All American Horror of the 21st Century

How Sweet It Was. Thomas F. Monteleone-1

HOW SWEET IT WAS

by Thomas F. Monteleone

Most people can’t remember a time without it in their life.

Not me.

Even if just barely. I was a little kid, maybe four or five, who spent most of his time playing with stuff like Lincoln Logs and Tonka Toys on the living room carpet. Until the day my mother opened the front door to let two workmen lug this big, polished mahogany box into the room.

“Where’d ya want this, ma’am?” one of them asked.

And the question kind of perplexed Mom, because she obviously hadn’t thought of the answer ahead of time. So she paused, scanning the living room with great pensiveness, then said: “There. You can put it right there.”

The workmen nodded and lifted the heavy piece of furniture to the wall beneath the staircase. Its height came level with the sixth step, and it was then I noticed a single, thick-paned window in the front of the box. It was like a glass eye, looking back at me.

My mother thanked the men and they disappeared forever from my world. I asked Mom what the one-eyed box might be, and she said it was a television.

“What’s it do?” I said.

“We can see pictures on it,” said Mom.

“What kind of pictures?”

“Let’s turn it on.”

So I watched her insert a plug into those two slots in the wall—the same place I’d jammed a dinner fork a couple of months ago. I got what my dad called a “shock,” and he got to go down into the pitch-black basement, where I heard him cursing a lot while he tried to find the “bad fuse.” (It sounded scary, and I didn’t want to know any more about it.)

Anyway, watching my mother, I studied her movements as she turned a knob on the left beneath the glass window. It made an audible click! and there was a flash in the dark window, then it began to glow brighter and brighter. I stared through the glass and saw a matrix of intersecting lines, circles and a picture of an Indian. A humming sound came from the box.

And that was it.

“It doesn’t look like anything’s on,” she said. “Let’s try some of the other channels.”

My mother reached for a larger knob under the right corner of the screen, and it made a harsh, yet muffled, clunk! as she turned it. The screen flashed, the speakers sputtered and hissed with static.

“I don’t get it,” I said, which is what my father would always say when he didn’t understand something.

“Hold on, here’s something ...”

And there was ...

Like nothing I’d ever seen before. The images remain burned in my memory as if I saw them yesterday: black and white cartoon of a cat being chased by really dumblooking dog, choreographed to some tinny, ‘30s dance-band music. I sat transfixed by it all, including the primitive commercials for a kitchen cleanser called Ajax and some local appliance dealer called Luskins. The cartoon show was called Film Funnies, and it became, for a little while, my favorite pastime as I sat cross-legged on the floor looking at the tiny screen over the television whose name I learned was Emerson.

But I soon learned to “change channels” with the big heavy knob on the right, and I discovered old Republic serials, quiz shows, and other stuff for little kids. As much as I loathe television today, that’s how much I loved it back then. Wow, looking back, I can still feel the afterglow of the pure magic it was for me. It was my private window into a larger universe about which I knew practically nothing.

And so the shows curled over me like waves hitting a beach. Hour after hour, day after day, I watched and I learned. So much, so fast. Polio, Wonder Bread, The Big Picture, Chevrolets, Hula Hoops, rock-and-roll, Punch and Judy, the New York Yankees, the atom bomb, and Ovaltine were just a handful of the icons which imprinted me, shaped me.

I watched everything and anything the Emerson would find for me, but my favorite was Mr. Curiosity.

Despite being enhanced by the nostalgic lens of memory, the show’s production values were cheesy—even for its own era. Mr. Curiosity was this guy dressed in a set of mechanic’s overalls and an old football helmet, which were supposed to look like a spacesuit. The show would always open with him sitting at the controls of his rocket ship (which looked, even to the younger me, like a red wagon with some plywood panels in the shape of stabilizer fins drilled into the sides.). And his ship always had a few extra vessels in tow, which made it look more like a train, which he rolled across the sound stage accompanied by some bouncy piano riffs. He would sing this song which told me you “Gotta Get a Sense-a-Wonder ‘bout the World!” and then he would spend the rest of the show telling us kids about the strange and wonderful world we lived on.

To this day, I can’t remember anything specific Mr. Curiosity showed me or taught me. And that is very weird because I do remember absolutely loving the show, and counting down the hours until it would be on the air. All I can recall is that I believed Mr. Curiosity told me things I could never learn anywhere else, and that there was something special, something magical about the show which appealed like nothing else on television.

As I grew older and my parents sent me off to first grade, I guess I stopped watching Mr. Curiosity. I don’t remember doing it with any sense of importance or ceremony, and if the show cancelled or pulled from the airways, I don’t recall hearing about it. As time passed, the show just kind of passed out of my life, and I accepted it with the calm sense of the inevitable that allows all children to buy into the massive machinery of being and nothingness without going insane.

* * *

That was it. One day, Mr. Curiosity was no longer part of my life, and I didn’t give it much thought. But every once in a while something would occur that brought an awareness of the show back into my thoughts. And it was always the same event.

