by Reif Larsen
“I can take you over here,” said Lydia. Checkout lane number 1 was empty.
Radar shook his head.
“I can take you here,” she said again, louder this time, thinking that perhaps he had not heard her. Clearly Lydia did not know that he and Ana Cristina were not just commercial acquaintances. Her ignorance made him even more paranoid: clearly Ana Cristina had kept their relationship secret from her co-workers. Clearly she was embarrassed about him.
Radar panicked. He could feel the heat in his face. “My knee,” he said to Lydia, pointing. “My knee is broken.” Which, in a way, was true.
Lydia looked at him strangely, but then a shopper coming from the deli section approached her till and the crisis was narrowly averted.
When it was finally his turn to check out with Ana Cristina, he became flustered again. How on earth was he going to do this? He set his yellow basket on the floor next to the counter.
“Hi,” he said, more to his basket than to her.
“Hi,” she said.
He couldn’t properly read her tone, so he stole a glance at her. She was wearing the dark lipstick again. It covered only the edge of her lips; on the inner part, there was a softer shade of burnt sienna, and the duotone reminded Radar of the interior pattern of his mother’s still-operational 1976 Oldsmobile Omega, an image that should have dispelled the sexiness of her lips but somehow only enhanced it.
Briefly stunned by her chromatic splendor, he bent down and picked up the jar of guacamole from his basket. The basket was covered in a thin brown film. This was the subtle, pernicious ooze of a thousand shoppers’ products—wet bags of cabbage and salami cold cuts and leaky containers of mayonnaise. I cannot be that ooze, he thought. I must be the guacamole and not the ooze.
He came up, guacamole in hand, and said, “I am the guacamole!”
Idiot!
Ana Cristina froze, confused.
“I mean . . .” He tried to recover. “I mean, it was fun last night.”
“Yeah,” she laughed nervously. “You were sweet.”
“I was?”
“Yeah. I was gonna call you when I got off. Are you free tonight?”
Radar was so stunned by this reply that he felt his entire body go limp and realized too late that the guacamole had slipped from his grasp. He watched in horror as it rolled along the very edge of the counter in an excruciatingly slow display of physics and then fell and fell and fell until it shattered onto the floor in an octopus splatter of tomato chunks and processed avocado solution.
Radar and Ana Cristina both stared as the puddle slowly grew before their eyes. A green paradise island of guacamole.
“I’m sorry,” said Radar. “I’m so, so sorry.” He could not bear to look at her, so he instead fixed his gaze on the rack of Dentyne Ice gum, which caused a strange sensory dissonance: the promise of spearmint paired with the vulgar wafts of salsa fresca and avocado preservatives.
“It’s okay,” he heard her say. “It’s no problem.”
He stole another quick glance at her and saw that she was not in fact angry, but still smiling, almost laughing, as she thumbed at the microphone above the register. “Javi, Enchanted Valley Light Guacamole spill, checkout 2.” He was amazed at the specificity of her announcement, the natural roll of the word guacamole off her tongue.
“Do you want to get another one?” she asked.
“Another what?”
“Another guacamole?” There it was again. He could listen to her say that word all day.
“Not really,” he said. “You really still like me? Even after everything?”
“Of course,” she said. “Why would I not like you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Because?”
“What is there not to like?”
“Oh, plenty, believe me.”
“You’re like the nicest boy I ever met.”
“I am?” he said.
“Cutest and nicest.” She hesitated, wiping back a stray hair. “Do you want to meet my mama? She’s cooking tonight.”
“Your mama?” His heart soared.
Javier showed up with a mop and bucket. Fifteen-year-old skinny boy Javier. The wolf. He who did not rid the baskets of their ooze. He who carefully launched his coagulate hair heavenward with a pound of toxic gel, he who always kept a white shirt tucked into the back pocket of his shorts, as if he were ready to change at any moment and enter a televised street fight. When had the bad blood started between them, really? Radar had never said a word to Javier, and yet he sensed evil in those bony, slumped shoulders. Maybe he was being unfair. Maybe he was being racist. Maybe Javier was a nice kid. Maybe Javier was in love with Ana Cristina.
