Nate’s note: Due to a death in the family, The Nate Way will be on hiatus until March 6. The following is a six page story I wrote my sophomore year of college. Read it slowly, and I'll see you soon.
Nate’s note: Due to a death in the family, The Nate Way will be on hiatus until March 6. The following is a six page story I wrote my sophomore year of college. Read it slowly, and I'll see you soon.
There aren’t many people in this country who don’t have a television. Most of those tubeless people are also homeless people, which is why the home of three wealthy students named Bill, Ed and Ethan was such an unusual example of American living—unusual that is, until their television arrived.
Bill, Ed and Ethan had lived in their house for three years without the benefit, or curse of the television. Their house consisted of three upstairs bedrooms, two upstairs bathrooms, one downstairs bathroom, a dining room, a rumpus room (complete with pool table and mini-bar) and a television room: the highlight of the house as far as guests were concerned—and guests were concerned.
Against the wall opposite the couches and coffee table stood an eight foot statue of Jesus Christ (stolen from the lawn of a Christian fundamentalist). The Christ statue had been home to the household for two years, and throughout those years, Jesus had been the benefactor a fashion overhaul. His crown of thorns had been replaced with an Oakland Raider’s cap, the bill of which extended past Jesus’ cheap, black sunglasses. Christ had three earrings, and one of the nails in his palm kept a tight hold on an empty can of Choors Light. The statue’s body, wrapped in a Budweiser beach towel and endowed with Mardi Gras beads, stood atop a mountain of offerings—mostly unwanted candy, maxed-out credit cards and pictures of ex-girlfriends. Behind the holy son’s likeness, a huge tie-dyed tapestry bore the words: you are all going to hell. The statue was a big hit at parties, but some people took it too seriously and even refused to enter the house.
After years of being protested and misunderstood, the threesome finally broke down and removed the statue, placing their shrine on the lawn, where it sat for four days until the neighborhood committee petitioned the sanitation department to haul his holy hunk of polyurethane to the city dump, where he sits today.
Three days later, Ethan Lee awoke from a drunken stupor and signed for a rather expensive and cumbersome delivery: a Sony Trinitron with picture in picture, built in DVD player and forty inch screen.
After the box had been placed neatly against the wall where the likeness of the famed son of God once stood, Ethan returned to his bed. Fifteen minutes later the young man arose to the knocking of the cable guy, signed some more papers, and went back to bed. As he slept to the soothing sounds of installation, he dreamt that Christ himself (not the statue) warned him about the television with the words, “Think nothing of false idols.”
He did not sleep well.
Four hours later, just after one in the afternoon, Ethan shook off a blanket of sleep and shuffled to the bathroom. After rinsing his thin body of grime, washing his long, blond hair, shaving his flat face and brushing his caramel colored teeth, the young man put on his robe, then went downstairs for coffee.
After finishing a few cups, reading the paper and smoking a joint, Ethan walked into the television room and stared at the huge television. Atop the beast of an appliance, he saw a movie-theatre candy-bar-sized remote control. Ethan, stoned and conscious of his recent dream, stared at the remote sullenly.
The lock on the front door clicked, and Ed and Bill returned from class (a place Ethan often avoided).
“Cool, it arrived,” said Bill.
Ed grabbed the remote then plopped his body on the couch while shedding his book bag. The threesome sat and stared at the television for eleven straight hours. Movies, baseball games, news, cartoons, game shows and wild life shows all flickered in front of their vacant faces. Ethan and Bill smoked three joints in the darkness. No one spoke except to suggest a channel change or mock a program. When bedtime came, Ethan and Bill fell asleep on the couches.
On the couch, Ethan dreamt that he’d been taken prisoner by robots which constantly saturated him with Naziesque propaganda in an attempt to rid his brain of any memory of his prior self or any semblance of free thinking.
Again, he did not sleep well.
“Where’s the remote?” Ed asked Ethan after waking him up.
“How should I know?” Ethan replied groggily.
“You and Bill were using it.”
“Ask Bill.”
