The Radio at 4 a.m.

From 1979 to 1982 there was a show on pirate radio that could be heard on Sundays from 3 am to 4 am in Richmond and El Cerrito and spasmodically on the car radios of drivers along the Berkeley and Oakland border. The show was called “Numbchucks” and featured interviews with subterranean writers, filmmakers, first-edition book dealers, organic farmers, and former boxers.

The most riveting segment on each program was when the host, who went by the name of Smedley Yi, opened up the phone line to callers. There was ever only one caller, who Yi referred stubbornly to as “caller” as though to cloak the man in the possibility of multitudes.

Yi and the caller had an antagonistic relationship from the beginning, according to long-time listeners. The caller would come out swinging about some position Yi had staked minutes earlier about Octavia Butler or Nam June Paik. Their voices would puff their chests out, then duck and weave looking for a weak spot.

When Yi reached a pitch of exasperation with the caller, as he often did, he would interrupt and insist that they needed to go to a commercial break. Then he would swiftly cut to himself aggrandizing about a regional brand of potato snack or delivering a hushed public service announcement about what to do in the event of an earthquake. He was most adamant about spare batteries, which seemed irresponsibly magnified beyond keeping a reserve of bottled water, for example.

Is there anything as simultaneously intimate and remote as the voices of a live call-in radio show in the early hours of the morning when you are awake? Are they not saving your life?

The show eventually went off the air. But five years later, reports came in that Yi was once again on the airwaves, roughly in earshot of the same coordinates, but on Wednesdays from 4 am to 4:30 am. Also, he was calling himself something else and the format had changed. Each segment involved his calling an 888 sex line and asking for a maid, or a professor of Eastern Religion. The segment would follow their stomach worm conversation, which was about 30/70 sexual.

The show was called “Numbchucks.”

I used to wait in another room, listening to the voice of my husband talk to other people as he made his way toward me. I would make no effort to move or otherwise make myself known. I could say I wanted to anticipate him with every one of my senses. Or I could say the truth, which was that I wanted to be found.

Reading House of the Sleeping Beauties

I was reading Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties in bed. An old man visits a secret brothel that specializes in girls who are heavily drugged so old men who have lost their virility, but not their lust or longing for young minxes, can fondle them freely as they sleep.

Beside me, he said he was tired; his lower back hurt.

Repeatedly the old man flirts with the idea of violating the house rules by forcing himself on one of the unknowing virgins, naked and milky beneath the blanket in that room swathed in crimson velvet.

He even imagines strangling one, and wonders if that act of violence would be enough to wake her.

I ran my hand down his front and pressed my breasts against his back. He rolled on top of me and spread my legs.

On the old man’s second visit the proprietress says the girl he will have that evening is more experienced than the others. The old man speculates that perhaps the girl had long ago stopped thinking of the men who lay beside her, and leave their impressions on the sheets in the morning.

Kawabata writes, Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.

In the end, the most the old man does is place his finger in the half-opened mouth of a slumbering girl. He wipes the paint from her lips on the strands of her hair, and docilely swallows the two white pills the proprietress offers each night to sink him into his own oblivion.

I thought you said you were tired.

I was. Then why did you touch me?

Because you said you were tired.

What are you, one of those sleep fuckers?