And now Javier was mopping at the spill, and Ana Cristina was saying something to him in Spanish, and Radar was straining to pick up its meaning. Javi sighed and propped the mop against Radar and left the scene. He was now pinned to the rack of Dentyne by the mop handle.
“Do you want me to clean it up?” he asked.
Ana Cristina shook her head. “No, no. I told him to get a paper towel. For the glass,” she said. “So, can you come tonight? No pressure or anything, but she asks about you all the time, and I was like, Okay, mama, all right already, you can meet him, jeez. She’s going to cook her empanadas. They’re really good.”
“Empanadas?” he said. Asks about me all the time? “I would love to. Nothing would make me happier.”
She smiled and then leaned across the conveyor belt and took his hand, just for a second, but her touch sent such a strong electrical current through his body that he thought he might have another seizure.
Javier returned, paper towel in hand. He scowled at Radar as he got down on all fours and began picking up the pieces of glass.
Radar. Un conquistador. A man among men.
Do it because you must.
He swept the mop handle aside and carefully sidestepped around the guacamole explosion.
“Good day, Javier. Sorry about the guacama-ole,” said Radar, completely butchering the Spanish accent.
Javier looked up and smirked at him, but Radar did not mind the smirk, nor anything at all, really, for he felt as if he were walking on air.
“And I will call you later,” he said to Ana Cristina, loud enough so that he could be sure Javier heard it. “About the empanadas.”
Then he turned around in slow motion, imagining that he was in a movie with a band of Guca trumpeters serenading his exit.
But he had not gone more than two steps before he became fearful that this whole scene had not really happened, that he had imagined it all, and that he was actually still standing in the doorway experiencing another one of his little deaths.
3
As Per Røed-Larsen notes in his introduction to Spesielle Partikler, the diligent historian often “struggles to work out the details of the hazy then when all we have is its faint, dying echoes in the muddled now” (28). How, then, to accurately capture all the twists and turns of young Radar’s life when the public record offers us such scant insight into the mechanics of our character’s psyche? There are really only a handful of sources we can turn to after the relative supernova of his birth, a few specks of data rather than a rich portrait of a New Jersey juvenescence, and, lest we wade into total conjecture, we must make do with what we have.
After Dr. Fitzgerald’s article in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, there were no more professional writeups concerning Radar—a search for “Radar’s syndrome” in the medical databases turns up a giant, singular blank. His haphazard medical file does indicate a long history of epilepsy, dating back to a first episode at age four, with several major hospitalizations following his grand mal seizures, approximately once every four or five years. The doctors’ notes for these hospitalizations are cursory, noting “left-centered asymmetric claudication,” “near alopec
ia totalis,” and a “jaundiced xanthoderma,” though from the lack of follow-up on these slightly disturbing observations, it seems clear that Radar was not under the care of any single primary pediatrician, but rather a revolving cast of disparate emergency room doctors, who had neither the time nor the inclination to assemble a working medical history. At age twenty-three, after a particularly vicious grand mal in which Radar almost bit his tongue in half, he did have an MRI at St. Elizabeth’s, the results of which showed some “abnormal dark spots” on his temporal lobe, the part of the brain concerned with, among other things, temporal perception, spatial organization, and object recognition. Following this MRI, it appears he began taking a prescription for Zarontin (ethosuximide), an anticonvulsant, for a period of approximately ten years, though this prescription ended with no follow-up medications prescribed.
Beyond this, there is only a cluster of peripheral sources, which, when viewed in sequence, offers the briefest of glimpses into a restless teenager testing the limits of his great, strange electromagnetic gift.