Ethan tried to sleep as Ed searched the television room thoroughly. Ed attempted to check underneath the couch cushions Ethan slept on, which required more movement than the newly christened couch potato could muster. Ethan watched his friend, who usually kept his cool at all times, as he ran about the house cursing the remote control. Edward Lukowski, a Management Information Systems major from Chicago, who dressed in nothing but collared shirts, combed his short, brown hair neatly to the side before strapping it to his scalp with hairspray, never missed a class, never got in trouble and never seemed without self control, screamed at the top of his lungs in a voice thick with rage, “Where is that mother fucker!?!”
Ethan broke out laughing.
“You think this is funny?” Ed yelled as his face reddened and a fat vein divided the middle of his large forehead.
“Man, loosen up. We’ll find the thing.”
“Don’t tell me what to do you dumbass, lazy bitch!”
Ethan bowed out from the argument by simply rolling over and attempting once again to rest in the land of sleep, but Edward circumvented that attempt by pushing the lazy longhair from the couch. He fell to the floor with an angry yelp.
“Where is it?” Ed asked as he tore apart the cushions Ethan previously occupied.
Ethan, seeing that any attempts for a normal Tuesday morning (technically, afternoon) were ruined, sat on a different cushion and rolled a joint on the coffee table.
“I can’t believe this,” Ed rambled on. “We just got this damn TV and we lose the remote on the first day.”
On the television, Ethan stared at the flickering image of a sharply dressed woman, revealing that the American Medical Association had approved ‘Prozac for dogs.’
He felt sick, ran to the bathroom and vomited in the toilet.
An announcer’s voice pounded from the television: “THIS IS CNN.”
“Where is it?” Edward screamed.
Ethan stared at his vomit in the toilet bowl. He missed the statue of Jesus more than ever.
A little later, Ethan and Bill sat on the couch, listening to CNN reveal that the president will most likely react to recent terrorist attacks by invading Iraq. Many old people in suits had comments. Soldiers marched. Buildings collapsed.
Ethan drank his coffee in silence, mouth agape. Was this the world he’d been ignoring for years? Was this the world which his years of rampant apathy blocked out? He tried to recollect headlines from around the globe but the reality of it was just too overwhelming. He was choking on too much food for thought.
The announcer went on to say that UN Peace troops would soon be deployed in Kosovo, as riots and rebel attacks destroyed the former Checkoslavakian city. Meanwhile, in Bosnia, an attempt at foreign aid by UN relations had failed. The supplies were cut off, captured by rebel troops.
Ethan sat in stoned awe as he learned about the world around him. Right there, on that beast of a television, the world was being brought to him. There was almost nothing he could do but sit and stare and start to care. The world was being revealed to him. And it was a fucked up place.
Bill opened the door and discarded his book bag.
“What’s up,” he said.
“Have you seen the remote?”
“Ah,” Bill, also stoned, paused his speech and appeared deeply contemplative of the very recent past. It was about three minutes before the bearded, longhaired surfer spoke.
“It was on the coffee table, when I went upstairs to bed, at like four in the morning.”
Ed frantically searched around the coffee table area.
“What do you think, Ed? It’s hiding behind one of the molecules?”
“Fuck you, Ethan.” Ed pointed at his roommate. “You’ve been laughing about this all day. I think you took it. You probably hid it before you crashed so that I’d freak out. Well, you’ve had your damn laugh so give me the remote.”
“First off,” Ethan retorted. “I did not know that losing the remote would cause such un-Edward behavior. Second, I didn’t hide the damn thing. So just get over it, order another one, and leave me the hell alone.”
Edward responded to Ethan’s retort by jumping across the coffee table and lunging at him. Ethan moved quickly to one side, letting Ed land softly on the couch. Then he jumped on Ed in an effort to restrain him.
“Look you crazy mother, I did not do this. Calm the hell down.” Ethan held Edward in a choke hold.
Bill went over to pull Ethan off of Ed. When he did, Ethan’s elbow hit Bill in the face, causing his nose and upper gums to bleed.
“Damn, Ethan!” Bill yelled.
Edward took advantage of Ethan’s apology to Bill and shot a sucker punch right to Ethan’s jaw.
