#19 - Mojave Phone Booth

We got a deal where we can add our daughter on our plan for ten bucks a month or something and she’d get her own phone with all that text messaging and facebook stuff. We did it for her birthday, surprised her with it. I picked her up after school that day and we drove over to the shop and she spent an hour looking at all the different phones they got there. Course, she wanted the Apple phone – with the camera and games and whatnot. She begged and begged. I tried to play tough, but you know how it is, and in the end I caved. It was lots more than my wife and I agreed on, but it was her sixteenth birthday. That only happens once. Plus, I figured we’d never make it out of that place unless I gave in.

After that, she was glued to it. That thing was always in her hand, her two eyes staring at the screen. She’d be texting her friends, playing some game, never looking up. We made a rule about no phones at the dinner table. That lasted about two minutes.

Couple months after we gave it to her, she came home one night about an hour late. We’d been calling her, sending messages, but hadn’t heard a peep back. Anyway, she comes in and says her friend just broke up with her boyfriend and she’d been talkin’ her through it. That’s all fine and good, but you know, we’d been sick worrying and all she had to do was send a text saying what she was up to. We sorta laid into her. I don’t like to lecture, but she had that sixteen-year-old attitude, like we don’t know nothin’. So, I took the phone away. I planned on keeping it for one week. She acted like the world was ending, crumpled into a ball on the couch like somebody’d died.

I thought it’d be good enough to keep the phone on the dresser in my room that week, but turns out she snuck into our room and took the phone to school the next morning. I caught her sneaking ‘round trying to put it back that afternoon. She lied and said she’d just needed to check a homework assignment on the phone, or something like that, but it was clear she was lying to us. So, the next day, I took the phone with me and kept it in the glove box of my truck.

At lunch I was sitting there listening to the radio, eating something, and I decided to take the phone out and play with it a bit. I hadn’t really had a chance to look at it much since we bought it ‘cause she wouldn’t put the thing down normally. I’m looking at it, messing with a game on there, when a text pops up and says something like, ‘what you doing?’ It came from someone named ‘Mojave guy’. I didn’t know what that meant, but you know, a father’s curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to find out. I figured out how to write back a message and I wrote, ‘Having lunch. How about you?’

Well, this guy starts asking me questions. Course, he’s thinking it’s my daughter he’s talking with. I just respond with real simple answers – only a couple words, but he’s flirtin’ and telling me how he wants to see me again. I have no idea who this guy is, and I’m just getting more curious. That’s when I have this idea. I tell the guy that I want to see him again too, and how it’s been too long and whatever. I was trying to sound like a girl, I guess you could say. Felt a little strange. Anyway, I ask him where we should meet and he says ‘at the phone booth’.

Honest, I didn’t even know there was any phone booths around these days. I didn’t know what to tell him. For a minute I just sat there in my truck thinking about what I should do next. I considered telling this guy the truth - that I wasn’t Brit and that I’d been messin’ with him. But then I sent him a message and asked him to meet me at Hellman Park near the tennis court. See, Hellman Park is close to where I work, so it was real convenient for me to drive over there and see if I could see this guy. He said he could meet me there in twenty minutes.

As I was driving over there, I started putting some things together. First, if this guy wants to meet up with my daughter at some phone booth, that means he’s probably not from her school. Could mean he’s at a different school, but more likely, he’s older or a dropout. Second, I started wondering why she’d never mentioned him. She talked about guys at school sometimes, but she hadn’t been talkin’ about nobody lately. In other words, I wasn’t havin’ good thoughts about what sort of person this ‘Mojave guy’ was.

I parked in the street on the west side of the park at a place I could see the tennis court from. Really, all I was hoping for was a look at this guy. There wasn’t no reason to suspect Brit was up to something fishy, but I just had this sick feeling. Maybe it was just that father’s instinct to protect his daughter. Whatever the case, I just wanted a look at him. Sort of a peek into Brit’s world.

I sat there for a long time, trying to look like I wasn’t lookin’. I watched the clock a bit, too. My lunch break had passed and I knew I’d be getting’ back late, which meant I needed a story for why. Time was runnin’ real slow, the way it does, and whoever this guy was, he never showed up. At least not while I was sitting there. He said twenty minutes, but I waited thirty-five and never saw him.

That night, I’d decided to give the phone back to Brit and try and get her to say something about the Mojave guy. At first she was real happy to have the phone back, but then I mentioned the message from Mr. Mojave, and she got real dodgy all the sudden. Finally, I had to fess up about my adventure at the park, and Brit looked on the phone to see all the messages I’d sent back and forth with the guy earlier that day. She rolled her eyes at me, which I’m used to, and she said I was a weirdo stalker. That’s what you get for caring ‘bout your kids, I suppose. 

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To learn more about the real Mojave Phone Booth, read the Wikipedia article HERE.