Fig. 3.2. “Blue Box from Modified Western Electric Test Equipment”
From R. Radmanovic’s NJ Science Fair Project, 1988 (disqualified)
Exhibit A:
During the summer of 1990, the New Jersey Bell pay phone on the corner of Midland Avenue and Forest Street was the target of repeated “phreak attacks,” whereby more than two hundred free long-distance calls were made over the course of three months. The pay phone was eventually removed. “Phone phreaking”—the practice of exploiting the telephone system via unauthorized means—was invented in 1959 by Joe Engressia Jr., a.k.a. “Joybubbles,” a seven-year-old blind boy with perfect pitch who discovered that when he whistled a 2,600-Hz tone into the phone, the call would temporarily disconnect and then search for a new trunk line, allowing him to make another connection to any number in the world, completely free of charge. Joe also figured out how to dial a number entirely by whistling—in essence, he had taught himself how to speak a rudimentary form of “telephone.” Based on Engressia’s breakthrough and several technical documents inadvertently leaked by Bell Systems, subsequent phreaks in the 1960s and ’70s developed and refined a device called the “blue box,” which utilized the 2,600-Hz trunk switch tone to quickly and easily reroute calls from one line to another.
In the case of the Midland Avenue pay phone, calls were made to nearly every corner of the globe, including New Zealand, Norway, France, Thailand, Kenya, Brazil, and Ascension Island, in the middle of the Atlantic. Numerous “reverse link-ups” were also placed from this phone, in which the system was manipulated so that two distant pay phones would call each other, ringing continuously until a bystander on the street picked up the phone and found himself or herself talking to an equally confused citizen on a completely different continent. Officer Burberry, the author of the Kearny Police report on the incident, writes that “[the] perp dialed [a] 1-800 number repeatedly using [a] so-called ‘blue box’ to switch to [a] different number, e.g. in Texas.” As if Texas were as far as Officer Burberry could imagine. What Officer Burberry did not mention was that a traditional phone phreak’s blue box no longer worked on the New Jersey Bell system in 1990. In the Midland Avenue case, the perpetrator must have been using either a highly sophisticated terminal device or—in the tradition of Joybubbles—some other unprecedented means to communicate with the vast inner workings of the telephone network. The case would remain unsolved, and though the phone itself was removed, the phone booth remained, becoming a kind of obscure mecca for certain members of the phone phreaking scene.
Exhibit B:
On the evening of June 17, 1990, approximately seventy-eight separate car alarms were set off, which led Officer Burberry (who was not having a good summer) to conclude that “an individual or group of perps” was going around “disrupt[ing] or tamper[ing] with the vehicles’ anty-theft [sic] devices.” Yet none of the vehicles in question were found to have any damage or exhibited any signs of tampering. Stranger still, the alarms themselves could not be turned off by normal means. Mechanics were required to physically disconnect the alarms from the batteries in order to quiet the cacophony of sirens that had begun to drive Kearny residents into hysterics. It was as if the alarms had been instructed to simply wail of their own accord. It is unclear whether Officer Burberry and his team (Johnson, Altez, et al.) connected this incident with the ongoing investigation of the Midland Avenue phone phreak case. A simple map, however, might have provided them with valuable evidence: if they had merely traced the route of these car alarm incidences, they might have noticed that the path of aural carnage forms a slightly deflated horseshoe beginning and ending at the Forest Street block between Midland and Oakwood Avenues, adjacent to the phreaked pay phone and also the location of the Radmanovic residence.
Fig. 3.3. Car Alarm Incidents in Kearny, N.J. June 17, 1990
From Radmanovic, R., I Am Radar, p. 297
Fig. 3.4. “R2-D2, Halloween, 1988”
Pasted into R. Radmanovic’s Little Rule Book of Life
Exhibit C:
In the Kearny High School faculty meeting minutes dated November 1, 1990, chemistry teacher Emily Gagnon relates an incident of “bullying” that took place at the school on Halloween. The details are hard to fully make out from the meeting’s rather perfunctory notes, but it appears that sophomore Radar Radmanovic, dressed “again” in a tinfoil R2-D2 costume, was “found by a member of [the] janitorial staff” trapped in a “dumpster behind [the] gymnasium.” When pressed for details, Mr. Radmanovic would not elaborate on how he had gotten there. The incident led to a larger discussion at the meeting about bullying at the school, with a host of faculty members chiming in on the perceived severity of the problem. Perhaps most troubling was Ms. Gagnon’s comment, recorded in the minutes, that this was “not [the] first time [we’ve found] Radar in [the] dumpster.”
