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On the Radio
I keep a brown wool jacket in my car that makes me
look like Winston Churchill. It's too big for me now,
but I used to wear it with a bowler and an umbrella.
Sometimes people stopped me on the street and asked
me if I was in the movies. I was a corpulent guy
then. I'm not as big, now. The jacket covers the
entire back seat of my Toyota.
I lost weight when I worked as a nurse's aid at a
rest home in North Bend, Washington, out in the
mountains. The home was done up in a rustic theme,
the walls built of huge, raw logs like a gigantic
Lincoln Log cabin. Tall pine trees lined the yard and
green field stones lined the pool. The residents were
rustic by default. I lifted the shells of old men
from aluminum wheel chairs into steel-framed beds. I
escorted women clasping their four-footed walkers to
the side of the pool where they played cards. These
old people were battered and worn like my old jacket.
They struggled to maintain an illusion of health and
youth. The women dyed their hair a uniform black, and
the men wore freshly-ironed white linen shirts. But I
didn't mind the attempts at hiding white hair and
crooked backs. As a nurse I had seen them naked and
watched them fidget as I drew blood from their arms.
I could identify them through their run-down
prostates and bad backs. No one was as they wanted to
be.
Sometimes their children came out in new, same-make
automobiles from Seattle. Each year a new fleet of
BMWs, or Acuras, or Lexuses swept into the visitor
parking lot. Children sat with their parents and
talked, generations connected by voice like car phone
to car phone. I felt isolated in the microwave
crossfire, as substantial to these people's presence
as the country architecture, the cement steps painted
red, the wheelchair ramp. As long as I wore the
Clorox white of my smock and held the key to the
medicine cabinet, I mattered.
Now I know better. I wear a blue suit jacket, khaki
pants, and a knit tie to a bank in Whiter Center, a
neighborhood some people call Rat City because of the
ramshackle taverns and decaying suburbs that were
thrown up in the few months after WW2. I deposit blue
collar pay checks and manage checking accounts that
never reach a thousand dollars. With so little money,
these people have no way of ever escaping the rat
trap of AM country western stations and Styrofoam
cups filled with rancid coffee. The detail of their
lives accumulates in the long hours I enter
overdrafts into the computer and in the dumpsters
behind my apartment building.
For me the good deal is: I am out of work at three
o'clock, hours before the end of the factory shift
starts a rush hour that freezes the drive to my
apartment.
At night I hear police sirens and the heavy growl of
freight trucks along Highway 99. I have this thing I
do when rain slicks the pavement and a wreck happens
on Interstate 5, or State Route 518, or 405; I drive
to the line of traffic passing the accident. On the
radio, the DJ says, "A two car pileup on I-5
northbound," and I am there, looking at a
twisted Toyota, the white hood torn back like a
butchered aluminum can. Sometimes a victim is still
inside the car, crushed in the metal. A medic in a
white suit coaches the pale casualty while the
fireman, in a yellow rubber trenchcoat, saws the door
away; the metal blades buzz and spit blue sparks
across the pulverized hood. I am there, almost on the
radio, almost in the ears of all the people stuck in
the rain, frozen in the rush hour.
