The boom box was a radio that refused to be private. The boom box said everybody is going to hear what I am hearing whether they want to or not. The boom box was a democracy of one. One person chose the station and the whole block voted with their ears and the vote was mandatory and the election had no opponent.

The boom box sat on a shoulder like a parrot. The man walked down the street with the boom box on his shoulder and the music preceded him the way a herald precedes a king. The music announced the man before the man arrived. You heard the bass line before you saw the sneakers. You heard the snare before you saw the jacket. You heard the DJ before you saw the face. The boom box was not playing music for the man. The boom box was playing the man for the block. The man was the song. The boom box was the instrument. The shoulder was the stage.

The boom box required eight D batteries and eight D batteries lasted four hours and four hours was exactly the length of a Saturday afternoon on the Lower East Side in 1985. The batteries were the clock. When the music slowed down and the bass got muddy the batteries were dying and the Saturday afternoon was ending and the man with the boom box walked slower because the music was walking slower and the block got quieter because the batteries had decided that the concert was over.

The boom box disappeared the same way the payphone disappeared. The technology shrank. The boom box became the Walkman and the Walkman became the iPod and the iPod became the phone and the phone went into the ear and the ear became private and the block became quiet. The music that used to belong to the whole block now belonged to one ear. The headphone was the wall that the boom box had refused to build. The headphone said this music is mine and you cannot hear it and the block said fine and the block got quieter and the quiet was not an improvement. The quiet was the sound of people keeping their music to themselves.

I played guitar on the corner and the boom box was my competition and my collaborator. The boom box played hip hop and I played folk rock and the two musics collided in the air above the sidewalk and the collision was not unpleasant. The collision was the Lower East Side. Two sounds that had no business being in the same airspace occupying the same airspace because the airspace was not big enough for one of them to leave. The boom box and the guitar shared the block the way the domino game shared the block and the fire hydrant shared the block. Nobody planned it. Nobody approved it. It happened because the block was the block and the block did not separate its sounds.