July 28, 2010
from the comments
Years ago a Chicago friend of mine, a musician and studio owner, tasked me with conveying a malfunctioning piece of audio equipment down to Garland, Texas to the audio geek who had built it. (I was driving to Texas anyway.)
You know the kind of thing. Really expensive black box with no name or label on it and a bare minimum of controls.
So I find the audio geek’s house. It’s an ordinary creepy brick ranch-style in a more than ordinarily creepy Texas suburb. Garland. I knock on the door, the geek opens the door, and the very first thing out of his mouth is, “You’re not wearing perfume, are you?”
Uh. No, I tell him. I’m not.
“Because I have a glass lung.”
It was only after I had taken a deep breath and made the decision that it was safe to follow him down into his basement workshop that I realized he must have said, “I have a collapsed lung.”
When I left, I saw children on bikes riding home from school. I bet that the audio geek was the Boo Radley of that neighborhood.
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A basement in Garland? The rarity of that alone would have kept me from following him down.
Maybe the Garland house’s basement wasn’t in Garland. Maybe it was in Richardson!