The Tube ‘Blow’.. (an excerpt from O'Connor Street)

The Tube ‘Blow’

All things considered, my father handled that surprisingly...well... uh... well.

He stood up, replaced the pliers on top the TV, and walked away.

Everyone else quickly and quietly left the room; everyone else but me. I sat in silence, dumbstruck, staring at the now completely dead TV feeling like I was public enemy number one. It was dying on its own, the slapping was having no effect whatsoever, but no, I had to open my big mouth about the stupid red knob that was put in the back of the TV to finish kill a TV when it was already dying. Now there was no TV to watch and as I slowly became aware of my surroundings I realized I was sitting on the middle seat, and it had no value anymore.

There was nothing left to do, everyone had gone their separate ways; quietly, waiting for bedtime, tomorrow was another day, but tonight, tonight was a night to be invisible and quiet and not get in this angry man’s way. I got up and went upstairs and climbed into bed and slept.

By the time I got home from school the next day, there was a TV repair van parked outside our house, so I hurried through the gate and ran up the stairs to get inside because I wanted to see what was going on.

The back of the TV was off and the TV repairman looked like he was trying to climb inside it. I said hi and he said hi and I said what’s your name and he said ‘Sunil’ without looking up from what he was doing. I looked around and there was a big book opened on the ground with what looked like TV drawings with directions, and a big box of tools overflowing with things I had never seen before.

My middle sister Giselle came up and handed Sunil a big glass of juice with ice and told me that daddy said to leave the TV repairman alone and I was, especially me, not to bother him. I promptly ignored her and went on asking questions because how else were you supposed to know how stuff worked?

Anyway, Sunil was hard at work with his little meter checking inside the wonderful maze of wires and gadgets inside our TV that just captivated me, and I was looking at all the interesting things in his box of tools and asking him questions about how TVs worked when my father appeared and I shut up.

My father asked Sunil if he had any idea what was wrong and Sunil said it looked like the tube blow.

Just like that.

No further explanation or clarification, like everyone in the whole world knew what the tube was.

And I thought wow, what a thing to happen, what a description, the tube blow, man, I couldn’t wait to tell Denyl and Colin, our tube blow.

My father continued talking with Sunil, trying hard to find a way for this to end positively, and I left him to it and went looking for my crew, who were nowhere to be found. Don’t you just hate when you have something new and exciting to share and nobody around to share it with?

The tube blow; man that idea kept circling my mind and I couldn’t process it, I didn’t even know what the tube was, but we had one, and now it 'blow'.

Later that evening I heard my father tell my mother that we have to get a new TV because Sunil say that the cost of a tube is like the cost of a new TV so it didn’t make sense fixing it and I was thinking how important it was to be the tube.

The next day we got a new TV and I wasn’t allowed to breathe near it (those were my father’s exact words), so I stayed out of the TV room completely for a week.