The radiator was a cast iron animal that lived in the corner of every room and spoke in a language of bangs and hisses. The bang was the steam hitting the pipe. The hiss was the steam escaping the valve. The radiator spoke all night in the winter and said nothing in the summer and the silence of the radiator in July was the absence of a voice you had gotten used to hearing.

The radiator had one setting. On. There was no thermostat. There was no dial. The boiler in the basement sent steam up the pipes and the steam went into the radiator and the radiator got hot and the room got hot and if the room got too hot you opened the window. You opened the window in January and the cold came in and the heat went out and the radiator kept pumping and the window kept leaking and the room settled at a temperature that was the result of a negotiation between a boiler and a window and nobody was happy with the compromise.

The radiator banged at three in the morning. The bang was not a gentle sound. The bang was a pipe expanding inside a wall and the expansion was sudden and the wall amplified the bang and the bang traveled through the building the way a rumor travels through a building. Every tenant heard the bang. Every tenant knew the bang. Every tenant lay in the dark and listened to the bang and thought the same thought. The boiler is on. The heat is coming. The winter is being fought by a machine in the basement that was installed before anybody in this building was born.

The radiator was hot enough to burn. Children learned this once. The burn was a lesson that lasted a lifetime. The radiator taught the lesson without apology. The radiator was not sorry. The radiator was cast iron and cast iron does not apologize. The radiator sat in the corner like a judge and the verdict was always the same. Do not touch me. I am working.

I dried my socks on the radiator. I dried my shirts on the radiator. I dried my guitar strings on the radiator and the guitar strings rusted faster because of the heat and the rust changed the sound and the sound was warmer because the rust was warmer and the radiator had changed my music by changing my strings by changing the metal by adding heat to a thing that was not designed for heat. The radiator was a producer. The radiator took a raw material and applied heat and the raw material became something else. That is what producers do. They apply heat until the thing changes.