No Smoke, Radio

When the smoke detector chirps to let me know the battery is low it isn't inconvenient, it's existential. A refutation of my place in the modern world, for what may be a simple act of handiness to others is for me a confusing, soul-diminishing ordeal. 

Do I have a spare nine volt battery, and if so, what drawer is it hidden in? And even if I have one, will I be able to get the old one out with my little cookie and crayon fingers, and if I can, will I be able to get the new one back in, and most of all why do things like this only happen at 4:30 in the morning? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate smoke detection as a concept. About seven years ago, Marlene, my hoarding, vicodin addicted neighbor, nodded out with a cigarette, setting fire to her junk shop of an apartment. I was sleeping, and my smoke detector didn't just start chirping, it started wailing like it was scared for its life! I woke to the smell of smoke, opened my front door and a wall of flame came flying at me. It was terrifying. I ran out of the back door in my shorts, then ran back in, grabbed my laptop and ran back out. (That's when you really know you're a writer). So yes, I have firsthand experience with the glories of smoke detection, but I'd still rather live in a time where men wear hats, people drive Packards and Benny Goodman is on the radio. At least if I died in a fire in 1940 there'd be some scuff-shoed kid on the corner, waving the Morning Telegraph, cryin' "Extra, extra, read all about it-- Screenwriter Has Third Act Cut Short by Blaze!"

It's actually chirping now as I write this. I took the old battery out, and grabbed one I had found in a multi-drawer pre-dawn scramble. After fifteen minutes I was ready to cry, an old bald kook on a chair, groping at the ceiling, balls hanging down like a church bell. Then I realized the smoke detector wasn’t even the problem, the real issue being a loud, mystery triple-chirp coming from my bedroom wall. This happened once before in my downstairs hallway. That time I called Vance, the handyman I found a few years back on Task Rabbit. He came over and replaced the smoke detector, but it turned out not to be the smoke detector but the mystery chirp. We stethoscoped around trying to find the source, Vance talking nonstop about his relationship and misplacing every tool he picked up (he has never worked here when he didn't have to come back ten minutes later for something he left). Finally, we realized it was emanating from within the wall. We weren't about to bust up the plaster, and so were left befuddled. Then the sound left as mysteriously as it came. And now I've got that situation again, but in my bedroom, and because I assumed it was the smoke detector, I diddled around with it, and now IT'S making a strange sound, but just a simple one-chirp ribbit, not a blaring triptych squawk!

I'm pretty sane these days, really. When something like this happens, I quickly recover from my ineffectual doom state and see it as a chance for story. But there is something about technology and all problems "woodshop" that utterly undoes me. I have shed more tears in the last thirty years over printer malfunctions than the deaths of loved ones. In fact, there is something about printer problems specifically that sends me straight to desperation. To have written something that matters, and the glowing hope of seeing it on an actual page, only to have the rug pulled out from under you, the printer gods sniggering viciously. It makes me want to hurl myself out the window. A kindergarten level of grief.

Give me garlic, beans and a Parmesan rind, a blank page or an amorous woman and I will show you a thing or two. But ask me for handiness and you will get a paralyzed, deaf mute. You want me to write a limerick about a smoke detector, I'm your guy. You need me to fix one, forget it.

There once was a wonderful bloke
Who struggled with detectors of smoke
He tussled and toiled
’Til his undies were soiled
But it was the wall not the smoke that was broke

P.S. Thoroughly defeated, I had to have my ex-wife Karen come over and put the battery in. She told Zoila “Soy el hombre de la casa.”