The Cellphone
Groggy from sleep, Alex was stirring sugar into a mug that had once been white. Now it was chipped around the rim and the small handle. Sugar and milk had created a hard crystalline surface down its greying side. There was a sharp knock at the door, knocking designed to be heard, if needs be, in the bedroom. Two walls were between the kitchen where Alex stood and the bedroom. One wall was hung with a fraying picture of New Order and the other, inside the hallway, was decorated only with stains and a polaroid of a black cat. The knocking was too loud for someone newly awake and next to the source.
He opened the door, and upon seeing the face of his neighbor unlocked the black burglar bars. Alvin lived with his mother in the other half of the duplex. Alvin was tall and dark skinned, his dreaded hair came down to just above the lump on the back of the neck where the spine protrudes. He didin’t like his name to be known, and had chosen the moniker ‘Dread’. He was proud of his hair. He was thin, but hid the fact with tent like white t-shirts and huge jeans. There was a liquor store that sold white tees by the bundle and various other items for the discount that came from working with boosters. Alex walked into the living room with him and thought about offering tea, but there were no clean cups – he remembered after feeling the sticky surface of his own.
There was a small green couch against the back wall. Above the couch the phrase “FASHION KILLS PERSONALITY” was scrawled on the wall in matte black paint, from a large tipped pen. Alex sat in the couch and watched Alvin sit on one of only two more seats, a hard plastic thing from Ikea that was supposed to light up. They never work, he thought, the thing had worked maybe four times in the last 2 years. And besides, it never looks good when it does. The only other seat in the room was a chair that had been stolen from a dentist’s office. A huge surgical white chair that could lay flat or up as access to the teeth required. Stiff arms jutted from the back and the base was a white box full of broken and obsolete machinery. No one liked to sit in that chair, Alex’s guests always balked at the first sight of it viewing it with suspicion, thinking that there was no way of knowing what had been done there, fearing bodily fluids and bad memories of dental offices.
Alvin shook his head as he thought about what his mother would say about the room, and sat. “Whats good? I was visiting my mama, when you got to go to work?”. Alvin spoke fluidly and languidly, full of slang and a southern touch that was the African American South. Since Alex had moved there, he noticed that everybody spoke this way. Alex found himself injecting new vocabulary into his English accented voice. He thought about the grill at work and how he only had 4 hours until he had to be there.
“I have to be there in 4 hours. We good. What’s up?”
Alvin was preoccupied with his phone. “My girl is calling me acting crazy.” To confirm this the phone was put on speaker and the shrill voice was asking where the goddamn hell you been. “That’s why I was at my mamas house to be honest cus”. Alex was upset that no one called him. No one bothered calling, they just came around. Then his phone rang and he silenced it.
“Yeah, that sucks. You can hang out here” as Alex offered consolation he hoped that Alivin would leave sooner than later so he could leave in peace.
The room they sat in was the hub of the house. A small yellow table made of plywood, another Ikea item, was the only surface. A large chunky TV with half of it spray painted white sat at the opposite wall from the couch. When the TV was turned on the white paint was partially transparent, allowing distortions of light from the set to get through. A bookcase filled and piled sat next to the TV. A Iggy Pop poster hung on the wall, one yellowed corner miserably hanging down, showing only POWER.
When Alex first moved there, met Alvin and the neighborhood people every time someone came in the room they would look around confused. The posters, the record player, the dentist chair it was bizarre for anywhere. Alvin had figured out an explanation quickly. “He English cus” saying English harder and slightly louder than the other words, he assumed this was the reason. “We maybe got pictures of our families on the walls, but they don’t do that”. So it was the fact that Alex was English that brushed of his dirty house, his tight pants, his white skin and his strange music.
Alvin passed Alex a brown swisher that had been split and then rerolled tightly. Alex inhaled, the flavor of the strawberry cigar coming through. The conversation was getting more heated. The faster Alvin talked, the harder it became for Alex to understand him. Alex was still a foreigner and still an outsider, no matter how long he lived there.
He sat and smoked hearing the conversation get louder and more aggressive. The phone was hung up repeatedly, then always re-answered until Alvin finally turned it off. “She mad because she says this is her phone.” Alvin explained, knowing that the conversation had not been understood. “It isn’t, it’s my phone, I bought it, she just use it.” Alex nodded. He had never met Alvin’s girl but the possessive aspect threw him off and it made him wary when she was slated to come. She lived in another neighborhood, a 10 minute drive from his house. In another neighborhood may as well be in another state. Alex never saw other neighborhoods, staying in the winding and sloping East Atlanta, the borders extending to I-20 in the North, Moreland in the West, and a fuzzy west and south boarder that ended near Candler park and Edgewood.
