TubeTopia
by Richard Osgood
Disruption wears cropped hair and a coat of thorns and her name is Kiki Roettele.
"Get your things," Kiki says, "we're going to see Elijah tonight."Things? I have things? The only things I have are in need of constant scratching or packing away in bottomless boxes and page-less albums of missed opportunity. I lay, unmoving, in the maternal embrace of my sofa, my bathrobe wide open and Stewie Griffin's football-shaped head on the front of my boxers accusing the ceiling of sinister activity. I scratch beneath his chin.
"You know," I say, "I'm kind of in the middle of something here."
"No you're not. You're crashed on the sofa like a pile of old clothes. Now come on, we need to get going. It's the biggest thing Elijah has done since SpillVille and absolutely everyone will be there."
SpillVille. There's an Elijah classic worth striving to surpass. The metaphoric drip of candle wax over a miniature town made of children's wooden blocks on an abandoned pier at the end of India Street. Upon arrival we were each handed a small box of Diamond kitchen matches and charged with the task of keeping lit the wicks of candles hanging upside down from a taut grid of kite string twelve inches above the pseudo-village. It was near impossible, navigating the grid as if high-stepping a maze of trip wire, but we managed to keep the candles lit, reacting with a kind of primal instinct as East River gusts chased the tentative flames from candle to match and back to candle again.
Elijah Proffit is performance artist from Poughkeepsie. He moved here five years ago and now lives above a vacant storefront in the meat-slicer section of Chinatown. We take the Z-line to Bowery at Delancey and walk three blocks north to number 264. The four-story building is squeezed between Globe-Slicers and Pho Tu Do restaurant like a St. Peter pendant in the cleavage of a Baltic Catholic. On the center of three rusting balconies hangs a white bed sheet on which the word "TubeTopia" is hand painted in block letters. On either side of the banner, crowding the upper and lower balconies, are stacks of televisions, all from different generations and all tuned to different programs. Volumes are set for audible reception by commuters on the Brooklyn Bridge.
"This is stupid," I say.
Kiki is right to ignore me.
We enter an offset door beside the vacant storefront and climb an unlit stairway to the second floor. It smells of mildew and unvented bacon grease. Through the wall I hear a thousand muffled voices amidst bursts of disjunctive orchestration and eruptions of what sound like canned laughter. At the door we are greeted by an orange-haired waif dressed in black from bound toes to fingerless gloves, who hands each of us a glass of Merlot. Stacked against the walls, from floor to ceiling, are televisions of every make and model from 1930 to 2000. Each is blasting a different program from the same seventy-year span. Kiki dives in like a bird of prey over open water, and for the first time I notice she is dressed in black, as it turns out are the others in the room, all of which are now staring at me wearing jeans and NYU hoodie. I pantomime the universal sign for 'whatever' and head to the wine bar.
In this world of gratuitous ego-masturbation, which Kiki believes I will one day grow to appreciate, there are artists and there are those who always thought they would become artists, but the latter, rather than endure the prerequisite suffering, accept positions at advertising agencies and public school systems. They attend the parties and gallery openings and special performances like this one and gather in exclusive circles until all the lies and false pretenses are diluted in complimentary Chardonnay.
Elijah enters the front room with a coronet tucked under his right arm. I want to say 'who died?' but he marches past us, eyes front, as if his tribute is reserved for the greatest of death. He steps onto the center balcony and wails away, not Taps, like I expected, but a stirring rendition of "Tiger Rag." I half believe Satchmo himself is out there in person.
At 9:05, seven minutes into Elijah's performance, the television screens go dead and the place fills with a tortuous white hiss. All the chattering stops and I find myself waiting for a crackling Public Service Announcement from loudspeakers on tops of buildings informing the masses that the end of civilization is upon us. Still on the balcony, Elijah unleashes a haunting rendition of Taps and all the black-wearing guests bow heads for a moment of introspection.
"What the fuck?" I say this out loud. Kiki shanks me with her elbow and tells me, under breath, to shut up. "Don't you know what day this is?" she continues. I must look baffled because she doesn't allow me to answer. "It's June 12, Julian, and we are paying tribute to the loss of nearly a century of television."
Of course. The Digital Conversion. What was I thinking? Maybe it's because I've already planned ahead, like everyone else should have, and purchased a digital T.V., which I should be home watching right now.
Elijah returns from the balcony and flicks a switch on the wall. The pervasive white noise goes silent and the screens turn blank. He points a remote toward a large, ornate, walnut console, in which the original tube had been replaced with a flat-screen television. The room animates with digital clarity. The scene in the console is that of Elmer Fudd running through the forest, shooting his rifle at Bugs Bunny, who dives into a hole in the ground as bullets pass harmlessly overhead.
"Genius!" I say.
Elijah turns to me and winks. It then strikes me that he and I are the only two in the room not wearing black.
Richard Osgood lives in a city on a river where the north meets the south. His fiction can be found in Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Hobart, Clockwise Cat, The First Line, Dogzplot, and Mudluscious, among others. He still mourns the deaths of Syd Barrett and Steve Marriott.