The Wisdom of Perversity by Rafael Yglesias Page B

Even if we fail.”
    Brian nodded and waited.
    â€œGo on,” Harriet said. She adjusted her blanket to cover her feet, heels and big toes blackened with dirt. She definitely walked sometimes, Brian noted. “Hurry up,” she said as if he had been dawdling. “Jeff is dying to show off his birthday present.”
    When Brian arrived at the sanctuary of his friend’s room something shiny flashed at him. He screeched and jumped away.
    â€œIt’s a mike.” Jeff displayed a narrow silver tube connected by a long black cord to the tape recorder. He explained how the machine worked, that one of the black buttons controlled whether the tape played for a half hour or one hour (the difference being a loss of recording quality for the longer time) and finished with a lecture on the delicacy of how to properly thread the narrow shiny tape through the spools and recording heads. He did not allow Brian to touch it. Jeff was jealous of the pleasures of his toy and who could blame him? It was better than the best of toys because it wasn’t a toy at all. This was an object from the grown-up world, hurled down to their lesser realm by a beneficent god.
    Brian soon learned that the gift giver was not Jeff’s parents, as first he had been led to believe. While Jeff finished threading the reels, he said, “You know what’s great?”
    â€œWhat?” Brian’s eyes were fixed on the fascinating tape, one side gleaming, the other dull. Jeff had explained the shiny side had to face the recording head.
    â€œNo kid in the world has a machine like this,” Jeff said. “In fact, nobody in the whole world has one. You know why?”
    â€œWhy?” Brian dutifully asked.
    â€œBecause it’s a sample. RCA gave one to all the NBC executives. My cousin gave it to my parents to give to me. RCA’s not even putting it on the market until Christmas. So nobody has it. Nobody in the world has it.”
    â€œYou mean, your parents got this from . . .” Brian caught himself from saying Richard’s name. He hadn’t said it since visiting NBC. In the meantime, Jeff had talked about Klein a lot, quoting Cousin Richard’s gossip about
The Tonight Show
and laughing about Brian’s having knocked over the plant. Brian had limited his responses to grunts. Vaguely Brian felt it was a kind of confession to say Klein’s name, the first step to telling what had happened in the bathroom. And how could he do that? He had no words to explain the experience and he didn’t want to try to describe his penis’s amazing reaction to the spiderweb caress of Richard’s fingers. Without a vocabulary, he was silenced, even with the friend who knew everything about him.
    â€œYeah, from Cousin Richard,” Jeff said. “He got it for free and gave it to my parents to give to me for my birthday.” He pressed the Play and Record buttons simultaneously, picked up the mike, and shoved it under Brian’s nose. “Say something.”
    â€œSomething,” Brian said. He pointed to the two depressed buttons. “Why did you press both buttons?”
    â€œYou have to press
both
Play and Record to record.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œSo you don’t accidentally press Record. Because Record tapes over things, you don’t want to accidentally start recording.”
    â€œOh . . .” Brian said as understanding came to him (from his logical mind, not Jeff’s foggy explanation) that having to press both buttons made an accidental erasure less likely since all other functions could be accomplished by pressing one button. He became lost in fascination at this procedural brilliancy of the RCA Corporation.
    â€œSpeak!” Jeff insisted. He bobbed the mike for emphasis. It bumped Brian’s nose.
    â€œOw,” Brian complained, then sneezed with sudden violence onto the fine mesh of the microphone’s head.
    Jeff jerked it away. “Jesus!”