Then there was a knock at the door, sudden and surprising. There was a door to the left of the couch. It was the front door, rarely used. There was no particular reason it was rarely used, it just was. Someone knocking on that door is someone who has never been here before, thought Alex. Anyone who came to the house used the side door, it was closer to the car, more private and closer his neighbors on the bottom of the hill with whom he played music and drank wine. It was a system that functioned as an alarm – signifying a stranger was here.
Alex got up and looked through the dull gold spy hole. A woman was outside moving back and forward like a horse before a race. She was wearing form fitting black pants and her hair was up in a light pink handkerchief decorated with paisley. Handkerchiefs are only ever sold with paisley. A town in Scotland invented it, and from there it disseminated. The town of Paisley was a pretty unremarkable borders town these days, Alex thought as he understood that this was the voice on the other end of the phone. He sat back down.
“It’s for you, please go outside, I don’t want her in here.”
Alvin went out through the side door to loop, he worried about what this girl was going to say, and he worried about fighting. Alex thought about the previous night, when he had smoked cigarettes until dawn, and it made his throat hurt to remember. The black cat in the polaroid had come into the room and was now preparing to jump onto his lap. Alex stroked the cat behind the ears and under the chin. The cat had been another point of cultural exchange. A black cat was bad luck, and naming it Human Head seemed to be inviting trouble. Human Head, affectionately called Human for short, usually enjoyed being pet, and was fearless around people. Human would also randomly scratch and bite anyone at any time, wether they were petting him or not, so he could be bad luck. Most guests, unless they were the most frequent ones, stayed away from him.
The door slammed and was locked. Alvin whirled into the room, his white T-shirt flapping. He sat down and began to talk to Alex quickly and shakily. “She crazy, she thinks this is her phone, she know I paid for it, she don’t even pay the bills, you don’t even know cus, she brought her girlfriend with a car here, she outside screaming at me”. Outside the woman was shouting and banging on the door. Alex thought about work in 3 hours. “Can we not do this? She acting like a damn child, give her the phone or tell her to get lost, this is my house she can’t be doing this.”
Human Head purred in his lap and nibbled on his numb, occasionally biting, ignoring the sounds outside. Alvin left and came in a second time, apologizing for all the ‘bullshit’. The burglar bars were rattling at the side door. The woman shouted and pulled at the iron twists, flecks of black paint coming off in her hands. She would have to find another way in, fuming as she thought about Alvin and the argument they had last night. She kicked the bars one last time and went down into the garden. Alex was frustrated and no longer listening to Alvin, who was rolling another swisher to calm the situation. The woman found a pair of long handled shears with a rusted top that had been sitting in the red clay beneath a cleanly trimmed shrub that was fastidiously maintained every other Tuesday by Alvin’s mama. The shears were obviously a mistake, and probably had something to do with Alex as his neighbor would never have left them on the ground.
The woman, now armed, came again to the burglar bars. The metallic clanging was worse than the rattle. Human Head jumped up and raced to the back room. The sound stopped. Alex and Alvin looked at each other. Alvin had a cigar to his mouth, slowly licking the underside of the wrapping and folding it expertly in his hands into a perfect cylinder. The front door resonated with a thump. Unlike the back door the front had no bars, but it was stout wood 4 inches thick with 3 locks and a dull grey deadbolt the size of a pairing knife.
Alex had wondered why the house was so protected. The windows all had thick wrought iron bars that had been painted black once, but were now chipping. The bars curled up at points giving a spiral decoration and another surface protection. The woman banged harder against the only entrance not protected by a gate. Looking through the spy glass Alex recoiled as the force of her blow made the door shudder.
“Oi!”, he shouted, “Quit the fucking banging”. As Alvin, Alex’s voice became hard to understand for Americans when he spoke quickly, with passion. The unexpected sound of a cursing English accent made the woman stop. Alex opened the door and positioned himself in the opening, prepared to be pushed.
The woman backed down the doorsteps and onto the grey slab path that lead from the street. “Tell Alvin to get out here!” she shouted, shaking the tool.
“You’re acting like a goddamn child banging on my fucking door and causing a scene. You’re a grown woman what the hell is going on?” Alex relaxed, she was not going to attack him.
She threw the tool to the ground, “He got my phone, if he gives me the phone I’m gone, but you tell him” her voice grew louder “to give me the goddamn phone!”
“I’m not telling him nothing, it ain’t got shit to do with me, I have work, you’re here fucking me up, trying to break my door.”
Behind Alex Alvin was standing with the phone. Alex moved aside to let Alvin come up, he thought about work in 3 hours and when he got off he would get a cold beer and probably a shot of whisky. Alvin had the phone in his hand and, as he threw it into the street, he bellowed, “Here go your phone!” The phone landed a few feet in front of a maroon hatchback and exploded into its component parts. Alex swung the door closed and locked it.
