by Russell Hehn

It wasn’t the best part of town that I was walking through. It wasn’t the worst either, but it was definitely sliding into such a state of disrepair that it would, soonish, become the bad side, until my grandkids’ kids — if I have grandkids, God willing — take up the torch of humanitarianism and gentrify the place. I don’t know what that means for the bad side of town, the current one, if it will get badder, or stay the same. Assuming it remains “bad,” then the city will be walled in by two bad sides, leaving a good middle. A happy median. I have to remain positive about the future.

And as I was walking through the not-so-bad-but-still-unsavory part of town I noticed a phone, a pay phone receiver, dangling by the cord, dancing in the chilly breeze. The phone booth — not really a booth, more of a pole. I don’t know what else to call it, but a phone poll is a different thing altogether, and it was not housed within a booth — it was situated on a concrete slab in between what may or may not have been a crack house — such assumptions just fling themselves at you, you know, and I try to ignore them, or at least suppress them, question them, but I go with crack house. It was almost certainly a crack house — and a severely overgrown lot that might have been the site of a house buried deep back there in the thick of the vegetation, probably with dubious vines coming out of the toilets and a young pine tree shooting up through the baseboards. It doesn’t matter if the one was a crack house and if the other was a house at all, but that dangling phone, bookended by those two sort of ominous and distinct habitudes, caused some serious feelings of apprehension and disquietude to well up inside of me in regard to the otherwise innocuous payphone receiver. So much so that I didn’t want to set foot on the slab. So much so that the slab, which was probably, in reality, no more than twenty feet long, stretched and elongated in my eye like one of those pan-in-zoom-out maneuvers you see in movies when a character realizes something really, really terrible and irreversible has happened, or is about to happen, and it’s important to the plot and/or character development.

I don’t want to give the impression that the phone was somehow calling to me. For one, it’s a terrible pun. For two, when somebody says that someone or something was calling to them, it’s usually in response to an overwhelming stimulus that comes with 1) regret or 2) something inexplicable. Like coincidence. Sometimes it’s both. Things don’t just call. The phone certainly didn’t. Not in that sense, anyway. Nor did it ring. But, and I say this now at the risk of sounding hypocritical, there was something in the pull of the dangling phone that outweighed the foreboding of the setting which made me walk to it and touch it. “Something” is too vague. I’ll explain.

In general, and by that I mean society and culture and that neighborhood and that slab and what-have-you, the phone was out of place. This is because nobody uses a payphone. And nobody uses payphones because nobody carries quarters anymore, unless, of course, you’re sixteen and going to the arcade, or you’re 27 and going to the Laundromat with the pocket of your dressy slacks full of quarters because all your good pants or your regular pants — your nonlaundry day pants — are soiled to the point of repugnance and you’re not going home to visit your parents for another week and a half, where your crazy mother will dutifully wash not just your pants but all of your clothes for you, and your “girlfriend,” who you’ve yet to commit to for nigh-on a year has been bitching your ear off all week about said repugnance of normal pants, so now you’re loaded down with quarters for the Laundromat for fear of not getting a nice, slow blowjob on Friday night after the homecoming dance, which is, coincidentally, the same night as the “anniversary” of the “relationship” you’re in with your “girlfriend.” These are the only reasons people carry quarters around. Arcades and blowjobs.

And so, the anachronistic quality of the phone pole piqued my interest immediately. That, coupled with the even more out-of-placedness of the dangling, unused telephone receiver set it in my mind that this was a wrong in drastic need of being righted. It is wrong that a telephone receiver be out of its cradle. Justice, order, peace and posterity hinged on that receiver being in its place, just as a crying baby must be made to stop crying, immediately. In the name of everything good, I sallied forth across the vastness of the slab and apprehended the dangling receiver with the thrust of a jack-hammer and the wanton grip of a novice masterbateur.

“Hello,” I said, and I said it in a tone which implying that everything was all right. Hello, like we hope God might say it. Hello, I’m here for real and you just rest your silly little noggin about the whole damn business. A hello’s all we need really. It justifies the questions. You can use hello as a question, yes, but when you say it like I said it, like, not as a question, it really solidifies all that haze you were so flustered over in the first place and makes it make sense.

