I don’t watch TV. I think it...

I don’t watch TV. I think it rots the mind. Myself, I listen to talk radio and play pinochle with the boys when I’m not home keeping an eye on my grandson, Tommy. He’s what they call autistic. All day, he stares into a toy crystal ball that snows when you shake it. He never says a word. He never even blinks, even when Rush Limbaugh is giving liberals hell loud enough to rattle the pictures on the walls.

I remember the afternoon my son, Don, came home from his construction job and said: “I just don’t understand this autism thing, Pop. He sits there all day long in his own little world.”

That was just before people who do watch TV found out that the whole “St. Elsewhere” hospital show had taken place in that crystal ball--in other words, in Tommy’s mind. That’s right. He’d dreamed up all six years of it, from 1982 to ‘88--the doctors and nurses, the cures, the deaths, the politics, the black humor, the love scenes on a slab in the morgue--everything.

Don’t ask me how.

The last episode explained it all. He’d made his dad Dr. Donald Westphall, chief of staff of the whole doggone hospital. Wasn’t that a nice thing for a boy to do for his father? I think so. And he’d made me Dr. Daniel Auschlander, a kindly old physician who has liver cancer through most of the show and finally dies of a stroke.

Norman Lloyd played me. He’s acted in lots of TV shows and in movies ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” to “Dead Poets Society.” Now he’s written a memoir, “Stages of Life in Theatre, Film and Television.” Lloyd will speak and sign copies of the book at 2 p.m. today at the Pacific Palisades branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, 861 Alma Real Drive. Refreshments will be served. Admission is free. Information: (213) 612-3320.

Anyhow, you can imagine that from then on I looked at Tommy a little differently.

“Why’d you kill me off?” I asked. “You know I’m grateful for being on the show and all, but why’d you have to give me cancer? And you know darn well your granddad would never, ever dose himself with marijuana like this Auschlander fellow did, no matter how much it hurt.”

But Tommy just kept staring at that crystal ball.

Then I had another thought.

“You aren’t dreaming up any more shows, are you?” I asked. Like I say, I usually don’t watch TV. But I figured I had to now, just in case he’d put me into something else.

When “Twin Peaks” started, I thought that was weird enough to be some of Tommy’s doing, but I never could be sure. And he wasn’t telling, either way.

The problem was . . . I had to admit it. I missed being a doctor. Even one with cancer. It beats being a retired auto parts salesman any day.

“Listen, Tommy,” I say now. “You can hear me in there, I know. If you do dream up another show, I’ve got an idea for one. Make me . . . a newspaper reporter, say. A nice, quiet guy, but I’ve got these big shoulders. Then, when it’s crunch time, I step into a phone booth and take off my shirt. Underneath I’ve got blue tights on with a big red S across my chest. I become the Man of Steel. Got that? . . . Tommy?”

But he never says a word.