Ethan landed on the coffee table, breaking its legs and destroying its function in the process. He then stood up and head butted Ed right in the nose. As Ed ran to the bathroom, bleeding, Ethan watched Bill grab his book bag and get out of the house.
Ethan went to the upstairs bathroom, tended his bruised shoulder, loosened teeth, and stinging face.
“Fucking TV,” he said to an empty bathroom.
That night was the quietest night that house had never heard. Bill spent the night at his girlfriend’s place. Edward spent the night in his bedroom, locked onto the internet, trying to order a replacement remote control. Ethan sat in the backyard, smoking joints and writing poetry by candle light. No lights could be seen from the outside of the house except for the flickering of Ed’s computer screen seen from the side yard. A few guests stopped by, but they were welcomed by a locked door.
No one had turned on the television since Ethan shut it off (after three hours of news).
Ethan couldn’t believe how much stuff he had to write about. He was a flurry of creativity on a quiet, cool night. Poems, stories and general observations escaped from his stoned skull like blood from a roommate’s nose. The news had provided him with a creative center—real life drama—that he never felt the television could provide him with. He was beginning to understand how fast paced the world really is and how that pace must be maintained by anyone who dreams of calling himself a freelance writer.
“What strange circumstances for an epiphany,” he thought.
As Ethan slept later that night, he dreamt that his roommates both tried to poison his breakfast, but he caught them in the act, pulled the remote control from thin air, and beat them repeatedly to death with the missing hunk of plastic.
He slept surprisingly well.
Ethan awoke the next afternoon with a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. He went downstairs and discovered an empty house.
“Probably at class,” he thought as he rolled a joint on the kitchen table. Atop the table was a note that said, “Ethan, you should pay for the next coffee table.” He balled up the note and threw it away. In the process, he felt the pain in his right shoulder and remembered his swollen jaw. He took four aspirins with his coffee.
A friend of Ethan’s, Gerald, stopped by to smoke dope, play pool and drink beer, which the two did until eleven o’clock at night. After Gerald left, Ethan wondered where his roommates were as he walked into the living room and turned the television to CNN. He marveled at the television’s lack of manual controls. Only on and off—no volume, no channels.
“This world is remote control,” he said to an empty house.
A pretty voice, attached to a pretty female face chimed, “And now for local news.” Ethan watched as they talked about the Henry Lyons case (a Reverend indicted for embezzlement after his wife set fire to the man’s mistress’s home—what material) and about three missing college students.
Ethan paid close attention as the news anchor with bullet proof hair and painted teeth reported that one Bill Simmons had been surfing during a small storm on the East Coast of Florida. His friends saw him paddle out with two others, but no one came back. Some other surfers found Bill’s surf board three hours after noting he was missing. The other two college students were friends of Bill, of whom no trace had been found in the ocean or ashore.
The door opened and Ed, soaking wet, walked in.
“Did you hear about Bill?”
“No, what happened?”
“He was surfing in that storm this morning and now he’s missing.”
“We didn’t have a storm this morning.”
“He was at Cocoa Beach.”
“Holy shit.”
Just then there was a knock on the door. Ethan went to answer it, but no one was there. He peered right and left but their was no sign of anyone. He looked at his feet and there, wrapped with a bow and attached to a single card, was the remote control.
“Damn.”
Ethan showed the remote to Edward, who read the card out loud.
“I hope you boys are happy. Sincerely, Jesus.”
Ethan cried, then howled like a wounded wolf. Ed stared numbly at the television wherein CNN featured a story on the world’s largest Alligator Petting Zoo.
Ethan stopped crying only after Edward stuck his oversized foot into the television tube causing sparks to fly. Ed’s foot stuck—the tube had actually pulled him into itself.
After Ethan helped Ed pull his bloody foot and mangled shin from within the confines of the nicest television in the neighborhood, he asked Ed for a favor.
“Want to go buy me a few drinks, please?”
“Sure thing, Stoner.”
The statue of Jesus sat solemnly in a scrap pile. A huge Sony Trinitron with a busted tube would join it soon.