(Photo by Jeff Baker)

Steven First Enters the Tower and Views the Magical City

by Jeff Baker

I turned fifteen years old in the Summer of 1974 and spent most of July flat on my back in a hospital bed on the seventh floor. I wasn’t in for anything life-threatening but I wasn’t going to be running after baseballs for a while.

I wasn’t that bored, Mom & Dad kept me supplied with comic books , I got to watch a lot of TV. Lots of game shows back then and local reruns of “I Dream of Jeannie” at four in the afternoon. And my older brother slipped me a crumbling paperback of something called “Topper,” presumably because it had a cover drawing showing a topless lady in panties (her top turned discreetly away from the reader!) I hid that one from Mom &b Dad.

“Don’t show the Folks, Stevie,” my Brother said with a conspiratorial wink.

Then, of course, there was the Tower.

The Tower was a large radio-T. V. antenna sticking out of the seeming forest of front-yard trees in the neighborhoods that stretched out across the city, and which I could see if I leaned over and angled my head just right.

I couldn’t miss it. It was at least a mile away but it dominated the view from my big window. It was black in the early morning light, then when the mid-morning sun hit it the Tower became a wonder of red and white etched against the blue sky.

In that month of TV., comics and tests watching the Tower as it changed through the day was as fascinating a show as the tube could offer.

I would watch it sink into the dusk it’s red lights flashed into the darkness.

And in the darkness, I would sleep and dream, lying there under hospital sheets, that I was climbing the tower in the dark, the lights smiling at me and then I would reach the top and sit down on the large, flat surface and survey the glittering city and the blue-white stripe of river and drink soda out of Styrofoam cups with my Brother and a couple of the interns and Granddad (who had passed away two years before.) We were all on top of the tower somehow and we partied the dream-night away.

In the decades since, I caught a glimpse of the Tower from time to time, not looming as large from a distance viewed from the ground. But one afternoon I drove to the seedy neighborhood where the tower stood and I saw it up close for the first time. It’s base protected by a fence topped with barbed wire on a lot surrounded by boarded-up houses. It hadn’t aged. Sturdy. Strong. From a Summer when I was not. I glanced upward and shielded my eyes from the Sun’s glare. The Tower was still red and white slipping into dark shadow on the ground around the trees.

As I drove away I heard in my mind the echoes of that long-ago dream party atop a tower that touched the stars in my sleep.

—end—

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although this story is largely fictionalized, most of it really happened to me in the Summer of (I think) 1974. The picture is the actual tower I saw in those long-ago days. And it was my folks who got me the copy of “Topper,” which I still have, including the racy cover! —–jeff