Phone Booth

The antique store’s delivery truck, looking kind of antiquey itself, Nick thought, wheezed along the driveway to deliver his latest acquisition. The driver claimed that it was the phone booth used in the TV Superman series starring George Reeves; Nick doubted that, but he didn’t care anyway, its attraction for him being that it was a piece of his past, something solid to anchor unsubstantial memories that otherwise might only be dreams. Hard to believe, he mused, that an entire way of life can be plowed under in less than a lifetime.

           Long ago in that past lifetime, his father, Gary, had also bought a phone booth, his being the old-fashioned English style, painted in royal red with a dome on top. Other fathers in the small township built miniature cabins for their children, roadside shelters to protect them in the wintry mornings when they waited for the district school bus to arrive. Thanks to his father, however, Nick was the only kid with a phone booth, all glass with a wrap-around view and a dome on top. But Nick didn’t see the beauty of it, especially once his friends would start making fun of the booth and worse, ridiculing his father. “Everyone else builds shelters,” they would taunt, “but your dad buys a stupid phone booth,” implying that Nick’s father couldn’t even build a simple shelter and therefore wasn’t a real man.

           Nick put away the sour memory and examined his new phone booth closely. It was the North American style, not as regal as the old British antique that his father had bought, but Nick liked its simple, clean style that connected him to the era of his childhood. 

           The driver set the booth down in Nick’s oversized garage, where he would soon clean and refurbish it, then hook it up to power to test the electronics. For Nick, things had to work as closely as he could get them to their original state. In this, he resembled his father, like it or not. When the phone booth was fully restored, it would join a veritable museum of an era that had pretty much disappeared, taking its place alongside encyclopedias and old books with yellowed pages, Pong and Atari consoles, the Vic 20 and original Apple computers, turntables, eight tracks, reel to reels, cassette tape recorders, speakers, stacks of vinyl records and CDs, and much more in every nook and cranny. They filled the garage, populated the workshop he had built over it, were sprinkled as conversation pieces around the house, and several even spilling onto the lawn where Nick transformed them into garden art.

           To some people, Nick was a hoarder; to those who knew better, he was a collector, a brilliant one at that. Nick’s large, rambling home, which he had mostly built himself, sat on two acres of land where he could indulge in his acquisitions. Actually, the property was where he had lived as a child and grown up, until his aging parents sold it in order to live closer to the city’s medical and social services, of which they were in increasing need.

           Nick never fully adjusted to the confines of urban life, and often spent several hours at a time driving around the rural areas. On one trip, Nick drove passed the old place, noticing that the red phone booth was gone, but also noticing a For Sale sign hanging at the edge of the driveway. Veering sharply, he turned in.

           Before the sun set, Nick had purchased the property. The house was derelict and the lot untended, but as he said to himself, it was nothing that some labour and love wouldn’t set right. He pitched a camping tent while he rebuilt the home so that he didn’t have a daily drive back and forth from his home in the city, staying for no more than a few days at a time so as not to be away too long from his family. Once they moved in, Nick began restoring the gardens and vegetable patch, rebuilt the chicken coop and finally added a large koi pond.

           At the time that he purchased the property, it was twenty miles beyond the city limit, twenty miles of farmland and woodlots with a sprinkling of villages, and air that always smelled sweet. As the city’s population grew, it started to expand, gobbling up the pastures and barns surrounding it. The urban sprawl soon crept northwards in his direction, new subdivisions built every few years. With the constant housing shortage, the sprawl’s advance had become more of a gallop than a creep. And so today, standing in his driveway, Nick could gaze across the town’s sideroad and watch the newest suburban development as it reached the edge of the sideroad. Long necked yellow monsters began the assault by ripping down every tree except the few that hugged the lot fence. They churned the long grasses and scarred the soil before giving way to the yellow behemoths that leveled the land. An army of workers took over: surveyors laid out several hundred lots, municipal services were installed and house frames began to rise, a foul crop of weeds on what was once pristine land. The noise was incessant and a film of dust covered everything, including his house and gardens. Even the chickens were gritty.

