If you really knew me, you’d know that I am scared of the telephone.
I write these words fully aware of how ludicrous they read. When I’ve voiced this fact before, even to trusted people, they hear the aural equivalent of clickbait; they hear hyperbole, exaggeration, dramatic license. They say things like “What?” with rising pitch despite a monosyllabic utterance or they say “I hate it too” ignoring that the actual uninterpreted words I said were “scared of” instead of “hate”. (Or they say “That’s ridiculous” and proceed forward as though I didn’t just confess something deeply personal to them. Either way.) Admitting this to others has trained me not to admit this to others. They don’t listen—for whatever reason.
But no, despite what you might think upon reading those words, the statement is true. If you really knew me, you’d know that I’m afraid of the telephone.
I suppose, more specifically, I’m afraid of answering the telephone. It used to be in response to hearing one ring, but even that pocket vibration or a text asking me to call can initiate it now too. I suffer jolts of fear whenever mine alerts me to a call, just as I did every time the one at my parents’ house rang since 2001. My stomach twists. My brain hurls itself into sweaty story mode, constructing hellish scenarios in the blink of an eye about what will appear on the other end of that call. I play up hating spam calls, but I actually feel relief when a call says “potential spam” because there is no story to write and worry over. Those callers only want to take advantage of me. I live that; I don’t fear it.
Unlike a ringing phone.
This entire angle moved to the front of my mind rather than nestled in some dark corner after watching The Fallout, a 2022 film I review below. I described the experience of watching the film as like that of attending a Challenge Day event and, voila, here we are with me writing “If you really knew me…” and following threads I normally wouldn’t follow. Contemplating one person’s trauma induces reflection that surfaces some of my own grief and unresolved emotional wounds. I didn’t look for them; I was just watching the film and thinking about main character Vada’s situation and then I was running through the park in the dark and overwhelmed by the sudden inability to think about anything else but the telephone and ringing and wincing internally about how raw some grief remains even two decades later. I’ve never stopped being afraid of the phone because I’ve never stopped grieving. That jolt of fear, the invisible wince, the story-churning brain ignition is a scar on my heart but also one of the ways in which I keep long-dead loved ones alive.
My fear of the phone is invasive grief that masquerades as fear. I’m okay if it never goes away. I wouldn’t want to forget if I even had a choice. Tell me I should “grow up” or “move on” and you’ve proved to me you weren’t listening. I do answer the phone, despite what it does to me. But I remain afraid of it, as I became after my freshman year.
I made the Babe Ruth league all-star team as a fifteen year old in 2001. I found that out on a recorded answering machine message after getting home from the movie theater one day. This was a special achievement for someone who quit baseball by faking an asthma attack in fourth grade but never stopped loving the sport. I wasn’t at the level of the players on the team who all otherwise played (or would play) freshman or JV baseball, but I was excited for the honor far more than actually playing. My future was in coaching—or at least it wasn’t in playing baseball. I wasn’t an idiot; I understood this already.
We played in a single tournament in July of 2021. I offered to keep score and track pitches for the coaching staff, the one thing I was actually good at and could contribute to the team. We raced ahead of North Area in the first game so they gave me an at-bat—I struck out—and two innings at first base, but the next day I didn’t play in the winner’s bracket game we lost. But I was over the shoulders of the coaches all game with information.
I got the sense when I returned home that my parents were disappointed that I didn’t play even though I had contributed. We had an argument about that—the loud kind where the volume crescendos in only a few words—and then it simmered down as things always tended to.
I sat down at my mom’s computer in the living room. I had already showered and eaten dinner. It was probably about 7:00pm. Maybe later. I probably had Lotus or Excel open to type up the latest box score for the coaches. The TV was definitely on—it always was—but I sat stewing silently at her desk, swiveling in her short office chair typing in data when the phone rang.
The ring was loud with a vaguely metallic cadence to it. The sound evoked cartoon ambulances in alternate realities. I thought nothing of that ring or phone call. Nothing at all. We didn’t have caller ID on the TV yet so I couldn’t know who was calling, but even if I had I wouldn’t have thought anything about it. There was zero consideration for what that phone call might have brought with it. I was lost in my own head sorting through performative anger about not playing in a game for a team I’d found a way to contribute to anyhow.
My mom picked up after two rings and talked for what I remember as only a couple minutes but which might have been twenty. All the details start becoming jumbled and hazy at this point. I also wasn’t listening because I had no reason to regard that call as life-altering. But I know that the three points of context I have are these: the phone rings, she hangs it up, and she says two words with a tone of utter bewilderment that betrays that she too hasn’t processed what she has just learned so that she hasn’t considered how best to distill it for my brother and me.
Those two words:
“Dwight died?”
