Telephone, Part 1
'American' Part 2: Dad, you can skip this one | Chapter 6
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This is a chapter from a short book titled ‘American’, a collection of personal essays and memories detailing my life in spite of and because of my culture and circumstances. You are about to begin:
Part 2*
Dad, you can skip this one
Aka “Love Story”
* If you only love me for my jokes, you won’t like this
Telephone, Part 1
2005 - Dad
I had my first panic attack at seven years old. It was my dad’s night to pick me up, and I called him early that evening to ask when he’d be there. No answer. Again. No answer. Mom told me to give him a few minutes to call back, but my mind was set on the potential horror on the other side of the dial tone. The world had not yet revealed the worst of itself to me, but I was born having nightmares filled with magnitudes of violence; my mind was always ten steps ahead of the most horrific plots available on television.
Mom said Dad might be in the bathroom.
My brain said he might have been in a wreck.
She said he could have left his phone at home.
My brain said he was probably there, headless, lying next to it as it rings.
She said he could be on another call.
My brain said he must be locked in a basement somewhere, dwindling limb by limb.
I sat crisscross on the carpeted floor of the family room, staring through the doorway looking down the stairs to the front entrance, awaiting a knock. Clutching the phone, my fingers punched 572-0365 in rapid succession, quickly hanging up and dialing again every time voicemail began. It became an undeniable truth to me that something ungodly had happened; that I’d never see my dad again. My chest started heaving sobs, my view to the front door blurred with tears. I couldn’t breathe.
Mom stood with her arms crossed helplessly, unable to do anything, leaning against the wall. It took me sixteen years to understand that she must have been in more pain than I was, watching her baby girl experience the same panic-stricken grief she had felt so many times before, not knowing where he was.
Fifty-two calls. No answer.
Finally, the phone began to buzz in my hands and he told me “Oh, I was at Bible study,” matter-of-factly, as if reason could brush away the darkness that had moved into my mind. It was Tuesday night. I knew he had Bible study, same time, every week. How did I forget?
There was no important lesson learned. Only a foundation laid, solid rock to build my worries on.
—
2019 - Luigi
At first there was Luigi. Luigi was good. Luigi was light. He took every memory touched by uncertainty and worry and he lifted it out of my anxious mind and sent it away. He was always there; he was there enough to make up for all the not-there that came before him.
The night we met, we sat on a single beanbag chair in a dorm room and talked about Russian literature. On the third day, we said I love you. We saw each other every day thereafter for a year and a half.
Luigi’s parents loved my voice and asked me to sing on their back porch for their neighbors during quarantine. They were Italian, as were the neighbors. Luigi and his sisters were Italian American, which is entirely different in at least one major way. When a family yells at each other in Italian, all of the words sound sweet, a war waged in passion. When a family yells at each other in Staten Island vernacular, all of the words sound like they’re threatening homicide.
Luigi loved my dad’s family, dry and Anglo-Saxon, because they never yelled - in fact, they hardly spoke at all.
Luigi liked weed, and I did not. He liked video games, and I did not. He wanted to stay on Staten Island, and I could not. So after a year and a half together, that was that. Sometimes a great person is still not the right person. Sometimes you spend three more years wondering if - maybe - he was.
Last year, Luigi went to Iceland with his new girlfriend. In their pictures, she looks at him like she knows he’s good. I hope she always does.
—
September 2021 - Noah
“Every time you called and he didn’t answer, he was with me.”
It was the most disrespected I’d ever felt, and it was being delivered by an eighteen year-old on a street corner under the Staten Island Railroad.
He had tried to stomp away when she walked over, as if he were so inconvenienced by us both orbiting him. I yanked him towards me before she reached us and said “You have to tell me the truth now, because I don’t want to find out from her.”
It was more than just a kiss. It was more than just texts. It was more than an accident.
