“Complaints and whining, that’s the thanks I get for teaching you a saleable skill? You’d rather still be selling that useless cult propaganda sheet?”
“Cult! You anarchists can’t even—”
“All right, all right! The whole yawning proletariat shall one day bust a move in a Bollywood dance number, waving a sea of red flags—”
“You think they won’t? Just like everything else in America, media for the people is winking out in the darkness. My organization happens to be developing real alternative community news outlets! For all you realize, my captain, I could be broadcasting this across the greater Northeast Los Angeles heights and the San Gabriel Valley on a pirate radio station, to arm our communities with the knowledge that you won’t—”
“Pirate radio!”
“You laugh, my captain! But the workers are the ones who deserve collective ownership of the skies. If your fleet of solar-powered dirigibles proves to be—”
“If! If? You mean when!”
“That is exactly what these flights may prove, Captain, sir! But come on, tell us—say—for the sake of our listenership (even if you don’t believe our listenership exists, like the authorities don’t believe this dirigible exists, like they deny the existence of Sky City), tell me the story behind it all, a personal story, give ’em a sense of your personal motivation for heisting abandoned materials, welding titanium-frame airships in collapsible folding sections, creating solar technology capable of eluding the forces of the downpressor government (I know, you said you can’t afford the insurance, but you can afford our listeners the true story)!”
“Comandante Che said the real revolutionary was guided by feelings of love. At the risk of appearing ridiculous.”
“Let us not go gently down the slippery slope of sarcasm, Captain. How’s that square with the one about that girl you used and abused, she was so young and sweet, what was she? Just a baby—eighteen, nineteen, baby sister of your best friend, she looked up to you both, threw herself at you like only a kid could, but there was something sinister going on between you and your compa so you took it out on her, kept her on the line, strung her along until you were in such a state you couldn’t recognize her as something fully human—in the end, what? Left her all in a mess? Gave her a dread disease? Wrecked her car? What were you planning next, kill yourself? Double-suicide, Japanese-style? Is that where love gets you?”
“Sounds like you heard that one before. The whole story in a nutshell, eh? I’m not sure that has anything to do with me.”
“So they say. In the twentieth century, you know, they thought the world was going to end with an apocalypse—death and destruction raining down on all nations through nuclear war, viral agents, genetic engineering, ecological disaster. There wasn’t even going to be enough left of us to make fossils out of—that’s what they were having nightmares about. They had no idea, not the vaguest, about what would happen via global warming, the obliteration of the auto industry, the end of aerospace, the bankruptcies and complete economic collapse, death of the oceans, the landscape erased and replaced by a scene of utter devastation, the past not even the vaguest dimness, not even nostalgic, not even a memory evoked by I Love Lucy reruns—”
“But what?”
“What?”
“So what about it?”
“I was just going to say that I agreed to train for this position because besides needing a real job (I’m tired of selling revolutionary newspapers up and down Figueroa Boulevard) and liking you personally, as a person I mean, and respecting your loco plan to build clandestine (because uninsured) dirigibles in abandoned warehouses and foreclosed office parks, to be launched at the perfect moment—”
“There is no perfect moment.”
“You said it, Captain. But this is my idea, hear me out. They have denied the existence of Sky City, the downpressor government, till their political credibility (such as it is, strained even among their most vocal supporters, probably about ready to combust like the so-called evangelical vote) depends on this lame fabric of lies. We prove the existence of Sky City, Captain, and it will bring the downpressor government to its knees.”
“Then the people will rise up, eh? I think that’s a fantasy. Legend from the mists of time.”
“I don’t make these things up. That’s too much of a whole lot of extra work.”
“John Brown said the slaves would rise up across the South when he took Harper’s Ferry. Che went down saying he only needed fifty more men in Yuro ravine.”
“Sure. But what they didn’t have was a radio audience of potential millions; you got the perfect broadcasting platform up here floating over the entire city. They’d be on the edge of their seats, I bet. Even if all they could hear was the droning of propellers (three on each side driven by electric engines powered by the dirigible’s self-charging titanium frame) and the occasional weird John Cage–like structural noises that the great airship makes while nosing its way through the wild empty darkness. It’s kind of spooky up here, just me and you. You marked our location?”
“Just northeast of the Burbank airport, acres and acres of lots, old abandoned hangars and warehouses and service facilities that used to—”
“Boys’ hangout. Playground for youth—”
“Yeah, well, when they planned for the expansion of the airport they didn’t plan on the airlines going out of business. All these empires coming to an end, leaving junk landscapes in their wake—socialism imploded, Sea of Azov dried up, capitalism exploded, toxic waste everywhere, dead forests like old ideologies on fire, public entitlement programs gutted, billboards for shit that people can’t recognize let alone hanker after, malt liquor and “Gentlemen’s Clubs,” cell phones and household cleaners, ads peeling off to reveal the coruscating undersurface, a face somebody might’ve seen on TV decades ago, dimly recognizable except that now nobody cares. What’s left that’s worth risking your life for?”
“Isn’t that Mount Washington or Glassell Park over there? San Fernando Road doglegging away from the river?”
“Our hometown.”
“Scene of the crime.”
“It’s all conspiracy and no crime, Cadet—just trying to survive, fanning insignificant dreams and desires like a tiny campfire on the stormy side of some immense mountain, maybe squatting in some empty building, making unpermitted renovations … calling it the headquarters of East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines! Taking calls at all hours. Attempting to broker deals for the production of great new fleets of revolutionary airships. Where other people looked at the huge old empty hangar and saw a derelict building with smashed-out windows and orange fiberglass insulation furling in the breeze, we saw opportunity. Vast opportunity, I might add.”
“Wow, can I work in telemarketing? Hello, Mister Investor, this is the East L.A. Dirigible Company. We are headquartered in Burbank. Yes. That’s right, for a loose ten thousand pesetas you got hanging in that sack there—”
“Scoff and mock! Scoff and mock at will. Professionals have made careers of it. But where are those professional mockers and scoffers when you truly need ’em? Where are the Marx Brothers now? In Hollywood Resurrection Cemetery where all the smart-asses end up, watching the movies from the solid side of the wall, listening to punk bands on Día de los Muertos.”
“Sorry, sir. Sarcasm isn’t maybe my best side. I apologize. But why the big secret? Why operate clandestinely?”
“Why do you broadcast on pirate radio?