MTV, Brezhnev, and Leukemia
David Mainelli
When my dad yelled “Luke” from the living room, I knew it was either to come straighten the antenna or change the TV to channel three so he could watch the six o’clock news with Tom Brokaw—the pride of the Midwest—and I didn’t complain. The days of him hollering my name to do such chores and justifying it by the fact that he worked blue-collar labor all day to support the family were nearly over. This was the week. It was finally here. We were getting cable.
My awkward body could barely hold its excitement as I turned the channel dial on the huge RCA console until the fizzing sound of the news station’s jingle filled the room. The television was more furniture than screen and resembled a monitor from NASA headquarters.
I reached for the antenna to make the picture less agitated.
“Hold it.”
The nightly hand-to-hand—or rather, hand-to-antenna—combat was underway. Dad would’ve let me stand there all night using my awkward preteen frame to boost the signal if Mom hadn’t drawn a line along time ago. Everyone knew back then that kids’ bones conducted the waves, improving TV signals. But no eleven-year-old was going to stand there like a living statue while their dad watched Tom Brokaw.
“A little higher…perfect. Now, don’t move.”
I squinted, signaling my discomfort.
“Just hold on,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Reagan and Brev-vevv-rev—whatever his name is—are having talks on medium-range missiles. Big stuff. Could change the world.”
Seeing a chance to impress him—a rare opportunity as of late, with my playing time on the baseball team more limited while my older brother, who was twice as good a player as I was, had been diagnosed with leukemia two months earlier—I nodded and said, “It’s Brezhnev, and the talks are called the START talks. We learned about it in school last year.”
But his face didn’t light up at all. Instead, every line sagged with disappointment, as if I’d just reminded him of something he didn’t want to recall. It was the same look he had after he asked me to help run a long board through the table saw; my job being to hold it steady, but not move it, an impossible task that no engineer or a dead person could muster. I flashed a weak grin, still holding the antenna like some poor sap in a science experiment. I hadn’t thought it through. My dad didn’t like being “corrected,” especially by his own kid, and his expression made it clear how he felt. He mumbled, “Little know-it-all, if you think you’re so smart, why don’t you get a job and support the family?”
“It’s just dumb school stuff,” I said, backpedaling out of it as fast as I could.
When I let go of the antenna, the screen fuzzed over, and disappointment instantly appeared on his face. He waved me away, and I hurried back to my room and my Nerf hoop, where Elliott and I played countless games of HORSE. It was also where Elliott told me he had cancer.
When Elliott told me he had leukemia, I biked to the public library to learn more about it. But the information was too complicated. The only part I understood was that people with leukemia had a five-year survival rate of 52%. So, if I had the courage to answer my father’s question that day, I would have told him, “No. I don’t know everything,” and maybe I would’ve asked if Elliott would be alive to watch the cable when it was installed. As it turned out, Elliott would see cable TV, but only through Christmas and some of the spring.
No one in the city had cable yet. I wasn’t even entirely sure what getting cable meant. I only knew it was a big deal. “It was the dawn of a new age,” the man from the cable company told my mother when he stopped by earlier that summer, standing on the front porch. I sat in the chair near the door, listening and cooing at all the features. I couldn’t believe she convinced my dad to do it, but he liked TV and hated the constant lousy picture, which might have been the biggest selling point, not getting all the channels. She thought that, with everything we were going through with Elliott, it would be a good thing for the family.
My friends were jealous that my family was among the first in Omaha to get it.
I called my friend, Chad. “This is the week!”
“You’re so lucky,” he said.
Everyone I told echoed the sentiment. My family wasn’t wealthy, and I never felt lucky until this. I had plenty of friends with nicer homes and way more things than I did, so in my mind, getting cable first was a small victory for the regular guy. Other kids always had the newest video game consoles and games, or their families were members of the huge private rec centers. We’d only bought a second, thirteen-inch black-and-white TV for the kitchen that summer.
“Now, Luke,” my mom warned that morning and every day for a week. “This doesn’t mean you can sit around watching TV all the time. They say it can make you go blond.” Blond was what I thought she said. I scratched my head. I pictured myself with blond hair. When she heard me repeating the “blond” line to Chad over the phone, she ran over to correct me. I would later hear her and Dad laughing about it from my room, in their bed.
