Nickel and Dime Television
by Rusty Barnes

"We can’t afford a bass boat."

"No real woman has boobies that big."

"Now Travis Tritt is some kinda man."

"Wait. I wanna see Double Jeopardy."

"You know they can restring a knee just like that." Finger snap.

Harley knew Morena was unhappy; he hadn’t needed to hear her attempt at getting to the point by indirection. She took to the couch and ate. He had taken to the affections of Cheryl, his service writer at the garage. Cheryl didn’t care about television at all; she would even bring his dog a snack when she came to work, in addition to the box of doughnuts, and never once called him Rin-Tin-Tin, even though the dog did resemble the legend somewhat, and had suffered all kinds of pats and gouges to the eye by well-meaning parents and kids. The dog often hid beneath the stacks of tires, and Harley wished he could do the same..

"I figure," said Harley, "that soon there will be more t.v.s than people in the world." He could feel the thing staring back at him. As much as it was possible to distract himself with the tube, in the back of his mind ran Cheryl in garters, the time she’d run out the garage door in his boots to shut the windows on her car. Nobody had wondered at all about it. But then, business wasn’t so good. Which also got Harley to considering the whys and wherefores of his relationships.

"Oh honey. Televisions outnumber people by a longshot already. Three or four to a house." Morena cracked the seal on a value bottle of cola and poured some into a blue plastic glass.

"That don’t bother you?" Harley could feel a bit of his mind coming on in slow gear, the only way it seemed to run these days. "That all these people are laughing at us and buying stuff we don’t have?"

"At least I didn’t say why we haven’t got the stuff." Morena stared at him, and licked a bit of cola from the side of the glass. Harley’s anger had risen, which had given him an unfortunate immediate hard-on, and he threw Morena the clicker, which she caught without looking.

"I’m going out."

"I ain’t dragging you back this time. Even partway."

Harley threw his boots on and walked out.

The sky outside was the color of dead television too, filled with grays and whites and blues that surely added up to something, if only Harley had had the wherewithal to know what it was. He headed toward Cheryl’s, though he had no intent of opening that particular mess up again. He passed by Ralph Sims’s house, seeing the football game through the window on his large-screen Toshiba complete with all the college football channels. He’d seen the ads a million times over the past fall, the fall that would never again turn to winter, it seemed. Spitting rain and cable outages everywhere tonight.

Harley had a thought, though, a way that might make it okay for Morena and him again too, and allow him to get Cheryl off his mind and out of his pants for good. He turned up Whippoorwill Hill road, narrowly avoiding a cable truck bent on getting somewhere really quickly.

The television towers ran the length of the hill, where he and Morena had once wrapped themselves around each other in an attempt to get older sooner. He pulled off and got out into the rain to get his bearings, and the small building looked pretty easy to get into. Harley snapped through the fencing easily, but had to pull out a hacksaw to get through the locks on the door.

Once inside, Harley didn’t know what to do. Everything in the room, a bank of switches, an older firemen’s calendar on the wall, a single dial telephone, didn’t seem as if it would cut the juice, and in fact looked as if it belonged exactly the way it was, slightly out-of kilter with the huge steel towers and miles of wire it connected . He opened the single other door and found himself face-to-face with a huge switch. Harley thought this was the heart of his world, his and Morena’s world, whatever that might be. He could see them eating a hot roast beef. Sarge was licking a plate, Harley had even grown some hair back, and Morena was 150 pounds again. If only he could do it.

Sirens sounded suddenly, and Harley figured it must have been alarmed, that damned fence. His huge hands he held in front of him, still a bit grimy, shaking with the idea of it all. Just then he heard Tommy Johnson’s voice behind him and a body knocking him into the wall.

By the time he’d fought through it the law and paid his debt to society, Harley had enough to get a prescription for Rogaine, and a new Toshiba like Ralph’s, and a DirectTV subscription. Morena sat on his lap some nights and ate soft buttery popcorn, and though that crushed him a little, he enjoyed it. More often than not, though, he wished he had a self-destruct button for himself, like that Mission Impossible guy.