The red box sat on the edge of the kitchen counter, by the door that led out onto the outer deck we added onto our already fairly spacious home. Three wooden high-legged chairs lined along the counter space in front of it. They were uncomfortable, not meant for relaxing or contemplative consumption. We ate breakfast in them to the blaring of the Today Show, already loud enough on its own, in a futile attempt to survive the morning commotion.
The red box was only one layer of our consumer geology. The first television I remember in the house was the silvery starter set from old home in Fairfield, which I believe had a rotary dial for a handful of channels. Added to it was the one we inherited from my paternal grandfather in Paramus. It was a beast of a box: framed in elaborately carved wood, with numbered buttons in a compartment off to the right of the screen. There is in one of the family photo albums a picture of me as a toddler in my grandfather’s living room looking at some object on a table while a baseball game plays on the screen of the TV. The vastness of the screen’s dimensions were relative to my infantile proportions.
That TV was living on borrowed time by the 1990s. In spite of its bulky dimensions and immense weight it got moved around the house like an illicitly disentombed corpse. Its buttons were barely functioning once it went upstairs from the family room to the sunroom, where I first watched The Shining in middle school, to accommodate an even larger, more immovable unit that could carry Cinemax and everything implied by usage of that channel name. It was ultimately consigned to the basement playroom, the spottily functioning overhead lights of which, in addition to our negligence in keeping it clean and free of spiders, gave it a fittingly mortuary aspect. My next youngest brother and I used it to play games on an Atari set handed down from our teenage neighbors at the time, who babysat us and taught me how to curse.
I was not endeared toward video games; but video games were my only reference point when the red box was showing bright dots flying up into a greenish dark surface. Otherwise I couldn’t then conceive of missile fire in the Kuwaiti desert shown on the evening news as we ate dinner. It is my earliest conception of war, and current events generally, as well as one of the few memories from pre-divorce familial life that haven’t vanished or been forced into oblivion.
The red box having cable, it was a basic enough last resort when all other options were, for whatever reason, exhausted. I watched Animaniacs in the morning and MTV at night. Then mostly just MTV or Comedy Central. The acoustics of the high-ceilinged extension of the kitchen caused almost anything that came through it or from it to bore through the skull like the wail of a banshee.
I was mostly careful in that time of my high school career when I was still taking early morning gym to play MTV without waking everyone else up. My reasons in opting for gym at 7:00 AM eluded me almost immediately after I started taking it, but it had the incentive of forcing me to be awake at one of the few remaining times of the day MTV still played music videos. One morning from 2000 lingers for me when one of those videos was for At the Drive-in’s “One Armed Scissor,” off of their new and (relatively speaking) much-heralded album Relationship of Command.
A few weeks earlier, a friend of mine was driving me home from our shift at Pizza Hut, and put on “Pattern Against User,” the song that precedes “One Armed Scissor.” I had not heard the band before that despite hearing about them enough times. I was impressed by what now sounds like art pop punk, so the following weekend I went to Scotti’s Records (in the location that is still opened today) and bought that album. Soon after making the purchase, I saw the video. When I informed my friend (who went on to do work for MTV) he was in disbelief, though perhaps secretly elated at the same time. At the Drive-in did not stick around, which in hindsight was a prudent and wise decision, unlike their subsequent reunion, which was prudent and unwise, but that is neither here nor there.
The following school year (my senior year) I was taking gym at regular hours, and quite pleased about it. I went into that year with a strangely upbeat attitude, having resolved to myself to “make the most” of the time I had left as a teenager. I remember the morning of my second day probably with greater clarity than any other. We were all gathered in the kitchen, the red box was on as usual. Ann Curry was at the news desk talking about an American spy plane downed by Iraq and Michael Jordan coming out of retirement. It was a beautiful day. Everything was great until second-period remedial math when a hyperpatriotic special ed teacher decided to burst into the middle of class to break school protocol (one which would be laughable today) in the most calm-shattering fashion. I called my dad on a payphone. Word processing class was next with internet-connected desktops. No work was done for the rest of the day. After school we gathered around the red box to watch footage of the World Trade Center’s North Tower collapsing.
Sometime later (or earlier, I can’t remember) my brothers acquired a new TV. Taken off the street from one of the “spring cleaning” piles around town, it was also broken beyond repair—a fossil, keeping with my iffy geological motif. Two of my brothers (or one of my brothers and his friend) brought it to the farthest edge of the back yard, against some bushes growing imperiously trough our fence, and took turns throwing rocks at the screen until it shattered. Another brother filmed it. When no more damage could be done, they shoved it over the fence, half-concealed by the bushes and dead leaves. It stayed there for a good few years. The footage is probably online somewhere.