The Shaggy Club
At fourteen Shaggy became a punk. At seventeen she left home. She became a DJ, den mother, and Dear Abby to the Dallas teenage underground. And then it was time to go back home.
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Now Jenny and Shaggy have a new roommate, a girl who works at a vintage clothing store on Lower Greenville and has a pet rat that she dyed pink. She takes her rat everywhere, slipping it into her purse when she goes into clubs or goes to work. In the Bill House she walks around with the rat on her shoulder, following Shaggy and Diana from room to room, talking nonstop in a soft, distracted drone. She comes from a large family, and Shaggy thinks she has never gotten much attention. It’s really kind of sad.
Tonight—the first cool Saturday of October—Shaggy is an hour into The Pajama Party. Since she quit school last week—something she’d been leading up to for a long time—she has become a full-time music person. There’s her job at Sound Warehouse, and there’s the station. It’s a couple of miles due east of downtown Dallas, behind a bunch of used-car lots on Ross Avenue (“¡Se Habla Español!”). KNON shares a two-story clapboard house with Acorn, a left-leaning community activist group, in a neighborhood where the front lawns of apartment houses are dotted with pay phones and Coke machines. To get inside late at night, you have to push a button that makes a light blink in the broadcast booth upstairs. Then you hope the DJ notices it and sends someone down to let you in.
Elicia, one of Shaggy’s informal assistants, unlocks the front door just after 1 a.m. Her job is answering the phone lines and, more important, letting as few people in as possible. She’s a big blond girl with wild, suggestive eyes and messy, spaghettilike stalks of hair. Elicia leads the way up a winding staircase, passing a sign that reads, “No Beer Beyond This Point.—KNON Board.” The walls of the studio are speckled with flyers and posters reflecting the station’s mishmash of playlists—bluegrass, gospel, Latin, Celtic, American Indian, Cajun, Vietnamese, Indian, and punk. Leftist bumper stickers (“No Euroshima: Stop the Missiles”) fill in the blank spaces on the walls. Everywhere on the floor there are cardboard boxes jammed with record albums donated by KNON listeners.
“Here’s something I haven’t played in a long time,” Shaggy is saying into her mike. She flicks a switch, and one of the two turntables to her right spins into “Doesn’t Somebody Want To Be Wanted” by the Partridge Family. Instantly, the station’s three phone lines light up. Elicia goes through them at her desk outside the booth, then sticks her head in the door.
“Negative calls on the Partridge Family, Shag,” she says. “One guy said, ‘Keep playing that and you’ll go out of business,’ and another one said, ‘Maybe you should wait just as long to play it again.’”
“Well, too bad,” Shaggy says, twirling around in an ancient office chair held together by duct tape. “It’s on my promo, so I’ll play it when I want.” To get even, the next song she plays is by the Monkees.
The floor space in Shaggy’s booth is about four by eight feet; her white basket of albums is in the middle, and a guy named Charlie is perched against the wall on a stool. He writes down every song Shaggy plays on a playlist stuck to a clipboard. John Spath, Shaggy’s cool-kid friend, has brought records by once again. He has curly black hair, and an enormous black T-shirt hangs on his thin body. Almost every guy Shaggy knows looks like he could use a good, hot meal. John Spath is hanging around the studio with two other guys who play in his psychedelic band, the Mel Coolies (“You know, just like on Dick Van Dyke“).
“Okay,” Shaggy says, “the current cabin pressure is twenty-three point five and one-third per cent per square inch.” Her voice is in fine form tonight. Most of the time it sounds like it’s about to break into laughter. She gives it her ultimate test, dropping into a deep, blaring FM style: “Coming up, a double shot of Psychedelic Furs! Only on Niiiienty Point Nine, the rawwwwwk of Dallas!” She settles back in her chair, opens up a notebook, and practices the promo she’ll read on the air in a minute. The first one that interests her is about a shelter for battered women. “A woman is battered every eighteen seconds in America,” she reads, “then fried.” She is straying from the text. “Every eighteen seconds, a woman is battered and deep-fried to a crackly crunch. A special this week only at Long John Silver’s: a battered women platter with shrimp and hush-puppies. Only three ninety-nine!” When she reads the public service announcement on the air, she does it straight.
