THAT EVENING, I read “Testing, Testing,” episode twenty-five of Dead Air, to an audience of thirty-four — Albertine, Suki, Lou, Elaine, Clark and Alice, Artie and Nancy, Otto and Esther, Louise and Miranda, Tony T and Cutie, and twenty daytrippers.
AMONG MRS. JERROLD’S many attractive qualities was the fact that she owned a tape recorder. Actually, it was her husband’s recorder, but he was rarely around. When he was away, I used to visit if I could find any excuse at all for doing so, since I didn’t like to think that Mrs. Jerrold, the little Jerrold boy, and the tape recorder were there all by themselves, alone and lonely. On one visit, while setting up a flying-saucer detector in the bedroom that Mr. and Mrs. Jerrold shared, I had discovered that the items in the second drawer of Mrs. Jerrold’s dresser included a set of red underwear, and I had also discovered that the tape recorder was under the connubial bed, running.
When Mrs. Jerrold came upstairs to inspect the installation of the flying-saucer detector, a kind of madness came over me, the way it sometimes does when a boy is nearly thirteen, and before I realized what I was doing I found myself beginning to ask her to model the red underwear for me. “Mrs. Jerrold,” I was saying, “could I ask a favor of you? Do you suppose that — ”
“What, Peter?” she asked.
“Do you suppose,” I said, getting a grip on myself, “that I could use the tape recorder?”
“Sure,” she said. “It’s in the hall closet.”
“No, it’s not,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s under the bed.”
“Under the bed?” She got down on her hands and knees. I got down beside her. Her shirtwaist dress, buttoned carelessly or inattentively, fell open at the neck, and I could see the swelling curves of her breasts above the top of her brassiere, which was white, not red. “Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s going!”
“Somebody must have left it on,” I said.
“Get it out of there, will you?”
I crawled under the bed and tugged the tape recorder by its cord until it was out in the open.
“Jesus!” she said. “Shut it off, okay?”
I shut it off, and I unplugged it.
“How did you know it was there?” she asked.
“What?”
“How did you know it was under the bed?”
“Oh. You mean, how did I know it was under the bed?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I — well — the detector.”
“The detector?”
“Yeah. I was having trouble getting it aligned, so I — ah — started looking around for the — uh — the source of the interference, and — what do you know — there was the recorder. The detector detected it.”
She looked at me without speaking for a moment, and then said, “Let’s take the damn thing downstairs.”
I carried the recorder, and she carried the lid, the microphone, and the headphones.
“Set it up on the coffee table, Peter,” she said. “I want to hear what’s on that tape.”
I set it up, and as I did, I realized that I too wanted to hear what was on that tape.
“Let me have the headphones,” she said. I passed them to her, and she put them on. “Let me hear it,” she said. I ran the tape back a bit and then shifted to play. The tape ran, and Mrs. Jerrold listened. “It’s you and me,” she said in the loud voice of a person wearing headphones. “Go back more.” I shifted to rewind, let the tape run for a while, and then shifted back to play. Her eyes grew wide. She put her hands over the earpieces, as if some of the sound might leak out. Her jaw dropped. “Stop it!” she said. “Stop it!” She yanked the earphones off as if they hurt her. “Peter, can you erase this?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said, “but I don’t know how. I could record over it, though.”
“What does that mean?”
“If I record something new on the part of the tape that has a recording on it now, then the new stuff will replace the old stuff.”
“No one can hear what’s there now?”
“No. All they would hear is what I record.”
“Will you do something for me?”
“Sure.”
“Go all the way back to the beginning of that tape and fill it up with — anything, so that no one can hear what’s on there now. Can you do that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thanks.” She gave my shoulder a squeeze, and she went into the kitchen.
I rewound the tape, put the headphones on, shifted the machine into gear, picked up the microphone, held the microphone in front of my mouth, and said the words that I’d heard everyone with a microphone in his hand say: “Testing, testing,” and I said it again and again, but I had the recorder set to play, and while I said “testing” I was listening to Mrs. Jerrold engaged in vigorous, passionate, loud, and apparently quite enjoyable sex with the man who delivered baked goods, the man we kids called Mr. Yummy.
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, and At Home with the Glynns.
You can buy hardcover and paperback editions of all the books at Lulu.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
Share this post