THAT EVENING, I read episode twenty-nine of Dead Air, “Bedroom Suits,” to an audience that was not, even though water was still being rationed and we had no working washing machines, noticeably more odoriferous than any of the audiences for any of my previous readings.
THAT NIGHT, I lay in my bed trying to recall and comprehend everything I had seen in the Jerrolds’ bedroom, remember every piece of furniture in their matching set, every smell, every sound, every private object. It was tiring work, so after a while I turned my radio on to distract me from it. For the previous Christmas, my parents had given me an Emerson clock radio. Before the Emerson arrived, I had had a radio but no clock. Having a clock was, I felt, a badge of entry into the world of adult time.
Whoever designed this clock radio must not have fully accepted the concept of a clock radio as a single unified device, because it was more a “clock-and-radio” than a “clockradio.” The radio was housed in a plastic rectangular solid about the size of a shoe box, while the clock was housed in a plastic hexagonal solid — an extrusion of a hexagon — that was grafted onto the left end of the radio housing. The whole functioned as a single device, but the clock looked like a clock and the radio looked like a radio, as if they had been fused by accident during a fire at the factory.
This clock radio had been styled to the point of exhaustion. Consider the knobs. They were decapitated cones (if we think of the narrow end of the cone as the head, as we in our relentless anthropomorphization of the world and all of its bits and pieces do). For the sake of style, they were mounted so that they tapered inward. Around the inward-tapering edge of each knob were radial indentations, shallow splines, which might have been there to give the knob-turner a better grip if curving the tips of the fingers inward to conform to the inward taper of the conical knob was the way the knob-turner was likely to turn the knob; in my experience, that was not how the knob-turner was likely to turn the knobs, so the indentations made no sense to me. (A couple of years later, however, I came to understand the meaning of the knurling on these knobs, and when I did I felt up-to-date and savvy. The knurling was there, I decided, as a vestigial reference to an earlier time in the evolution of radio receivers, a time when knobs were linked to big, clumsy devices inside the radio’s case, making them hard to turn and so actually needing knurling so that the knob-turner could gain a better purchase for the knob-turning task. The reference was nostalgic, ironic, and witty. Maybe. Maybe not.)
The tuning knob was on the right, the volume knob on the left. Behind the tuning knob was a small window, a sixty-degree section of a circle. Behind the window was a milky-white plastic disk with golden numerals imprinted on it that indicated the frequencies on the AM band.
I roamed up and down the dial, but at last I turned, as I usually did late at night, to the station that broadcast “Baldy’s Nightcap,” a program that consisted entirely of a rambling dialogue between the host, a dummy named Baldy, and his assistant, a voice in the background called Bob. In the course of his ramble, Baldy would read his sponsors’ commercial messages as if he had come upon them by accident, just discovered them on his desk. He had no national sponsors, no soft drinks or cigarettes or deodorants, just local businesses. One was a store called Rooms for Rent, where people could rent furniture. Even I understood the impermanence and uncertainty that this implied. Listening to Baldy read their ad, I could imagine living in a rented apartment reading a library book in the light from a rented lamp, and then nodding toward sleep in a rented bed.
“‘Get yourself on down to the showroom at Rooms for Rent and pick out the bedroom suit of your dreams,’ he read, but then he stopped, crumpled the paper loudly and dramatically and shouted into the microphone, “‘Bedroom suit’? Who the hell writes this stuff? Who are these people? Let me tell you something, listener, if they weren’t paying me to read this crap, I wouldn’t do it. I’ve got my pride. Well, I used to have my pride, didn’t I, Bob?”
“Yeah.”
“Now I’m only in it for the money, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve sunk about as low as we can go, haven’t we, Bob?”
“Yeah.”
He purred into the microphone, “Here’s an idea, boys and girls. Maybe you’d be willing to do old Baldy a favor. Hmm? Go take a look at those bedroom ‘suits’ at Rooms for Rent and tell those ignorant bastards that Baldy says they are bedroom suites, suites, suites!” For a moment, there was dead air; then: “Now we’ll find out whether anybody’s listening, won’t we, Bob?”
“Yeah.”
The next night, Baldy came on at the regular time, and nothing was changed. Apparently, no one had telephoned the station to complain, not even the people who ran Rooms for Rent. Reasoning from that remarkable lack of response, and employing an adolescent’s egocentric logic, I concluded that I must have been the only one who had heard him. For a moment, I was elated, but a moment later, I felt the enormous weight of the role fate had dealt me: I was Baldy’s only listener.
[to be continued]
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