We didn’t get our first TV until I was 17. My mom always said that it would rot my brain, so I grew up with books instead. I’m not holding it against her or anything. To this day I still prefer words on a page to pictures on a screen, and that’s something I’m eternally grateful for. Plus, my mom committed suicide two months after we got it, so maybe she had a point.

It was one of those old school behemoths that dominated living rooms across the country in the early 2000’s. Flat screens had been out for a few years, but my mom had always been something of a luddite, so one Tuesday after school I spent my afternoon with a mover hauling this 200lb monster into the house. In the beginning, everything was fine. My mom always kept the house meticulously clean. She cleaned other people’s houses for work, and when she got home, I guess she had trouble leaving the job behind. The house always smelt like disinfectant and bleach. To this day when I smell Lysol it brings me back to being a kid doing my homework while my mom bounced from room to room armed with a spray bottle and rag. I thought it was normal growing up. I never had anyone around to tell me different. It was me, my kid brother, and my mom most of the time, so I always thought her compulsive behavior was just something moms did. But then we got the TV.

There was a week or two after we first got it when I thought television was just what she needed. When she got home from work she would actually sit down and unwind. Instead of picking up her spray bottle, she would grab the remote. She’d put on some shitty daytime soap opera or the local news channel, and for a few hours she managed to turn off the part of her brain that always yelled at her to keep cleaning. Then she found the QVC channel. I think the one that set her off was the ShamWow. At least that’s the one I remember. Despite her aversion to new technology, she bought the TV with TiVo. So as soon as the ShamWow commercial ended, she would rewind it and watch it again. It didn’t get bad right away. Or at least I don’t think it did. My therapist says I subconsciously blocked out a lot of the trauma, but I think she is full of crap. In reality, I was just stoned a lot when I was in high school, so my memories from that time are a bit hazy.

Anyway, the first time I remember anything being wrong was during one of our Sunday dinners. I was sitting at the table high as a kite, with a brick of meatloaf and a mountain of mashed potatoes in front of me. My mom was next to me on one side, and my six-year-old brother was on the other. A piece of meatloaf slipped off his fork and onto the table, and being six years old he reached for it to shovel it into his mouth along with the rest. My mom shrieked. There wasn’t anger in her voice, only pure, animalistic panic. I jumped up from my seat ready to fight off the intruder that I was sure had busted through our front door, but then she lunged across the table and latched onto my brother’s wrist. “Drop it,” she yelled. And again, she wasn’t mad, only scared. “Drop it right now.” Her plate fell and shattered on the floor when she lunged, but she didn’t notice or didn’t care. My brother dropped the meatloaf and started bawling his eyes out. “There are over ten million different bacteria living on every square inch of this table,” she quoted from the ShamWow commercial. “Now stop crying and go wash your hands. I don’t want you to come back to this table until every single bit of your skin is as pink and fresh as the day you were born.” He went to go wash his hands, but he didn’t stop crying. “Get between your fingers too,” she hollered at him once the sink in the bathroom started to run. She cleaned her plate off the ground, made herself a new one, and we finished eating together. That was that.

It either escalated quickly after that, or my therapist was right. Regardless, I don’t remember other “minor” incidents like the one at the dinner table, only the big one. She didn’t stop watching TV after work, but she did start to clean again. Except now she did it at night. I remember lying awake at two in the morning listening to the sound of her vacuum or the slosh of water from the mop bucket. I don’t know when she slept, but I guess that stopped being important to her. She got home from work at five, watched TV till eight, made dinner for me and Rich, and then she would clean. Every night at about 4:00AM I would hear the vacuum switch off. Then she would shower and head into work until she got home at five again.

She ditched the soap operas once she discovered the QVC channel and the wonders of TiVo. Now when I came home from school, I’d hear Billy May’s talking about Oxi Clean instead of Nancy Hughes professing her love to Dan McCloskey. She must’ve recorded every infomercial for cleaning products there was. ShamWow, Oxi Clean, Shark Vacuum Cleaner, you name it. She stopped asking about our days at dinner, and instead would spend the entire meal quoting commercials and rattling off statistics about how dirty the typical American household was. Again, I don’t remember too much about the days leading up to the big incident, but that final day will be burned into my memory forever.

When I came home that night, I knew something was off right away. It was 5:30, but I couldn’t hear the TV. I was so used to those damn infomercials that I think I noticed the TV being off before I noticed the screams. My brother cried as much as any other kid his age, but I’d never heard him make sounds like he did that day before. I sprinted upstairs to the bathroom and froze in my tracks. Rich was in the bathtub and my mom was sitting on the lip. She was pouring water over his head like she normally would to rinse the shampoo from his hair. Except this time she was pouring from a tea kettle, and the water hissed and steamed when it made contact. Blisters covered his face and there were red blotchy patches where the skin was sloughing off. The sight of Rich in the bathtub still haunts my dreams, but worst of all was my mom. Rich was screaming and thrashing trying to escape, but over the screams I could hear my mom muttering “Dirty boy. Filthy, dirty boy” over and over again.

I grabbed my brother, burning my hands in the process, and rushed him to the hospital. When the police came for my mother, they found her dead on the couch with an empty bottle of bleach by her side. I wasn’t there but I can still picture it when I close my eyes. My mom sitting in front of the TV with her glasses on. Foam and blood-stained spittle covering her face. And Billy Mays’ voice in the background telling her lifeless body “Don’t just get it clean, get it Oxi Clean.”

Me and Rich moved in with my aunt in Poughkeepsie, but I got out of there as soon as I turned 18. I got a job cleaning pools, and moved into a tiny studio apartment in the same town I grew up in. I furnished it with my childhood bed, the kitchen table from our old house, and a cheap couch I found at Ikea. Oh, and the TV. A buddy of mine loaded it into his truck and helped me carry it in today. It snapped on as soon as I plugged it in, and I was greeted with “Hi it’s Vince from ShamWow.” Those infomercials actually aren’t half bad. A lot of good information. I never realized how much bacteria there really is lying around. I washed my hands before typing this, and I washed the keyboard too. But I can still feel my fingers picking up dirt with every key I touch. I’m going to wash my hands again now, but the water from my sink doesn’t get hot enough. The girl from the Bissell Power Steamer commercial says that water needs to be at least 149 degrees Fahrenheit to kill bacteria.