Mason Boyles Phonebooks
Phonebooks
Imagine this:
It’s midnight. You’re sitting in the parking lot behind the Ramada Inn just outside of West Charlotte, punching your steering wheel and tearing your hair out— literally, pulling oily strands of it from the follicles on your scalp— and you’re considering flooring the gas and driving your truck into a wall.
In case you didn’t know (you probably didn’t), hair is made of stratified squamous cells glued inside a layer of proteins like peas in a pod or the beef inside of a piece of Ravioli from Macaroni Grill. It grows in three phases. A meaty hunk of connective tissues and capillaries called a papilla starts things off, spitting out the strand of hair so it pokes through your epidermis and into the cold, harsh world; you know a thing or two about that place. The papilla nourishes your hair for a little while, gets it soft and fat and complacent, and then it cuts it off to starve. It gets stale. Dormant. It shrivels up and dies, and then a new strand of hair starts growing and pushes it out of the follicle and into the great abyss.
So hair is made of these rapidly replicating cells, right? Well you know what other kinds of cells replicate rapidly? Cancer. Chemo makes your hair fall out. You haven’t had chemo but yours is still tearing away in flaky brown clumps, slipping between your sweaty fingers and falling into your lap, onto the car seat, everywhere, really, while you yell obscenities into the air bag.
You’ve got cancer, chief.
Deal with it.
****
Rewind.
Imagine that you are thirty-four years old. You work nights at a telemarketing company that sells used welcome mats. Six times a week you drive halfway across Charlotte so you can sit in a cubicle and leave messages on the answering machines of people you don’t know, people who might be missing or dead or blind or deaf or mute or barfing out their intestinal tract from dysentery.
The manager puts a new phonebook on your desk at the beginning of every shift. It could be from anywhere. Ghana. Japan. Argentina. It doesn’t matter; none of those places area real. None of the names in the phone book are real. The only things real to you are the numbers on the pages and the dials of your telephone and the groove cut into the mouthpiece from rubbing against your chin and those damn welcome mats you have to talk about. You’re supposed to make it through the entire thing— usually about seventy thousand names— by the end of your ten-hour shift. That’s seven thousand names an hour, which comes down to one hundred and sixteen names a minute, which means that you have to make two calls a second. This is entirely impossible, but if you don’t do it your pay gets docked.
Your pay always gets docked.
Imagine that this is you, that this is your limp-dicked, mickey-mouse, why-don’t-you-go-ahead-and-hang-yourself-in-the-linen-closet existence. Imagine that the highlight of your day is logging into your Brazzers premium account and jerking off with a Fleshlight. Imagine that one night, a Thursday in October, you call a number halfway through the phonebook and a woman— a real life, non-pixelated woman— answers.
“Hello?” She says.
“Hello.” You say, and then you say something along the lines of “hibgleebajitz” while you try not to succumb to an aneurism from the sheer shock of actually talking to another person.
“May I help you?” She asks, and her voice is sticky and sweet with a Charleston lilt.
“No.” You’re beginning to recover basic motor function. “But I might be able to help you. Do you ever find yourself with dirty feet? Do you wish you had a more friendly way to welcome others to your home? Well I have the answer for you!”
“Sorry?”
“I said, I have the answer for you.” This is really throwing you off your game. No one has ever been listening while you recite your lines. This lady is taking you off the script. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I’m a telemarketer. I know you don’t want to talk to me.”
You can hear her breathing on the other end of the phone and you’re reminded that she’s a real human being and you’re a real human being and both of you have to breath so hey, that’s one thing in common, maybe you should ask her on a date or something. “I don’t mind,” she tells you. “Go ahead. Give me the answer.”
“Well. Um. Welcome mats. Yeah. That’s it. I’ve got these welcome mats for you, they’re used but they’re in good condition. All kinds. Beach themed. Mountain themed. Family themed. We’ve even got one shaped like a giraffe, if you can believe that.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“Ha. Nice joke.”