My parents’ room was right next to mine. That summer, my friend Danny spent the night. When we woke up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons, I opened my bedroom door to head to the kitchen. Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate—depending on whether you worry more about immediate shame or the need for future therapy—I walked out first. As I headed past my parents' open door and peeked in, I saw my dad on top of my mom, face-to-face, humping like a red-ass baboon. For some reason, my parents didn’t think to close the door. I quickly turned around to Danny and, loud enough for everyone in the house to hear, said, “Hey, will you grab my backpack?”
Danny looked at me with one eye closed, still half-asleep, and confused that I would want my school bag on a Saturday. He went to grab it anyway, and in the meantime, the door of my parents’ room slammed shut. I thought about reporting them to social services for some Geneva War crime, but I mostly liked them as guardians, so I internalized it and kept the shame inside like a good Catholic kid.
And okay, she meant blind, not blond. TV was supposedly bad for your eyes. But then again, so was masturbation, and both were risks most preteen boys were more than willing to take.
We had no idea exactly when the cable was to arrive. It could be any time that month. I came home Monday from riding bikes along the Papio. “Cable come?” “No.” I came home Tuesday from the pool: “Cable come?” Wednesday: “Cable come?” No. But my mom wanted to tell me something.
“Sit down.”
I sat down in the same chair where I spied on the cable guy explaining all the features of CableTV.
She sat across from me on the sofa. “Luke, I have some bad news.”
“Okay.” The last time she said those words, I was told my brother would be in the hospital for a spell.
“Kelly is going to a different school next year.”
“Oh.”
She paused. “They can’t afford it anymore. He’s going to Westside.”
Westside was the public school. The idea that we were wealthier than another family hit me. And the fact that Kelly hadn’t said anything felt weird.
I called him and asked him about it. He didn’t say much, so I didn’t force the issue. I felt bad. All our friends were at St. Leo’s. He said he had a few friends from his neighborhood, and we would still be friends, but we both knew it was hard. I didn’t stay close to my neighborhood friends after I went to school.
I came home from my friend Chad’s house around five that Thursday after a day of playing Centipede on his Atari. I went straight to my room until dinner. An hour passed, and my dad hadn’t called me to change the channel or to be the antenna. My mom hadn’t come to see how my day was or find out what I did. Odd. Mom was an investigator—a real Cagney and Lacey. She had tough questions for me when I came home, and if I didn’t have my story straight, she would get to the bottom of it and find out what went down. So with no questions and little interest in my day, I ventured out to see what was happening.
I passed the family room and saw my father in his chair watching TV. A commercial ran about a bank. I could tell he hadn’t taken a shower. Unusual. His routine was off. Suddenly, the TV channel changed. I froze. Then again. Yet my little sister was nowhere to be seen. I focused on my dad’s hand, which he held like a magic wand. I almost walked into the wall as I rounded the corner into the kitchen, when the first thing I saw was the big silver box on the counter next to the 13” TV with the word OAK next to a glowing red number 23. The cable box was wider than the television.
I threw my hands up. “We got it!” The scream came out in a high pitch, but I had no time for shame on the vocals being destroyed by puberty.
“Yes,” my mom replied, as if it wasn’t a big deal.
“And you didn’t say anything?”
“Was I supposed to?” She set a pot on the stove and turned the burner on.
I sprinted back to the family room to find my father frantically flipping channels, and leaped onto the sofa perpendicular to him. Without facing me, and on cue, he took the moment to comment about my running. “Maybe you would've played more if you’d run that hard this baseball season.”
There was no time for his sports takedowns. I ignored him and peppered him with the relevant questions the moment called for. “What was that? Who was that? “What channel was that?” Does the remote work on radio waves? How many channels are there? Is that the clearest picture you’ve ever seen? But the man’s selective hearing was an art form, and he ignored every question as if I’d died, become a ghost, and communication was helpless. He eventually broke down, and without flinching or removing his gaze from the TV, he reached his arm out with a long, laminated card at the end of it. I ran over, snatched it, and ran back to my seat like a squirrel with an acorn, holding the card in front of me. Thirty-five channels. That was so many. But anything more than four was going to be monumental. There could have been five, and I would’ve been impressed.
Dad was excited, too, constantly flipping the channel, a habit he would never stop. He already had his favorite and announced that the news channel called CNN was the cream of the crop. “Now we can really stay updated on those talks with the Russians and Brezhnev,” he said confidently with a lot of sarcasm.
