Hardscrabble Road(14)

“Why the West?”

“Because you need the accent,” Marla said. “God forbid anybody should sound like they came from New York or New England. It’s guaranteed to brand them as an intellectual snob. But I don’t like the Southern ones. It’s overkill.”

“And under brains,” Frank said. “Why is it that a Southern accent always makes people sound twenty IQ points stupider than anybody else?”

“You don’t think Ray Dean Ballard sounds twenty IQ points stupider than anybody else.”

“It’s not the same kind of Southern accent. Did you know his name isn’t really Ray Dean?”

“What did he change it from, Joe Bob?”

“Aldous.”

“Like Huxley.”

“It’s his mother’s maiden name.” “Whatever,” Marla said. She was fiddling with the tape. It was a very good tape, even though she’d made it off the satellite hookup, which made everything sound like a cat pissing. She got it into the tape machine and hit the rewind button, because she’d listened to it last night, and it was obvious from the way the thing looked that she’d forgotten to rewind it. She always forgot to rewind things. She wondered why that was.

“I like this one,” she said, “not only because I like the guy, but because I like the content. I know politics sells, but I think we’re coming to the end of that on a lot of levels. There’s too much rancor, too much anger.”

“I thought you said that was the point. That our listeners are angry.”

“They are. But they’re angry about a lot of things, not just ‘liberals.’ And they’ve got a couple of dozen angry white guy talk radio hosts to listen to.”

“So, this is what, a shock jock?”

“No. We’ve got FCC problems,” Marla said. “The FCC is suddenly forcing all the ‘obscenity’ off the air. It’s enough to make you crazy. Also, I don’t really get the shock jock thing. I don’t have an ear for it. No, this is something else. His name is Mike Barbarossa, and he’s from Seattle.”

“Uh-oh,” Frank said. “Seattle, the home of Starbucks, computer programmers, and the lowest citizen church attendance of any part of the country.”

“Wanna move?”

“Let me hear the tape,” Frank said.

Marla heard the hard chunk that meant the tape had stopped rewinding and pushed the play button. At first there was nothing but fuzz. Marla thought she needed to learn how to burn a CD off the satellite feed. It might be clearer. Then there was some tinny music that sounded as if it were being run through yet another not very good tape machine.

“Ignore the technical level,” Marla said. “This is a small station, they probably don’t have the money or expertise. We could fix that.”

The tinny music stopped and a mildly twangy voice said, “It’s five o’clock in the city of Seattle and this is Mike Barbarossa coming to you with sanity, common sense, and an uncorrupted crap detector. We ought to apply the crap detector to the commercials, but we never do. Give a listen to this message from our sponsors and I’ll be right back, with the day’s first winner in the Just How Stupid Can You Get contest.”

Frank Sheehy frowned. “We couldn’t let him do that to the commercials, could we?”

“Sure we could. People know the commercials are propaganda. They know they’re crap. And the sponsors don’t give a damn as long as they have the captive audience, which they will have, in the car with nowhere to hide. Seriously. Listen to this.”

“Okay,” Mike Barbarossa said. “We’re back from that fantasy land where a new car can get you a love life and a new cake recipe can bring you closer to God. It’s time for Mike’s How Stupid Can You Get roundup, the way we start the day with news that makes you think the human race should have been extinct long ago. Let’s start with Mr. Tim Mayfield of Marden, Oklahoma, who cut off his own penis in order to blame the ‘crime’ on a woman who came home with him from a bar and then refused to sleep with him. After he’d cut his penis off and thrown it across the parking lot of the trailer park where he lived, he called the police and blamed the whole thing on Shirley, resulting in a manhunt lasting three days—maybe I should say womanhunt for our feminist listeners—that left police more and more suspicious that something was wrong with Mr. Mayfield’s story. Mayfield finally confessed, and he’s being charged with making a false crime report. It turns out that it’s not illegal to cut off your own penis in Oklahoma.”