Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
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.
****
1
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
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, whydon’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.
2
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
“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.”
3
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
“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
4
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
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
5
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
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
6
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
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.”
7
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
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.
8
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
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.
9
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
You can’t tell her, this girl you love, that you are dying. Some things aren’t
ready to be spoken. They need time.
You drive home slowly, staying in the right lane. The cars behind you honk
and swing wide and slam onto the gas to get by like they’re worried that they’ll
waste precious seconds of their lives stuck behind you. You turn on the radio. It’s
still set to the jazz station. Jazz is her favorite.
She told you about Louie Armstrong, how he could play the trumpet like it
was a game of poker, how his fingers and lungs moved in infallible synchronicity.
That’s how you move around her. How she moves around you.
You come home to a dark and empty apartment. It is seven p.m. Your shift
starts in two hours. For two hours you will sit on your couch and sob. You will look
at the clean rug, the newly organized apartment, and think about how hoping for
anything, how doing anything, is pointless. You will log onto your premium
Brazzers account and assuage your frustration with a lugubrious game.
After two hours you will shower and dress and go into work and try to call
one hundred and sixteen people per minute. You will not conduct yourself
differently than any other day at the office. You will squeeze under your black
plastic desk in your rolling chair, turn the pages of the phonebook, and wear
through the calluses on your fingers dialing the numbers while you stare at the cat
calendar thumbtacked to the wall of your cubicle. The picture for this month—
September— is of three kittens jumping into a pile of leaves. It takes you four days
at the beginning of each month to memorize every square inch of the calendar
picture. You don’t even look at it anymore, but it’s there in front of you so you see it.
10
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
In two and a half minutes (two hundred and ninety calls) the manager will
walk by. “How’s it going, Simon?” He’ll ask.
You won’t say anything and he won’t stop to give you the opportunity.
“Good work,” he’ll say after he’s already passed.
****
It has been two hours. You have showered and dressed and gone to work
and conducted yourself. The manager has walked by. You are now sitting at your
desk and looking at the cat calendar.
You think about those kittens. You wonder what happened to them after that
photo was taken. Did their agent call with another gig in Monaco? Did they land a
minor role in a screenplay? Maybe they let down the only cat they’d ever loved.
Maybe they found out they had cancer and died.
You dial another number. Answering machine. Beep. Would you like to buy
welcome mats? Dial number. Answering machine. Beep. Buy welcome mats?
Number. Machine. Beep. Welcome mats?
Number. Machine. Beep. “Hello?” For the second time in your eleven-year
career, someone has picked up the phone. You haven’t even had the chance to start
asking them about welcome mats.
“Hello,” you say. “My name is Simon Warren. I’m dying of cancer.”
A pause. An intake of breath. A shuffling of feet. “What kind?” The guy on
the other end asks.
“Pretty much every kind. Testicular, prostate, pancreatic, lung.”
“Wow, that’s some shit.”
11
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
“It is, isn’t it?”
You tell him about the girl you love. You tell him about your shitty job, your
shitty apartment, your shitty life and your not-so-shitty premium Brazzers account.
And by golly, he doesn’t hang up. He holds the phone and he listens and occasionally
says things like ‘geez’ or ‘mm’ or ‘damn.’
And you keep talking until your throat stings and you haven’t just run out of
things to say but the air to say it with and then you suck in a breath and tell him, “so,
yeah.”
This guy, this person who is real enough to pick up the phone and listen to a
stranger’s problems, he coughs and he says, “Well, chief, I’m not going to say there’s
a bright side, because from what you’ve told me there isn’t. I’m not going to pretend
I know what its like to be you. I wish I could give you some kind of life-changing
advice. Hell, I’d buy you Bojangles if that would make you feel better.”
“Thanks.”
He sighs, and you swear that you can hear him running his hands through his
hair on the other side of the telephone static. “Listen, chief, life’s a bitch. I’m sure
you know that by now. But that doesn’t mean you have to be one. Way I see it,
you’ve got two options: you can go ahead and end it now, break things off with the
lady and hang yourself in the linen closet, or you can forget about what’s going to
happen in a few months and love that little lady like you mean it. Fuck her like you
mean it, too. Hell, try anal if the mood strikes you. It’s hard to say no to that when
your boyfriend is dying of cancer.” He pauses, coughs. “Then again, what do I
know? I’m just some number in the phonebook.”
12
Mason Boyles
Phonebooks
mdboyles@live.unc.edu
“Thanks,” you say, and when you slam down the receiver your hands are
shaking. You sit there, with the cat calendar and the phonebook and the
accumulating pay docks, and all that you can think to do is call the woman that you
love and tell her that you’re quitting your job and moving in with her. You don’t tell
her the part about the cancer, not yet. That will come when it’s ready.
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