Shooting the TV
Roger Gathman

I plop down in an old brown recliner, causing the springs to jangle in it, and
start exploring in one of the holes in it and pull out fuzzy bits of stuffing.
Mark is moving around in front of his dad's work table, his dad who, as Mom
puts it, slipped away, meaning not that he escaped from prison or died, which
would be interesting, but that in broad daylight he packed his suitcases, took
them out to his car in his suitcoat and tie, and drove away, ending his
marriage to Mark’s Mom with a little puff of blue smoke from the exhaust pipe.
Mark hasn’t seen him for at least a year.
 
However, Mark has a new father, Ralph Purse, as of three months ago, since his
Mom definitely needed a husband. That’s what Dad said, although I couldn’t
tell if he was being sarcastic. Mr. Purse doesn’t live with them except on the
weekends, when he comes down from Chattanooga. Mark’s crazy mom is from
Chattanooga, and after Mark’s dad left they moved up there for a time. Anyway,
Mr. Purse hasn’t seen his way to clearing out Mark’s dad’s stuff, or using it,
so it just sits in the basement. The worktable, the tools, all ready and
willing, although even when Mark’s old Dad bought them you have to wonder if
it wasn’t just peer pressure from the other fathers on the street, since he
sure never used them to make much or repair the 1000 and 1 things that break
around the house. That’s why there are dents in the hall upstairs that look
like somebody was moving a table and didn’t look where they were going, and
the doorhandle to the door of the bathroom will come off in your hand if you
aren’t careful, and the ceiling in Mark’s bedroom has a big brown stain from a
roof leak. Though the Vermillion’s have the biggest house in the neighborhood,
it is also the most neglected.
 
Mark gets a tube out of one of those boxes under the work table. He unscrews
the cap from the tube. It is a little red tube. He finds a nail. He punctures
a hole in the mouth of the tube, and he takes a plastic bag and squeezes some
grayish gel into the bag.
 
He holds the bag up to his mouth and he takes a hit.
 
He passes the bag to me. God damn he says.
 
I don't know, I say. So far, the farthest I’ve gone with Mark is drinking some
of his father’s (his old father’s) scotch. I'm just going to do this once, I
say, in my compromise tone. I put the bag up to my mouth and breath in the
chemical, rather sweet odor of the glue. It hits the back of my throat in a
sudden clump and I drop the bag. God damn, I say, trying to imitate Mark, to
be funny. I close my eyes and see a white spotthat looks like pigeon shit, in
the middle of a velvety, whirling darkness. My eyes are open again, and I get
up.
 
I put a hand out. Help me, I’m falling, I say, in a crinkled kind of voice,
such as the witch uses in the Wizard of Oz, when she is dissolving into a waxy
pool.
 
Mark opens the door after a while and lets in the watery light. Through the
spring sogginess I see green and gray and blue: sky,cloud, leaf. Mark's lawn
is patched with different greens, with the green of crabgrass and the lighter
green of bermuda grass and the different greens of wild onion and dandelion
and thistle and clover, and there are a lot of bare patches of red clay, too.
This is because nobody takes care of the lawn anymore. Mr. Purse put down
grassseed one Saturday, he used one of those broadcasters with the canvas bag
and the winnowing fan and the crank, but because he isn't here on the
weekdays it was a totally wasted effort. I wonder sometimes if Mr. Purse is
totally on the ball. Dad comes home and waters our lawn before dinner, with
his hat on, and on the weekends he uses weedicide to get rid of crabgrass and
the nettles. Dad says you have to take care of a lawn.
 
This is the season of appetite; all of nature, or at least all of the nature
I see in Gladstone Georgia, is hungry and on the prowl. The cats slink around
and yowl at night and leave muddy pawprints on the top of Dad’s car, for him
to come out and yell about in the morning. The birds fly in formations
overhead, heading north, and the cardinals fight near the birdfeeder in the
maple tree in our back yard. One day last week, there were around six dogs
that wandered up our street, like a pack of wolves. I recognized the Effbury’s
dog, Sam, and the Aaron’s beagle, but I never saw the cocker spaniel or the
German shepherd before. They crossed over the Flesher’s lawn like they had
serious business to attend to somewhere, and disappeared in the direction of
my piano teacher’s house. It is March, and everything is bursting into life
from the earth where it has all been asleep. From science class I know that
there is an exact parallel between the seasons and the day: spring is waking
up, summer is being awake, autumn is falling asleep, and winter is sleep.
Actually, what I know about nature I know by instinct. The trees almost clutch
at the rain with their leaves, while I sit at the table every night, sucking
up spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, hotdogs, lasagna, ice cream,
cakes, pies, making myself more and more of a presence in the world, legs
growing, arms growing, face filling in, neck growing too big for my head.
I'll be in bed and I'll put my hands under my head, my elbows out, like a
sailor on a bunk. I have a map of Indonesia from a National Geographic which
I like to spread out on the floor, kneeling down, looking over all those
unpronounceable orangutan names, the stutters and clicks way beyond any shape
I can set my mouth to. Map blue for the sea, and the islands are a crushed
backbone, scattered vertebrae. On the shore I'll cast up, there'll be tall
coconut palms like I've seen in Florida, at Uncle Victor's house who really
isn't my uncle, and naked women with suntans.
 
