Phone Fun
By Scott Deckman
Monday. Nov 26, 1:46 AM
Chapter 23: the epiphany and the conclusion.

Lucy was hustling it up the stairs, trying to get the ring-a-ding-ding before whoever it was got the machine. Was everything a struggle these days?

She fussed with the regular lock, then the dead bolt.

“Ah… come on you f…”

Open, now the phone, on its last ring, about to pick up.

“Hello hah hah,” she let out, wheezing slightly.

“Settle down there, girl: sounds like you’re out of breath. It’s Dr. Goldstein.”

“Oh, hey doc, just running up the stairs and tried to catch the phone,” she wheezed again. “I guess I gotta increase the carbs and the cardio, eh?”

“Well, you must be doing something right. I just wanted to congratulate you: you’re fine. The lab did make a mistake on the Pap smear and the lesion is just a nevi, a new mole, and fortunately it’s benign. But as a precaution, we should have it removed sooner than later. You’re fine. And I can do that procedure here, it’s really basic…”

Lucy stood grabbing the desktop, ears not comprehending much past “you’re fine.” A single tear streaked down her right cheek, then a second down her left, and she struggled to hold back a sniffle as she talked with the good doctor, silently wiping her tears away and lapping up the remains with her tongue in an open-mouthed deliverance.

Soon she was off the phone, a sweeping lightness penetrating her core, a lightness of aura and soul and womanhood and peace… and luck.

“Now what am I gonna do?”

Later, out on the deck – such a frivolous expenditure really, cost her an extra 100 or so a month, but was it ever worth it – Lucy gazed out over Chesapeake Bay, connected to a water foreign to her as a little girl, but a body of water she always liked the sound of: A-t-l-a-n-t-i-c. And it just then occurred to her: as an incredibly precocious little fifth grader, she was assigned a school project on colonial Philadelphia, and that whole section of study made her think of the Atlantic Ocean as a gateway to freedom for the settlers who eventually propagated our nation, and sad in knowing that even then, there were really no more frontiers to conquer (except for space, which then held little interest to a Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag-listening kid at 10. Yeah), no more oceans to discover, no more Indians to kill. And believe you me she would feel bad about that eventually, and along that same thought pattern a smile cropped up as visions of she and Mel at their organized sit-in at TwentyFiveFourThree on June 1, 1988, in honor of Geronimo, who was born sometime that month, though they couldn’t say for sure when. The smile broadened at the reverie: those two and a couple others being carried off – bodily, by burly gym teachers, one she could have sworn was feeling her up – to the principle’s office, her later suspension, ultimately leading to the school’s recantation and apology, formerly written out like a high school diploma, all to avoid an embarrassing and potentially costly lawsuit.

“Hahahah.”

She had brought out her remaining cigarettes to smoke, but there they sat on a little unlacquered wooden table, incorrigible cancer sticks and if she was close enough she would have chucked them into the Bay, but they would have hit only grass, or worse, maybe a passerby with her luck with tough habits to break, and that wouldn’t do any good. As the weather had taken on a slightly cool note, she had donned a bulky wooly brown cardigan over her Barbie tee, the kind Dad would wear well into the ’80s that she’d tease him about, now suddenly hip again. The sun was getting close to its nightly nap, and the sucker was living huge! A golden orange that illuminated the declining sky, imbuing it with a rich tapestry of colors – as advertised – blue, mauve, out and out purple, reds, oranges, and others indiscernible, like life itself. The Dandy Warhols’ first major label effort, …Come Down, was infiltrating her senses with its post-Velvet stoner sensibility. And aptly, “Orange” was the one doing the damage, a drugged-out blissful rhythm section-cum-trippy melody and space cadet drone. Soon the dittie switched feet, but not pace, to “I Love You.”

Although we’ve only known each other a bit,
already I can’t sleep at night and I feel like shit (that’s right).

This made her think of the two potential disasters she chatted up on that ridiculous Matchline. What a cream dream that thing was. There was that guy Rob she wrote to briefly on IM and that other character John, who admittedly made her nervous and angsty and had her cute little belly flip-flopping with estrogen want and need. Smart, too. If that was even him, which she still had doubts about. And Amelda and all the cool people never did anything like this, so, so, so… ah, such is life. To his credit, John had called her back later on in the afternoon and the two chatted for another 20 minutes, not covering much, just him imploring that they had to meet and you’re not like the other girls on here and you’re sharp and sexy et al. And while he was smart and hot (if, well, you know), through it all there was definitely something a bit off about that potential suitor, some underlying subtext that needed to be ferreted out and exposed into the harsh light of day, gone over like a slide under the microscope she used in her first year at UCLA during a lab of some sort, or however it was those scientists declared that she was again cancer free, before they even got around to setting up a meeting: and not a date! And any meeting would have to be someplace really, really public, with the malevolent milieu for young cuties in the Baltimore/D.C. area (of which she finally had to do some work on for a segment that aired earlier that evening: The Harvard Killer. Police chiefs from both assailed cities playing their political chess to benefit the squeamish masses)… who knows, was it even worth the risk until that nightmare ended? Like she’d come up empty, please. As she sat ruminating about love or lack thereof, those cigarettes looked so damned inviting. But again, something stopped her, something unexplainable: maybe it was her body and brain being thankful for the fourth life they had been given (besides the obvious, she was an inch away from being crushed by a crane down by the sea in Santa Monica when she was 15), maybe it was a sort of penance or repentance, or maybe it was something else entirely.

