Prime Time

No TV This Month

Prime Time

by Richard C. Walls

If the lady next door to me had paid her electric bill and if my dog hadn't decided to display his proclivity for the bizarre then this column would probably have something to do with Battlestar Galactica. But she didn't and he did and this doesn't.

The lady next door comes over and tells me her electricity has been turned off and her bill's over $100 and they want her to pay it all at once and I say gee that's really tuff and she sez if she bought a long enough extension cord from the hardware store maybe she could hook up her utilities and snake it thru my window and I say gee I don't know andshe sez I'll pay you $10 a week and I say which window? So we get it hooked up and Ifigurethat'sthat, but then there's my dog. My dog has a lot of problems but I won't go into that because this is supposed to be a TV column, but one of the side effects of his having to deal with continued emotional distress is that he's a bit eccentric (I, on the other hand, am perfectly normal). Anyway, at this particular time he decides to relieve his inner turmoil by taking a fancy to th~ new extension cord, showing a particular fondness for the plughead. And, in an act which parallels the behavior of so many of my friends (deviates all), he expresses his fondness for the plughead by sitting on it. He's a really big dog so naturally it comes out of the outlet and lies snug between his buns. I don't know all this is happening `cause I'm in another room cl~aning all my old Magma records.

Thenthere~s this Iou'~1 rapping on the door and it's the lady next door and she's all flushed and trembling and sez that h~r electricity went off in the middle of Hee Haw Honeys (Ha! I bet her vibrator went off in mid-O) so I go into the,room wh~re the extension cord comesin andthere'sthe dog sitting upright and majestic with a far away beatific look in his eyes. I restore order and go beck to the lady and make some lame excuse ("Duh, it just fell out"). This happens about four times during the next two days then stops for reasons unknown. Iforget about it, life goes on, end of Part One.

I shouldr~'t have forgot about it `cause a few weeks later TV's third mid-season starts and, anticipatin,g some heavy viewing so's I can write some stunningly insightful critiques, and particularly anticipating ripping into Battlestar Galactica `cause Ithinkit's a really hilarious piece of shit, I move my TV into my back room where I keep a pallet on the floor, ajug of Crotch and no telephone. I plug it n right under the Hee Haw lady's extension cord and gc into the kitchen to drink some dinner and when I cc~me back, right, my dog's sitting erect on both plugheads, eyes burninq with cult mysteries.

The exten sion ccrd is replugged easily enough but the TV plug isfucked because when the plughead came out of'the wall both prong~ stayed in the outlet. As I examine the damage I notice that my dog has thesad look of someone who's just had double nirvana removed from their cakes so I say'it's~ all right boy and pat his head. What I really want to do is pick him up by the hind legs and smash his head against the wall like Max Von Sydow did to that little punk iq The Virgin Spring. But what would that prove? Besides, it would probably take me a week just to scrape his brains off the wall.

I figure one thing's for sure, I'm not going to take it to a repairman-I've been screw?d that way too many times before. So Icut off the plughead with a pair of scissors, splice the wire, hook it up to a new plughead I've taken off an old radio I had in the attic, plug it in and blow out half the fuses in the house. The next morning I'm at the TV repair shop.

"What happened?" sez the man examining the spliced wire with disapproval.

"My dog sat on it."

"He must have teeth in his ass."

"I never looked. Listen, can you fix it?"~Long, long pause then aheavy sigh then he sez "Guess so."

Three days later I get a phone call from the repair shop. The screw begins-"Had to put in a new ,ther~monucfear aborigine." That's what it sounded like.

"A what?"

"You know, the thing that's attached to the terminal eskimo."

"How much?"

"Well.. . with labor.. . $75."

"How much without labor." He didn't laugh. They never do.

It took about two weeks to get the bread together and rescue the TV and by then the third mid-season's already rolling. I decide I can catch the latest episode of Galactica, fake like I've seen `em all and write a hilarious column which is what I do (BG turns out to be the big shit I knew it would be, which makes it a lot easier). Two days before deadline and `I got it all typed out and ready to submit when I make the mistake of laying it on the couch to go answer the phone. When I come back my dog has pissed on my paper ,ith' enough ferocity to make the ink run together into one reeking unreadable mess. Deadline's soon and I don't have enough time to rewrite all that (fake) hilarity.

So I,wrote this instead.