CHRIST, IF THERE was ever an invention nobody needed, Langley said. By then we had another couple of TVs that he had found somewhere. None of them had worked to his satisfaction.When you read or listen to the radio, he said, you see the scene in your mind. It’s like you with life, Homer. Infinite perspectives, endless horizons. But the TV screen flattens everything, it compresses the world, to say nothing of one’s mind. If I watch any more I’d might as well take a boat down the Amazon and have my head shrunken by the Jivaro.Who are the Jivaro?They are this jungle tribe that likes to shrink heads. It’s their custom.Where did you hear that?Read it somewhere. After you decapitate the guy you make a slit from top of the head down the back of the neck and then peel the whole thing off the skull — neck, scalp, and face. Sew it into a pouch, stitch up eyelids and lips, fill it with stones, and boil the damn thing down till it’s the size of a baseball.What does one do with a shrunken head?Hang it by a hair along with the others. Tiny human heads in a row swinging gently in the breeze.Good Lord.Yes. Think of the American people watching television.
BUT BEFORE WE unplugged the TV forever, it happened that they were televising the hearings of a Senate committee investigating organized crime. Let’s just look at that, Langley said, and so we tuned in.Senator, a witness was saying, it’s no secret that in my youth I was a wild kid, and I grew up the hard way, meaning I did time. That juvenile rap is like a dead bird around my neck and so you subpoeny me here.Are you denying, sir, that you are the head of New York’s leading crime family?I am a good American and I sit down with you because I got nothing to hide. I pay my taxes, I go to church every Sunday, and I give to the Police Athletic League, where they keep kids playin’ ball and out of trouble.Good God, I said, do you realize who that is? It must be! I’d recognize that voice anywhere.If it is he’s heavier, Langley said. Dressed like a banker. Most of his hair’s gone. I’m not sure.Who doesn’t change in twenty-five years? No, it’s him. Listen to that: How many gangsters speak in a whisper with an attached wheeze in high C? That’s Vincent all right. He asked me how it felt to be blind. And now he’s at the top of his profession. He’s a big muck-a-muck in front of a Senate committee. He sent us champagne and girls, I said. And then we never heard from him again.Did you hope to?I was being idiotic, I know, carrying on about this hoodlum. I wasn’t the only one. I don’t remember what he actually testified to but after his appearance the tabloids were all over him. I had Langley read to me: “Vincent Rats!” they screamed in their headlines as if it was they who’d been betrayed. And then their accounts of the rackets he was alleged to be running, his competitors who had mysteriously died, the various courtroom trials from which he’d emerged with an innocent verdict, thus affirming a guilt so vast that the law could not get around it, and, what was most suspenseful, the arch enemies he was reputed to have made among the other crime families. I was very impressed.Langley, I said, what if we had been a crime family? How much closer we would have been to Mother and Father if we had all worked together running protection rackets, gambling syndicates, loaning money to people at exorbitant rates, committing every imaginable felony including murder though I think not prostitution.Probably not prostitution, Langley said.
AFTER THE SENATE HEARINGS, Langley had pulled the plug and thrown the TV set into a corner somewhere, and we were not to look at television again until a decade later when the astronauts landed on the moon. I never told my brother that in my own way I could see the television screen: I saw it as an oblong blur just a shade lighter than the prevailing darkness. I imagined it as the eye of an oracle looking into our house.My thrill at having once met a famous gangster was indicative of how bored I was by my own life. When, a few weeks later, a news bulletin came over the radio that Vincent had been shot while dining in an East Side restaurant, it was a weird pride I felt — the sense of being a privileged insider, an I-knew-him-when feeling that was quite insensitive to the extremity of his situation. After all, I was a fellow who sat most of the day in his house, living without the normal complement of friends and associates, and with no practical enterprise to occupy his days, a man with nothing to show for his life but an overworked consciousness of it — who can blame me for acting like a fool?It was that testimony he gave, I said to Langley. The crime families don’t like publicity. The Mayor feels pressure to do something, the D.A. gets busy and the cops start pulling them in.All at once, you see, I was the expert criminologist.I waited by the radio. Diners had seen Vincent being carried to his limo and driven away. Was he alive or dead? I was left with a vague sense of expectation. That is something less than a premonition but can be just as unsettling. Jacqueline, when you read this, if you do, you might think, Yes, at this point of their lives poor Homer was losing his mind. But forget the oracular power I imputed to a TV set and you are left with an improbability that had a certain logic to it. I think now what happened I had wanted to happen, though what I will describe here was finally only one more passing event in our lives — as if our house were not our house but a road on which Langley and I were traveling like pilgrims.