Today is a good day. I weighed in at two hundred and
thirty pounds this morning so I can have a little ice
cream after dinner. The ritual is: after work, I
change into my brown flannel sweatsuit, do three
hundred push-ups at fifty a bang, jog in place for a
half hour, sit up six hundred times, and then I'm
done. I shower for ten minutes, buy groceries, and
catch the evening line up. But today—on account
of how good it is, on account of how much weight I've
lost—I don't feel like the workout, so I walk to
the store and buy a Tombstone Pepperoni Pizza, a
carton of milk, a head of lettuce, low calorie
Italian dressing, a block of cheddar cheese, a six
pack of diet RC, and The Seattle Times. I
read the paper while I eat my pizza. Using the sports
page as a plate, the grease in the cheese turns a
picture of a football player clear. I read the column
of words through his face. Later the evening lineup
of reruns starts—Night Court, Cheers, and
Cinema at Ten. After Night Court, I put
on my red, plastic overcoat and walk to the store in
the drizzle. Fuzzy rain wets my face. As I leave, I
pass these three people I've never seen at my
apartment before. Obscured by water beading on their
windshield, they sit inside a Cadillac Seville. The
license plates are the old Washington plates, without
the decoration of Mt. Rainier. The strangers' skins
are different. They aren't black or white. One guy in
the car has a typical Anglo face, but something like
disease or starvation or parasites has hollowed and
yellowed his flesh until it looks waxy and blunt like
the white plastic of laundromat chairs. The other two
men in the car may have been black once, but the
roundness, the human appearance of their faces has
been drawn away until their bony cheeks and cartilage
of their noses stands away from their skin like the
edges of knives. Their skin spreads pasty and
luminous over cheeks, reflecting light like oil
slicks. The pale man says something, and they all
smile without laughing. In the clean refrigerator
atmosphere of the supermarket, I feel secure among
the bins of frozen orange juice and stacks of
microwave meals.
I buy Rocky Road in a gallon carton. The clerk
smiles and nods and bags the carton in a plastic
freezer bag. I walk back to the apartment swinging
the bag. One of the black guys stands by the car.
"Good evening," he says. A silk cloth wraps
his head, and he wears a black jogging suit with a
red stripe along the side. It's a nice suit.
"Hello," I say.
"Shopping?" he says.
"Evening snack," I say as I hurry past him.
Inside my apartment, I strip the plastic bag from the
Rocky Road, wet a spoon under the tap, and then sit
on the sofa by the window. From apartment number
twelve, the white guy limps to the Seville. He slides
into the passenger seat. I don't know anyone in that
apartment. Whoever lives there keeps the drapes drawn
back night and day. After the white guy slams the
door closed, the three men sit in the car. Finally, a
woman, wearing black jeans and a grey ski jacket,
leaves apartment twelve. I've never seen her in the
building before. Her hair pulls back in a blonde
clump. I would remember this woman, because her legs
are straight, without fat, and her butt fits round in
the pockets of the jeans, just like one of the women
from a magazine's cigarette advertisement. She sits
in the back seat. Her head lays back against the
seat, and she bends forward as one of the men raises
something up. I see the thin plastic casing of a
hypodermic needle.
I pick up the phone, which I really only use to call
the pizza place after I see their commercial on TV.
Sometimes the last seconds of the commercial are
still on the screen when I get the voice on the other
side of the line. And then, a quarter of an hour
later an actual knock sounds from my door and I open
the box, letting out the doughy odor of crust and the
heavy smell of melted cheese. I call Ms. Krantz, the
manager, because something is assuredly happening
outside.
The manager always dresses in her bedroom jacket over
a silk bathrobe. She calls out for maintenance. She
calls out for groceries. A repairman will show up on
weekends, mysteriously summoned from the nexus of
phone lines in her office. Her voice has been altered
by a succession of half-burnt cigarettes into a raspy
and charcoaled wheeze. "What?" she says.
"This is Reese Clarrington, number eight.
"There are people doing things in the parking
lot." I tell her about the movements of the
woman from number twelve, suspicious.
"I've got it handled," she says. A call, I
know, goes out as soon as I hang up. I poke my spoon
around at the bottom of the empty ice cream carton.
The manager circles the parking lot like a robed
monk, her head bowed, like she's looking for
cigarette butts. She even bends over in disguise. She
isn't actually picking them up because she never
does.
I turn the TV on to the start of a movie until blue
lights flash from outside. In the parking lot, a
police cruiser blocks the exit, shines a floodlight
across the parking lot and reveals the pale faces of
the three men as insubstantial triangles. They run
toward the Seville. A uniformed officer—his pant
legs ironed so that the crease falls in a vertical
line—stands in front of the police car. I have
caused this. I am behind the policeman's movements.
It was my voice that set in motion the manager's
voice, and now my actions speak through the police
officer. In the floodlight, they move in slow motion
like guttering images from a TV with a broken
horizontal adjust. The officer grabs the white guy by
his wrists and twists them. Something flips into the
air, sparkles as it rattles across the ground and
slides under a truck.
