When I was little I would cover my ears so that I wouldn't have to listen to the man with the red tie talk because every time he would he did it in this detached voice, robotic like. It was always the same thing. Someone was killed. A person missing. A new drug was found on the streets right next to some elementary school. Back then, I didn't know the difference between a homicide and a suicide. Back then, there were just the dead ones.
It was just me and my mom at the time, nobody else. A small apartment. A few dishes. A cat who would sometimes visit me. I got in the habit of looking out at the window and watching this man with short black hair carrying his trash to the dumpster. He was a tall man. Stocky. Carried himself very well. In my head I thought of him as one of the good guys, the ones that were better than the dead ones on television.
My mother hated that I thought about death all the time. She wanted me to focus on coloring. She would buy a box of Crayola every week along with a new coloring book. I picked out the colors that I'd used each morning. Green was too bright. I'd seen it every day outside, whenever my mother would take me to the park and we feed the birds that flew by the bench we sat at. Then there was yellow and orange, two colors with the same personality, only one was darker than the other. I hardly ever used yellow though. Orange was a much better one especially when it came to the sun. Part of that was because I loved watching the sunset before bed. It was also another color which again was too bright.
Then I came across red, which became all too familiar during my younger years. I've seen too much red on the television, so much so that I avoided it like the plague. Whenever I would sit in front of the television, before the man with the red tie would say the ominous words, 'warning, this image may be too graphic for younger viewers', I would get this pain in my stomach, as if someone punched me in the gut. I would come across images of men bleeding on the forehead, women and children being carried off on gurneys, fire trucks and ambulances stacked up next to each other in front of houses that were too much like mine.
Then the image would turn into a woman who was bathing in the shower, only her head and shoulders showing. She would be wiping herself down with soap and a voice would talk over her. The voice was smooth and quiet, it said things like, 'this soap product will give you excellent skin' and blah, blah, blah. Then another image would take its place. It would be one of another man but with a different color tie, saying things that I couldn't understand but knew where somehow important. My mother would always say that whenever someone would speak in a loud voice that what they were saying mattered. It may've not mattered to me, but it did matter to someone, most of the time it would someone who was older than me.
After a while I became glued to the television. I sat there as each new image said something new. I didn't care whether I understood what was being said, I only cared about the pictures. A hamburger with numbers on the bottom of the screen, the dollar sign right next to them. A Nike shoe being worn by one of the famous basketball players I seen every now again on television. The pictures were tantalizing. I couldn't get enough of them. My mother had to literally pull me away from the television because I was in front of it for so long throughout the day.
It was the pictures that came with the news which scared me the most. There was something about them that made me feel ill. A picture of a body part covered in red blood. A crowd of kids about my age huddled together in front of a school for a long time. These images began to drown me. I felt like I needed to open a window and stare back outside and wait for the man with the short black hair to come out and throw out his trash. He and I were like creatures from two different planets who didn't knew the other had existed. By the time I was ready to take a bath at the end of each day I was covered in dirt and a substance that was transmitted to me from the television. I couldn't explain it really, but my mother later said that it was the inevitable truth about humanity and all its recklessness which covered me from head to toe. It was more than any sort of shampoo could take away.