And I can’t say that I was completely surprised when a voice came through from the other end. This is, after all, the reason we speak into phones. There’s a phone off its hook? There must be somebody on the other end of that line somewhere. Otherwise we’re just shouting into the dankness like a bunch of mental patients.

“Hello?” came through on the other end. But it wasn’t a question, nor was it a real statement. It was… I’ll put it like this. Imagine you’ve been going to a therapist for months and months now, and you thought you knew the answer to your problem of never being able to reach orgasm, and also, maybe, why you have some trust issues. You’re just looking for a second opinion, even though you know the
answer. Your answer is: “I was molested when I was very young,” because you’ve seen that diagnosis on television a million billion times over. “You were molested when you were very young,” which solves the problem, and “I’ve repressed it” is your explanation for why you can’t remember it. You’ve gone into this whole therapy rigmarole with some quack who was recommended to you by your lunatic brother, paying exorbitant amounts of money just to have her confirm for you that you were, in fact, molested by some adult or another when you were very young, only to have the shrink — after several months of expensive therapy, mind you — say, “This is all rooted to that experience you had in your fourth grade biology class that you told me about on our first day together,” — she uses the term “together” in a way that makes you slightly uncomfortable, to the point that you don’t expect there to be a bill every month and you’re kind of offended when it arrives — to which you reply, “So I wasn’t molested when I was very young?” And it’s with that tone, that still-uncertain certainty, that the “Hello?” came through on the other end, which was extremely satisfying for me, considering the gusto I’d put into my initial hello. I really felt like I’d accomplished something.

The voice belonged to a girl, a youngish girl, and the voice carried a horribly familiar timbre — and I use “horribly” here in the best and most nostalgically erotic way possible — that reminded me of the girl on the radio, Katie Heath, who used to run the classical music show on Mississippi Public Radio back when I was in college.

With Katie it had been something in her Rs that just really hit me deep. The letter L, for example, is liquid, pronounced with the breath at the back of the tongue, then the tongue to the teeth. The R, on the other hand, is typically pronounced with a primitive gnashing. But, Katie Heath formed the R way down there at the back of the tongue where the L comes from, just above the belly, and didn’t involve a single tooth, molar or otherwise, in the whole business. It rolled up, slithering, like an opium puff, then gathered audibly, somehow, in the bottom of the cheeks and crook of the mandible, and she had no idea about the grandiose sexuality that that R promoted. There was something clumsy about it, and something cutely inelegant about her on the whole, like she didn’t really have her life together, like she didn’t prepare at all for the 4-hour show, but she made it through anyway, every weekday from noon to three, clumsily. And it was this innocent daredevil way of going about things yoked with the girl-next-dooryness that made me want her. That R,
however it happened to ease up her slender, fragile throat, was dripping with sex by the time it came out. Good sex. Sweet sex. The kind that lasts. The kind you sing songs about when you’re sixty and your wife just left you. I never saw Katie Heath, but I knew that throat of hers was as paper white as a Beluga. And, although this person, this youngish girl on the other end of the line, did not let a single R fall from her lips or drip from her cheeks, that timbre, as I mentioned, that waver, indicated to me the potential for a soggy, sultry R that would shoot me back to those Katie Heath, radio-induced erections set to Bartok and Schumann.

With that Hello — and I wouldn’t have thought that this would happen — even now, writing it, it seems odd — I was immediately aware of the cold, dead, glass-littered slab upon which I stood, framed by crack and vegetation, and the fetid pile of human shit next to the phone pole that I hadn’t noticed until right then. You’d think I would have been lost in the moment, waiting on an R, but, really, I became miserably self-conscious and I felt just as out of place as a public telephone in the 21st century. I fought off the immediacy of my locale.

“Hello,” I said again, but this time with assurance rather than that Superman all-is-well bullshit, and immediately followed that with, “The phone was off the hook.”

“I know,” said the youngish girl.

“Well. Were you on the phone with someone?” I asked. “Did they leave you hanging?”

