by Martin Riker
She drank no alcohol; it bothered her esophagus. Each day she swallowed an assortment of pills—painkillers and others, in various shapes and colors—which made her loopy but did not cause her mind to vacate her body in any significant way. In short, I was once again stuck. Which you might think I would find very frustrating, but the truth was, after what had happened with Henry—his death but also my realizations about myself, who I was, how selfish I’d been, and what I was capable or not capable of doing—I had no stomach for more “adventures.” In fact I felt rather empty right then. Much like Lillian, I no longer had the heart or saw the point. And since she continued not to die—or her body couldn’t, or wouldn’t—we spent 1978 to 1985 in her upstairs room watching television.
She liked Tom Selleck. As a matter of fact, so did I. He was known for his remarkable mustache, but I always thought his voice was his most charismatic feature, raspy and intelligent sounding. His voice gave his Thomas Magnum character a kind of dignity that I found lacking in similar characters on similar shows, of which there were plenty back then. That, and the program’s exotic Hawaiian setting (it brought to mind Antigua, that hour spent with Christopher hiking into the green hills, under the red sky, now so many years in the past); his voice and the setting made Magnum, P.I. the program I loved best and best remember from that period. And programs are all I do remember, the programs and almost nothing else.
There was Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap and the bald boss and the blond secretary and the uptight younger man with the feathered brown hair. Fast-talking Arnold with his “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” and a big bar full of people shouting “Norm!” A talking black Trans Am that fights crime and an orange Confederate sports car that for some reason had its doors welded shut. There were a lot of programs featuring characters with complementary hair colors, not just The Dukes of Hazzard and Charlie’s Angels but Three’s Company, CHiPs, Cagney and Lacey, even Simon and Simon, although the brown-haired brother (they were sibling private investigators) always wore a hat. Bosom Buddies. The Facts of Life. There was Buck Rogers, whose sidekick was a stuttering robot, and there was a truck driver whose name escapes me but whose sidekick was a chimpanzee, and there was the Incredible Hulk, doomed to walk the Earth with no sidekick at all. That one was oddly serious for a comic-book show, with some very somber music at the end. Like Mork and Mindy, a silly sitcom that always tried to end on a thoughtful note, with Mork (a space alien in rainbow suspenders) stepping into his egg-shaped spaceship to report back to his commander, Orson (Orson!), on how odd yet lovable humanity turns out to be. B. J.—that was the truck driver’s name. And the program was B. J. and the Bear. There was Airwolf, which was about a super helicopter. And MacGyver, which for some reason I am getting confused with Airwolf. Hardcastle and McCormick. Scarecrow and Mrs. King. 60 Minutes and 20/20. These are all just off the top of my head.
Of course, for me they name more than programs, more than characters with story lines in exotic or familiar locations. For me these titles name the categories into which my existence during those years was divided.
The words “Magnum, P.I.,” for example, describe a nonsequential period of time (a regularly scheduled series of pieces of time) and the manner in which I spent that time as meaningfully as (probably more meaningfully than) the words “my late twenties,” for example—a category just as specific as regards chronology but far less so as regards the manner in which that time was actually spent. In other words, my memory, which clearly has its own criteria for judging the value of each moment spent, has determined to store away Tom Selleck and his raspy intelligent voice in much finer detail than it has stored away “my late twenties,” by which time I admittedly was already dead. But my memory has its criteria, is the point, and since my memory is mine, its criteria must be mine as well.