She came with backup, another teenage girl. She was smaller than I was at ten years old, about five feet tall, without an extra ounce of weight anywhere on her body. Eighteen going on pre-teen. He was thirty-two. I’ll let you form your own opinion.
I wouldn’t let go of his hand. “I’m your girlfriend right now. I won’t be in an hour, but for now, you owe it to me to act like you have any respect for me.” I kept holding his hand, as she told me about the poems he wrote for her, and the dinner he had with her parents, and the groveling message he sent her as soon as he told me he’d never see her again.
She and the other teenager kept asking me “Why are you doing this?,” as though I were the one in the wrong. In the moment, I felt no anger. I could only tremble with laughter at the foolishness of this girl who believed this man could possibly do right by her - this pathetic man who has fallen for a near-child, his newest employee.
He called a car to come pick us up. As he got in the backseat, I turned to her and said “Thank you for telling me the truth. I’m sorry he’s done wrong by you. I hope you can free yourself of this situation.” As we drove away, the driver played Christian rock, and I laughed until my thoughts got vertigo - Every time you called and he didn’t answer, he was with me…
—
October 2021
He’s here, incapacitated in my bed, having barely been able to walk himself up the stairs. He’s so drunk, he doesn’t hear his phone ringing with strings of anxious calls. I remember how it felt, calling him, worried, panicked. And I remember how it felt as she said Every time you called and he didn’t answer, he was with me… So I reject every call coming through his phone, and I don’t feel guilty. I could do much worse - I could answer the calls and this whole farce of love would be over… except she has no self-respect, and he has no remorse. So they’d make up, two addicts with desperate hands clinging to the toxic, lead bars of “love.”
He called me an hour ago from a taxi and said the driver was going to kick him out of the car. He put me on speakerphone, and the driver listened as I said “straight up Broadway, it’ll only take you a few minutes to get here.” Was it insanity or fatigue? Self-destructive empathy? Three hours ago, he was yelling at me on 74th Street. A skateboarder whizzed by, reprimanding him, “Don’t make her cry, dude.” But he was sixteen drinks into the night - how could he know whether my face was smudged with tears or he’d just drunk himself blurry?
In the middle of the road, visible through the polished windows of multi-million dollar brownstones where families were sleeping, he grabbed me by my dress, yanked the skirt up, and said “If you really loved me, you’d do this right now.” I pulled my dress back into place and turned west, walking as far as I could, without any train to safety passing at 1 am. My feet pressed into the sidewalk mechanically as the meaning of his last sentence pressed into my mind and out of my eyes.
A group of students outside a pizza shop on 99th Street called to me to join them for a slice, and as I hurried by, they shouted “we love you, please don’t hurt yourself.” The city held my halves together, as he, both less and more than human, hacked from the inside out.
He’s here now, in Harlem, in my bed. He couldn’t take his own shoes off. We broke up two weeks ago. She’s in Staten Island, conveniently close to the mall where girls her age go on a day off. He never denies how messed up it all is - he takes it as an identity and drinks himself to pride so he can feel like a man as he knocks himself down, diligently.
At 7 am, he’s still knocked out, his swollen face slobbering against my pillow. I’m already late to work. My hand taps against his shoulder. He is faintly disturbed. “Noah!” His eyes open, bloodshot like a mouse in a trap.
Why do you do this to yourself?
Because I’m so good at it.
Why are you destroying everything you wanted so much?
No one will do it for me.
He’s the misery man, proud to be anything at all.
Two weeks later, he calls me. Monotone, he says I’m sorry I came to your apartment drunk that night.
Is that all you’re sorry for?
Yes.
Okay. Bye.
Tough read but you kept your dignity with him throughout. He had all of us fooled. A professor by school year and high end restaurant manager by summer. He was charming, sweet, fun, and nothing more than a hollowed out chump. Or maybe even a stump. You were merciful to give up your bed for his drunk ass. I think I would have directed the cab to the worse part of the city and told him to your apartment was there and to just dump him out and he would know where to go. He still knows where to go....