RADIO RADIO

“Arabs and Muslims are the enemy. They have chosen to be our enemy, and we will not be safe until every Muslim and every Arab and all of their sympathizers in this country are rounded up and put where they can be kept track of. Look, I don’t want to see them hurt, I just don’t want them to be able to hurt me, or my loved ones, or our American way of life.”

I was saying these awful things in a loud and impassioned voice, which was being broadcast throughout the country.

Some months earlier I received a call from a man named Larry. He had been given my number by my friend Brett along with a recommendation that I’d make a good “caller.”

Larry hired folks like Brett, a children’s entertainer who works under the name Mr. Lizard, to call in to talk radio shows and pretend to be various eccentric characters. Sorry to pull off Santa’s beard, but yeah, those outrageous callers they get on your wacky morning show, they’re mostly if not totally fake. My guess is the middle man, Larry, is used so they can pretend to believe he is going out and finding actual weirdos, plausible deniability.

I proved I could improvise and do various voices and Larry agreed to put my talents to use. The gig paid fifty dollars a call. The radio show folks would phone me between four and five o’clock in the morning and then put me on hold for an hour or more during which I earned my money, having to listen to their horrible sexist, racist, homophobic ranting until they got to me, the host pretending that I had just dialed in.

In the beginning, Larry wrote the roles for me to play. Not surprisingly, they were crass and infantile. My first time was on The Mancow Show. Mancow is a Chicago-based Howard Stern wannabe, twice as creepy and half as clever. I was given the role of “guy who washes his ass with a toothbrush several times a day, and advocates the listening public do the same.” I added the detail that I was working on a kid’s book. I did research, finding statistics and developing an actual argument. Did you know that over 50 percent of Americans suffer from hemorrhoids? I had no idea.

Mancow didn’t need much. After just a few minutes he called me a sick jackass and hung up on me. I barely had a chance to get in, “I’m sick? You sit there with a filthy bum, and you call me sick?”

I played a few more of these horrible characters and then came the abortion call. Larry hired me to play a guy who had spent large amounts of money on fertility treatments trying to have a baby with his new wife only to find out that she had had three abortions prior to their relationship that she had never told him about. This surely meant she was now incapable of getting pregnant.

I made the call. I had a really bad cold that morning, making it easy to sound like I was in tears.

Mancow sympathized completely with me and instructed me to leave that bitch, slut, whore. His callers were less understanding as they slung insults at me in my time of suffering, and more so at my imaginary wife.

I felt like a tool having aided Mancow in this embarrassing misogynistic propaganda. Mancow didn’t strike me as pro-life so much as anti–pro-choice, more about hating on his enemy than loving any fetuses.

I decided that unless I could ensure better characters, I was done being a caller.

After watching Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, I had an idea. I called Larry and pitched a new character. He loved it, and I went on Mancow as “Mad Dad,” a macho father who was sending his kid to school every day with a gun in his backpack to play hero should any of these “Marilyn Manson freaks” decide to make the school a shooting gallery.

I hoped that by playing the most exaggerated version of the conservative asshole that Mancow represented and appealed to, following his views to their logical extreme, I could push him back the other direction. I said cringeworthy things, like pointing out what lousy shots most of these school shooters were, and how my boy wouldn’t get dessert with shooting like that. This strategy worked perfectly, and gun-loving Mancow told gun-loving Mad Dad what a moron he was. This I enjoyed.

The September 11, 2001, attacks happened and I didn’t much feel like playing on the radio. But as the backlash against Muslims and Arabs built, I called Larry and pitched an idea for a person who takes this need for security so far, he advocates for all Muslims and Arabs to be placed in internment camps.

Larry went for it, but I wanted to be sure that Mancow would disagree with the caller. I figured he would, but he was extreme enough that I had to be sure.

Larry called the obnoxious talk radio star with me listening on the other line and described the Arab-hating caller.

“God yes. Get him on tomorrow.” Mancow was excited.

“So, you disagree with him?” Larry asked.

“What?! Of course I do. He’s an asshole!” Mancow answered sharply.

In the wee hours of the morning I had to make as strong of an argument as possible that Arabs should be interned in order to get the response I hoped for.

“Sure, it’s easy to say interning the Japanese was wrong, but we won the war, didn’t we? We’re all better off now, aren’t we?”

Mancow went nuts as did his listeners, all of them professing their love for Muslim Americans. I was so delighted at this, it was hard to maintain my angry voice. I was dancing around my living room, bubbling over with excitement.

“Yeah, sure, go ahead and love them from your secured building, Mancow. I don’t hear any of them there with you in the studio. Easy for you to love ’em while you stay out of their reach.”

“I have a Muslim, Arab woman right here, working the phones!” he snapped back.

“Prove it.” Now I really scored. Mancow put a female Arab voice on the radio. She was awesome. She defended her ethnicity and faith and told me off in a language I didn’t speak.

Mancow kept me on for over an hour, where I usually got only a couple of minutes. I was still on, yelling terrible racist things as my neighbors began waking and starting their days. I worried that they’d hear me. Brett was on later that day playing another character but was mostly ignored as the Muslim lovefest continued.

I had never felt such pride in my creative endeavors. Larry must have been pleased, as well. He got me on the Howard Stern Show next. Unfortunately, I would again be playing a part that Larry had written for me. Stern interviewed Animal Lover Ben a.k.a. Bestiality Boy, a man trying to create a human dog hybrid by having sex with his neighbor’s dogs. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Stern paid twice what Mancow did and my rent was due.

I would not attempt these kinds of stunts on talk radio today, as, sadly, I’m not at all convinced that modern Trump conservatives would be opposed to the idea of Muslim internment camps or arming schoolchildren.