Jim Daniels
Upon Googling My First Job Looking for Evidence
Payphone Location Information: Marlinga’s Party Store, 21497 Ryan Road, Warren, MI
Only one result, and it’s wrong, unless
the payphone could be unearthed beneath
the cracked parking lot of the check-cashing joint
now on the premises. I lifted that impossibly
heavy receiver the night we were robbed.
I wish I could hold it in my hand again, throbbing
at the front door to tell the operator
we’d just been robbed—nowhere for nostalgia
to drape its gaudy curtain, no sepia-toned
stills of children’s hands smudging the glass
of the candy counter. Hey, I shout at my screen,
aren’t you supposed to save everything.
I worked there three years and never posed
for a photo. Even the cops left their camera
in the car that night I thought I was going
to die, a pimply kid, my voice changing forever
under the cold timbre of a gun. My favorite job—
cute kids, Polish ham, jelly donuts (paczki),
bakery bread delivered daily from Hamtramck,
reliably desperate but polite alcoholics,
sweeping spray of smokers fumbling change
on the counter, perfect lines of rigid iced soldiers
of beer in stocked coolers, neighbors with their tabs—
paper-clipped pieces of scratch paper they rarely
paid back—stuffed in a cigar box that, like them,
had seen better days.
C’mon kids, give it up on-line for sweet memories
of Lucky Suckers, Bit-O-Honeys, Milky Ways,
blue Satellite bubble gum. I know you’re out there
on your magic screens, your unswallowable
and swallowable tablets, grandchildren on your laps
as you tell them about Marlinga’s, the sweet, patient boy
behind the counter who took your sticky change,
wished you a good day as if you’d just spent real money.
The owner, Ziggy, dead fifty years. He put a quarter away
for every hour I worked and gave it to me for college
when I left. What I wouldn’t give to get him on the line,
talking around a hunk of baloney. Would he remember
when we lay together on the floor, lullaby guns to our heads,
and the robbers told us to close our eyes?
If only the phone was still there, sturdy
as an ancient safe at the bottom of one
of our Great Lakes. Nostalgia drapes
its curtain, and I light that curtain
in the burn barrel behind the store
sending smoke signals into polluted factory skies
hoping someone gets the message. I burned
those IOUs in the barrel when he sold the store.
A quarter for every hour versus a gun to my head.
Calling collect. Accepting charges. Looking through
binders of mug shots for a clue. Ziggy said
Hell yeah, it’s an emergency, we’ve just been
robbed. My first one. I walked home
in the dark, jingling the change left
in my pocket, no one to call.