Saturday, May 19, 2007

Narwhal

Doctor Jo used to have an apartment on Central Park West. Our family visited there for a week once when she was out of town, and we used it as a base of operations as we discovered the city that never sleeps. For my brothers and I, it was our first experience with cable TV.
The cable TV in New York City during the mid-1970s offered a form of entertainment called "public access", which was new to those of us who grew up with rabbit ears antennae on the prairie. On one particular evening, the three boys were left alone in the apartment while mom and dad went out to the theater. At this time, there were dozens of channels to choose from, and so my brothers and I had a difficult time choosing and agreeing on anything to watch, so we looked at everything. Sometime in the late evening hours, we stumbled on a channel which showed naked people. Naked grown up people. Naked grown up people having carnal knowledge of one another. Very limber and flexible naked grown up people having creative carnal knowledge of one another for what seemed like hours. When my parents came home, we tried to explain, perhaps by way of confession, what we had seen.
For the next few nights my parents watched to see what they had missed, but were treated instead to odd bits of performance art and other curiosities, but none of it naked. We wondered if the whole thing might have been just a collective pubescent hallucination. My mother stayed on for a week after while the boys headed back across the country in the family station wagon. When Doctor Jo returned, she assured my mother that it was quite possible, and indeed very likely that we had seen floppy sex on her cable television. There was some relief, then some questions, like "How do you get a schedule for the Public Access Channel?"
Thank you for the window on the world, Doctor Jo.

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