THE STUDIOS OF KPMC RADIO, VOICE OF the Maravilla Valley, are on Main Street, in the heart of Pico Mundo, in a three-story brick Georgian townhouse, between two Victorian edifices housing the law offices of Knacker & Hisscus and the Good Day Bakery.
In this last hour of darkness, lights were on in the kitchen of the bakery. When I got out of the car, the street smelled of bread fresh from the oven, cinnamon buns, and lemon strudel.
No bodachs were in sight.
The lower floors of KPMC house the business offices. Broadcast studios are on the third level.
Stan “Spanky” Lufmunder was the engineer on duty. Harry Beamis, who managed to survive in the radio business without a nickname, was the producer of “All Night with Shamus Cocobolo.”
I made faces at them through the triple-insulated view window between the third-floor hall and their electronic aerie.
After conveying by hand gestures that I should copulate with myself, they gave me the OK sign, and I continued along the hall to the door to the broadcast booth.
From the speaker in the hallway, at low volume, issued “String of Pearls,” by the immortal Glenn Miller, the platter that Shamus was currently spinning on the air.
The music actually originated from a CD, but on his show, Shamus uses the slang of the 1930s and ’40s.
Harry Beamis alerted him, so when I entered the booth, Shamus took off his headphones, tuned up the on-air feed just enough to stay on track with it, looked up from his stool, and said, “Hey, Wizard, welcome to my Pico Mundo.”
To Shamus, I am the Wizard of Odd, or Wizard for short.
He said, “Why don’t you smell like peach shampoo?”
“The only soap I had was unscented Neutrogena.”
He frowned. “It’s not over between you and the goddess, is it?”
“It’s only just begun,” I assured him.
“Glad to hear it.”
The foam-cone walls mellowed our voices, smoothed rough edges.
The lenses of his dark glasses were the blue of old Milk of Magnesia bottles. His skin was so black that it, too, seemed to have a blue tint.
I reached in front of him and put down the meditation card, snapping it sharply against the countertop to intrigue him.
He played cool, didn’t pick it up right away. “I plan to come by the Grille after the show, chow down on a heart-stopping pile of fried shaved ham, shoestring onions, and biscuits in gravy.”
As I circled the microphone island, sat on a stool opposite him, and pushed the other mike aside on its flexible arm, I said, “I won’t be cooking this morning. Got the day off.”
“What do you do on a day off—go out there and moon around at the tire store?”
“I thought I might go bowling.”
“You’re one wild party animal, Wizard. I don’t know how your lady keeps up with you.”
The Miller tune wrapped. Shamus leaned into the mike and let ad-libbed patter dance off his tongue, cuing back-to-back cuts of Benny Goodman’s “One O’Clock Jump” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”
I like to listen to Shamus on the air and off. He has a voice that makes Barry White and James Earl Jones sound like carnival barkers with strep throat. To radio people, he’s the Velvet Tongue.
From 1:00 A.M. to 6:00, every day but Sunday, Shamus spins what he calls “the music that won the big war,” and recounts tales of the night life of that long-ago age.
The other nineteen hours of the day, KPMC eschews music in favor of talk radio. Management would prefer to shut down during those five least-listened hours, but their broadcast license requires them to serve the community 24/7.
This situation gives Shamus the freedom to do anything he wants, and what he wants is to immerse himself and his insomniac listeners in the glories of the Big Band era. In those days, he says, the music was real, and life was more grounded in truth, reason, and good will.
The first time I heard this rap, I expressed surprise that he would feel such affinity for an age of active segregation. His answer was, “I’m black, blind, seriously smart, and sensitive. No age would be easy for me. At least the culture had culture then, it had style.”
Now he told his audience, “Close your eyes, picture the Duke in his trademark white tux, and join me, Shamus Cocobolo, as I ride that A Train to Harlem.”
His mother named him Shamus because she wanted her son to be a police detective. When he went blind at three, a law-enforcement career ceased to be an option. The “Cocobolo” came with his father, straight out of Jamaica.
Picking up the black plastic card, holding it by the top and bottom edges between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he said, “Some stupefyingly stupid bank give you a credit card?”
“I was hoping you could tell me what it says.”
He slid one finger across the card, not really reading it, just determining its nature. “Oh, Wizard, surely you don’t think I need meditation when I’ve got Count Basie and Satchmo and Artie Shaw.”
“So you know what it is.”
“The last couple years, people have given me maybe a dozen of these things, all different inspirational thoughts, as though blind people can’t dance, so they meditate. No offense, Wizard, but you’re entirely too cool to give me a plastic fantastic spiritual whizbang like this, and I’m a little embarrassed for you.”
“You’re welcome. But I’m not giving it to you. I’m just curious what it says in Braille.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. But why curious?”
“I was born that way.”
“I get the point. None of my business.” He read the card with his fingertips and said, “‘Father of Lies.’”
“‘Father of flies’?”
“Lies. Untruths.”
The phrase was familiar to me, but for some reason I couldn’t make sense of it, perhaps because I didn’t want to.
“The devil,” Shamus said. “The Father of Lies, Father of Evil, His Satanic Majesty. What’s the story, Wizard? Is St. Bart’s old-time religion just too boring these days, you need a whiff of sulfur to give your soul a thrill?”
“It’s not my card.”
“So whose card is it?”
“A nurse at County General told me to drive pedal-to-the-metal, into the desert, toss it out a window, let the wind take it.”
“For a nice boy who makes an honest living with a fast spatula, you sure hang around with some seriously whacked people.”
He slid the card toward me, across the microphone island.
I got up from my stool.
“Don’t you leave that brimstone Braille here,” he said.
“It’s just a plastic fantastic spiritual whizbang, remember?”
My twin reflections watched me from the dark-blue lenses of his glasses.
Shamus said, “I knew a practicing Satanist once. The guy claimed he hated his mother, but he must’ve loved her. Cops found her severed head in his freezer, in a sealed plastic bag with rose petals to keep it fresh.”
I picked up the meditation card. It felt cold.
“Thanks for your help, Shamus.”
“You be careful, Wizard. Interestingly eccentric friends aren’t easy to find.