The blank box is exactly that — the box containing the tape is completely, totally blank, just bare white cardboard. I had no record anywhere of what was on the tape.

I had some vague memories, though, which turned out to be partially correct.

I think this may have been a tape that came with the recorder, actually, so the buyer could start using it immediately without needing to buy anything else.

Anyway, it’s a mess. There’s some stuff at the beginning just messing around, experimenting with different speeds — talking very slowly, for example, at low speed, with the idea it would be played back twice as fast, so it sounded like normal-speed speech (or close to it) but at higher pitch.

Then there’s a long stretch of recording card games. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea. I was playing games like Spit and Pounce with my friend Jack, who died in 1991, and in the latter part with my sister Ruth, as well. Another sister kept butting in and being told to shut up or go away.

And after that, there’s a long interview I did as research for an article I wrote for the Bedford Patriot — my first paid writing was doing features for the Patriot. That dates this to early 1972. I think the card games were earlier, ’70 or ’71.

After that, we’re well onto Side 2, and the rest appeared to be blank. I played through it, just to be sure; there was some other stuff right at the end, but it’s junk.

What’s mildly dismaying is that of all the people on the tape, I come off as the biggest jerk. I hope I outgrew it.

None of this is going to get transferred to MP3, but on the other hand, I’m not sure I want to discard it, either. There isn’t much left of Jack anywhere.

Jack Wells wasn’t anywhere near as smart or funny as he thought he was, but since he thought he was a fuckin’ genius and master comedian, he was still pretty bright and amusing. We met when we were four, when my family moved in across the street from his, and we were best friends from then until high school. All through elementary school he spent more of his waking hours at my house than his own, for a variety of reasons. We started to drift apart a little when puberty hit, because he turned out to be gay while I was straight, and then we largely lost touch when I went off to college and he didn’t. He turned up again every so often until his death from AIDS.

He’d had all these grandiose plans that never came to fruition; he wound up a flight attendant, not the entrepreneur or Broadway star he’d hoped to be.

Anyway, here’s this tape of him doing comedy shtick that doesn’t quite work, and talking about his business as a supplier of occult paraphernalia that failed within a few months, and so on, and I don’t know that I’ll ever want to play it again, but I can’t just throw it away, either.

Ah, well. Thirty-three to go.