I don’t remember anything else from that night.
The next day, I got condolences from the coaches and a base hit in my token at-bat but threw my helmet after being thrown out on a missed interference call. I would never play an official game of baseball again. I’d like to say either I was or wasn’t thinking about Dwight the entire game but neither was true. I wasn’t buddies with anyone in the dugout; I sat over my coaches’ shoulders feeding them info until I entered the game. Then, after one checked on me following the final official play of my career (I think he interpreted my reaction as less game and more death, but I can’t recall any distinction in the anger I felt), I returned to my scorebook. It was a good postgame speech that I remember through a haze of blank existence as simply being good. I wasn’t thinking about the game or my playing career being over and I wasn’t thinking about how life can end with one fucking ring of a telephone because of fucking choking on fucking peanut M&Ms during a fucking seizure only feet away from sleeping people who will be haunted forever by the deepness of their sleep even though they likely wouldn’t have heard anything either but none of the hypotheticals change the outcome which was that phone call announcing his death but I also wasn’t not thinking about the latter. I didn’t know how to process things. I wasn’t emotionally intelligent enough or experienced enough to understand the mechanics of grief. In sixth grade, I was a kid who wasn’t expected to figure things out myself when Uncle Tom died and I fell asleep on Dwight and Audra. At fifteen, in the middle of summer, there was no offer to talk about Dwight dying with anyone. And there was no Dwight to fall asleep next to. I wouldn’t have known how to start the conversation anyway.
I had no one to blame. No one was at fault. I stopped eating peanut M&Ms for many years trying to stave off this very thought about how miserably, tragically mundane the circumstances of his death were. To this day, I still taste a bitterness in every one I pop into my mouth; this could be age decaying my taste buds like it’s doing to my ears or it could be a memory of the candy’s role in Dwight’s death. It doesn’t really matter why, though. I see the M&Ms and think about him for an instant and then I pop them in, chew through the tragicbitter, and the thought softens, slacks, cools down into the cavities of my memory again. I swallow the sugar and grab another. Rinse and repeat.
It’s not that way with the phone. I think I blamed the phone in 2001. Dwight had already been dead for a few hours before we learned as much but that phone’s ring killed him for me. It brought his death to life and dropped on my lap that my most enduring adult role model was gone and I would never see him again. I had his old bike that we’d both outgrown, I had a few photographs of him, and I had our conversations in his Saturn about driving and women and turn signals. I had memories. I had eleven-year-old and fourteen-year-old memories. But I had those memories when he was still alive, too, alive until there could be no more thanks to the phone ringing after game two of the District 7 15U all-star tournament on Elk Grove High School’s varsity field in July of 2001.
The phone brought death to life in a way that losing Uncle Tom and Grandma Jeanette hadn’t. Grandma had been paralyzed for my whole life and then struck with bone cancer; Uncle Tom had been the 1% of 1% who survived massive brain aneurysms with only scars. They were both older—not old but older—so their deaths, while affecting, fit my schema for death. Both were candidates for death. Dwight was twenty-nine. I passed 29 almost seven years ago. That ride with Dwight was in 1996 or 1997; we’re going on more than a quarter-century since the moment when I understood that this man, bald at 25 with a thick Minnesota accent despite living half his life in California, was someone I looked up to and wanted to have like me. I wanted him to be happy. I wanted Leecey to love him when he so clearly wanted that, and then I really wanted him to get married to Audra when he really, really wanted that. That both women were with our family at meals and birthdays and performances that year in Irvine speaks to how I see family. My experiences with family are almost all in Irvine.
(Or at funerals.)
I remember Dwight’s service. I remember the priest talking about getting coffee with Dwight and the latter wanting to do charity work in Mexico but with computers. The church lit up with laughter; I didn’t get the joke. We were in the front of the church—the family of the deceased, the object of compassion—and when it ended I bolted from the church. My brother followed me. I ran to the car and went inside and we cried. It might be the hardest I have ever cried. No thoughts except loss and absence and knowing that my relationship with my cousin was ended with Dwight not even thirty and a sudden awareness of how random and cruel death was and a sadness that it would rob me of one of my role models. Death took Uncle Tom. Death took Dwight. Death was already stalking me.
From then on the phone became the swing of Death’s scythe. Every ring of the phone stunned me: who died? My mind asked that each call. I would get flustered when the phone rang and struggle through even normal conversations. I would hold my breath when one of my parents picked up the phone waiting to catch a clue from their tone about who was gone. Dread fills me like water in a balloon. I become momentarily bloated by fear at the potential faceless reintroduction to death and loss and grief.
I’ve never outgrown that fear of what hides behind the ringing of a telephone. Every time I do answer without a thought, like I did in June of 2016 when Alicia called or like I did when I saw a missed call from the principal in April 2018, someone has died. But even when no one has, I think about those who have. I think about Dwight. I mourn for Dwight.
