I’ve mentioned my early life in Phoenix several times on Aloha, Pangaea.  Whenever it comes up I have a prefab response about its pollution, sprawl and lack of diversity.  I generally don’t talk about that part of my life much, which is a shame as most of the people I care about here in St. Louis have deep, rich attachments to STL.  It’s not unlikely to stand around awkwardly while someone from your friend’s fourth grade class comes over to say hello at a party or bizarre.  I’d as soon recognize someone from fourth grade as I would from a book of unsung American Whigs.

Phoenix isn’t a bad city, despite what I may have drunkenly insisted.  It’s pretty new, and its cultural contributions have been slim.  There are notable Phoenicians (the preferred plural), but its sheer size makes that statistically probable.  I just never got it.  Something never meshed.  It was almost always very hot.  On average, it reaches one hundred degrees almost one-third of the year.  Think about that.  The climate rivals Baghdad.  No shit.

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This is a tape recorded by my friends and I in high school.  This was not our finest hour.  Like many suburban boys, we were callous and cruel, and nowhere is that more evident than on this tape of prank calls.  The problem is that they’re really, really funny.  My friends had the uncanny ability to keep people on the line long after they should have hung up.  At one point, my friend somehow deduces that the man he’s calling is an amputee and then offers him the chance to be in a program that would give him a new leg, albeit one from a black man.  “Your left side may jump higher and faster than your right.” Sensitive we were not.  Also featured: Galactus is destroying the neighborhood, a lost toe at Walmart and the indescribable Bagels & Cheese call.

The end of Side A features a compilation of calls we made to the Jay Lawrence show on KTAR in Phoenix.  We would try and get on the air and would yell “Police Academy 4.”  That was it.  That was the joke.  Still, Jay had an obvious respect for my friend’s ability to make it past the screeners every single week.

RIYL: insensitive teenage boys, harassing the elderly

http://www.mediafire.com/?94cr77ykdy130h8