In fact it is even more than that. (I should say that I am not having all these thoughts about television just now. I have been pondering this subject since at least the Orson chapters, but have saved up my thoughts, having decided this would be the right place to share them, since it was during my time with Lillian that my relationship with television reached its most tumultuous pitch, leading to the end, not of television, of course, but of everything television has ever meant to me.) It is more than the meaningfulness of what my memory chooses to remember—for of course “entertainment” was never television’s greatest value for me, not in those days and not ever. It was perhaps the most immediate value, the most obvious, but the real value had changed over time: a magical window . . . a portal to reality . . . and now? Now when I looked back upon my relationship with television, upon the various eras during which I’d watched television, and asked myself what those experiences had truly meant; and granting that they must have meant something, that the time I’d spent with television could not have been merely a giant waste of my already utterly wasted existence, but in fact must have contributed in some way to the formation of my soul (since I seem to have a soul, and what else could have contributed to it?) such that I could actually say about my time watching television, “That was meaningful”; in that case, the most meaningful thing about television must be (and I am not suggesting that this would be true for an actually living person, though I don’t see any reason why it would not be), it must be that watching television made me feel nearly alive, and a part of things. Not because it reminded me of my life, not because it transported me to one place or another, but because it was the one experience that was no different for me than for anyone else. Because seated in front of the television, I was, practically speaking, no less alive than Lillian. Or than Orson had been. Or anyone. During those moments, our experiences of existence were precisely the same.
Phil had said as much, or something like it, on our final journey together, but I had not been paying much attention at the time. He’d described how television allowed him to feel near to me during our time apart, that it provided a connection between us—but busy with my own thoughts, I’d patronized him and then turned melodramatic about an episode of Andy Griffith. So it was only now, with Phil gone, with our peculiar, miraculous friendship lost, probably forever, that I finally made sense of what he’d said. That for people like us, watching television was a way of being in the world, not a portal but the connection itself, and not just with each other, but with the thousands if not millions of others who were watching that program at that time, that legion of breathing humanity tuned in to whatever comedy or drama or game show or news program happened to be on, their minds simultaneously engaged with the same characters, proceeding through the same story lines at precisely the same speed. When J. R. Ewing was shot (on the nighttime soap opera Dallas), I was among the millions who gasped, then spent the off-season trying to guess the shooter’s identity. When all of America was laughing at “Where’s the beef?” I too laughed, and was as self-consciously curious as anyone as to why exactly I found it funny. When Luke and Laura on General Hospital finally got married, and when later they broke up before Laura was kidnapped and Luke just barely survived an avalanche, I too was riveted and flustered—nor am I being anything other than perfectly serious right now, despite how dumb I am sure all of this sounds, for it mattered to me, my participation in this shared human adventure of viewing. It must have mattered, or else my mind would not have chosen these moments to store away while tossing into memory’s trash can almost everything else that made up my existence during this time.
Yes, it was only with Lillian that I realized television’s true value, its value all along. And this was me maturing, I thought. This was wisdom, the payoff for passing years: things don’t change, but your understanding of them changes. Through Phil and Lillian I had at last come to understand how television truly connects us: not a portal, but the connection itself! And I had acquired this knowledge (unless it was merely a higher form of foolishness, as part of me already suspected) just in time to enjoy it for a few years, before that knowledge and that value were lost forever, to me and to everyone
else, in the greatest, quietest cultural catastrophe of our time, which we will get to in just a minute.
Years passed, and seasons—the seasons that froze and thawed the river outside the window, and the seasons that aired on the television just below. Old programs were canceled and new programs debuted. Lillian, however, stayed largely the same. She grew older, more infirm—while I, Samuel Johnson, had gradually come to see the situation with Lillian in a different light. My failure with Henry felt distant to me now, and of course Lillian wanted to die. Helping her would be a kindness. And given how close we were to Unityville, my chances were much better than before; in fact they were practically good. In short, I felt again the blood-pulse of purpose, the thrill of possibility, feelings that were unfortunately still pointless and frustrating, since as long as Lillian remained sober, neither of us was going anywhere.
Finally one day her bones were too brittle, and her curvature too debilitating, and her pain too great. In the spring of 1985, Elizabeth moved her into a nursing facility. Lillian had refused this move for years because she did not wish to be around other people; yet having waited so long for life to end, she now found herself burdened with a new beginning. By this time she lacked the energy to make a fuss.
