At The Booth

The Booth. Located deep in the heart of the Mojave Desert, 75 miles southwest of Vegas, 15 miles from the nearest highway, stuck out in the middle of nowhere like an afterthought’s afterthought. What was it doing here? More importantly, what were we doing here?

Well, we were here to fix it. We’d just gotten up early on a Sunday, left our wives and daughters behind to fend for themselves, and spent five hours driving 240 miles to see this phone booth just because it had been busy when we’d called it. We’d come to hang it up so we could go back home and call it and hear it ring.

And the damned thing wasn’t off the hook after all. It was out of order. Damn.

Well, hell. What do you do when you’ve come all this way, spent all this time, gone to so much trouble to hang up a phone that’s out of order? You make like a lineman and try to fix it.

We jiggled the hook a couple times. No go. We yanked on the cord a couple times, checking it for loose connections. Tight. We walked around the booth a few times, looking it over and making manly, problem-solving noises. I ripped open the junction box and poked around in there a bit, looking for loose connections. Nothing. We spied what might have been a loose wire way up on the telephone pole and tried to devise a way to climb up and fix it. No go: no ladder; no climbing spikes; white guys, so no vertical leap. We were good and stumped.

What do you do when you’re stumped in the middle of the desert? Take a leak. That’s one of the pleasures of being men. No matter how bad a situation is, no matter how miserably you’ve failed, no matter how powerless you feel, you can always whip it out and pee standing up. If you’ve got enough saved up you can even write your name. So we wrote our names in the desert and took some solace in that.

The rest of it was pretty anticlimactic, I’ll admit. We took some pictures, started a sign-in sheet for fellow Booth supplicants on the back cover of the phone book, signed the booth itself and wrote down our URLs, graffito’d and compared logos (Steve’s is really cool), re-installed the sign Godfrey put up which had since blown down, called in a repair to PacBell via cellphone, and walked around a bit to soak up the flavor of the desert. But it was really all just busywork; we were just doing to be doing something. We’d had our hearts set on taking calls and it was a bitter pill that we couldn’t.

We loaded up and left before too long. The silence was mocking us, making us out to be fools for driving all that way for nothing. Deep down we knew it had been a noble mission, but right then, at that moment of exquisite failure, the silence was deafening and ego-deflating. It got to us; we did feel a little foolish. We had to leave before we started to believe it; we had to put miles between us and it to remember that we’d just done a far, far better thing than we had ever done before.

We started to drive away, then circled back around for one final pass by The Booth. It wasn’t right to just drive away. We were sorely disappointed, but we had to pay our respects anyway.

Goodbye, old friend. We’ll see that you’re fixed and then we’ll be back. We won’t forget you. Goodbye.

We put The Booth behind us and headed off into the desert. We didn’t look back. We didn’t have to: we’ll see it again.