I think my parents understand my fear. My mom sent me a text after Uncle John’s suicide. AVID seemed to as well: Gihmare told me JD died via text. “I think we lost JD” and then it all exploded. I appreciate that each one gave me time and space that I didn’t have when I lost my favorite adult, the guy perfectly aged to be a mentor that bridged between me and my parents.
Dwight would be turning fifty this August. 50. Five-zero. That means I’ve watched 21 years go by since he died on the night my fear of answering the phone was born. Some pains never fade, and some pains also warp into wincing traumas that make you feel broken and stupid and small and lost. Dwight knew a kid; Dwight never knew me. Who knows if we would have gotten along these days? I suppose I wouldn’t be me without losing him or without that paralyzing double ring of the telephone. But that’s no consolation because losing him still hurts and his loss of 21 years right at the time in which he seemed to have found someone who loved him still stings me.
There’s not some Shymalanian ending here where I turn this on its head and reflectively draw a lesson out of this. I’m still afraid of the phone. My dad sent me a text at the end of school Thursday asking me to call him and I stumbled out of school trying to lower my heart rate enough to drive home. Petrified, I began composing eulogies in my head. I shook as I removed my shoes. I called him and he asked about my W-2 Form. So shaken was I that I convinced my parents to go to dinner right there. Because this wasn’t that call but someday it will be and I am terrified that that moment is this moment and this call and this ring just like every ring is that ring until it isn’t that ring but the next ring that steals away another person I love.
This will be me for the rest of my life. Every ring, every vibration, every “call me” text, every single time. That’s it. That’s the story. That is me just as writing this is me. And that’s okay, because the fear leaves me remembering someone I loved. It also stings every time. Some things don’t resolve. Some rings echo forever. Some rings never stop etching scars. Some scars are heavy and ache but nevertheless rest like grateful tattoos as much as bloody scars. Peanut M&Ms are bitter killers. Every grief follows its own schedule. Death lurks in every ring for me. Maybe it doesn’t for you but it does for me. Ring ring.
If you really knew me, you’d know that I’m scared of the telephone.
Content Consumption
FILM
Just Go With It (2011)
I’ve watched Just Go With It multiple times before so I’m not going to approach this like I would a new movie today. Watching the film with a more developed eye today than when I first did a decade ago, I found so many holes, odd line deliveries, and cartoonish situations that a part of me could not believe I remembered this film so fondly. But the other part of me just didn’t care: this movie continued to have a stupid charm and sufficient heart to give me chills at the end. I enjoyed watching it. // Danny (Adam Sandler) is a shallow plastic surgeon who meets his perfect woman in school teacher Palmer (Brooklyn Decker). The problem is: he keeps a fake wedding ring around and, when she find it, she thinks he’s married. Danny cooks up a story about getting divorced to slither out of the mess but, when Palmer insists on meeting his soon-to-be ex, he enlists his surgical assistant and friend Katherine (Jennifer Aniston) to pose as her. The ruse soon expands to include Katherine’s kids (Bailee Madison and Griffin Gluck) and Danny’s brother (Nick Swardson) which leads to a massive “family” trip for all of them to Hawaii where Danny’s and Katherine’s relationship begins to evolve. // Predictable through and through, I nevertheless loved watching Danny and Katherine discover the depth of their connection. Sandler and Aniston have real chemistry in these roles; they are playfully derisive in the way old friends are and they believably seem unaware of how deeply they care for one another. One of my favorite scenes involves a silly game called “coconut snookie” where, although they are ostensibly competing against Katherine’s college rival Devlin (Nicole Kidman), the two lose themselves in the game and finish lost in a moment of giddy joy and unexpected intimacy that induces a stupid grin every time. This is a dumb comedy that their chemistry elevates into a romantic comedy. It blows me away how invested I am after that scene, a scene that reveals love between two characters who’d thoroughly dismissed such a concept before but suddenly and simultaneously realize their love. // But the film succeeds in other ways as well. Major scenes are half-baked with stilted dialogue or stupid set-ups but they land each time. Katherine’s kids have far greater depth than expected and each adds to the comedy: Gluck’s deadpan delivery cracks me up as Michael both manipulates Danny but also remains clearly a thoughtless eight-year-old and Madison’s Maggie fakes a British accent throughout in a way that is so over-the-top it works. Even Swardson and Decker earn laughs and have a sort of silly chemistry: their shared scene of “sheep-PR” is executed in the most cartoonish way imaginable but yet endearing as well. Palmer could simply have been a sex object but the script gives her a wholesomeness and earnest insistence that everyone in the big extended “family” get along that helps me overlook the flawed construction and foundation underneath. // I really enjoyed watching Just Go With It—maybe just as much as I did the first time. I have a thing for stories built around deceptions that lead to positive outcomes which certainly helps but it’s just this gloriously ludicrous Parent Trap-y set-up with an often juvenile and predictable script that somehow taps into optimism and connection and the spirit under every good rom-com. I genuinely love this movie, even while watching it and recognizing a parade of its flaws. That I can truly appreciate and enjoy this film no differently than more intellectually demand and thoughtfully construct films also makes me happy. It’s my love for entries like Just Go With It that help me avoid becoming a movie snob.