Exhibit D:
On the afternoon of December 5, 1990, a varsity basketball game inside the Kearny High School gymnasium was interrupted when both teams and the majority of the three dozen spectators experienced what was described in the police report as “cramping” and “diarrhea-like symptoms.” This turns out to be polite language for what was in essence a mass crapping of the pants. A barrage of ambulances and even a P3 CDC hazmat team from Long Island were summoned, and rumors of a “killer virus” whipped through the community like wildfire, but doctors could find nothing wrong with the victims beyond a lasting case of public humiliation and a newfound appreciation for the daily operations of the lower intestine. Curiously, none of the city’s tabloids carried the story, ignoring a golden opportunity for near-infinite scatological punnage. Only WWOR-TV, a local outfit broadcasting from Secaucus, mentioned the incident, briefly, during its evening newscast—and even they neglected to dispatch an on-scene reporter. Neither they nor anyone else, apparently, looked into the possibility of the so-called infrasonic “brown note,” rumored to be somewhere around 22.275 Hz, effective when broadcast at levels of at least 120 decibels. The elusive brown note was purportedly experimented with by the French during World War II and is currently used by certain elite Japanese SWAT teams, although there has never been any official documentation of its effective implementation. Nor did anyone bother to interview Radar Radmanovic, the installer and student operator of Kearny High School’s highly sophisticated (some might say excessive) public address system, who also happened to be working the scoreboard for the game that afternoon.
Fig. 3.5. Sample Tests, KHS Gymnasium PA System (March 1990)
From Notebook of R. Radmanovic
Exhibit E:
Finally, there is the now mostly forgotten “Vladi Affair” from December of that same year. Those living in New York City at the time may remember that for a series of three consecutive days right in the middle of the Christmas rush, the newly installed Sony Trini-lite JumboTron at One Times Square displayed a strange series
of interference patterns—including clips from 3-2-1 Contact and various Run-D.M.C. music videos, but most famously a grainy feed of a mildly beleaguered goldfish with a black spot on its forehead, swimming in circles to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (“Leningrad”), which played from a hidden speaker that would take the authorities a day and a half to locate. The iconic image of this fish limping to moribund Soviet nostalgia persisted for almost seventy-two hours, evading the best efforts of the JumboTron’s engineers to correct the malfunction. A December 17 New York Daily News article surmised that some “hacker” (an early use of the term, at least for the Daily News) had managed to create an “off-site remote control” and taken command of the television, despite the fact that the screen was not actually connected to any VHF or cable receiver system but instead received its data from prerecorded LP-size “optical discs.” The Daily News noted that the goldfish had already caused “several car accidents” and that the NYPD, Port Authority, and the FBI were all investigating the crime. On the fourth day, the giant screen at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue was unplugged, an act that met with some popular outcry, as the goldfish—by this point nicknamed “Vladi” by a popular on-air personality—had gained a cultish following among commuters and tourists alike, perhaps buoyed by the recent dramatic fall of Communism. When the JumboTron was finally turned on again two days later, the interference patterns had ceased and did not resume again, though it is debatable whether this was because the JumboTron’s engineers had discovered a way to block the incoming transmissions or whether “the hacker” had ceased his malicious activity. Regardless, the crime remained unsolved. Years later, you could still find certain street kiosks selling T-shirts of the goldfish’s pixelated image, with the caption VLADI LIVES! printed in some heavy-handed pseudo Soviet font.