As I grew older and learned the arts of conversation and beer-garden philosophy, the talk among friends would occasionally tip towards old television programming and favorite shows. Whenever this happened to me and my cohorts, something odd always followed: I would mention Mr. Curiosity and everybody would look at me with blank stares.

Nobody had ever heard of it—much less remembered it.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. Some of my friends were younger, some didn’t get TVs into their homes until much later, some lived in different cities. And besides, I had no idea if Mr. Curiosity had been a local, national, or syndicated broadcast. But as more time passed, and I grew older, presumably wiser, and a lot more paranoid, I began to wonder why I was the only one who ever remembered watching Mr. Curiosity ride his rocket-train—knees high and wobbly—across the dull linoleum of a sound stage.

Once, while browsing in a B. Dalton’s, I found a coffee-table book called How Sweet It Was, which purported to be the most comprehensive compendium of every television show that aired up until the time of its publication. It was thick and cyclopedic in appearance, and as I picked it up, I was reminded of the show that none of my friends remembered watching. I went to the table of contents, confident I could solve the mystery of my forgotten show. The book was divided into chapters which listed shows by type—variety, westerns, sit-coms, quiz shows, and of course, children’s programming. In the back pages, I noted an exhaustive index.

This should take care of business, I thought, as I flipped through the book, seeking vindication.

But I was wrong—there was not a single mention of Mr. Curiosity within the book’s six hundred-plus pages. Nothing. I spent more than a hour, standing at the bargain table, carefully perusing the pages, studying each photograph and caption. Was it possible, I had the title confused? Had some network Suit changed the name of the show when it went into syndication?

No. And no.

That prompted me to deepen my search, and in those pre-Internet days, it wasn’t easy. Not every neighborhood library had the reference volumes that would contain the definitive information I craved. I tried alternate resources such as universities and their repositories of popular culture, museums of technology, and even letters to various television “pioneers.” This took time, and progress proved grindingly slow. Years passed, filled with the obligations and obstacles of life—job, bills, wife, kids (you know the drill)—and my quest took a backseat to lots of other things. But I didn’t quit, and by the time “to google” had become a verb form found in any contemporary dictionary, I was all but convinced there was no record anywhere of Mr. Curiosity.

So what was really going on? If there had never been such a show, the only sensible explanation didn’t seem terribly appealing to me—I had hallucinated the entire program. Could I have been so creatively loony at such a young age?

No way. Impossible.

Gradually, despite any supporting evidence, I dismissed the notion I’d imagined Mr. Curiosity. I knew I’d seen the show; it had been real.

I began treating its existence the same way I did gravity—I knew it existed, but couldn’t really prove it, so I just stopped thinking about it.

* * *

Things went along like that for years. I stopped counting. But it all changed when I was reading an anthology of short stories.

In one of them, a character waxed fondly of lost innocence and made a passing, quasiliterary reference to old television programs being the techno-equivalent of Biblical parables or other cultural mythologies. His exact words: “Is it possible our Winky Dink or Mr. Curiosity will become the Aesopian lessons of a stainless steel future?”

While not exactly the poetic prose of Bradbury, the line struck me with the force of a Martian heat-ray. And its single, searing message covered me in its smoking ash: This guy knows!

My hands trembled as I tried to keep my place on the page. Other, less pleasant sensations included my tongue turning dry and thick, my eyes stinging. I felt a swell of abyss-staring fear rise and fall within me. I was panicking, and I wasn’t even sure why.

I calmed myself by planning my next step.

The writer’s name was Vincent Manzara, and while not one of my favorites, I knew his work well enough to know he’d been at his business for a while now. Certainly long enough to have remembered a show called Mr. Curiosity. The guy has a website for email, but I wanted to talk to him.

The publisher was a small press in Maryland. They had a website and a phone number on the dust jacket. There was only one thing I could do. After bugging the publishers, I tracked down the editor of the book in Ohio, and who, after some badgering, gave me the contact info on Manzara who also lived in Maryland, a couple of hours from me in central Pennsylvania.

Piece of cake.

* * *

“You know,” said Manzara. “In one sense, I’m not at all surprised to hear from you. And in another ...”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind talking about this.”

“No, not at all. I mean, you’re not the first, actually.”

“What? How many others?”

He tried to laugh, but he sounded nervous. “Well, I don’t know. But a woman from Michigan sent me an email about two weeks ago—all freaked out because ... well you know why ...”

“So there’s three of us?”

“So far. I guess I put that line in the story as a kind of bait. I wasn’t sure it would have any effect, so I was really shocked when I got her note. That got me thinking if there’s two of us, maybe there’s more.”

“And here I am.”

“Yeah,” said Manzara. “But you know what—now that I know there’s more of us, I actually feel worse than when I was feeling like I was the only one.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m kind of scared myself.”

“Do you know why you’re scared?”

I thought about that for a minute. “No, but I can’t help the feeling.”

Manzara paused, and I could detect a vacuum in the phone line, as if there were some other entity hanging silent in the space between our words, sucking up all the energy.