I READ “Filling Time,” the twenty-sixth episode of Dead Air, to a good crowd, but as I looked out over their faces I couldn’t help seeing them as agents of destruction, people who were going to make messes and break things and cost us money.
THERE I WAS, sitting in Mrs. Jerrold’s living room wearing headphones, listening to a tape recording of her coupling with the man who made deliveries for the Yummy Good Baked Goods Company. To conceal from Mrs. Jerrold the fact that I was listening to her approaching orgasm, I pretended that I was recording, not listening, and in the service of that pretense I repeated, relentlessly, “testing, testing,” until Mrs. Jerrold leaned around the door frame from the kitchen and called out, “Peter!”
“What?”
“Say something else!”
“Huh?”
“I can’t stand it anymore. If I hear you say ‘testing’ once more, I’ll scream.”
“Oh — um — okay,” I said. On the tape, she had already begun screaming.
I looked at the microphone. What to say? Nothing came to mind, nothing, that is, except “testing.” I looked toward the kitchen. Mrs. Jerrold wasn’t watching, at least. I looked around the living room for inspiration and found none.
“Testing,” I whispered into the microphone, as softly as I could. I glanced, warily, guiltily, in the direction of the kitchen. Mrs. Jerrold leaned slowly around the door frame, just until her left eye showed.
“Sorry,” I said.
She leaned a little farther around the door frame, enough so that I could see that she was smiling. “Want some help?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said, and, hastily, I stopped the recorder, so that she wouldn’t see that I’d been playing, not recording.
She came into the living room and sat, in a single smooth motion, folding her legs under her, on the sofa beside me, facing the recorder, which I’d set up on the coffee table. I shifted it to record, and the reels began to turn. Mrs. Jerrold leaned toward me to speak into the microphone, and since I was holding the microphone she put her hand on mine to turn the microphone toward her. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, she slipped into a character, she became the announcer who opened the radio program that my mother always tuned to on the kitchen radio in the mornings, the program that greeted me when I came downstairs for breakfast: “Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Bob Balducci’s Breakfast Bunch! We’ve got a great show for you this morning. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy it. Bob’s off on vacation this week — lucky guy — but sitting in for him is one of your favorite radio personalities — Peter Leroy.” Then she did an amazing thing. She made crowd noises by breathing into the microphone and changing the shape of her mouth. While she did this, I looked closely at her, since this behavior was so odd, and I knew, from the way she shifted her eyes in my direction and grinned, that there was nothing wrong with my looking so closely, because she knew that she was doing a mysterious and magical thing. She was performing, and one is always invited to watch a performance. I took the opportunity to notice and record the fullness of her lips, the luscious frosting of the lipstick that she wore, the tip of her tongue when it tapped her teeth or licked her lips, and, with the quickest flick of my eyes, the bulge of her breasts beneath her shirtwaist dress.
Then, suddenly, I found myself looking at the microphone again. She had turned it back toward me. She was still holding my hand. She was looking at me expectantly. She wanted me to say something. A remarkable thing happened to me: because she had established the context of a radio program, I experienced the broadcasting professional’s reluctance to allow more than the briefest moment of “dead air,” time during which the station is broadcasting no music, no commercial message, no official announcements, no chatter, nothing but static. I didn’t actually know that this was something that people in radio worried about, but I had intuited it from my experience as a radio listener, from the fact that I rarely heard dead air when I listened to a program, and from the fact that if an empty moment was allowed to pass, the announcer or host or whatever would return to the air after the lapse, embarrassed, with a comical reference to the silence we had heard, a reference that suggested that this gap was a mistake, and so, to avoid embarrassing us, I rushed right into the breech with, “Hello, there, everybody, and welcome to another meeting of the Breakfast Bunch. How about a big hand for my lovely assistant?” Mrs. Jerrold made crowd noises, and, invisible to the listening audience, she and I exchanged the collegial grin of two performers filling time.
[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