What concerned me about my question was that an acceptable answer would have been “yes,” and, if that were the case, this young woman had been on the phone with a native of this sketchy part of town and, to my mind, it had to — if the answer was yes — involve some shady dealings, like drugs. Bad drugs. In the short span of time between my question and her retort I had managed to convince myself that this was most certainly the case and, just as I was about to slam the phone back into its cradle and head for the hills because I was sure the drug dealer or the person to whom the drugs were being dealt was coming stealthily up behind me from the bowels of the crack house with a dirty needle in hand ready to shove it through my lungs for no reason but black-hearted malice, the girl responded. “No,” she said. Thank God.

“Oh,” I said.

“I’m an operator,” said the girl.

“I didn’t know they had those anymore,” I said. I’d never met a telephone operator before, and assumed all the operating was done by computers.

I had also, until right then, assumed that I knew what a telephone operator — if computers weren’t running the show — looked and sounded like: Grandma-ish and slightly gruff, busy and monotonous and generally pleased in a very professional and distant way, perhaps with a cigarette forever burning unsmoked in an overflowing ashtray or balancing upon a lip, and never, not ever, sharing a singular feature with Katie Heath. This girl was not, unless my ears deceived me, a gruffish grandma.

“You never know we’re here until moments like these. We
don’t get out much,” said the girl, “us operators.”

“Probably for the best,” I said. “This whole side of town’s overgrown and decaying. I’m uncomfortable where I stand. My skin crawls. It isn’t pleasant out here in the world. You telephone operators have the right idea, by gum.”

“By gum?” she asked.

It was a cognitive slip that I’d said “by gum,” just then. A little phrase I use often with my family and, occasionally, my coworkers down at the bottling company, people who know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t use “by gum” seriously, ever. When I say it, I slip my thumbs through my belt loops and rock up onto my toes and then back on my heels like an old Appalachian on an old country porch. I say things like, “And that’s the way it is, by gum,” or “You kids’ll never get nowheres actin’ like that, by gum.” It gets a laugh.

But apparently, I’d managed to subconsciously dupe myself into thinking there was enough familiarity between the girl and me for me to be comfortable slipping a by-gum in there, as if she could possibly know I was being ironic.

“How old are you, man?” she asked.

Man. Christ, because “by gum” is an oldism, a relic from days-gone-by that only grandfathers and dead-peckers hold on to and actually utilize from time to time, like “nifty” or “gadzooks.” And no, I’m not old. I’m 37, to tell the truth, but it got slippery here because I didn’t want to tell this girl I was 37, and I didn’t want to tell this girl I was 37 because she was, at the very least, a decade younger than 37, and somewhere in the back of my mind, beneath Katie Heath’s Rs and the thought of the broken glass upon which I was standing — which really summed up for me the whole miserable ambiance of the crumbling neighborhood and life in general — I was considering striking up an affair with the operator, because nobody would ever have to know about it, and it would only last as long as I could tolerate standing there.

“I’m thirty-one,” I said. “My birthday was last month. I’m a Virgo.”

The thought of a brief affair with the operator sprung up from the same naughty place in my brain that makes me look for open curtains each and every time I pass a hotel, hoping that I might get to see the naked, nimble thigh of a newlywed bride or the silky curve of a mistress’ breast, a shock of lovers’ hair flitting past on the way to the bathroom. A habit I picked up around the age of 15 after seeing some porn that only showed scenes through foggy windows. It’s called Peeping Thom 6: Bay Windows and Boobs, and a VHS copy is currently sitting in a storage unit that my wife doesn’t know about, in a box labeled “Nostalgix,” under a photograph of me and my mother beneath the Eiffel Tower wearing coats and scarves up to our eyeballs. I will give the picture to my oldest son, Robbie, on his wedding day. I will point at the picture and say, “This is the sort of mother your wife needs to be,” which will be completely unfair of me, considering that Robbie will almost definitely not marry a woman like my mother, who turned into a total nut-job about three years after the picture was taken. Robbie doesn’t know the woman in the picture. He only knows the nut. I bought the VHS when I was 19, after winning about two hundred bucks at a casino. I also bought a gold chain with a golden Nike Swoosh pendant and a dozen chocolate éclairs in cellophane wrap, because I was stoned. Two hundred bucks, gone like that.

And so, the whole idea of the affair, mostly because of the voice, and the fact that that voice carried the same value of eroticism as a boob in a window, made me really just want to go for it, so there was no way I was going to volunteer the information regarding those thirty-seven years I had under my belt.