Elicia sticks her head in. “‘Kill the Poor’ by the Dead Kennedys,” she says. “A fifteen-year-old girl in North Dallas would really like to hear it.” Before playing the Dead Kennedys, Shaggy interrupts the show for a sermonette.
“Earlier tonight,” she says to Pajama Partygoers everywhere, “I was standing in line at Burger King, waiting to get a burger. It was taking a long time. And then I heard this man behind me talking about the ethnic qualities of the Burger King employees. And I thought, you know, how terrible! I am so sick of prejudice, but then it occurred to me that it’s easy for us to say it’s bad when other people are wrong. But when do we consider ourselves? And when do we think about the bad things we do? Think about it.” She puts on a record and turns to face everybody in the booth. She’s a little embarrassed. “Hey,” she says, wiping her face clean of any expression and holding her hands up in peace signs. “Peace! Love!”
The Mel Coolies are having fun, which means they’re causing trouble. They’re all racing around Elicia’s desk, answering the phones and saying dumb things, tapping on Shaggy’s window and making faces through the glass while she’s live.
“Could y’all shut that door, please?” Shaggy asks impatiently. The guys’ voices keep carrying into her mike. Shaggy tries to pick up a call on hold, but there’s just static on the line. “Elicia!” she screams, “will you please answer the phones?”
“That’s what I’m trying to get them to let me do.”
“Well, tell them to stop, okay?”
Elicia walks out to the guys and says, “You’ve been disbarred.”
A few new stragglers are wandering around in the office when someone says a guy named Ward is on the line for Shaggy. “Oh, great!” she says. “Hey, everybody, shh, shh, okay? Really. I’ve got to have quiet.” She picks up the phone, purses her lips, and says, “Ward? I’m worried about the Beaver.”
Ward is a friend of hers. The last time they talked, Shaggy was kind of depressed. Since then, she has dropped out of school, which has chilled her out and calmed her down. “No, I gave up being grim,” she tells him now. “I was grim for my whole life. Hold on—this record’s freaking out. Shit! Okay. What? No! Of course not! Do you think I’d put that on the radio?” When they finish talking, Shaggy has agreed to play something else for him. “Okay, well, ten-four, Ward. Till then, may the Force be with you. And don’t be grim, okay?”
Shaggy takes another call, leaning forward with her hand over her ear to hear better. After a long time, she hangs up. “She called me last week and was going, ‘Oh, no, I think I’m pregnant,’” Shaggy explains. “And I basically gave her the scoop on what to do, gave her a little moral support, told her to get some professional advice. It turns out she wasn’t, though, so I told her some things maybe to think about in the future.” Sometimes Shaggy is a punk teen Ann Landers; last week a girl called who had taken some drugs and was freaking out. Shaggy talked to her, tried to calm her down, played a couple of songs for her. “I like it when they do that,” she says. “Sometimes kids treat me like some kind of star, but I’d rather they just treat me as just a friend.”
One of the Mel Coolies nudges John Spath. “John Spath,” he says, “we have to go. If there’s a party to go back to.”
People keep calling in with requests and calling back fifteen minutes later wanting to know what happened to them. “KNON,” Shaggy says, when Elicia is busy with two other lines. “Yeah. Hi. Yeah, just keep it in your pants a minute, dude. Okay. Bye.” She slams down the receiver. “That guy needs to calm down!”
At 3:16 in the morning, after a series of calamities involving skipping records, badly timed intros, and jerko callers, Shaggy sits back in her chair, pulls her knees up to her chin, and sighs. “Patheticness,” she says.
After a while the light from downstairs blinks. It’s close to four, the show is nearly over, and Brother Joe Norvell has already arrived in a blue suit, with a box of gospel records and what seems like the weight of the world on his shoulders. Elicia goes down to see who’s at the door. It’s Royce and his friend Keith. They’re wearing their customary mismatched vintage plaids and polyesters, several shirttails out each. Shaggy is real glad to see Royce; she misses him, even though Jenny is furious that he hasn’t squared his share of the bills yet. Jenny is another reason Shaggy doesn’t see Royce so much these days. Here, away from the Bill House, they’re back on neutral ground. Friendly ground.
Royce spots Shaggy’s sermonette burger to the left of the controls. The ketchup on the wrapper has clotted to a deep, dark red. “Hey,” he says, “are you going to eat the rest of that burger?”
“No,” Shaggy says, “you can have it. Do you really want it?”
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