My Uncle Who Died of Radio

     It was pure chance that the photo captured him early on, long before he died of radio.

     You would not guess it from early pictures of him: in his twenties they show a nice looking man, smiley man, spiffy man.  He looked perturbed in this one but who doesn’t on occasion.  And in any case, he is still full of life in all those pictures…rather than paranoid schizophrenia that is.

     I was told that when my grandfather brought home the first crystal radio set, my grandma was so terrified by the noise coming through that she cursed it in Yiddish.  He was boy at the time and maybe that incident – or that curse – rubbed off.  One way or another, the mishegoss slowly took over and we would visit Uncle George at Pilgrim State and try to say calm, normal things.

     By the time I was in high school, he was the lunatic on the street, railing against anyone and everyone.  He became a fixture on Flatbush Avenue, startling teenagers, terrifying old ladies, amusing the beat cop who knew after a few arrests that he was harmless and of no real danger to anyone.  I suspect that like all lunatics, he was a dreamer and a deemer and he cared too much about every damn little thing.  I don’t know for sure, but the early photos say to me that he was gay at a time that such a thing could easily drive you over the edge.  Something sure did.  When he was discharged from the hospital to that room over the dry cleaners, he was alone with his nutball thoughts, increasingly enraged.

     Alone with the radio. 

     It was all normal at first.  The usual programs, comedy routines, dramas and jingles, but somewhere along the line it began to bypass his ear and seep like raw sewage directly into his skull.  And as the vacuum tubes got smaller and the microwaves got shorter, his alarm expanded until he was in the throes of an occult romance with the ether.  He thought he could see radio waves and that they were sharp, like blades, and nasty.  He began to stuff his hat with paper to protect himself, spent turbid days turning the dial wildly and thinking that the babble was some kind of code.  It was soon after that that he began listening to pure static.  Full of distrust, he turned the sound dial all the way up until the scratching filled the room.

It did not help at all when he realized that the word paranoid he had so often heard contained within it the letters of radio.

     That was when the letters to famous men began.  First to Jack Benny, then to General Sarnoff, and eventually to President Roosevelt.  The letters were warnings, pure jigsaw lunacy, about the owners of the frequencies and how they were controlling the minds of America, trying to turn us into a race of Yankee doodles, and the Japanese were somehow involved and the Big Bands and the teamsters, and they were shooting mind rays through the radios of the world, hidden on the innocent carrier waves of commercial broadcasts, and sometimes through the toilets too.  He called them Varishana rays and they were the reason the war had started and he began to wear tin foil in his underwear to block the effects on his testicles. 

     And so on.

     What he came to understand in that time was that everything, every single thing, was all hepped and haywire.  Mixed, blotched, crumpled and creamed.  Flipwigged, scattershot and turbulated.  In a word…farblonget.  But somehow this knowledge was not in any way enlightening.

     I always heard that he died from some sort of cerebral something or other.  Could have been other things too but I am sure that radio waves were never on the list…even though that is the most likely explanation.  Think about it.  Think of the hundreds of thousands of watts, sparks, bolts, flashes, bursts, and pulses coming from countless TV and radio stations, signal relay towers, television sets, CB transmitters, garage door openers, radar scanners, missile guidance systems, interceptors, anti-missiles, anti-interceptors, tracking systems, eavesdropping hardware, detection, intruder, and alarm devices, microwave ovens, diathermy machines, medical scanners, satellite signals, industrial scanners, remote sensors, heating units for pencils and tobacco, and all that.  Not to mention the cell phones that pickle the blazes out of your you-know-what, as everyone knows.  

     Radio is the least crazy culprit. 

     But at least the obituary in the Times got it incorrectly right.

     It was short and sweet except for that weird little typo.  No one noticed it; you really had to be paying attention to see it.  And who would be?  The linotypist had accidentally tapped an “r” instead of the adjacent “t” on his keyboard and so the final sum said that my Uncle George, beloved brother of his four sisters and so on, had died of a "rumor of the brain."