Riverfront Senior Living, which was not on or even close to the riverfront, was an ugly facility, understaffed and poorly managed, and was all that Lillian’s pension could afford. It consisted of a large common room just inside the entryway, a dining room to the immediate left, a television room to the immediate right, with two hallways of residential suites extending back on either side. The fixtures were cheap and poorly mounted, the carpeting threadbare, the windows heavily draped. The furniture was mismatched living room sets likely purchased at one or more estate sales, with lacquered end tables that reflected too brightly the overhead lights. The air was stale. The food lacked color. The tenants, though technically alive, were not lively, and the employees were neither attentive nor kind, with the exception of Tanya, Lillian’s primary caregiver, who was not truly kind but simply young, too young to have yet gained the confidence or worldliness to be entirely indifferent.
Although, no, to be fair, when we first arrived, Tanya was kind.
Also pale—a pale girl, a little chubby, a little pimply, but pretty. She was not a nurse, and possibly was not even old enough back then to legally hold a job, but she took care of Lillian and kept straight her medications. She brought Lillian to the television room, checked in on her regularly, and occasionally staged a card game, playing both hands. They did not talk much (in fact, Lillian did not talk at all any longer), but Tanya at least attempted to comfort her, which I found very sweet. In picturing her now as she was back then—Tanya—I see a naïve, ill-fated young woman whom I liked, whom I even felt something like parental fondness for, having plenty of parental fondness to spare. She was a child from the wrong side of the tracks, or so I imagined, doing her best against terrible odds and the world’s unlimited indifference.
Now, the fact that I’ve begun describing Tanya might lead you to believe she was the instigator of an important change in Lillian’s circumstances. She was, but not until later. At the time, she was simply a new face, a pleasant smile; and other than meeting Tanya, Lillian’s transplant to Riverfront Senior Living quickly revealed itself to be mostly inconsequential. Elizabeth continued to visit, if less often. Lillian continued to not die, but now in a different location. We continued to watch television.
Indeed it is for television, more than anything having to do with Lillian herself, that 1985 became for me a benchmark year. You see, as essentially unlivable as Riverfront Senior Living was in every other way, its one amenity, and as far as I could tell its only selling point, was a large communal television set that stayed on all day and well, well into the evening, and that contained not just the normal network programs Lillian and I were used to but a whole host of new ones, in a format unlike anything I’d seen. For it turned out that in departing Lillian’s dusty hermit cave and rejoining the world of people, we had unwittingly entered a new age of television, an age that had actually started years before and been spreading across the nation while Lillian and I had sat clueless before her old-fashioned antenna-fed set.
The Age of Cable had arrived.
Here it was, new (if only to us), and looking like television, sounding like television, but seeming in other ways completely unlike the television I’d known. Where before you would tune in for a particular program at a particular time, now whole channels featured a kind of program at any time: a news channel, a sports channel, movie channels, and so on. Two channels for shopping. One entirely in Spanish. Two just for women. An entire channel running nothing but congressional proceedings! Much of it not even resembling entertainment, yet we watched as if it were. And people had made short movies out of pop songs? And someone had decided the weather was worth a channel unto itself? Even just the clutter of faces—of Budget Bob and Bobbi Ray, Pat Robertson and Downtown Julie Brown, and all those generic ones on CNN . . . Well, it was just too much. I was accustomed to television’s seasonal migrations, its annual unveilings, occasional upheavals, and the land-swell shifting of the culture over time. But I was not prepared to handle so much newness all at once. I felt, in the face it, for the first time ever, old. Unexpectedly old. Unpleasantly old. Though forty-two in human years—more or less “midway”—I had come to assume for myself a sort of agelessness: there is no getting older than dead. But there is, it turns out; there is an oldness of the soul.