The shouting outside continued. Alex could not understand what she was saying, and was thinking about when she would finally leave, when Alvin would leave and when all this would stop. Alvin had to tell him what she was saying, “She say’s she’s calling the police cus. She’ll do it too”. Alex recoiled from the news. People never called the cops in the neighborhood he thought, and said; “I’ve got warrants”.
They went to the bedroom and pulled the black curtains shut. Alvin took care of lowering the blinds and clicking them in place. Alex turned of the TV which powered down with a low buzz that went down in pitch like it was trying to suck in the last bit of light. The back door was checked, the burglar bars shut again. Alex turned all the lights off, cut the record player and went to the hallway, Alvin following. They closed all the doors to the hallway, anywhere with a window was closed off. The bedroom, bathroom and living room were now separated by 3 different doors.
Crouched in the semi darkness, idly moving the cigar around Alvin was on another phone talking in hushed tones to someone. Alex looked at this realizing that was her phone, he has his and he broke the one he gave her, Alex thought. He was breathing quickly.
He had warrants, they were only bench warrants from never going to traffic court or paying any of his numerous tickets. He was more worried about what manner of illegal things were in his house. For 2 years now, his house had become a spot for people in the neighborhood to come hang out, not that he minded that, but after he found a gun squeezed into the green feux leather seats of the couch while cleaning up after one of the larger parties, he had stopped letting unknown people in. Still he and a lot of his friends carried a lot of contraband on a regular basis.
This was Atlanta, GA where they would arrest anyone for possession of any kind of drug. There was no prescription for the morphine in the drawer of Alex’s desk, and he was thinking about this as he heard the crunching roll of a new car pulling up onto the gravely road. His roommate, though he was not always there had a predilection for cocaine and had a crack pipe hidden inside one of the amplifiers, and he was thinking about that as he heard the police talking to the woman. Their condescending and arrogant tone, that they so often use, made him angry, and then he thought about his friends last week – hadn’t they sold his roommate mushrooms, or LSD. He had taken little interest in it, but knew there was some kind of psychedelic somewhere in that room his roommate kept locked. I need a new roomate Alex thought. The other painkillers were out in plain sight because he was the only one who enjoyed them, they were just as illegal as anything squirreled away by his housemate. The woman was telling the police that Alvin, inside the dark house, had weed. He thought about that, about what Alvin kept on him. Nothing really, unlike some of his other friends Alvin was only schedule II, no felonies on his person. He could have a gun.
Alvin crouched and thought about what was in this house, and where he could hide his weed. He thought about what English people do around cops, he could sense Alex’s discomfort. He knew that a white englishman didn’t get harassed by the police, and didn’t know anything about the mechanics of avoiding arrest in the neighborhood. He could have a gun, he thought as he heard the girl talking to the police, demanding entry. He was worried Alex would open the door. He worried about the crazy roommate that his friends had sold crack to behind Alex’s back, violating the no selling crack rule that Alex imposed after crackheads came to the house, asking for rocks. He needed to calm down, and calm down the naïve, shaky man next to him.
Lost in his thoughts and straining to hear the police Alex was startled when the smell of cannabis filled the hallway. “What the fuck?” he whispered, “there are police right outside the..” his voice trailed of as a knock came at the door. He took the cigar and put it out.
The next minutes were tense, neither of them breathed as the knocking continued.
“They in there, they got weed, they are in there”. The sympathy Alex had had for the woman died away.
The officer now:
“Ma’am it looks like no one is home, we can’t go in there.”
There were ten minutes of silence that was 2 minutes long. The crunch of tires crushing stones marked their disappearance, followed 10 minutes later by another. We opened the doors and stretched. Sitting down on the couch, next to each other this time. Wordlessly the cigar was lit again, this time wet mango. He got up to look out the window and the thought about 2 hours until work, he thought about his bench warrant and the house full of hidden drugs. He thought about the police. “That can never happen again, I don’t want cops here. Ever.”
Alvin leaned forward and straightened up; “’cu’, This is my mama house nigga, you think I want cops here, shit. I’m with you.” Then he leaned back, passing the cigar. “my mama would’ve killed that girl if she was home, she don’t play, and she would have killed me.” He knew he had to brush off the fact that the event scared him, but he had hidden in a house before, he was more worried about if his mama had heard.
Alvin’s mother was formidable. Mrs Jones, or Miss Jones if you knew her well enough. Ma’am to everyone else. There could be 5 or 6 big young men standing in the shared yard, boasting about what they do, telling stories about cars stolen, asses whupped, sexual conquests, but if they were being too loud while they did it she would come out and silence the entire group with a word. Alex was fine with being less feared than M. Jones.
John Hutt 