The next day, Elliott went into the hospital for a three-day stay. His white blood cell count was low, at least that’s what they told me. I wasn’t allowed to visit him, but he called a few times to check how my baseball game went, make sure I was watching our little sister, and to make sure I wasn’t causing any trouble. He kept promising he would be home soon and couldn’t wait to watch cartoons and some movies with me on the new cable system. Saturday morning cartoon time was a ritual we kept for many years. He would tell me his favorite Looney Tunes episodes, usually featuring Daffy Duck, as they played, and I would share the best new ones like Pac-Man. We’d make two giant bowls of Sugar Crisp or another sugary cereal and laugh until he had to leave for practice. Once he got sick and started treatments, those times became fewer. The last time was a month ago, and he slept the entire morning. I appreciated his effort to still spend time with me.
Now with Cable TV, movies and shows were on all the time, and he wasn’t here to enjoy it. He asked how it was, and I told him it was okay. Nothing too special, but I think he knew I was lying because he laughed at that. I took every chance I could to brag about it to my friends, though. For months, I would have something that almost everyone else didn’t, and they all wanted to come to my house because of it. Eventually, cable spread quickly across the city, but for a few months, I knew what the rich kids felt like.
School was starting in a few weeks, and we went on our annual Kmart trip for clothes and supplies. Elliott had been home for a week, but was really hurting from the chemotherapy. I ran into Mark Fortune, another classmate, at the store, and it turned out his family was also a cable pilot household, so we discussed the different channels and the shows we liked by the dressing rooms while our moms talked about school stuff. We whispered about the Playboy channel and attempts at grabbing glimpses of nipples between the horizontal flipping lines. But then he said something that caught me off guard.
“So, are you excited for the new music video channel coming?”
“What’s that?”
“MTV. Comes on Friday at midnight. They are going to show videos of all the songs from the radio.”
“Huh.” My mind went to watching bands playing on stage.
If I didn’t think it was a big deal at that moment in Kmart, I soon would. That night, it was on the evening news and CNN. Dad grumbled through the entire segment about how the channel would ruin music. The DJs talked about it daily on the radio as if it would be the biggest thing to hit the music world since the Beatles. My friends and I stayed up late on the phone, listening to our radios, discussing what was playing on the local stations. I had to be a part of this new thing. And because our family had cable, I could be.
I first had to get my mother to agree to let me stay up the night MTV was set to come on the air. She was tired from dealing with Elliott all day, who was home but downstairs, sound asleep most of the time. I begged him to stay up and watch it with me, but he said, “Oh, little buddy, I want to. But I don’t have it in me.”
Mom warned that I would still be going to church the next morning without complaint. “If you bitch,” she said. “This will be the last time you stay up late for a long time.”
I sat in the kitchen with my feet on a second chair while on the phone with Kelly until he couldn’t take it anymore and went to sleep. I wanted him to be part of it, but he didn’t feel excited because he didn't see the point. His mom wouldn’t let him spend the night because he had to go to his grandma’s the next day. We hung up at 10:30. I still had a long way to go, or so I thought. I flipped around, only occasionally turning back to channel 31 in case they put something on the channel that MTV was supposed to come on. Every time, it was just static. Mostly, I just watched the Spotlight movie channel, which seemed to show whatever they could get their hands on. The Spotlight marquee banner and jingle came on more than the movies did, with neon cars and people coming toward me, as if they were going to fly out of the screen.
Spotlight
We’re shining bright
Day and night
We light up the Stars
(Dramatic pause)
Spotlight!
A scene appeared with a guy on a pay phone. I couldn’t see his whole face as he said in a creepy voice, “I’M GOING TO COMMIT... MUUUURRRDER.” Then, a voiceover said, “He only strikes at midnight. And he means it.” I lowered the volume so my mother wouldn’t know I was watching weird stuff. Coming up next: New Year’s Evil.
Another preview. When you got that 9 to 5 feeling...
My phone rang. I picked it up immediately so my parents wouldn’t think it was a party. It was Mark Fortune. “It’s going to come on in two minutes! You ready?”
“What? You said midnight?” I flipped to channel 31. Static. Whew.
“Haven’t you been listening to the radio? Midnight Eastern time!”
Thank God Mark called. If I’d stayed up and missed the whole “coming-on-the-air,” I would've been so angry at the world. Everyone I knew had been told by me that I would be witnessing this event.
“Oh man, thanks.”
