Man With the Golden Remote

Sure, I thought I could beat it. Everybody starts off thinking they can beat television. The evening news. A little PBS. The World Series. What could it hurt? Television was merely a recreational appliance, was it not? It came equipped with an on-and-off switch, and I could make it go dark whenever I wanted. Click.

I see you smiling? Is that condescension, pity? Perhaps there is something funny in the image of a grown man on his hands and knees, in the middle of the night, crawling across the floor of the family room, ripping apart chairs and couch in frantic search of, yes, the remote control device.

Got to find that remote.

Got to work that tube.

Got to watch . . . history, Letterman, black-and-white movies, Australian Rules Football, C-SPAN, country singin’, Riverdance (again?), Baseball Tonight, Chinese-language news, Arena Football, Motor Week, anything.

Oh, where did the kids stash the remote this time?

Why do they torture me like this?

Who’s paranoid?

Who’s an addict?

What?

*

Looking back, I suppose I seemed an unlikely candidate for a television Jones. Growing up, TV was kept in its place in our house. We called it the Idiot Box. I remember the family watching a black-and-white movie about a guy who hated television. Every time something dumb came on, which was often, he’d kick his foot right through the set. We considered this hilarious, and on point.

When I was in third grade, a thief broke in and stole the family TV. For reasons that remain cloudy--economics? prescient parenting?--it was not replaced for a long time. In that interlude I became a reader, peddling my bicycle every week to the Sunnyside Branch of the Fresno County Library for another batch of books.

Through early adulthood, the pattern held. No television set for me. A virtual Luddite. Then it happened. I took sick and was forced to miss work for six weeks. Trapped in a Los Feliz apartment, new to the city, bored, I decided to buy my first television set. I laughed when the Sears salesman tried to push remote control, saying to myself: “If I ever get so vegetated that I need one of those devices . . . “

The set was advertised as “cable ready.” This meant nothing to me, until idle curiosity led me to a stray cord winding out of the apartment wall. I screwed it into the back of the set, and flash, there it was: Full-on, illicit cable. Movie channels. Superstations. MTV. Sports galore. That first night I stayed up watching almost until dawn. The junkies will tell you: There is no high like the first one; after that, it’s all about trying to re-create the initial glow, rarely with success.

*

From here any red-blooded (and red-eyed) American can fill in the blanks. Mine has been a common-enough descent. Mainly I main-line sports. Newly married, I assured my wife I only watched important games, playoffs. It took her only a lap or two around the calendar to catch on: In sports, playoffs never end. They run, almost unbroken, from the NFL, to the college bowls, to March Madness, to Grand Slam golf, to the Stanley Cup, to the NBA, to the baseball stretch drive, to the Canadian football Grey Cup, to the World Series and back to football. In the rare lulls, there are the bass fishing shows.

Rationalizations abound. I congratulate myself: Hey, at least you don’t watch prime-time network programs, have never even seen an episode of “Ellen” or “‘Third Rock.” Or I’ll maintain that television watching comes with the job, a window into the American scene. The Vietnam War and modern national political campaigns, breakthrough television events, made this a plausible cover. Of course, down this same path, an hour with the Home Shopping Channel can be defended as sociological study. O.J.’s Bronco ride becomes “important.” In truth, it’s all just opium in an electronic box, an excuse to zone out, to escape into nowhere.

In a newspaper the other day--yes, I do still read--was a story about National TV-Turnoff Week. For the third year running, a grass-roots organization wants Americans to watch no television in the last week of April. An organizer explained that the movement is focused, not on content, but on the base, seductive pull of the appliance itself. It’s a good point: Just observe how merely turning on a television set will kill the liveliest of conversations every time, as all eyes shift toward the flickering screen. Cave dwellers drawn to the communal fire.

Well, such demons must be battled, especially when the little children of the house start tossing around phrases like “not available in stores” and “action figures sold separately.” And so a promise: A thief is going to come in the night and take away our television for a while. That thief will be me. I’m not saying exactly when, maybe this week. No, this week the NBA playoffs begin. Anyway, stay tuned.