“What’s your name?” She asks. You poke your head over the top of the cubicle like a prairie dog, checking to make sure that no one is listening. If management finds out that you’re letting things get personal they’ll dock your pay. They could fire you. They might even make you clean the bathroom before you leave.
“Between you and me, I’m Simon.”
“Just Simon?”
“Just Simon. Well, Simon Warren. That’s my last name.” It’s true. You are Simon Warren. Simon ‘just Simon’ Warren. That was your nickname in middle school, the one your imaginary friend gave you before he faked his death in an imaginary car accident.
“Are you doing anything on Thursday afternoon, Simon?” She asks. You wonder why she’s so curious about you. Maybe she’s some kind of government spy.
“Sleeping,” you say, because it seems safe enough.
“How about you take me out for coffee instead?” The words hang like a hammock in the air, in the space between digitized sound waves and manifested reality. This can be real. All you have to do is say so.
“Yeah,” you say. “I mean, yeah. That sounds good.”
****
She comes into Starbucks three and a half minutes late. That’s worth four hundred and six phone calls. “Sorry,” she says, sitting down with a foaming drink that’s more corn syrup than coffee. “Traffic was awful.” You believe her. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina, ninety minutes and one state border away.
You watch her sipping the froth off the lip of her cup and you decide that this is vaguely erotic, that it is definitely better than the Kleenex and the moisturizing lotion and the premium Brazzers account you have at home. You want to have her at home, too, curled up next to you on the couch watching movies. They wouldn’t even have to be pornos.
She asks you questions, meaningful ones about things you’ve never considered. Your favorite color, for example. (She likes blue.) Your spirit animal. (She thinks hers is a parakeet, but she wants it to be an eagle.) Your Zodiac sign. (Hers is Pisces.) What you want to do with your life. (She doesn’t answer that one for herself. At least, not directly. “I’m still figuring it out,” she says, and you decide that this is a pretty good answer and tell her that’s how you’re feeling about it, too.)
She touches her cheek with her index finger at the end of every sentence, almost like she’s putting a period on her mouth. She is dangerously, sickeningly thin. Her collarbones push through her cotton Ninja Turtles t-shirt like curtain hangers. She is bald and she doesn’t hide it. The freckles on her head look almost burgundy against her pale skin, almost dark enough to be flecks of blood. You feel sick for her. You want to hold her, to put her back together, to sit beside her and squeeze her twiggy hands until she is healthy. She isn’t beautiful, but she is captivating.
She tells you that she normally doesn’t look like this. Chemo has been hard, she says. She has lost forty pounds since the nurse pricked her with the IV for her first treatment. It’s a poison, she explains, and it doesn’t discriminate between healthy cells and cancerous ones. Kind of like an atomic bomb. Kind of like an angry god.
She isn’t looking for anything serious right now, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. She is very sick. She could die soon. She is dying, cell by cell, every time she sits down in the plush chair at the oncology center and pushes up the sleeve of her shirt while antimetabolites are pumped into her forearm. What she wants, now, is to find someone to be lonely with. She wants to be able to share her pain because pain can be an adventure. It is, after all, a part of life.
You nod because all of this makes sense. Not really, but in a broad kind of way. And even if she were whispering schizophrenic gibberish you would listen because she is entirely fascinating to you. She is the first person you’ve met who you are certain is also a human. She is a lot like you. More like you than you realize, but you will realize it later when you’re also sitting in the plush chair at the oncology center and pushing up your own shirtsleeve. You don’t know that now. All you know now is the way she touches her cheek when she talks, and how she sits with her right leg crossed high over the left one, and how she rubs her elbows like they’re sore after she leans on the table for too long.
All you know now, the only thing that’s important to you, is that you are in love with this girl.
****
She thinks your apartment is quaint. It’s really just messy, crowded with antiques and porcelain dolls that your late mother gave you in her will. You thought you were going to sell them, once, back when you had enough gumption to do anything other than work, sleep, and masturbate. Now you wonder if apartment management would let you set up a yard sale in the parking lot.
