Cell Phones

When I was in high school my good (and significantly older) friend Dick bought a plastic dash board mountable phone and put it in his car. Wireless. In fact it had no electronics of any kind. It was just molded plastic. Dick would drive around pretending he was on the phone: a very important seventeen year old.
I remember in the movie Wall Street, from the mid-80s, Michael Douglas (how is it possible for him to be as good looking as his father) walking on his beach just before dawn and calling Charlie Sheen on a wireless phone. That phone did have electronics: about forty pounds worth. It wasn’t a pretend phone, it was a real phone: or could have been. Hollywood could have switched in a plastic dummy to save Michael Douglas from having to carry equipment like a marine would raid a beach with, rather than walk before dawn for pleasure, or business. Michael Douglas has just made, or is about to make, sixty million dollars in an afternoon. (The most money I have ever made in an afternoon was seventy-four thousand dollars, in 1978, when dollars weren’t quite so worthless. But that money wasn’t replaced by another seventy-four thousand dollars the next day, and the next. It had disappeared within months, replaced by seventy-four dollars here and seventy-four cents there.) Sixty million though, that would have lasted me: a little while, even at 2005 gas prices. In any case, if I had sixty million dollars, for an afternoon, or a life time, I might have walked on my beach before dawn, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have been carrying a weights-machine-substitute telephone. Indeed, I did walk on my beach, before dawn and many another time, when I had seventy-four thousand dollars (and a four million dollar inventory in the warehouse), and when I didn’t have seventy-four cents, didn’t have a quarter, and didn’t carry a forty pound wireless phone. I wouldn’t carry a .04 ounce phone on the beach.
The beach, for me, is for getting away from business; not for being interruptable by a seeming-infinity of moron telemarketers with a badly memorized, poorly articulated spiel.
This afternoon, on the line in the supermarket, I heard a little ding, and the blond behind me answered her cell phone. For years now in the market, hoards of women walk the isles with cell phones glued to their ears. I think they’re reading prices for competing markets. But then I also see platoons of women walking the isles with cell phones glued to their ear that no market would hire in trust that they could reliably read the logo on a billboard. I suspect that their phone is real but that they’re connected to no one: just want to be mistaken for someone employed.

In my park there’s a woman with a cell phone grafted to her ear as she walks back and forth to the laundry room. Enormously fat, though hardly a freak these days, I’ll bet not one of her calls is real.

2011 09 07 I'm glad to notice this speculation years later to take it back, to apologize. I came to know Ruthie since then. Her cell phones calls were continuous and real: with other nursing school students. Ruthie was a real Good Samaritan to me by driving me to see the parole board in Fort Pierce when I first got out of jail and had no transportation.
I tell other impressive stories about her elsewhere.

In 1954 Dick’s wish to be mistaken for a busy, successful businessman, or rich playboy (driving an old Dodge), was sort of cute. (I certainly thought it was more inventive than the plastic rockets that other classmates bought to glue onto their cars’ fenders.) In 2005 the plethora of people with cell phones, on real or imaginary calls, is pathetic.

They’re like the wind that’s dipped only slightly below hurricane force for the last three months here. I dip my brush, hold it to my wall, and my touch-up paint spatters the tree three sites away. I recently met a woman who sees sure signs that we are entering the Bible’s Last Days. I sure hope so, though people have seen such signs forever. But I don’t remember any cell phones in John’s Apocalypse.

I bet there are plenty of crushed ones in any ER though.