drowsy august days – autobiographical fiction

That summer, between my junior and senior years, I worked for AT&T, thanks to a connection my dad had. My job was to collect LIDS – Left In Disconnected telephones – from summer homes in Falmouth and Bourne on Cape Cod.

I would get a company van early in the morning at the Wellingham garage and drive over the Bourne Bridge and out to East Falmouth, stopping at cottages and small homes that served as summer rentals for people from up around Boston and the western parts of Massachusetts. I was provided with a long list of addresses every morning and would start at the ones furthest away and work my way back toward the canal, and home.

Most summer rentals back then were for two weeks, and people would often have a phone installed so they could stay in touch with family and friends back home, or with a dad still working in the city and only coming down to the Cape –- along with about 300,000 other people — on a Friday night. When the two weeks were over, and they went fast in the summer, the renters would head home to Roslindale and Marlborough and West Springfield, and the phone – generally on a wall – would be left behind. The phone would have been turned off when the renters left, hence “left in disconnected”.

AT&T wanted their phones back, and that was my job, take away travel and lunch, about six hours a day, five days a week. I managed to actually find a new renter or a landlord or rarely an unoccupied open door on a somewhat whimsical basis, so if I’d been given a list with 25 addresses on it that morning, a successful day’s work would find me turning in 12 or 13 phones to the garage just before 5 pm.

I did that job for two summers and went to some addresses probably five or six times. I got to know Falmouth and Bourne on the Cape side of the canal a lot better, made a little money and saved less, and generally managed to stay out of trouble summer days.

Summer nights were a different story.

(Excerpt from the unfinished novella “Another Couch.”)