ILL MUSICAL MADELEINES: Radiohead, "Planet Telex" (c. 1998)

By THOM HAWKINS

The apartment on Gelding Drive. S. makes hot dogs in the microwave. I try to make dinner using a black bean burger. The patty is bland, so I add barbecue sauce. This is too tangy, so I add Frosted Alphabits from S.'s collection of forty boxes of cereal. I reason he can't miss it if I only take a little from each box. I sit down at the black lacquered table and turn on the CD player. Eating takes me five minutes only, but I always start at the beginning of The Bends.

Sitting at his computer in the dining room, S. mocks the opening guitar to "Planet Telex." I counter his behavior by staging a life-size cardboard cut-out of Barbra Streisand next to his computer. Neither of us drinks normal milk. I drink soy and he drinks acidophilus with bifidobacterium.

I also keep a hammer in the refrigerator because there's enough room and I have no other place to put a hammer where I will not lose it. There's a strip mall across the street where my sister works at a health food store next to an Italian cafe. I sit down for ten minutes ... if no one speaks to me, I walk out ... if someone takes my order, I ask for a pound of angel hair with tomato cream sauce. When we leave the apartment in S.'s car, he tunes the radio to a station that plays disco ... we're out of range of the tower, but S. reconstructs the song through the fuzz. All I hear is static.