“Can I sit here?” She asks, pointing to a mahogany rocking horse in the corner next to the television. Sure, of course she can, where does she think she is? Some kind of five star restaurant? She rocks gently back and forth, pushing with her legs, and even this seems to drain her.
You clear a spot on the rug and sit down Indian style. You sneeze because you haven’t vacuumed that rug since your cousin gave it to you as a housewarming gift when you moved into the apartment. Which, by the way, is an apartment. Not a house. There’s a difference. A house says home. An apartment says this is where I sleep, I’m not necessarily proud of it, there’s no yard or homeowner’s association, but it does its job and I get by okay.
There is a pink strip of tape across the cradle of her arm. The needle marks from the chemo aren’t healing up anymore, she explains. If she doesn’t put something over them she walks around slowly hemorrhaging blood everywhere. She’ll wake up, two a.m., and there will be an alphabet of bloodstains crusting onto her mattress. It’s gross, she knows, but she feels like she needs to tell someone because if she doesn’t talk about it then no one will know after she dies. You understand and you wish you could tell her things, too, so someone else might know them if you die, but you can’t articulate anything yet.
“Give it time,” she says. “It will come when it’s ready.”
You warm up two Healthy Choice meals in the microwave, phytoestrogens be damned, and you put them in plastic bowls and think this is pretty classy dining. She seems impressed. She even laughs when she sees it, the chicken parmesan with crystals of frost still clinging to the tops of the pasta.
You don’t eat much because she’s asking you so many questions. Outside of the spiel they have you recite for the welcome mats, you’re not a big talker. But this comes easily. It’s not forced. It’s not awkward. She softens the edges of your speech with smiles, suggestions, and her own take on things.
When she leans across the table you’re not sure what’s happening. Maybe she’s reaching for the saltshaker. Getting a napkin. But she isn’t; what she’s doing, the thing that no one else has ever done before, the brave thing that most of them are afraid to do, is kissing you. You’re not sure what you’re supposed to do but you kind of move your lips around a little bit. Halfway through it occurs to you that closing your eyes might be a good idea. It certainly wouldn’t hurt.
She breaks away and smiles. You smile too, even though most of what you feel is confusion and only a small part of you has the courage to be genuinely, thoughtlessly happy at what has just occurred.
“You’re nice,” she says. “I like you.”
“Yeah, you too.”
****
Imagine that you are in love for the first time in your life. Imagine that the person you love is very sick, that they might die very soon and leave you empty and broken like a glass bottle of Budweiser on the shoulder of the interstate.
Imagine how you feel when she brings you the good news. She is in remission. She’s going to get better. It’s gong to be okay. A future you haven’t planned for is now booked.
Okay, good.
Now imagine that you wake up with a fever and a lump on your gonads. You go to the doctor. It can’t be anything significant. After all, you’re in love. You’re planning the rest of your life with the girl who changed it. But the doctor doesn’t care about that. All he cares about is what the numbers and graphs on his clipboard tell him, which is ironic in a suicidal kind of way.
Now is the time to imagine that you have cancer, too.
It’s often hard to detect it in the early stages. Hell, it can grow inside of you for weeks before you realize something is off. In your case, it’s spread from your testes into your abdominal cavity, and now it’s jumping up and nibbling away at your lungs. The x-ray is a Jackson Pollock painting of tumors.
“It doesn’t look good,” the doctor tells you. He is tall and bearded and built like a refrigerator, but without the power cord. He phones the oncologist who says that you need to start treatments today. It will cost you thousands, even with health insurance. It will cost you the woman that you love. It will cost you yourself, who you are beginning to understand how to love. It will cost too much.
And now here you are, sitting in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn with an empty gas tank and trying to decide whether you should drive into the wall or go home and leave the car running in the garage until you pass out.