I do one more hit, but I don't think I'll do any more, since the feeling I get
is that I am in a bell, an almost translucent, silvery bell, and it makes me
slightly uncomfortable, as if I’ve lost my edges. It is interesting, though.
My body is a chemical toy, and here's just another proof to put alongside
dizziness, sleep, fever, deja-vu, and hard-ons, plus the attack I had, which I
never experienced the like of again, a year ago. They had to send me home for
four days. Dizziness. Fear. Mark says it is not the best high, he goes into
how I should try grass. Today he asks me again. Come on, I say, and he says,
what is the hold up? Lately he's been on about this. Actually, it isn't that
I am afraid of it, like I think he thinks, although he’s never said chicken.
It is because of the smell. I don't want my clothes to smell like Norman
Sick's, the high school football coach’s son, but I am embarrassed to give
this as my reason to Mark.
 
Which speak of the devil and he appears. Norman Sick is standing in the
doorway in a blue sports jacket with "Gladstone Goats" on the back. The
highschool is the Goats, and there is a drawing in white of a goat kicking a
football. Two years from now I'll be a Goat. Norman says that he has some
money. He steps in the door and stands just a little ways in. He's wet, there
are water drops in his crew cut. Norman hates having a crew cut, but his dad
make him get his hair cut. He looks at me, then he takes two tattered green
bills out of his pocket. He is dripping onto the concrete of the floor.
How much is that? I ask.
 
None of your damn business, son.
 
Mark says he'll be back, and he runs up the stairs. Norman says what are you
doing, and I say nothing much, we're just doing. Where’d you get the money,
Norman?
 
He says, I got plenty of money, stupid.
 
Well, if he’s going to call me stupid, I just won’t talk, I think. I cross my
arms.
 
When Mark comes back, he has a bag with some rolling papers in it and what
looks like crumpled up leaves, which of course I know is grass.
 
Mark takes a rolling paper out of the bag, and he gets a pinch of brown weed
from the bag and spreads it out in the paper. Then he rolls it. He is pretty
good at rolling cigarettes. We used to smoke with pipe tobacco he'd swipe from
his Dad up in the houses Effberry construction was building up on Gladstone
Mountain Drive, we’d go up and look around for the slugs from the electrical
outlets, and then we would sit on a beam and he’d roll a cigarette and we’d
smoke it. The smoke sort of cut my throat, but it was fun to do.
 
Norman never does come all the way in, but he sits down there in the doorway,
the stoop made by the concrete floor being a little above the ground, with his
legs a little outside. Mark takes a lighter out of his back pocket and lights
the joint, and takes a big hit. He passes it to Norman, who gestures to me.
 
I'm fine.
 
After a while Norman leaves. He hadn’t said much. Mark is the talker. He
said we been sniffing glue, which I was just as well with Norman not knowing,
but oh well. Then Mark went to saying this grass was awful smooth shit. Then
he started onto Lisa, the girl who sat in front of him in science. He said
he’d turned her on. He'd been talking about her lately a lot, which made me
wonder, because dangerous Dana liked her. Then he started singing: the minute
you walked in the joint, I could see you were a man of distinction. Then
Norman said he had to get on now, and we watched him slog across the back yard
in the drizzle, carrying his lunch sack. He climbed over the fence between the
Vermillion's and the Scassio's. He cut across the Scassio's front lawn, which
Mr. Scassio, if he had been there, would have rushed out at him about. Then
the jut of the way the Scassio's house lay to us hid him.
 
After another little while, we decided that it would be a good time to
shoot the B B gun.
 
In one of the darker corners of the basement was a big old television set.
It had been the living room television, but years ago they’d bought a new one
and just hadn’t ever got around to throwing this one out. Nobody was ever
going to use it again. Inside it something had gone wrong and the picture had
a tendency to suddenly go up and go up and go up like a blind someone was
persistently pulling down and releasing, or they would narrow down to thin
shivers of white and then dilate to thick murky blobs. The sound was all
right, though.
 
