the entertainment center
john means
Odz had told me it was just a bookcase we’d be hauling away in my pickup. I expected it to be sitting out on his carport, but there was nothing there.
Instead, it was down in the basement rec room, and it was no bookcase. A monstrosity of particle-board shelves, platforms, and compartments with little doors. Odz said it had been their entertainment center.
Had been. Odz was too old to be getting a divorce, too overwhelmed to navigate the minefield of a real estate settlement, too alone to be moving off to another town alone. I confess, I envied him, so we started the loading up. And up it was. I worked from the top, backing up, and we heaved it out of the basement, one step at a time, with a rest between each. We were both too old to be up to something like this. Odz at the bottom was lifting most of the weight and was in a dangerous position.
However, as we wheedled it up, I was thinking, yes, work could still be done by old men. The trick was to break the task down into small increments and to expand the time factor. In physics class about sixty years ago I had learned that power equals work divided by time. In our case the work was raising a lifeless mass, a dead weight, against the force of gravity from its past life at a lower potential energy in the basement rec room upward eight feet to a higher state of potential energy in the carport. Potential energy of a mass is determined by its elevation above a lower reference level. A boulder at the top of a high cliff has greater potential energy than a boulder of the same mass resting at the base of the cliff. The higher boulder has the potential to fall, accumulate velocity and kinetic energy, and then transfer that energy to a body at the cliff base. Like a Road Runner cartoon.
Heaving the monstrosity required us to put energy or work into the system. A winch could raise the object from Odz’s former rec room up a plywood incline on the steps to the carport in three seconds. Two teenaged boys such as Odz and I sixty years ago could tote it straight up the steps in about fifteen seconds without even thinking about resting, much less a failed marriage. Odz and I at age 75 required five minutes to heave-step-and-rest it up to its higher level of outdoor freedom from its lower level of failed marital incarceration.
Each of the three methods requires the same amount of work or energy, but the power ratings vary greatly. Do the math and we find that the winch is 100 times as powerful as 75-year-old Odz and me, the testosterone teens 20 times as powerful. This last is a sad proportion on what we have lost.
But more can always be lost. As I neared the top step, I realized we had muscled considerable potential energy into the system, and my old hands were losing it. If I let the monster slip, it had the potential to boulder down and crush poor Odz, still mostly in his basement. I’d never get him out, but I know him well, and in his last seconds, he would appreciate the irony.
The entertainment center was, for Odz and me, an ungainly and encumbering contraption. We might have tried to explain and warn the 20-times-stronger teenagers that entertainment in marriage took work and had precarious potentials, but zipping up the steps with ease, those boys would have been mightily bored by the old-man backstory. Their work was a lark, “no sweat.” Ah, a lifetime of entertainment lay ahead for them.
My wife and I had also spent a lifetime in our rec room with our entertainment, a console TV. Maybe our lives revolved more around this furniturized picture tube than it did around our daily work, children, schedules, arguments, commutes in traffic, ballet and Little League, arguments, dishwashing and laundry, appliances, insurances, arguments, service contracts, income taxes, credit cards, and lawn mowing. So much power consumed, so much entertainment deserved, even though most humans who have ever lived upon the earth have neither known nor heard of evening entertainment.
A wife and a husband might not know what to say to one another or might have let slip how to speak love. Or one might dare not say a single word. But always the center is there with its hours. Each knows it better than the other. It is where they touch and share their days alive together.
I was afraid that at the loading dock of the Rescue Mission Store, Odz might cloud up. It would be goodbye. Any man could cry giving away, donating things that had measured out his life.
Then there’s the Abyss. Gravity and good solid ground always have potential, but not the free fall into the Abyss. Then what? When the measures and the credits are over, the obituary snipped from the newspaper for future reference, will the subsequent hours be people still flickering in drama or the emptied-out entertainment center being hauled out?
The Rescue Mission Store was in a converted old warehouse. All we had to do was slide the old remnant out the back of the pickup onto the concrete loading dock. Driving over, I had decided to depart quickly so that Odz would not have a chance to look back on his life.
“Can’t take that,” a voice cut in when we had it halfway slidden out. He was a rough-looking character, and his dog was at us, teeth bared, lunging, blitz-barking, his head jerking from my balls to Odz’s, back and forth, inches away, maniacal, two-headed. The leash pulled him back a bit, but he did not let up.
Then I saw the tail, straight up, erect but whipping back and forth. Was it covered with rattlesnake hide? A rattler rattling at its end? The snake going to bite?
“Entertainment center. Nobody wants them no more. Went out with recreation rooms.” He smiled, shook his head at us, pulled his dog back. “You old boys come to the wrong place.”
We slid it back in and left in a hurry, as planned. Next stop, Goodwill, a block away. There, a sign informed us donations were now received at their regional facility across from the airport. They had gone upscale, into a brick office building and warehouse terminal that had previously housed a trucking company. It no longer looked like an organization that needed donations, and they even had a nice secretary, who told us where to drive and enter the gate.
A cordial man greeted us, “Welcome, I’m Pete.” No dog.
This time, before we slid it out again, we asked if they took entertainment centers.
He was agreeable, and we moved it half out the back again. He leaned over and inspected its exterior. He scraped with his fingernail at a couple of blemishes on the door of the VHS-tape storage compartment. He leaned down closer and scanned the damaged front edge of the TV platform. He stood up and faced us, not barking.
“Sorry,” he smiled, “but we cannot take it. My boss says not to accept damaged pieces. They don’t move. They sit for what seems an eternity and take up space we need for items in good condition. This piece has a damaged finish.”
Only if you look, I thought. Back into the truck. Odz said for me to take him home. I backed into his carport and we slid it out again. We walked it over against his house. Perhaps it was meant to be part of the house under contract.
Odz did not say much. He shook my hand and thanked me. I wondered where the old piece would end up after being the center of attention for so long a time and then being turned away in so short a time.
As I pulled out onto the road I looked back and there stood Odz in his carport, alone with his empty entertainment center against his house, which would soon be empty itself. He waved goodbye to me. I returned his wave but he had turned away.
A week or so later on a swirling, blustery day with rain squalls, I was out Odz’s way so I drove by his house. It was not yet settlement day, but the house looked empty. There were no curtains, and I could see straight through from the front picture window all the way to the kitchen and out the back door. His car was gone, but the entertainment center still sat where we had put it, Odz and I.
Rain was blowing in on it. One of the lower compartment doors was waving willy-nilly, back and forth in the wind. The only thing moving.
Nobody wanted it. A damaged finish.
