Mat Johnson - Drop

‘Is this the right number?’

‘Oh yes, this is the right number I’m just going to help you through right now.’ Reggie started laughing. Choking on his food, but still laughing. I was hitting the computer keys, hoping something would come up, when I realized I could hear myself hyperventilating into the microphone. It sounded like someone was getting mugged on my end of the line.

‘Mister? Are you all right?’ I hit mute. Reggie was really choking now, his eyes dripping tears and the veins in his throat bulging out. Blank faced, Cindy leaned forward and slapped Reggie’s back hard enough to knock his glasses off. Throat clear, he grabbed me on the shoulder.

‘Cuz, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you?’ Reggie asked.

‘Hey, I was taking care of it.’

‘Holmes, you didn’t listen to a word Rosalita said all last week. I saw you. You was just sleeping and doodling.’

‘Yo money, you need to step your midget ass back.’

‘Just let me take the call.’ Reggie switched our headsets so that he was talking and I had to listen. He got her name, pulled her account up on the computer, got her an application for the aid, then hung up the phone and laughed at me some more.

‘See, that’s how a real man does it.’ Reggie nodded till it was time to push his glasses back up. F real men. I returned to drawing circles in black ink on an empty aid application and planning what memory I would think about as I cried that night. Mrs Hutton came pounding out of her office.

‘Who was that on the line?’ When Reggie realized accolades were not to follow, he pointed at me. Apparently, I had the worst phone answering skills she’d ever listened in on.

‘What are you thinking? Don’t you know your job?’ Mrs Hutton was getting madder at me because I was smiling, thinking it better to reveal my ineptitude to a boss early rather than fail them in the end.

‘You keep working like this, okay? Watch the repocushions.’

Repo cushions meant that I was getting sent up to Outreach for the rest of the day along with Natalie and Cindy. Outreach was something new. Just from the way Mrs Hutton pronounced it, you could tell it was labor intensive. When could I come back? ‘When you get your phone manner down.’

Going up in the elevator, Cindy stared at the lit numbers above the door and said, ‘I don’t care. They ain’t breaking my ass.’ Natalie looked more scared than usual: her front teeth nearly covered her chin. She was creeping to the back corner of the elevator as if she didn’t plan on coming out.

The room they had us come to was almost as big as 30th Street Station, filled with cluttered desks and the people who sat behind them and stared at us. On the table before us were three large metal boxes with numbers, lights, and faded instruction stickers. Mrs Hall, the old white lady who was the supervisor, plugged me in first, putting earphones the size of turtles over my skull.

‘What’s gonna happen here is,’ Mrs Hall started, ‘I’m telling you’se because it’s your first time up here, what’s gonna happen here is we’re going to turn on these machines and what they’re gonna do is start calling a list of numbers we put in there automatic. First you’re gonna hear some ringing and then you’ll have your customer, and then when that person hangs up the machine will have already called the next person on the list and told ’em to hold on for you, so all you got to do is start back up again.’ I raised my hand.

‘Yes?’

‘Can I go back downstairs?’

‘No.’

I looked at Cindy, waiting for her to go Denmark Vesey on the woman, but all she did was shove a few more onion rings in her mouth and mumble, ‘Hit me.’ Natalie’s earphones were almost as big as her head. They looked like they were trying to swallow her.

For the next three hours, the voices on the other end of the line kept coming. I couldn’t get them to stop. I wanted to hit one of the buttons on the box, but I was afraid I would break something or it would shock me, bulge my eyes out of my sockets and leave my body smoking. A chorus of the broke, phones ringing across the ghetto, me on the other line. I ain’t got no money to eat, I ain’t got no money for you. Screw you, turn off my lights, I’ll learn to see in the dark. Please don’t turn my heat off . During one call, after giving my lines, an old voice said, ‘I can’t feel my toes.’ I tried to wave to Mrs Hall across the room, but she yelled back, ‘You can go at lunch time,’ and the rest of the office stared at me from their cubicles. There was a click and then the call was gone, replaced by another confused voice on the line. ‘Hello, I’m Chris from the Philadelphia Electric Company, and I’m calling to give you money.’ Their poverty was a vacuum, devouring my voice before it even got down the line, their hunger so strong it could suck the flame from a candle.

Five o’clock came around just when I stopped believing it would. I walked home fast to kill the workday, but didn’t catch the trolley because my apartment was a closet of dishes, soiled clothes, and trash. People drove by me in their cars, their radios on, going places I wouldn’t know about. Close to home, I bought a forty, a gallon of milk, and a box of imitation Oreos. In the crib I washed out one coffee cup from my collection of crusty dishes, poured the milk to the very top, then sipped it. Under the milk, the cookies got soft except in the place my fingers were holding, and until it got dark I practiced dipping them correctly, getting every part equally mushy. I finished the whole box that way. I was tired of cookies two-thirds of the way through, but it seemed weak to quit without finishing the job. David would be so proud. See, I was a hard worker. Afterwards, the forty came out of the fridge and into my hand; my first time touching malt liquor since high school. When I got really drunk my apartment seemed smaller.

On Monday, a week after Mrs Hutton arrived, fifteen thousand postcards, red and yellow with a cartoon of a white guy with a big nose and scarf hugging himself above the sentence Are You Ready for the Cold ? went out in the mail. Two days later the phone started ringing hard. I handled a hundred and twenty calls each day, telling every person the same thing: how to get the government to pay their electric bills. Each call lasted an average of three minutes and I could handle fifteen an hour. I helped them through their applications, asked them all the financial information needed, then put their applications to the side to be sent to them. The phone was never not ringing; often I was cleaning up the last call with the new caller on the line. Nobody in the office talked to each other. We came in and went straight to work, took lunch at different times, and at the end of the day we were tired. Nobody brought the newspaper anymore.

After a few weeks, I could identify types of customers even before I got the information out of them. I could recognize the welfare voice that sounded as if the person was so tired they couldn’t even move their jaw or lips to talk, that they couldn’t even stand up, that they were lying flat on their beds, their arms at their sides, the phone rested upon the tops of their faces because they were too tired to hold it to their mouths. Most welfare voices didn’t sound like this, but everyone who did was on welfare. The only energy that could be heard in the room was the sound of children and television in the background.

Some of the callers spoke Spanish or Polish or Russian or Korean or Vietnamese, and I figured out how to get a translator on the line. Those were good calls because they were always confusing and took a long time and even with Mrs Hutton eavesdropping I could get away with staying on for a while. In her office she had two lights for every employee, a green one if we were taking a call and a red one if we’d been on that call for more than five minutes. Clive insisted that you could tell if she was checking your line because you could hear a slight clicking, but Clive was a moron.