An early writing from Santo Domingo

Television Vampire, part one

When I first looked at it, the wires weren’t hooked up properly, so it appeared that I didn’t have use of the TV. Somewhere deep in my soul, I longed for it, but I was outwardly happy, as I wouldn’t be bothered by it. Ever since that long, strange night in the summer of 1991, when scenes of camp were etched deep in my brain, the television vampire held a mysterious sway over me whenever I looked into its eyes. It could take hold of me in a flash, and when I finally came to my senses, hours had passed. And so, I was glad to have the TV rendered dormant by the mysterious sunshine of electronic incompatibility.
After a few days, I decided to tempt fate and play around with the cables to see what would happen. As the menu popped up in Spanish, I was a little tense. Surely, I had studied Spanish for years, and I had been speaking it (more or less) in Spain, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Kansas, Florida, and New York for a few years, too. But I was still hesitant to fumble around with those things, as the necessary technical terms were not yet in my mental dictionary. What the hell does _____mean? The closest English cognate is ______. Still, I was no closer to animation than I was before.
I made my guesses, punching up, down, menu, enter, or whatever I thought might awaken the creature. I was starting to work more quickly now, as I learned what worked and what led to a technological dead end. After a minute or two longer, a flicker of light. I stretched my neck out to look at the back and extended my sleeveless arm to manipulate a wire. With a flick of the wrist, the dark screen suddenly lit up. A channel came in clearly. In that slightly aggressive voice which middle-aged male talk show hosts use in this country, the one which renders the interlocutor quiet and passive, the Dominican man on TV was telling me something about la patria. His charcoal and white pin-striped tie on a pastel yellow background was much louder than he was, as it violently screamed at the beige suit which had already begun swallowing its lower quarters. It was on.
I slowly retracted my body from the TV, with my head centering over my shoulders and my arm dropping limply to my side. Like a person in the arms of a lover during their first tryst, I lowered myself to the edge of the bed. My spine relaxed and reclined, and my head was gently placed on the pillow. My whole body stretched out before me, basking in the glow of the TV. In those last moments of consciousness, my thumb slid over the soft plastic buttons of remote control while my other digits curved around its backside. I remember pressing up just before I succumbed to the allure of the TV.