“This is so cool; talk to you tomorrow.” Mark hung up.
I stared at the snowy screen, waiting. Was I excited that a new generational-changing media landscape was beginning, or was I just happy to see something most kids I knew couldn’t participate in? Probably, the latter. And just as I finished that thought, the screen suddenly changed to a solid square with lines drawn vertically.
It changed.
Out of nowhere, a space rocket appeared with an MTV logo in the corner. A voice came over the speaker: “Two seconds away from switching from the redundancy [something, something]… T-MINUS 15, 14, 13, 12, 11,” Holy wow, is the world ending or a music channel coming on? Should I wake up Elliott? I really wanted to, but he didn’t look well earlier. “4, we’ve gone for main engine start…” The rocket roared as it lifted off the ground. My stomach did somersaults. I felt a grin on my face, but why was I anxious? It was a contradiction of nervousness and awesomeness all at once.
A loud, electric guitar riff sounded over my shitty 13” TV speaker, and I rued the fact that I made camp in the kitchen on the small TV for the first time. That was because it was by the phone. There was no switching now—no time. Another voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, Rock and Roll.” The MTV flag grew larger, and I assumed it changed colors as the shades of gray on the little screen went darker, then lighter. The drums were loud, banging over the guitar.
Then it all stopped.
The moon over rippling water played on the screen set to soft, pretty music. Four lines of text that would become ingrained in my head like my friends’ phone numbers, but not with specific words, rather a general feeling—words I would see for years to come—appeared on the bottom left of the screen: The Band Name. The Song Title. The Album Name. The Label.
And the first one ever:
The Buggles
“Video Killed the Radio Star”
The Age of Plastic
Island Records.
A child in red suspenders sat in front of a speaker as a man with a microphone sang in an altered voice. “We can’t rewind. We’ve gone too far; Video Killed the Radio Star.”
I watched in awe as it played out like a movie. A production all for the song? I wanted to call Mark Fortune back, but I worried it might be too late. I wanted to call all my friends. The moment was meant to be shared. Then sadness hit that Elliott was missing it.
The four lines came on again as the song ended. A white screen appeared for a moment; then, a video came on talking about the history of music.
In the beginning, there was music… blah blah blah.
Finally, the second music video:
Pat Benatar
“You Better Run”
Crimes of Passion
Chrysalis Records Inc.
Okay, I had the gist of it. The song ended. Wait. A man in a studio was talking, followed by others.
“Hi, I’m Alan Hunter.”
“I’m Martha Quinn.”
“Well, all right, I’m J.J. Jackson.”
“Hi, I’m Nina Blackwood.”
Another man with long, curly hair. “This is it. Welcome to MTV Music Television. I’m Mark Goodman. You’ll never look at Music the same way.”
And commercial. I was exhausted. The ad was for a three-ring binder called The Bulk. Please don’t remind me about school. Another commercial for “Superman 2.” A dumb commercial about Dolby Sound, and we’re back.
Rod Stewart
“She Won’t Dance With Me”
Foolish Behavior
Warner Brothers Records Inc.
Elliott loved Rod Stewart. He had several of his albums and cassettes in his room. I got up and opened the fridge to grab a bottle of Pepsi. I was preparing for a long night. But that changed when I shut the door, and my mom appeared like a ghost where the fridge door had been, with her arms on her hips, scaring all the music right back out of me.
“Okay. You saw it. Let’s get to bed.”
“But I’ve only seen two and a half videos?”
“And that’s plenty. You can watch it tomorrow. Come on, turn it off. Let’s go.”
“Mom.”
She said nothing. Which was worse than yelling. Speak, you demon-monster. Anything. And it might as well be something terrible as you rip yet another good thing from my youth. She wasn’t budging, so I turned the TV off just as another video came on:
The Who
“You Better You Bet”
Face Dances
Warner Brothers Records Inc.
She was right, though. I would watch the next day and the day after that.
That night, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, still buzzing. Sure, my dad, CNN, and school were all saying Brezhnev and Reagan were reshaping the world—but from where I was sitting, what I’d just witnessed felt bigger. MTV was going to change everything. I could feel it.
I’d tell Elliott every detail in the morning, and he’d listen with that quiet grin of his. We’d spend the coming months watching videos together on the color console, just the two of us.
And yeah, I was there when it happened, curled up in front of a little 13-inch black-and-white TV, but I was still there. I was one of the lucky ones.
