When I was really young, my mother had to sit with me at night until I fell asleep and then quietly sneak out of the room, because if I woke up, or if she went to sleep before I did, I wouldn’t sleep at all. As I got a little older, to stave off the nighttime willies, I watched M*A*S*H. reruns for hours on end, until the local TV stations stopped broadcasting, and then I would turn to one of those stations, which likely don’t even exist anymore since the advent of cable, that had some seedy spokesman hawking some foundation or some product, which I vaguely associate with religious hymns and bald eagles for some reason that is no longer clear to me; around five or six in the morning, the regular TV stations would come back on air and it was usually about this time that I would actually fall asleep.
I suppose all of this was a sort of sad and telling state of affairs for an eleven-year-old boy, but I was only vaguely aware that something was off, in the same way that one can feel watched, look up, see no one there, and return to whatever it is that they were doing; the oddity, in my mind, was only something vaguely recognizable, something I figured everyone encountered, something not too far outside the norm, and thus something that, as ruminations go, could be brushed off as not worthy of deep consideration: it just was.
Although it was by no means clear to me at the time, looking back it is not hard to see that I obtained an obsession as a result of my insomniac nights. On the school bus one morning, I overheard one kid telling another that his father couldn’t leave the house in the morning without two cups of coffee. “He can’t face the day awake without it,” the boy said. Why an eleven-year-old would be discussing his familial coffee habits on the school bus, I don’t know, but the words stuck with me and I planned my strategy for the next morning.
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“Mom, can I have some coffee?”
“Why?” She didn’t even turn from the countertop to look at me.
She wasn’t buying it.
“It smells good,” I said, “and I tasted Dad’s and it tasted good.”
“Get a cup,” she said, still not turning from the lunch she was preparing.
It had worked. I got my coffee that morning, my first cup of steaming black brewed coffee, which also seemed to me the marker of being an adult, and though, like so many things, I can no longer remember what my initial impression was, eighteen years later I can’t live without the stuff, despite the fact that more often than not it terribly upsets my stomach, despite the fact that my gastroenterologist has advised me to avoid it, despite the fact that, for me, it is a very expensive habit (because I have another obsession, and that is having only the finest of everything, but that’s a whole different sport, and we can play that one some other time, perhaps).
So, for a while, coffee got me through my days and kept me awake for my sleepless encounters with M*A*S*H and the seedy spokesman. While I’d always seen random electronics parts in the basement of our house, circuit boards and such, it wasn’t until the age of twelve that I encountered my first police radio, a gadget I believe my father had put together many years earlier (I’d eventually recognize the soldering as evidence of his handiwork). Unfortunately, he told me that it didn’t work, something about crystals being too old, which really piqued my curiosity: there were crystals in a police radio?
I suppose I forgot about the thing, though, because it wasn’t until Irv, a friend of the family, presented me with one of his old, barely functioning police radios that I actually got to hear one of the things in action. The radio consisted of a black rectangle the size of a school lunch box, but several times heavier, with lots of little knobs and a pullout antennae. When turned on, it sounded like an angry brood of cicadas that had indeed been sleeping for seventeen years, brooding the whole time and only now letting the world know about it. But something magical happened that first night as I curled on the floor in my bedroom, turning the knobs, adjusting the tin foil I’d attached to the antennae: I fell asleep.
And so began my fascination with police scanners, which, I later learned, my uncle also used to help fall asleep at night; I realized this when, shortly after that first night in my bedroom, I saw a similar device on top of my uncle’s dresser, just out of reach, and asked him about it, his answer providing confirmation that my situation, like that sense of being stared at, was not so unusual.
For many years, I lugged a slowly improving set of police scanners and overly large antennae with me from house to house and apartment to apartment; I had one in my college dormitory and one in my post-grad apartment, but when I made my most recent move, I took the still-space-consuming scanner back to my parents’ basement where it currently resides. I just didn’t have the room in my new place and the reception was pretty poor anyway.
You can imagine my excitement, then, when I found out earlier this week that my new phone has a police scanner built into it, and, to my great surprise, one that works far, far better than any of the hefty clunkers that came before it. Gone are the angry cicadas and fiddling of knobs, present is a crisp, clear signal with easily discernable and intelligible voices. Present is my choice of counties and states to eavesdrop on and a list of their most oft-used codes. Present is a portability never before imagined.
Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that I have been listening to the thing nonstop. When I wake up in the morning and prepare breakfast, when I drive to work, when I’m sitting in my office, when I’m grading papers, when I’m driving home, and when, as the whole thing began, I’m going to sleep. And there’s the rub: most of the time, I do sleep now.
So what was it, what is it, about the police radio that worked where such powerhouses as M*A*S*H and the seedy spokesman had failed? Certainly I had no clue at the time, and I can only speculate now, that it had something to do with quelling the sense of dread surrounding the thought that everyone around me was tuning out, falling prey to that netherworld of suspended animation, willingly giving in to the haze that awaits all of us at the end of the road, but that I couldn’t see allowing in so early. The scanner provided some kind of confirmation that, yes, you can close your eyes and we, the voices not of some far off land—as I used to try to assure myself with—but of Randolph Road and Briggs Chaney and 198 right down the street, will be here to keep the world turning while you rest. There was, and is, some solace in knowing that the roads are still roamed and activity still takes place, even at three and four in the morning, that there is a baker beginning his day beneath a single bulb, that a coffee pot is being put on, that a club owner is just shuttering his doors. I could close my eyes at night, let their voices lull me to sleep, and wake up in the morning with them still sitting on my nightstand. They wouldn’t abandon me; they would be there.
They are here still.
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