1956 Zenith Royal

Having never been married, I don’t think it is a stretch to say I have an aversion to relationships. On the other hand, I didn’t mind the odd entanglement. The woman who I now wanted to be entangled with had recently been divorced. I had pursued this woman spectacularly unsuccessfully before she got married and now providence, conveniently disguised as a cheating husband, was giving me another kick at the proverbial can.

I often complain to Allie that things never seem to fall into my lap - and when they do, they are invariably accompanied by a kick in the groin - but in this instance I had to admit that things were looking sunny in Floradelphia.

To begin with, she reached out to me. Now it was not the first time a woman had made the first move, but the two previous times they had been calling from American Express and Visa respectively. Plus, she was coming to me. She was going to spend the winter in Boca. In a community not five minutes from my own. And to top it off, not only did she not know anyone in Florida other than her aged aunts, but she had sworn off dating apps and any sort of fix ups.

As my late father used to say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And I, after a long, long wait, was finally the man with only one eye.

Lewberg, who had been around during my first falls and fails, said he was very excited.

“I know you are going to screw it up,” he said, “the fun is going to be watching just how.”

So, this woman and I started dating. I say dating, but I may be taking poetic license with the word because although what we were doing had all the appearances of dating, it really wasn’t dating at all. Put another way, ever so delicately, I may have been the king of the land, but I was definitely not collecting any taxes.

Now the problems and issues she may have had with me in this department are no doubt too long to list or to mention, but since the theme of all these stories are radios, let us, for the sake of argument, say that her number one issue was my radios.

While there are radios in nearly every room in my house, the room where they are the most prominent is my bedroom. On the far wall, I have constructed a floor to ceiling shelf all filled with radios. It is one of my favorite places in the world.

This woman said the room made her uncomfortable. It was a constant reminder she was dating a man who was a little bit off. Needless to say, I would have been quite open to any other room. My mind once even wandered to the prospect of the golf cart in the garage. But no, she said, if this was going to work out, she would have to come to terms with the fact I collected radios. It’s not so much that she didn’t like the radios. It’s just that she didn’t like the fact that anyone could or would ever want to do such a thing. It wasn’t that she was bemused - she was downright embarrassed. In the meantime, the coffers of the kingdom were bare. I didn’t mind striking out a second time - god knows I was no stranger to the swing and the miss - but why lay the blame of the ‘no lay’ on these poor radios? I was ready to throw in the towel and the tubes when came a glimmer of hope. It came, as luck would have it, in the form of a radio. You know how a flu vaccine is sometimes made with part of the same flu? Well I was about to inoculate her with a dose of Zenith.

I had bought this Zenith Royal Transistor on eBay and the seller was telling me what a great deal I got even though I had just paid him what he was asking and hadn’t bargained at all. He was a very nice person and emailed me every day to give me the status of the box. But he kept going over and over about what a great deal I got and I kinda sensed he was having seller’s remorse. I get how you can get attached to an item like that. So, I offered to ship it back. No hard feelings. But he said no, no, he just was letting me know what a great deal I was getting because both the radio and leather case were in mint shape. So, then I wrote back how ironic it was because I didn’t even keep the cases. And he said, ‘what do you mean?’ And I said, ‘well, I only collect the radios, not the cases.’

The case, he said, was mint. I gently told him I didn’t collect cases.

I kinda thought he would just cancel the order and ask me to ship it back but instead, he asked that, if I wasn’t keeping it, would I mind shipping the case back.

He was pretty nice about it so, even though it was a pretty weird request, it was really no skin off my, is it nose, so I agreed. This woman I was not really dating had not said anything as crazy as ‘it’s either the radios or me,’ but it seems I had given her the impression that I was done with radios and in fact had started to, as we collectors say, thin out my collection. Now I’m not sure where she got that impression but I have heard of many a monarch who literally lost their minds because they were not collecting taxes. I’m just saying.

And so, king or not, one eye or not, I began to treat the arrival of packages containing radios, packages whose frequency if anything increased, as a bit of a covert operation. Luckily, my sharing of my golf cart pseudo fantasy proved to be a blessing in disguise because she now avoided the garage like the bubonic plague. I was disposing of cardboard boxes, much like Tim Robbins in Shawshank, in different recycling bins on the street. The new radios I tucked away on shelves behind the paint cans.

Every once in a while, I would remove a radio from the shelf in my bedroom and announce, “just sold another one,” then stow it away in the garage. It might have been my imagination, but I felt the hugs and kisses, such as they were, were increasing in intensity. It was only a matter of time until, I’m just going to go ahead and say it, no more euphemisms, that we were going to have sex in the radio room.

And then she caught me.

It was the Zenith transistor. I had brought it into the house only to see, for a moment, how it would look on the shelf. Also, I was looking for some tape so I could send back the case.

That’s when she caught me red-handed.

There was a moment of silence and I prepared for the worse. Then she said, “is that leather?” Then she said, “oh my god, that case is sooo cute!”

Then she said, “why did you never tell me about those cases?”

If I had been paying attention, I might have noticed that transistor radio leather case “sooo cute,” was not the same as Louis Vuitton leather purse “sooooooooo cute.”

But I wasn’t paying attention.

So, I didn’t ship back the case. The seller gave me a one-star review, complete with a very long harangue about how badly I treated cases and how nobody should deal with me.

Which would have been all fine and worth it if she hadn’t started dating a Miami Heat player a few days later.

Turns out, it wasn’t the radios after all.

I got my second eye back, and although I still had no taxes, I had a really nice view of my radios.

The End