~ ~ ~
March 2026
David Mainelli
When my dad yelled “Luke” from the living room, I knew it was either to come straighten the antenna or change the TV to channel three so he could watch the six o’clock news with Tom Brokaw—the pride of the Midwest—and I didn’t complain. The days of him hollering my name to do such chores and justifying it by the fact that he worked blue-collar labor all day to support the family were nearly over. This was the week. It was finally here. We were getting cable.
My awkward body could barely hold its excitement as I turned the channel dial on the huge RCA console until the fizzing sound of the news station’s jingle filled the room. The television was more furniture than screen and resembled a monitor from NASA headquarters.
I reached for the antenna to make the picture less agitated.
“Hold it.”
The nightly hand-to-hand—or rather, hand-to-antenna—combat was underway. Dad would’ve let me stand there all night using my awkward preteen frame to boost the signal if Mom hadn’t drawn a line along time ago. Everyone knew back then that kids’ bones conducted the waves, improving TV signals. But no eleven-year-old was going to stand there like a living statue while their dad watched Tom Brokaw.
“A little higher…perfect. Now, don’t move.”
I squinted, signaling my discomfort.
“Just hold on,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Reagan and Brev-vevv-rev—whatever his name is—are having talks on medium-range missiles. Big stuff. Could change the world.”
Seeing a chance to impress him—a rare opportunity as of late, with my playing time on the baseball team more limited while my older brother, who was twice as good a player as I was, had been diagnosed with leukemia two months earlier—I nodded and said, “It’s Brezhnev, and the talks are called the START talks. We learned about it in school last year.”
But his face didn’t light up at all. Instead, every line sagged with disappointment, as if I’d just reminded him of something he didn’t want to recall. It was the same look he had after he asked me to help run a long board through the table saw; my job being to hold it steady, but not move it, an impossible task that no engineer or a dead person could muster. I flashed a weak grin, still holding the antenna like some poor sap in a science experiment. I hadn’t thought it through. My dad didn’t like being “corrected,” especially by his own kid, and his expression made it clear how he felt. He mumbled, “Little know-it-all, if you think you’re so smart, why don’t you get a job and support the family?”
“It’s just dumb school stuff,” I said, backpedaling out of it as fast as I could.
When I let go of the antenna, the screen fuzzed over, and disappointment instantly appeared on his face. He waved me away, and I hurried back to my room and my Nerf hoop, where Elliott and I played countless games of HORSE. It was also where Elliott told me he had cancer.
When Elliott told me he had leukemia, I biked to the public library to learn more about it. But the information was too complicated. The only part I understood was that people with leukemia had a five-year survival rate of 52%. So, if I had the courage to answer my father’s question that day, I would have told him, “No. I don’t know everything,” and maybe I would’ve asked if Elliott would be alive to watch the cable when it was installed. As it turned out, Elliott would see cable TV, but only through Christmas and some of the spring.
No one in the city had cable yet. I wasn’t even entirely sure what getting cable meant. I only knew it was a big deal. “It was the dawn of a new age,” the man from the cable company told my mother when he stopped by earlier that summer, standing on the front porch. I sat in the chair near the door, listening and cooing at all the features. I couldn’t believe she convinced my dad to do it, but he liked TV and hated the constant lousy picture, which might have been the biggest selling point, not getting all the channels. She thought that, with everything we were going through with Elliott, it would be a good thing for the family.
My friends were jealous that my family was among the first in Omaha to get it.
I called my friend, Chad. “This is the week!”
“You’re so lucky,” he said.
Everyone I told echoed the sentiment. My family wasn’t wealthy, and I never felt lucky until this. I had plenty of friends with nicer homes and way more things than I did, so in my mind, getting cable first was a small victory for the regular guy. Other kids always had the newest video game consoles and games, or their families were members of the huge private rec centers. We’d only bought a second, thirteen-inch black-and-white TV for the kitchen that summer.
“Now, Luke,” my mom warned that morning and every day for a week. “This doesn’t mean you can sit around watching TV all the time. They say it can make you go blond.” Blond was what I thought she said. I scratched my head. I pictured myself with blond hair. When she heard me repeating the “blond” line to Chad over the phone, she ran over to correct me. I would later hear her and Dad laughing about it from my room, in their bed.
