words they took twice as long to read than they were supposed to, and Charlie was a fast reader. Even worse was the music. Junk in Charlie’s mind. Deadly. The whole station was a bore.

Only Magnuson’s editorials lifted DUM from stupefaction, and they were voiced in such quiet, moral outrage three times a day even Charlie was spooked. The FCC specifically barred editorials on the public airwaves, a prohibition that wouldn’t be lifted until years later. How did Magnuson get away with editorializing? He didn’t call them editorials. They were religious, sermons, pieties… whatever.

He told Charlie, “I’m no longer an active Pentecostal minister, but my religious status is quite useful. When vicious elements accuse me of violating the FCC’s rules, I gently inform them my commentaries aren’t editorials, but pastoral lessons. Broadcasters are obliged to devote a reasonable time to public service, which includes religion. I’m not going to turn WDUM into a faith-based station, however. Not enough money in that.”

His editorials, directed primarily at the incestuous bloodline—primarily Italian—within the local borough government, prompted so many death threats that the bulge in the jacket of his dark suit proved to be a .38 in a shoulder holster.

“Mr. Speed, you may have heard of a famous evangelist known as Sister Aimee Semple McPherson. In the twenties, she started her own radio station in Los Angeles, KFSG, to promote her ministry, Four Square Gospel. She was the first woman in America to be granted a commercial broadcast license. When Sister McPherson decided KFSG’s position on the dial had too much interference from other stations, she simply moved it to a better frequency. When she felt she needed more power from her transmitter she told her engineer to give it more watts. Without regulatory permission, of course. The federal authorities chided her, but she informed them she was guided by a higher regulatory authority.”

Magnuson chuckled, as if the story he told about early anarchy on the airwaves was a joke.

“Mr. Speed, obviously I cannot take the sort of liberties as Sister McPherson, but I believe the people in our community are in need of a moral reawakening, in particular Mayor Angelo DiBenedetto, his family, and his cronies.”

And, thought Charlie, what better place to damn the damned than here, near the remnants of a vanished, sanctified utopia, Old Turnblad, founded by a disgruntled Swede who broke from the teachings of Luther, formed his own band of adherents, and led them to America where they adopted celibacy and died off for a lack of propagation. It was after learning about the self-extinction of the Turnblads that Charlie decided sexual intercourse was, indeed, salubrious for the race, which is why he did so much of it.

Magnuson,forehead furrowing, said, “You do not have to answer this question, Mr. Speed, and it will not be held against you if you answer in the negative. But have you been saved?”

Charlie had never been asked that question. Saved? His mother had saved ration stamps during the war; he saved in his parents’ attic his comic book collection, as well as his Big Little Books, his Lionel train, and a stack of quarter-inch thick Caruso records; and his father saved sheet music, some of it in German, going back to who knew when.

To avoid answering, Charlie might have fallen back on his paternity, being half-Jewish, and Jews were never saved—the perfect out. But, delicately, he suggested he was still searching for the answers, which seemed to satisfy Magnuson for the moment. It was also truthful, for Charlie, so sure of himself professionally, never quite resolved his issues with the unknowable, and he hadn’t yet been inspired by the Muddy Waters song containing the line, ‘I got a gypsy woman givin’ me advice.’

Tune in anon for that portion of the Charlie Speed story.

“There’s always the hour to discover the light, Mr. Speed, even on one’s deathbed, God forbid.” Magnuson placed his holy hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “One more thing. In order to maintain decorum in the station, which I view as a kind of sanctum, we allow no extraneous conversation—except that on the air, of course, becausewe need placidity on the premises in order to complete our tasks. It’s vital for us to devote full attention to our duties.”

“No talking? Like in grade school?”

“Nor do we permit our announcers to use their names on the air. Better for us all to identify as one and in anonymity as a communal obligation.”