March 28, 2008


Black Box Errand

Today I had occasion to recall an errand I undertook for a Chicago friend a dozen years ago. My friend: a musician in hock up to his eyeballs on account of — well, you know the kind of guy. A ruby stylus set in a cartridge that cost him $17K. Black-box equipment — no manufacturers’ logos — just sleek tech-noir boxes adorned with two toggle switches each, max. Anyway. he ran into problems with one of his black boxes (the pre-sub-capacitor that connected to the knee-bone of the back-up woofer, I think it was), and the Only Person in the World who could make it right worked out of a basement in Garland, Texas. So I hauled the black box down to Texas one Christmas and drove way the fuck to some suburban block in Garland. It’s mid-afternoon, I knock on the door, and no sooner has the Wizard of Garland opened his door an inch and a half than he asks me, “You’re not wearing perfume, are you?” No preliminaries. No opportunity, really, to sniff the air and detect any whiff of perfume. I assured him that I wasn’t; he opened the door another few inches and added, “Because I have a glass lung.”

It was only after I’d handed over the black box, chatted a bit, and bade him farewell that it occurred to me he’d probably said, “Collapsed lung.”

posted by Sheila Ryan in anecdotes, health, odd, technology 

comments

3 Responses to “Black Box Errand”

  1. Michael Grant Smith on March 28th, 2008 at 10:46 pm

    Holy shit, Sheila.

    Thank you.

  2. John Buaas on March 29th, 2008 at 8:40 am

    Wow.

    This is all echo-y of the Berryman poem you posted above.

  3. Sheila Ryan on March 29th, 2008 at 9:55 am

    There was a little mental space (yesterday) in which various things came together, yes.

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