Telephone

The telephone isn't inherently evil. The SPAM calls, the robocalls, the political huckstering, the pre-recorded pleas of DON'T HANG UP! before we slam the receiver back in its place, the bad news traveling fast, and even the occasional good news are neither the fault nor the virtue of the telephone. The telephone does what it's told to do. It's not evil. Yet I hate it anyway.

I don't like talking on the telephone. It wasn't always so. In high school, I would tie up the family phone every night, chatting with a girl I knew and adored. I called up a different girl and asked her to the Senior Ball, because I was an idiot. Many years later, I did telephone interviews with various rock stars, record producers, songwriters, et al. for articles I was writing. I received a surprise phone call from Joey Ramone. I received a surprise phone call with news about a friend, who'd been near death, receiving the lung transplant that saved his life. The telephone isn't evil.

But I remember the times phone calls crushed me. There was the phone call on July 1st of 1979, telling me that one of my best friends had killed himself. There were calls about my father-in-law falling, about my Dad needing to get to the ER, about my Mom falling. There was the call I received ten years ago today, in the early morning. My wife answered it; it was my Mom, speaking in a monotone voice. My wife cried out the name of my niece, killed that morning in a stupid accident. Even now, the recollection fills my eyes, tightens my knuckles. I stood from the bed, hyperventilating, gasping for breath. In the next room, my daughter heard me, understood what had happened, and tearfully and bitterly relinquished her belief that this world could ever make any goddamned sense at all.

A decade later, I'm still angry. I still want to find something that I can hit and hit and hit, and keep on hitting until the force of my blows changes the past into a better present. I know my pain is not unique, and that even its specific ache is nothing compared to the loss suffered by my sister and her family. I'm still angry. And I no longer answer the phone.