This “old” feeling only compounded, then, by the other great change cable wrought, which for me was even more emotionally complicated than these other changes, though it will not seem complicated when I say it to you, it will seem very simple, the simplest thing in the world, at least in the world of television, for the change I am referring to is nothing more or less than reruns. Television in the Age of Cable had expanded not just outward but back, toward not just new programs but old ones, and while certainly there had been reruns before this, the Age of Cable brought back not just some old programs but all of them, every program that had ever aired. Stations stretched into the stillest hours of night, the wee-est hours of morning, rehashing the entire life of television to that point, from The Honeymooners to Mister Ed to Happy Days to Moonlighting (which at that time ran new episodes and reruns simultaneously on competing channels). Here was the past made present, and not only the past I’d known but also a whole host of programs I’d missed, whose entire runs had aired either during years I was away from television or in time slots opposite some other program I’d regularly watched. Nor do I mean only the obscure outliers, for it turned out I had in fact missed whole continents of televisual experience and had simply not known. The Twilight Zone, Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek . . . I only now discovered Star Trek! Yet it was not a “new” discovery, is the point. It was already old. The production values were old. The sets looked old. The actors, on the other hand, were off-puttingly young. William Shatner had aged backwards, or rather—since Captain Kirk was already T. J. Hooker to me—T. J. Hooker looked shabby, suddenly, compared to his younger self. And if the arrival of the past aged the present, the present made this new past depressingly irrelevant, the Starship Enterprise long since canceled and boldly going nowhere for all eternity. And “old” and “irrelevant” was how I felt, as well. As if I’d discovered new facts about a lifelong friend, facts that did not alter my opinion of my friend so much as make me conscious, unhappily conscious, of how much life that friend had been living apart from me all along, how large a portion of that friend’s world back then had nothing to do with me, and, by extension, how little I had meant to anyone, or had actually known or understood about anyone for all of my life.
In short, hunkered there in the television room of Riverfront Senior Living, stuck inside Lillian who was stuck inside herself, who wanted to be done with herself as much as I did, the two of us like squatters in a bomb shelter waiting out a war, feeling old and disconnected,
day after day, then year after year, I found myself sinking into a long bout of melancholy and the most unpalatable nostalgia. Or not sinking so much as being sunk, since of course it was television’s past that was being remembered, and the television doing the remembering. Although in a sense it was my past and my nostalgia as well. For forty-two is an age when a person might look back upon his youth, and were I still alive, and capable of making real choices and so forth, I would probably have sunk just as deeply into my own memories, only to discover that most of them were of television anyway.
But this sickeningly sweet melancholy—well, it made me disgusted with myself. It’s torture enough to be alone in the world, but worse to be a stereotype on top of it, and a “midlife crisis” was something I could not countenance. Yet I was unable to shake my melancholy, no matter how foolish it felt. As time went on, I even began to pity myself for my foolishness, then feel even more foolish about my self-pity, and back and forth, or down and down, with at every step more disgust.
Later, I would come to understand what had really happened. I would see the future that cable wrought, a future where people stopped meeting on the common ground of television, but cordoned themselves off in the comfort of whatever tiny worlds they already felt they knew: where women watched women’s programs and men watched men’s; where family programs “streamed” to individual family members cloistered in their separate rooms; where “choice” had exploded into infinitely esoteric sports options, segregated movie channels, and news programs catering to each person’s preferred politics; where the idea that in tuning in you shared something, you participated in something—where this idea had been lost without anyone other than Phil Williams and myself having noticed how important it was in the first place . . . Yes, later I would look back on my time in Riverfront Senior Living and see there the beginning of an end. I would understand that the unpalatable self-pity I felt was not a form of oldness at all, but simply a new (to me) form of loneliness, which was not unlike Lillian’s loneliness, for like Lillian I had lost, or was in the process of losing, my available means of participating in the world. At the time, however, I only intuited this future. I felt its weight, but had no way to understand it. And of course in another sense I was not yet truly “like” Lillian, for whatever my emotional state, the fact was I had not yet resigned my own future. I had not given up my own hopes and desires. I was still planning to return to my son.