Return to Hogwarts (2022)
Watching this in chunks across four mornings, I didn’t think about it as watching a movie or even a documentary; it felt different than that. This was getting together for coffee with old friends and reminiscing on the olden days. I didn’t think there was any chance this would be enjoyable or feel real—I expected performances throughout—but Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and especially Emma Watson brought vulnerability and what felt like honesty (to me at least) to this 20th year revisitation of the Harry Potter saga and its eight films. As someone who treasured the books but felt just okay about the cinematic adaptations, this left me more appreciative and fond of the films with greater perspective on what an achievement they were and what it meant for those three children and so many others to give a decade of their lives to bring them to life.
The Fallout (2022)
I judge films set in or around schools very harshly. Spider-Man: No Way Home almost lost me with its paper MIT admissions letters; a tiny detail like that has no lasting ramifications on the story for most people but, for a teacher who deals with college admissions and applications constantly—I just completed my 47th recommendation letter two days ago—that error destroys any semblance of immersion, forcing me to see the fiction. I begin finding fiction everywhere else then too. In addition, there are topics that are so close to my heart that I can struggle with a film that fumbles them or voices messages that run counter to the mindset I’ve developed. Not in every movie, mind you—just in school-centric ones. // I say all this because The Fallout was primed to alienate me. Following modern day high schoolers navigating the aftermath of emotional trauma, I anticipated that I would roll my eyes and huff with frustrated sighs every few minutes. Knowing the general story was enough to pull me in—I literally wrote about the central (I’ll use Vada’s words and call it a) thing last month—but also enough to make me skeptical. My brain was primed to mentally scribble notes about every offense the film offered. // And then I watched it and lost myself in it. Save for one two minute scene—the very final one, I might add—The Fallout is a beautiful, haunting, but ultimately uplifting story about navigating intense trauma and ripple effects that connecting after it can cause. Impeccably acted, expertly scripted, gorgeously filmed, and powerfully emotional without ever becoming hokey or sensational, The Fallout is—save those final minutes—the best film I have seen in the last year, bar none. Watching it felt like attending Challenge Day. It all landed for me. It all felt remarkably, movingly real. // Vada (Jenna Ortega) steps out of class to respond to a text from her sister. Minutes later, she is huddled in a bathroom stall with influencer Mia (Maddie Ziegler) as gunshots echo around them. In the aftermath of the shooting, Vada grows closer to Mia as the two try to navigate their new world. While Mia recedes, Vada finds herself flung between emotions and pivotal moments with friends new and old, family, and herself, as each tries to move forward with the heavy, beautiful burden of surviving. // The Fallout does an incredible job generating intimacy between the audience and Vada from early on. Shots are close to her face; Ortega plays her as awkward but self-aware. Ortega showcases Vada’s vulnerability so often that it’s feels odd when she suddenly performs for Shailene Woodley’s well-meaning psychiatrist. I could rave about the camera work and how personal it makes every scene and conversation, but Ortega carries this film and makes not an issues movie or a coming-of-age movie but a character-study that also happens to be those other two things. She is a revelation: I’ve never believed in the authenticity of a character as much as I did Vada. // Telling a massive story about trauma and violent tragedy would seem to court some huge character at its center—Vada’s friend Nick (Will Ropp), for instance—but Megan Parks chooses a character orbiting the tragedy who might otherwise be easily missed. It works to perfection: we see every interaction and response through alongside Vada, helping secure empathy that might otherwise be lost. // I have so much I feel compelled to say about The Fallout but I lose my objectivity quickly and stride right into personal reflection, underlying grief, and a desire to talk to someone about the movie but also about life and emotion. I’m glad that, even as I type this after a mostly bad day following an epically bad week, I have people that I can reach out to. But I’m still thinking about Vada and Mia and Quinton and Nick and Vada’s sister and parents and yes, always back to Vada. I hope that she’s okay in whatever fictional universe she inhabits. I think she will be. But I’d bet her pain never really goes away. Im not sure some pains ever do. And that’s okay.
It’s disorienting how re-examining old pain this week actually helped me navigate new pain. Gravity is heavy.