           Sooner or later, Nick knew, an expensive car, uninvited, would pull into his driveway. A fast- talking agent would climb out, knock on his door while greedily looking at his two acres, making him an offer so generous that he simply could not refuse. Except that he could. Easily. What need had he for more money? What could he buy with it to make him any happier?          But the realtors had a secret weapon they themselves were unaware of: the encroaching development and its future traffic, its noise and pollution, garbage trucks, swarms of leaf blowers in summer and snow blowers in winter. It’s total confinement was, if anything, what could cause Nick to accept their offer and move.

           Several weeks later Nick finished restoring the phone booth to an almost pristine state; he resurfaced his father’s concrete pad, deciding to place his own phone booth there. Unlike his father, however, there would be no one complaining to him that he was the cause of his child’s suffering because of the taunts of childhood friends.

           Finally, Nick replaced any worn wires and electronics and ran some old Bell cable from the phone to a line terminal he had installed in the garage, even though there was nowhere for a pay phone call to go. He hard wired the electric cord and watched as the letters above the hinged door lit up, glowing in the darkening, late afternoon light, spelling TELEPHONE. A fluorescent light attached to the ceiling of the booth likewise lit up, helping users to see at night. On many a lonely corner, those lit phonebooths served as safe harbours for people unsure of their whereabouts, seeking shelter from cold or rain, in need of help for a stalled car or other emergency. Nick had to admit, despite the negative aspects of cellphones, in an emergency they had their advantages. Yet they lacked the phone booth’s romance, its symbolic presence that help could be reached at the other end of the line. 

           Laughing at himself for having grown up with his father’s need for authenticity, despite not always appreciating it as a teenager, Nick looked at the shiny silver coin slots, the instructions telling users to deposit a quarter to make a call, the hanging phone book and even a small, pullout seat. He wondered about the thousands of human lives that must have entered this one phone booth over the years, people calling their loved ones, asking for directions, searching in their pants or purses for the right change, the distant sounding voice of an operator asking them to deposit three more quarters for a long distance call. Nick felt their spirits, all of them, packed into the tiny booth.

           Shrugging why not, Nick fished a quarter from his pocket, picked up the receiver and dropped the coin into the vertical quarter slot, hearing its clunk on the bottom of the coin box. He was just about to hang up the receiver, satisfied that everything worked as it should, when he heard a dial tone.

           “Impossible,” Nick said aloud, yet immediately trying to analyze possible causes. True, he had bought two old, Bell house phones at a Sunday barn sale, and had also wired them to the line terminal. But this only made it possible to use the three phones as a closed intercom system, so that he could talk to family in the house when he was out working, without bothering to carry his cell phone. He had wired the phones to ring if he pressed the zero, but only a functioning Bell system could result in a dial tone, and that system had long since been decommissioned. 

           Tomorrow, he would examine the electronics and try to figure out how the phone could possibly have produced a dial tone, which even now buzzed in his ear. Nick thought, Got a dial tone, so I might as well, and began dialing his childhood phone number, expecting only silence as he pressed each button, but the clicks sounded as though the phone was live and connecting. He hesitated: first a dial tone, now seemingly active buttons. His finger hovered over last button, fearful of what might happen. Don’t be stupid, he chided himself. Press it. 

           Reminding himself to breathe, Nick jabbed at the number. Nothing. Just what he had expected. Relieved and laughing at himself at the same time, he started to hang up the receiver. That’s when Nick heard the tiny voice, “Hello.”

           Nick paused, putting the phone to his ear. He heard it again, more of a questioning this time. “Hello?” 

           A dial tone Nick could maybe explain as some trick of electronics, but a voice? He grasped the phone box with his other hand to steady himself.