My parents’ room was right next to mine. That summer, my friend Danny spent the night. When we woke up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons, I opened my bedroom door to head to the kitchen. Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate—depending on whether you worry more about immediate shame or the need for future therapy—I walked out first. As I headed past my parents' open door and peeked in, I saw my dad on top of my mom, face-to-face, humping like a red-ass baboon. For some reason, my parents didn’t think to close the door. I quickly turned around to Danny and, loud enough for everyone in the house to hear, said, “Hey, will you grab my backpack?”
Danny looked at me with one eye closed, still half-asleep, and confused that I would want my school bag on a Saturday. He went to grab it anyway, and in the meantime, the door of my parents’ room slammed shut. I thought about reporting them to social services for some Geneva War crime, but I mostly liked them as guardians, so I internalized it and kept the shame inside like a good Catholic kid.
And okay, she meant blind, not blond. TV was supposedly bad for your eyes. But then again, so was masturbation, and both were risks most preteen boys were more than willing to take.
We had no idea exactly when the cable was to arrive. It could be any time that month. I came home Monday from riding bikes along the Papio. “Cable come?” “No.” I came home Tuesday from the pool: “Cable come?” Wednesday: “Cable come?” No. But my mom wanted to tell me something.
“Sit down.”
I sat down in the same chair where I spied on the cable guy explaining all the features of CableTV.
She sat across from me on the sofa. “Luke, I have some bad news.”
“Okay.” The last time she said those words, I was told my brother would be in the hospital for a spell.
“Kelly is going to a different school next year.”
“Oh.”
She paused. “They can’t afford it anymore. He’s going to Westside.”
Westside was the public school. The idea that we were wealthier than another family hit me. And the fact that Kelly hadn’t said anything felt weird.
I called him and asked him about it. He didn’t say much, so I didn’t force the issue. I felt bad. All our friends were at St. Leo’s. He said he had a few friends from his neighborhood, and we would still be friends, but we both knew it was hard. I didn’t stay close to my neighborhood friends after I went to school.
I came home from my friend Chad’s house around five that Thursday after a day of playing Centipede on his Atari. I went straight to my room until dinner. An hour passed, and my dad hadn’t called me to change the channel or to be the antenna. My mom hadn’t come to see how my day was or find out what I did. Odd. Mom was an investigator—a real Cagney and Lacey. She had tough questions for me when I came home, and if I didn’t have my story straight, she would get to the bottom of it and find out what went down. So with no questions and little interest in my day, I ventured out to see what was happening.
I passed the family room and saw my father in his chair watching TV. A commercial ran about a bank. I could tell he hadn’t taken a shower. Unusual. His routine was off. Suddenly, the TV channel changed. I froze. Then again. Yet my little sister was nowhere to be seen. I focused on my dad’s hand, which he held like a magic wand. I almost walked into the wall as I rounded the corner into the kitchen, when the first thing I saw was the big silver box on the counter next to the 13” TV with the word OAK next to a glowing red number 23. The cable box was wider than the television.
I threw my hands up. “We got it!” The scream came out in a high pitch, but I had no time for shame on the vocals being destroyed by puberty.
“Yes,” my mom replied, as if it wasn’t a big deal.
“And you didn’t say anything?”
“Was I supposed to?” She set a pot on the stove and turned the burner on.
I sprinted back to the family room to find my father frantically flipping channels, and leaped onto the sofa perpendicular to him. Without facing me, and on cue, he took the moment to comment about my running. “Maybe you would've played more if you’d run that hard this baseball season.”
There was no time for his sports takedowns. I ignored him and peppered him with the relevant questions the moment called for. “What was that? Who was that? “What channel was that?” Does the remote work on radio waves? How many channels are there? Is that the clearest picture you’ve ever seen? But the man’s selective hearing was an art form, and he ignored every question as if I’d died, become a ghost, and communication was helpless. He eventually broke down, and without flinching or removing his gaze from the TV, he reached his arm out with a long, laminated card at the end of it. I ran over, snatched it, and ran back to my seat like a squirrel with an acorn, holding the card in front of me. Thirty-five channels. That was so many. But anything more than four was going to be monumental. There could have been five, and I would’ve been impressed.
Dad was excited, too, constantly flipping the channel, a habit he would never stop. He already had his favorite and announced that the news channel called CNN was the cream of the crop. “Now we can really stay updated on those talks with the Russians and Brezhnev,” he said confidently with a lot of sarcasm.