She thought about calling her dad: scum though he was, as he might not even have known she’d been out there. His initial reaction to her cancer had been less than enthusiastic, as she could hear him mutter on the phone, supposedly out of earshot, swear to God, This is gonna end up costing me a fortune. But, like it or not, he was still… well, Dad, and now with her heart so reflective, maybe it was time to at least talk civilly with him for once, in spite of his lugubrious nature upon her heart.

As the sun further declined and with it the demise of the aural flood of a certain bunch of hipsters from Portland, Lucy saw things both grand and unspectacular in its beauty, the interconnectedness of God and Christ and Buddha and Siddha Yoga and the Tao and that cute little Gretchen girl from the plane and Mom and Dad and Amelda and Jim, that they were all somehow a chain that couldn’t be broken, that one thing led to another and life led to death yet death led to life and water to fire and air to dirt.

All around her emanated a buzz of a spot that, only a decade or two earlier, was a working man’s town with salt-of-the-sea fishermen and dock and factory workers, blue-collar heroes and terrible lowlifes, generations of Welsh and English and Pole and German and Irish, certainly different, yet all equal in their struggles (many to get out of Canton): birth, struggle, survive, live, love, die. It was a place now ensconced in regeneration, or gentrification, old Baltimore giving way to new Baltimore with all its sleek, impossible technological grandeur and soulless limitations. The way of the rugged seafarer was taking a backseat to the young urban professional, the local rowhouse market replaced by The Can Company, a refurbished edifice that housed out-of-town hi-tech mavens and chic eateries and other assorted materialistic gunk for the benefit of everyone everywhere, something that could last unto the end of time memorial, if God would permit, whose sole efficacy consisted of dividends and speculative future earnings. Hegemony screams for blood and mucus and tissue and breath, much breath.

And the buzz further encompassed those working class heroes sitting down to break bread for maybe the last time, as their row houses would surely be torn down or entirely renovated one day, maybe a couple of years down the road, maybe a decade, for the benefit of luscious young playthings and newly minted families to have more room, space (as valuable a commodity as could be found anywhere in the teaming), violent, crowded Northeast, and, more critically, the entire West. The buzz also synthesized into the sidewalks, full of unmitigated harsh concrete, unmercifully hard, pretty blacktop, and ugly exhaust fumes funneling up to meet their maker and claim a few while they were at it. And that could be transformed into any number of things that hung out over the beatific scene Lucy was viewing, a dying day, gorgeous decay, a promise of hope that things might not turn out that bad after all.

The buzz also reverberated through the television sets and computers and telephones of the world. Somewhere someone was talking to their grandmother in Boca Raton, someone was calling in a bomb threat, someone was downloading gay porn surreptitiously (and some slob the hetero stuff too, you bet); there were psychopathic killers stalking victims in the streets, some clever enough to evade capture for the longest time, many one-shot amateurs, none ever to get away with it completely. Somewhere a couple was breaking up, and somewhere an infant spoke his first words all blubber and happy, as surprised with this newfound evocation of language as his beaming, peacock-proud parents; and somewhere someone was losing their fight, their grip, to alcohol, to drugs, to madness, to compulsions seemingly benign though anything but, and somewhere Shtippers was being deleted, with the system administrators notified; and somewhere someone had just gotten hired for the job he was fired for previously, the one he said he’d never go back to, not on his life. Somewhere someone was converting to a somewhat speculative religious practice, as another person died of AIDS in the same town in an awful, grotesque heap, and no one cares.

And the buzz could be interpreted as the great adversary, that of black contusions and smog, of bile and carcinogenic fruitless pulp, of a stymied implacable binary consciousness, of the ’88 Orioles and their ghastly 21-game skid to start off the season in as inauspicious a manor as possible. That same buzz could have been the beating hearts of death row prisoners, a scant few there because of falsehoods, most of them there because they deserved it, and all of us certainly wishing better for our loved ones or fellow man. Death, cruel and incongruous, the paradoxical sentiment of all time, both needed, wanted, abhorred, and feared, as much a part of life itself as living.

Death hovers over all the seekers, the livers, the lovers, the killers, the haters, and the whiners, over all the saints and sinners and betrothed and recently bereaved, the moneyed elite, the harried middle and gnarled working classes and the poor bastards one and all, and as Lucy soaked up the last rays of the gorgeous elliptical life force that was here long, long before her and destined to be around for another billion years or so, give or take, God was speaking to her, through her, and she wasn’t about to cry, for this voice went in deep and sure, way past her arms and legs and neck and trunk, past her liver and heart and spleen and uterus, on past her capillaries and cells and neuropeptides and synapses: these words engulfed her ki, her semangot, her base, her soul. It was comforting her with a holy tonic, a blissful swath of light, love and temperance, if only in epiphanic evanescence, soon to leave but forever burned in engram. And the words that kept running across her mind as the day turned into night, hammering at a stealthy clip and oh so visible, encapsulating her volition, though somehow pre-sight, pre-verbal, and pre-aural, what she must have felt in her mother’s womb all those years ago, and freer than anything she’d known previously, or might have dreamt of, or ever would know, they spelled one simple, rudimentary thing, all natural and pure.

CHOOSE LIFE.

Scott Deckman

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