The policeman pushes the man and prostrates him, the
policeman who acts as the incarnation of my will. He
quickly captures the other two.
The police deposit the men into the white cruiser
that blocks the entrance to the parking lot. A spat
of radio traffic flies skyward to connect the event
to the nearest police station. The crackle of numbers
rattles my window. As the cruiser backs away, I see
the glint of metal on the asphalt. In the empty
parking lot, I watch cigarette butts float down the
trickle of runoff.
I turn the radio station on to hear if there is
any news. I bet these events play on the police band
radios but I don't own one. I use the remote to check
the channels on TV. A high school band marches on
channel 7; on 5 and on 6 anchor men point at clouds
and rain drops as big as their fists. It will rain
tomorrow. An accident will probably be somewhere on
the freeways. No one says anything about me. My
actions are not reported or recorded or accounted
for.
At a quarter to twelve, I wake to the rustle of rain
on the roof. A harsh floodlight from the used car lot
next door permeates my room like smoke. Through a
crack in the drapes, a slash of white-blue light
cascades across the ruffle of sheets, across my chest
of drawers, onto the poster of a Berlin street,
tacked to the wall. In the poster, an old building on
an abandoned street corner juts over a door painted a
startling bright red. Everything in my room is as it
is every night and already the event, the particular
sequence of things, has begun to fade. I remember the
cold watery trickle in my stomach when the men
noticed me in the parking lot, and the electric
tingle in my arms as I watched them getting arrested
in the parking lot as a result of my tip, but already
I'm aware of the distorting of my memory. I don't
remember what I said to them. My involvement in these
moments of my own life seems as subliminal and
uninvolved as my listening to a stream of mid-morning
radio ads.
Sweat collects in my pillow. The damp linen feels
slimy against my cheek. My body does things; if I
concentrate, I can change the beat of my heart.
Sometimes my cheeks flash red while I'm at the bank.
I think the other plain faces I work with consider
me—quiet, trembling, servile—a pervert.
They imagine my thoughts are identical to the
confessions of convicted rapists, child molesters,
and necrophiliacs they've seen on day-time talk
shows. But my face turns red for no reason.
At midnight, I dress in my brown flannel sweat suit.
I put on my red plastic overcoat. I ignite my
flashlight; the rubber nipple over the switch
depresses and the light jumps into the parking lot.
Outside, under a truck, I find the silver cache of
strewn keys, six slices of metal, two labeled with
the Seville logo. Before I go to their car, I slip
into the cramped space of my Toyota, and I slip off
the red raincoat, with water beading across the
surface. I put on my old Churchill raincoat. I pull
the shoulders out, and even though it barely fits, I
feel like I fill it out again.
The plastic interior of the Seville smells like
cigarette smoke and my old gym locker. The rain takes
the blue street lamp and waves the light in pulses
across my face. It makes my hands white. I grip the
smooth leatherette with my outspread fingers; it
feels like a bed of cold, human skin.
I fit the key into the ignition slot. I turn the
headlights on, and I fire the engine; it rolls and
clicks and clicks and hums until the defrosters strip
the windows clear. Clear of traffic, the empty
streets unfold before me. This car is not much of a
prize, the paint is battered, and the clatter of the
engine is like shaking keys, but it's now mine; it
belonged to someone else, someone whom I put in jail.
I can do as I will. I turn on the radio. But it just
has the AM dial, so I turn past the familiar drawl of
country, over the murmur of Motown love songs until I
come to an unfamiliar language. German sputters into
the car. Der Kommissar, Oh, Uh, Oh.
Through the unfamiliar windshield, the passage of
houses I normally don't notice suddenly gains a
strangeness. I notice buildings and streets that I
had once just driven past. I feel as if I had stepped
out of a long, slow movie into a sunlit street and
realized that I could go anywhere now that the movie
was over. I drive on the freeway feeling the wet wind
gush through the rolled down window, looking at dark
houses with people sleeping there, and I feel free,
even though the gas needle hangs down regardless of
the E and F. I can drive anywhere.
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