The next day, Elliott went into the hospital for a three-day stay. His white blood cell count was low, at least that’s what they told me. I wasn’t allowed to visit him, but he called a few times to check how my baseball game went, make sure I was watching our little sister, and to make sure I wasn’t causing any trouble. He kept promising he would be home soon and couldn’t wait to watch cartoons and some movies with me on the new cable system. Saturday morning cartoon time was a ritual we kept for many years. He would tell me his favorite Looney Tunes episodes, usually featuring Daffy Duck, as they played, and I would share the best new ones like Pac-Man. We’d make two giant bowls of Sugar Crisp or another sugary cereal and laugh until he had to leave for practice. Once he got sick and started treatments, those times became fewer. The last time was a month ago, and he slept the entire morning. I appreciated his effort to still spend time with me.
Now with Cable TV, movies and shows were on all the time, and he wasn’t here to enjoy it. He asked how it was, and I told him it was okay. Nothing too special, but I think he knew I was lying because he laughed at that. I took every chance I could to brag about it to my friends, though. For months, I would have something that almost everyone else didn’t, and they all wanted to come to my house because of it. Eventually, cable spread quickly across the city, but for a few months, I knew what the rich kids felt like.
School was starting in a few weeks, and we went on our annual Kmart trip for clothes and supplies. Elliott had been home for a week, but was really hurting from the chemotherapy. I ran into Mark Fortune, another classmate, at the store, and it turned out his family was also a cable pilot household, so we discussed the different channels and the shows we liked by the dressing rooms while our moms talked about school stuff. We whispered about the Playboy channel and attempts at grabbing glimpses of nipples between the horizontal flipping lines. But then he said something that caught me off guard.
“So, are you excited for the new music video channel coming?”
“What’s that?”
“MTV. Comes on Friday at midnight. They are going to show videos of all the songs from the radio.”
“Huh.” My mind went to watching bands playing on stage.
If I didn’t think it was a big deal at that moment in Kmart, I soon would. That night, it was on the evening news and CNN. Dad grumbled through the entire segment about how the channel would ruin music. The DJs talked about it daily on the radio as if it would be the biggest thing to hit the music world since the Beatles. My friends and I stayed up late on the phone, listening to our radios, discussing what was playing on the local stations. I had to be a part of this new thing. And because our family had cable, I could be.
I first had to get my mother to agree to let me stay up the night MTV was set to come on the air. She was tired from dealing with Elliott all day, who was home but downstairs, sound asleep most of the time. I begged him to stay up and watch it with me, but he said, “Oh, little buddy, I want to. But I don’t have it in me.”
Mom warned that I would still be going to church the next morning without complaint. “If you bitch,” she said. “This will be the last time you stay up late for a long time.”
I sat in the kitchen with my feet on a second chair while on the phone with Kelly until he couldn’t take it anymore and went to sleep. I wanted him to be part of it, but he didn’t feel excited because he didn't see the point. His mom wouldn’t let him spend the night because he had to go to his grandma’s the next day. We hung up at 10:30. I still had a long way to go, or so I thought. I flipped around, only occasionally turning back to channel 31 in case they put something on the channel that MTV was supposed to come on. Every time, it was just static. Mostly, I just watched the Spotlight movie channel, which seemed to show whatever they could get their hands on. The Spotlight marquee banner and jingle came on more than the movies did, with neon cars and people coming toward me, as if they were going to fly out of the screen.
Spotlight
We’re shining bright
Day and night
We light up the Stars
(Dramatic pause)
Spotlight!
A scene appeared with a guy on a pay phone. I couldn’t see his whole face as he said in a creepy voice, “I’M GOING TO COMMIT... MUUUURRRDER.” Then, a voiceover said, “He only strikes at midnight. And he means it.” I lowered the volume so my mother wouldn’t know I was watching weird stuff. Coming up next: New Year’s Evil.
Another preview. When you got that 9 to 5 feeling...
My phone rang. I picked it up immediately so my parents wouldn’t think it was a party. It was Mark Fortune. “It’s going to come on in two minutes! You ready?”
“What? You said midnight?” I flipped to channel 31. Static. Whew.
“Haven’t you been listening to the radio? Midnight Eastern time!”
Thank God Mark called. If I’d stayed up and missed the whole “coming-on-the-air,” I would've been so angry at the world. Everyone I knew had been told by me that I would be witnessing this event.
“Oh man, thanks.”
“This is so cool; talk to you tomorrow.” Mark hung up.
