Ghetto TV — Reason #17 Why I Moved to the South End
My ex-wife and I bought a house in a Seattle ghetto back in ’77. She was living with her boyfriend across town and I lived in the ghetto house with an assortment of roommates. Don’t ask, it’s too long a story right now. The house was in what was the Red Line District, meaning grocery stores, pharmacies, most retail weren’t able to finance from the banks which considered our area a DMZ. We did have a small store down the block which sold beer and fortified wines, some bread and old dairy, lots of canned goods, pop and candy. In a pinch, I shopped there. When I got my change, it was always short. Always. Not being the sort who argues about nickels and dimes, I wrote it off as a sort of ‘tip’ to the clerk, usually an obese black guy who never said hello or thanks or how’s the crime down your way?
Wednesday nights my wife would come over to visit. We had a small black and white television set that got 3 channels, something called an Astronaut, probably Sputnik era. The sound was shot — even turned up full volume, you could barely hear it. My wife liked watching it while we ate dinner, usually a box pizza. We were ‘living large’, as we say down in the mean streets. One Wednesday she forgot to bring wine so I hopped over to the ghetto market and bought something savory and romantic to go with sitcoms and preservative packed pizzas. I was thinking our marriage might’ve pretty much run its rope. I was thinking maybe I was close to Bottom. Course, if you think that, you aren’t even looking over the edge of the abyss. Yet.
I carefully chose an insouciant little white zinfandel for $3.99 plus tax, took it to the counter and watched ruefully as my friendly merchant shorted me most of a dollar in change. Don’t ask me why, but I chose this moment to challenge his math skills. “Mistakes, happen, Man,” he shrugged. “They happen all the time here,” I said, “and oddly, Man, they always come up short on my end.”
“Don’t got to shop here, you know. Plenty of other places. Free country.”
A racist thought jumped into my politically correct head. I kept it to myself, pocketed my extra quarters and headed back to Camelot with a fine bottle of screwtop swill. My ex was 5 feet from the Astronaut, sound this tinny scratchy noise. I poured her a tumbler of zin, popped a beer and we settled in to eat pizza and watch reruns. When she finished her wine she mentioned casually she had to leave soon. She and her beau were meeting for an evening of fun and frivolity and, well, she’d forgotten to mention it, but there you are.
My one lousy night a week marriage just got whittled down a bit. I looked at her with what I assume was a look of incalculable pathos mixed with scarcely concealed rage and/or disappointment. I’m guessing it was actually the look of a rube at the fair who just spent his last dollar on his girl throwing baseballs at rigged targets for a kewpie doll prize he’d never in a million reincarnations ever win. When she left minutes later, I sat stupidly staring at the Astronaut, slowly becoming aware the sound had given out, no doubt beyond earth’s orbit and terrestrial audio range. I twisted the dial until it too left orbit.
It was later that night, after midnight, when the wine was gone and the beer too and most of what was left of a stupid marriage. The TV had sat on its crappy little stand, flickering black and white images for hours, snowy ghosts dancing in my peripheral. At some point I jerked the power cord out of the wall and the picture shrank to a dot then nothing. I picked up the set, walked out the front door with it and up the now rainy street to my ghetto store. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just walked up the block looking, to any cop driving along, like a looter on his way to the pawn shop with a brand new stolen TV.
The store was closed, the doors shut behind iron bars, the lights mostly out other than a neon or two. I suppose I vaguely planned to put the TV through a window, but the bars made that plan pretty much senseless, if it ever made sense before. Finally I put the Astronaut on the ground in the doorway next to a couple of empty fifths of wine, gave it a good kick in the picture tube teeth and walked away. If I thought the Space Age had ended, I was in for a very long wait.
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