Free Specimen & Other Stories by Alan Annand Page A

earlier position.
    By now the lecture hall was filled to
capacity. Ms. Atwood was chatting with a few of the English Faculty
and at one point I actually heard her laugh, and I could see that
everyone was squirming with excitement and that the evening was
shaping up to be one of those great cultural events everyone would
fondly remember years after. A few minutes later the Professor
started shushing people and urging them to take their seats. He and
Ms. Atwood mounted the stage where he fumbled his way through her
introduction, getting the name of one of her novels wrong, calling
it The Inedible Woman , probably still thinking of the food
she’d left on her plate. Finally, he finished and left the stage to
her.
    There was a hushed silence in which the
audience was clearly perplexed to hear the drone of a distant
airplane. I crept from my seat in the front row and thumped the
Bassman with the heel of my hand. A low rumble echoed from the back
of the hall. Now it sounded like an airplane flying through a
thunderstorm. I passed my hand over the amplifier and discovered
that if I kept it within a few inches of the biggest tube, the
sound of the distant airplane diminished from that of a four-engine
cargo plane to that of a single-engine Cessna. I crouched there, my
hand in place like a Reiki master administering healing vibes to a
sick client, and nodded to Ms. Atwood that it was safe to
proceed.
    She began to read her poetry. She had a
small breathless voice like an asthmatic child and it was clearly
evident why amplification was mandatory for her. Things went well
for another poem or two and then it all went to hell in a handcart.
She was in the middle of a poem when the Bassman suddenly cut loose
with a terrible yowl, like a cat “getting fixed” without benefit of
anesthesia. She stopped in mid-sentence and glanced in my
direction, and the look in her eyes was like a hail of bullets in a
drive-by shooting. I be wastin’ yo ass, muthahfuckah, if’n I
hear dat again .
    I withdrew to the side of the amplifier. On
other occasions before this, I’d noticed that if you approached it
too closely from the front, the amplifier would start to squeal
with feedback. Jimi liked that sort of thing, but Maggie didn’t. I
stroked the Bassman with my Reiki technique but it wouldn’t
behave.
    Up on stage, thinking maybe it was her end
of things that had gone awry, Ms. Atwood tried to adjust the
microphone at the end of the coat hanger. The electrical tape
peeled off and the microphone fell with an amplified thunk to the lectern. I heard titters and sighs from the peanut gallery
as I vaulted up onto the stage and went to her rescue. I wrapped
the microphone back into place with some extra tape and hissed at
her to stick to the poetry and leave the sound system to me, at
which point I realized my harsh words were being amplified for all
to hear. More titters and sympathetic groans of outrage from the
gallery. I slunk back to my post beside the Bassman.
    To reduce an epic story to a haiku, hell
hath no fury like a feedback-prone amplifier. Maybe all those old
Marconi tubes, even as they teetered on the verge of electronic
Alzheimer’s, still harbored some kind of primordial intelligence
like the computer Hal in the movie 2001. And in the heart of its
circuits the Bassman probably suspected it’d been pressed into
service, not to hasten the revolution via rock ’n’ roll, but to
propagate mere poetry without the force of power chords and killer
riffs.
    No matter how I cajoled him, Bassman
wouldn’t behave. He growled and howled, drowning out every word Ms.
Atwood tried to share with her audience. I twirled his dials and
flicked his switches, punched and kicked him, and rocked him back
and forth. Bassman would not be controlled, so in the end he had to
be silenced. I pulled the plug.
    Ms. Atwood looked at me, as if to say, are
we done now? I shrugged helplessly, feeling like the village idiot
in a room full of professors, students and