Mark went upstairs to get the gun and I rolled out the TV. Then Mark was
downstairs again and he and I pushed the TV out the door and wheeled it
through the yard. The wheels left a track in the yard, and the mud clung to
the wheels and made them hard to roll. Dad would kill me if I'd done this in
his yard, I had a clear picture of him dropping me off at an orphanage or
something, since I wasn’t as up in Dad’s affections as his bermuda grass. Next
Mark went in and found a long orange extension chord. We thought if the thing
was turned on, and we shot it, maybe it would explode. Everybody likes
explosions. So he snaked it out to the TV, and said plug it in. I took the
chord and I took the plug from the television, which was wet, and I connected
them. At that instant they sparked and I jumped and dropped them. I wasn’t
shocked, though, I didn’t think. I yelled at Mark, you goddamn indiot, why did
you plug the thing in. He was laughing at the way I jumped.
 
It didn't hurt you none, he says.
 
I could have been killed.
 
Right.
 
The next thing was to turn on the TV. I was still a little scared and I
was trying to figure out if the sort of buzz I felt was the my being afraid
when the thing sparked or my being actually shocked. The way I thought about
it, wires and nerves were like the same kind of thing. I thought of my body in
terms of the machines I was familiar with. Wires, sacks, boings and echoes,
television sets and tape recorders. Anyway I didn't want to turn on the TV and
maybe get a real shock. On the other hand, I didn't want to act too scared.
In the end honor won out, and I went over to turn it on.
 
It was your idea to turn it on in the first place Street.
 
Yeah, yeah.
 
It was drizzling a little. I opened the little wooden door, examined the
panel. Just switch the little power switch. I reached out and touched it and
recoiled, as if I had already felt a shock. I reached out again and turned it
on. I noticed something sort of weird about doing all this, which was that I’d
keep forgetting what had just happened. Like what I’d just been doing seemed
very small, or even blank. It made me want to laugh
 
I was high, I suddenly realized.
 
There was a great hiss, and I jumped away. Just then Mark shot the BB.
Instead of hitting the TV, it hit me in the leg. The television was
sputtering, and the pictures on it were cavorting horizontally and vertically,
spasming. I fell on the ground, and immediately regretted it, because I felt
the damp soak into my pants and my shirt. I thought shit, I've muddied up my
britches. Mark shot again and hit the glass, putting a crack in it. The
splutter was louder. I cried out to Mark he'd goddamn hit me. Maybe I was
bleeding. I rolled into an upright position and started to roll up my pant's
leg. Mark came over and both of us stared at the exposed bit of leg. There was
a red mark on the calf. Mark said he wondered if the little bb itself was in
the grass somewhere around me, and we patted around a little bit looking for
it. As if finding it would explain anything.
 
I was disappointed with the impact of the b b-ies. I had a vision of a
movie bullet shattering the glass wholesale, smashing it, and flames leaping
up. Although that probably would not have been cool, Mrs. Scassio would
surely have come out and yelled at us, or somebody from some house would have
come out. But instead we had to take a rock and make a preliminary crack in
the screen, because the bb-ies kept bouncing off.
 
Then the bb-ies did some damage.
 
I'd take a shot and he'd take a shot, and I tried to make the cracks I made
connect to those he made, until we’d caved in most of the glass and exposed
the inner vestibule, that strange chamber where the TV rays landed after
touching down invisibly and swiftly at numerous high TV towers. After a while
Mark went back in the house and came out with a box of kitchen matches, and I
lit one and threw it in hole in the screen. That made it more interesting to
shoot at. Flames started coming out of the TV after a while. We squatted
close to it, hanging Ir butts down so that they weren't quite touching the
grass and hugging our knees and watching the TV burning. When it really
started going I said Mark ought to get some baking soda to put it out. He said
why, and I said do you want the goddamn thing to burn up and everybody to see
it? Oh, Mark said, Purse isn't going to notice. But as it got more serious I
got nervous. Mark just watched it. I went and found the hose folded up
behind some wet shrubbery next to the back wall of the house, and screwed one
end to the faucet there. Then I turned the faucet on and got a big squirt of
water in the face from where I hadn't screwed tight enough. I was thoroughly
soaked by now. I raced with the hose to the TV like I was a fireman, and
doused the fire and squirted some water on Mark, to get him back for the bb.
The next day the TV was still there, charred and ugly, like it had been
taken out of some detonated structure, one of those buildings the Americans
bombed in some World War II movie, or in one of those riots I’d seen on tv, a
lot of black people coming out with tv sets while cities burned. The orange
wire snaked out to it, it was all like I had left it the day before, except in
that day's rain it looked even more ruined. It amazed me that Mrs. Vermillion
hadn't said boo to Mark about it. After school I and Mark rolled it back
across the lawn and into the basement, and after all that labor when Mark said
do I want to toke I said yes.
 
I might as well, I said.