I remember the snow was waist high in Iowa City. I had influenza. I had an apartment that always smelled of cooking gas but the gas company couldn’t find anything wrong.
I had a headache that wouldn’t go away. I didn’t even own a radio. I got dressed, badly, the way you do when you’re ill, and went out into the slanted gray winter streets, walking the unshoveled sidewalks, all in search of a radio. There was still a “mom and pop” television repair shop on Linn Street, a quarter of a mile from my place. The kind of store with a bell on the door; with a yellowed flag in the window: “Zenith, the quality goes in before the name goes on.” I had the chills. I was pretty sure I was walking straight, though I felt like I was tilting sideways. My hair appeared electrified. The man behind the counter looked askance, a pawnbroker’s stare–I’m sure he thought I wanted to pawn some silver. But all I wanted was a radio. He told me the hard truth: “We don’t have no radios. Only TVs.” His televisions were displayed like second hand furniture, they even looked like second hand furniture–old cabinet jobs, big as “family style” electric organs. I was sweating. I thought about having a TV that doubled as a musical instrument. I was staring at a murky lakebottom. I had the flu. I was legally blind and on the verge of fainting among boxy television sets. I asked for a chair. The proprietor hastily produced a metal folding chair. I was feeling like Typhoid Mary. I sat down. Told the man I would take a portable TV. He brought out a weird Bakelite black and white job with a leather strap on top and a pair of bent “rabbit ears” and I gave him $30 and staggered out the door. The thing was heavier than it looked. It weighed as much as a bushel basket of apples. I staggered, stopped, wheezed, clutched the thing with all my strength–there was nowhere to put it down in a world of snow. Walked achingly, nauseous, step by step through drifting snow with the TV in my shaking arms. And home again in my gassy atelier, I plugged it in, adjusted the bent antennae, and “saw” the way blind people do, a report from Tehran, the Ayatollah triumphant in a sea of people, an ocean of the black garbed in the mid-day sun. There was a stubborn humming from the TV that obscured any words the announcer may have spoken.
Planet of the Blind 