Archive
01/27/10
Answering Machine
You felt so out of it, so irrelevant, so extraneous, so miscellaneous, So profoundly, incongruously innocuous, inconsequent, So inconspicuous, anonymous, shadowy, disembodied, so not,
So (face it)...so (call it like it was, why don't you?)... So (yes, yes, just say it out)... So goddamn lonely, even, especially, when you were at home,
Because, for at least a year and a half, Your answering machine had drowsed on the kitchen countertop, Without a solitary soul triggering a twitch of its red-LED display,
Registering so much as an approximation of a message, Not to mention an India-generated boiler-room solicitation Or, God forbid, a midnight call from your long-deceased mother,
Complaining of her tremors, arthritis-gnarled toes, reflux, angina, Requiring you to dress and, in the dead of a.m.'s dread, Race over to her studio apartment, to nurse her back to equanimity —
Nothing, not even a few "sorry, wrong number"s needing to be erased. And so, you began frequenting the three remaining local pay phones, In the neighborhood liquor store, subway and BP stations,
Using them to place calls to yourself, Holding loquacious or taciturn conversations with your answering machine, Grateful just to be engaging in a kind of animated dialogue,
Conducting what, over the next six months, Grew beyond a mere routine to which you longingly looked forward, Into a four-to-six-times-a-day ritual of spiritual significance.
To be truthful, phoning home, then arriving back at your habitation, Just in time (or so it always seemed) To retrieve your recently recorded message from your "secret admirer,"
Spend the next hour addressing his every nuance, overture, innuendo, Had become such gratification, such a mother lode of happiness, That you had a second landline installed.
Now, you don't have to leave the confines of your living space, Can relax on your comfy sofa, on the toilet, in the laundry room, And place calls from one of your side-by-side phones to the other,
Hold a receiver to each ear, and just gab away, for hours, Lost in the unadulterated pleasures of deepening companionship Leading to friendship, to intimacy, to love, to...who knows?
01/27/10
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