           “Who is this?” the voice asked. It was high pitched but male, young, maybe twelve, thirteen years old.

           Feeling silly, he found himself answering. “This is Nick.”

           The voice replied, “Cool! My name’s Nick also.”

           Nick’s grip tightened on the phone box. His mind whirring, he replied, as calmly as he could, “Funny coincidence, I guess.”

           “Are you calling my dad?” The boy seemed mature for his age.

           Nick floundered for a second, then asked, “Is he home? Your dad?” He was relieved when the boy replied that his father had gone out to run an errand. And then, before he knew he was going to mouth the words, Nick asked, “What’s your dad’s name?”

           “I guess if you don’t know you’re not a friend of his. It’s Gary.”

           Nick almost dropped the receiver. His heart raced, and sweat ran down his forehead, falling into his eyes. When he rubbed them, for a moment, the framing for the new homes across the sideroad seemed to disappear; in their place were the trees, the fields full of autumn crops and the farmhouse of the old McDermott place.

           The boy asked, “Are you calling about the phone booth?”

           “What?”

           “My dad went to pick up some old phone booth he wants to use as a shelter for me when I wait for the school bus in the winter. Is he supposed to pick it up from you?” Nick detected disapproval of the plan in the voice’s tone.

           “No, not from me, Nick,” Nick said, “But that’s a pretty neat idea, don’t you think?”

           “My friends are going to make fun of me; I’ll be the only kid with a phone booth. Dad always gets these weird ideas and it’s embarrassing sometimes.”

           The boy was honest, and clearly needed to talk with someone, Nick thought. Kids can be cruel sometimes, and the worst thing was to be different, not to fit in.

           Nick began to see the source of what had haunted him all these years. A denial of his father’s uniqueness and the love that came with it, for no other reason than fear of the judgement of others.

           “Well, Nick, I think it’s kind of cool you know, to have a phone booth for a shelter. Anyone can slap some old barnboard together with a tiny window and call it a shelter, but a phone booth with glass on three sides so you can look out…that’s special. And he’s doing it for you, you know.”

           “Yeh, but the other kids will think it’s stupid.”

           Nick thought quickly. He needed to get this right for the boy, for himself. “Maybe they will, but maybe not. And people sometimes make fun of things that are different or that they don’t understand, or even that they’re jealous of, you know? But I have an idea. Want to hear it?”

           “Okay.”

           “Invite them over. Let them go inside, play with the phone, dial up a number, pretend to call someone.”

           “You think that’ll work?” The boy’s voice was hopeful. He was clearly looking for a solution.

           “Yes, I do. Really.” Then Nick added, “But even if they think it’s still a bit weird, they’ll have played with it and it won’t be a big deal anymore. They’ll find something else to do.”

           After a pause the boy responded, “Okay. I guess.” He was still somewhat doubtful.

           “And anyway, what do you have to lose?”

           The boy seemed to consider. “Yeah, maybe. Worth a try, I suppose.” A slight pause, then the boy remembered this was an adult call. “Did you want to leave my dad a message?”

           “No, that’s okay. To tell you the truth, I think I dialed a wrong number. But listen young Nick, I enjoyed talking with you very much. Give that phone booth a chance and try what I said.” Making sure to use the language of the day, Nick added, “Even though I don’t know your dad, I think he’s a cool guy.”

           He hung up, doubting his own sanity: having a conversation with a voice at the end of a disconnected line as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Really?

           Either there were such things as time warps, or he was hallucinating, or something deep inside had found a way to reconcile himself with the memory of his father. He wiped the sweat dripping into his eyes again, and looked out from the phone booth. The McDermott place had now disappeared into the past and the framing of the homes being built across the sideroad were back. Maybe he’d learn to coexist with them eventually, and he had to admit that the new subdivision would bring much needed prosperity to the township.

           He picked up the phone’s receiver one more time. Just to check.

           There was no dial tone.