telephone:

::change in your pocket::

Everywhere you go now, you see a telephone booth. It used to be that you could go way far out in the bloody boonies or something, maybe in a cow pasture, and there wouldn't be one for miles and miles. Now, that kind of solitude is pretty much limited to places like the rainforest, or the Sahara desert. Despite their omnipresence, I find them fascinating. All these people dropping coins into a box, waiting until their voices morph into billions of sound waves, little electronic grains of white sand arranging themselves against the black cradle…it's so poetic, you know? Drug deals, love letters, eulogies, appointments, and scared inquiries all drifting through the dark sieve. I think of all the faces pressed up against the receivers, lips moving, arms leaning against things. All the things people find out. Standing in the rain, fanning themselves with magazines in the sun, letting the snow bite into bare ears and hands. There's a telephone booth outside of a tavern in a sad little section of Burien. It's in the section where antique shops spring up after the carpet business bankrupts, and flies hum sleepily over dry grass in the summer. The asphalt bakes. The booth is right in front of this tavern, as I've said, and there's a curious little gas station/restaurant to one side, and a meat market to the other. The meat market is very little, and if you didn't look close enough (or see the sign) you might miss it. I remember one particular summer before I had my car, so it must have been two summers ago, and I was tooling around. It was hot out, and I called my friend from this phone booth. She only lived a mile or so away, and I was on my bike. I figured maybe I could stop by, but her older brother answered the phone instead, and said that she wasn't home. He was rude and mean, so I liked him. He liked me too, because I was young and rude in return. It was a beautiful day, but I was standing in this Plexiglas phone booth, hot and sweaty, talking to an older brother. She wasn't home. We're not friends anymore. The reason that I remember that phone booth is because it was one of those numbers that still worked on dimes. I don't know if it still does, but that killed me. I feel so old. "When phone calls only cost a dime." Then it was a quarter. We were all upset about that. Then it was 35 ¢, and that was horrible because you couldn't say to someone, "here's a dime/quarter, call someone who cares." You can't just say, "Here's thirty-five cents. Call someone who cares." It just doesn't work. There was a phone booth outside the Handi-Mart that used to take quarters. They got wise to the ruse, though, and ended the gratuity quick. But now, it's so ridiculously expensive that you don't want to be giving away that much money for the sake of wit. I'm fond of telephone booths, despite the expense. They're comforting. On Broadway, the phones are kind of grimy, and have stickers and advertisements for raves and the like stuck all over them. They smell like cigarettes and coffee. The booths are pretty large there, and they have lights that turn on when it gets dark. A lot of them don't work, though, and you have to try four or five before you get one that does. Occasionally, one that didn't work the week before will work the next week, but the one between Baskin & Robbins and this chic little café never does. On Alki Beach, they sit, silver-brushed, with the word "Phone" punched out in a bunch of tiny little holes on the side, and glitter at night. One particular booth was perched petulantly outside of a little latte shack with palm trees painted against a deep blue wash of water on the wall. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. It's strange, but I know why I like them. They remind me of people.