I stared at the snowy screen, waiting. Was I excited that a new generational-changing media landscape was beginning, or was I just happy to see something most kids I knew couldn’t participate in? Probably, the latter. And just as I finished that thought, the screen suddenly changed to a solid square with lines drawn vertically.
It changed.
Out of nowhere, a space rocket appeared with an MTV logo in the corner. A voice came over the speaker: “Two seconds away from switching from the redundancy [something, something]… T-MINUS 15, 14, 13, 12, 11,” Holy wow, is the world ending or a music channel coming on? Should I wake up Elliott? I really wanted to, but he didn’t look well earlier. “4, we’ve gone for main engine start…” The rocket roared as it lifted off the ground. My stomach did somersaults. I felt a grin on my face, but why was I anxious? It was a contradiction of nervousness and awesomeness all at once.
A loud, electric guitar riff sounded over my shitty 13” TV speaker, and I rued the fact that I made camp in the kitchen on the small TV for the first time. That was because it was by the phone. There was no switching now—no time. Another voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, Rock and Roll.” The MTV flag grew larger, and I assumed it changed colors as the shades of gray on the little screen went darker, then lighter. The drums were loud, banging over the guitar.
Then it all stopped.
The moon over rippling water played on the screen set to soft, pretty music. Four lines of text that would become ingrained in my head like my friends’ phone numbers, but not with specific words, rather a general feeling—words I would see for years to come—appeared on the bottom left of the screen: The Band Name. The Song Title. The Album Name. The Label.
And the first one ever:
The Buggles
“Video Killed the Radio Star”
The Age of Plastic
Island Records.
A child in red suspenders sat in front of a speaker as a man with a microphone sang in an altered voice. “We can’t rewind. We’ve gone too far; Video Killed the Radio Star.”
I watched in awe as it played out like a movie. A production all for the song? I wanted to call Mark Fortune back, but I worried it might be too late. I wanted to call all my friends. The moment was meant to be shared. Then sadness hit that Elliott was missing it.
The four lines came on again as the song ended. A white screen appeared for a moment; then, a video came on talking about the history of music.
In the beginning, there was music… blah blah blah.
Finally, the second music video:
Pat Benatar
“You Better Run”
Crimes of Passion
Chrysalis Records Inc.
Okay, I had the gist of it. The song ended. Wait. A man in a studio was talking, followed by others.
“Hi, I’m Alan Hunter.”
“I’m Martha Quinn.”
“Well, all right, I’m J.J. Jackson.”
“Hi, I’m Nina Blackwood.”
Another man with long, curly hair. “This is it. Welcome to MTV Music Television. I’m Mark Goodman. You’ll never look at Music the same way.”
And commercial. I was exhausted. The ad was for a three-ring binder called The Bulk. Please don’t remind me about school. Another commercial for “Superman 2.” A dumb commercial about Dolby Sound, and we’re back.
Rod Stewart
“She Won’t Dance With Me”
Foolish Behavior
Warner Brothers Records Inc.
Elliott loved Rod Stewart. He had several of his albums and cassettes in his room. I got up and opened the fridge to grab a bottle of Pepsi. I was preparing for a long night. But that changed when I shut the door, and my mom appeared like a ghost where the fridge door had been, with her arms on her hips, scaring all the music right back out of me.
“Okay. You saw it. Let’s get to bed.”
“But I’ve only seen two and a half videos?”
“And that’s plenty. You can watch it tomorrow. Come on, turn it off. Let’s go.”
“Mom.”
She said nothing. Which was worse than yelling. Speak, you demon-monster. Anything. And it might as well be something terrible as you rip yet another good thing from my youth. She wasn’t budging, so I turned the TV off just as another video came on:
The Who
“You Better You Bet”
Face Dances
Warner Brothers Records Inc.
She was right, though. I would watch the next day and the day after that.
That night, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, still buzzing. Sure, my dad, CNN, and school were all saying Brezhnev and Reagan were reshaping the world—but from where I was sitting, what I’d just witnessed felt bigger. MTV was going to change everything. I could feel it.
I’d tell Elliott every detail in the morning, and he’d listen with that quiet grin of his. We’d spend the coming months watching videos together on the color console, just the two of us.
And yeah, I was there when it happened, curled up in front of a little 13-inch black-and-white TV, but I was still there. I was one of the lucky ones.
~ ~ ~
March 2026