“Really?”

“Really,” I said. “Thirty-one. September eighth.”

“What’s an educated-sounding thirty-one-year-old doing at the corner of Jefferson and Third at half past midnight on a Tuesday?”

It was spectacular the way she said “thirty.” It wasn’t the usual grinding of an R she had. It was more like she pampered it, powder that turns into even finer and sweeter powder when it leaves the tongue, and it was a good question to boot, by gum. A tough question. A question that, had I answered it as the actual me, the thirty-seven-year-old me who was out for a walk in the shitty part of town trying to score some pot because of a minor, non-physical scrape with his spouse over finances, an inability to “really” listen and something about narcissism, it would have sounded much less interesting and much more pitiful than what the thirty-one-year-old me was doing, which was:

“Taking pictures,” I said. First thing that came to mind. “I’m a photographer.”

“Really?” said the girl. I’m sure the other granny operators shushed her and cut her dirty looks at that, what with it being a violent outburst of emotion and intrigue in an otherwise droning and mildly disinterested conversation. “I’m a model,” she said. “I love having my picture taken.”

And I knew I was in. She might as well have put down her little headset right then and dropped her panties I was so in. I considered telling her to meet me at a hotel where we could do it on the third floor with the curtains slightly parted. I considered sprinting to the secret storage unit and pulling out all the classic, immaculate baseball cards I was saving for my second son, Rusty, and selling them online to fund a little one-bedroom flat downtown somewhere where me and the operator girl would meet on lunch breaks and take pictures of one another in wildly suggestive poses, but, instead, I played it cool.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “That’s interesting,” like I stuck it to wannabe models every day.

“What kind of stuff do you do?” she asked, all breathy.

“I’m doing a series on urban life,” I said. “Trying to get some grant money, you know? It’s not what I like to do, but that’s what the bourgeoisie want, you know? Offset their white guilt by quoteunquote supporting the underprivileged. I mean, all they’re doing is exploiting them, you know? Anyway… My first love,” and I knew this would get her, “is noir.”

“Oh-my-God-I-love-noir!” she said. She said it like a machine gun. Rat-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s great. Do you know Jean-Paul Viviere?” I asked, as if that were an actual person.

“Ummm…” she said. “I know I’ve heard the name. It definitely rings a bell. Did he do, uh…that thing with the, uh…”

“Life, Pelican, Death’? You’ve heard of it?” I said. That’s not
real either, by the way.

“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s brilliant.”

“I never knew blood could be so thick,” I said.

“Wow,” said the operator girl. “You really get it.”

“No,” I said. “It gets me. He does his job well, Viviere…”

“You’re so real,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I am what I am,” I said.

I heard a rustle over my shoulder and almost squealed. I’d been so wrapped up in the conversation, pretending to be some youngish arty dude that I’d forgotten I was standing on what was, for all I knew, the most dangerous abandoned slab in the city. It was a tiny jolt of reality that I didn’t really want or need just at that moment. It put a bad taste in my mouth, the reality of it. Reality meant wife. Reality meant kids, a loony mother, a secret storage unit you feel sort of ashamed of, a decently paying job down at the bottling company where you’re well-respected but, by gum, you spend the better part of your day mindlessly pecking at spreadsheets, wishing you’d reconsidered going straight into that MBA program at Loyola where, incidentally, you met Connie, your wife, whose father owned a bottling company, that maybe you should have gone off to Colorado or someplace and worked on a ranch for a while like that Seth guy you were acquaintances with who’s now a lawyer for little crippled kids who are the products of industrial accidents. He’s a fucking saint. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. I didn’t mean to say it aloud. It was only
meant for me.

“What was that?” said the girl on the other end. Owing to the fact that she was quite obviously taken with me, she was sincerely and desperately concerned over my well-being, worried that I was about to be stabbed through the neck by a crackhead’s dirty needle.

It took me a moment to get my bearings, to remember the masquerade.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just a cat.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I should probably check on it. I think it’s sick.”

“Well, okay,” said the girl.

“It was nice speaking with you,” I said. I said it like a man
pushing forty.

RUSSELL HEHN is a landscaper in South Mississippi. Some of his other work can be seen in The Barcelona Review, pindeldyboz, and McSweeney’s.