Todd Blanche and the Fifty-Cent Payphone That Ate My Quarter

NBC News's website took eleven seconds to load on my machine this morning, which I timed with the second hand on my father's Timex, the one with the cracked crystal that still keeps better time than whatever they've got running things now, and before I even got to the headline about Arizona I want it on the record that a webpage should never take longer to appear than it takes a man to walk to the mailbox and back, and mine does both, they've built the whole apparatus of American information delivery on a foundation you could not trust to hold up a card table, and that's before we even discuss the pop-up asking me to accept cookies, cookies, as if I am some kind of a Girl Scout, as if I owe anybody a transaction just to read about a state attorney general, but fine, fine, I accepted the cookies, I always accept the cookies, that's my whole generation's problem right there, we accept the cookies.

So. Todd Blanche. Acting Attorney General, apparently, of a whole state, cuts a deal with the holdout senators — and I want to sit with that phrase, "holdout senators," because in 1982 a holdout was Kenny Corcoran's older brother who wouldn't come down off the Methodist church roof after the homecoming bonfire got out of hand, and here we've got grown legislators being called holdouts like they're up on a roof somewhere in Scottsdale refusing to come down, and maybe they are, I don't know, nobody sends me photographs — and the deal, as I understand it, and I use "understand" the way a dog understands a thermostat, is to scrap this $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund, which is a name so slippery it's practically wearing a windbreaker, and I don't know if I'm for the fund or against the fund, I genuinely do not, because the moment somebody hands me a name like "anti-weaponization initiative" my brain just goes soft in the middle like a Twinkie left on a dashboard, and —

— and this is going to sound like it has nothing to do with anything, because it doesn't, but there was a Twinkie in question, once, a specific Twinkie, on the dashboard of a Ford Fairmont that belonged to a man named Duane who drove the number 14 bus route before they rerouted it in — I want to say '82, everything is '82 with me, I know it, my niece has told me it's a "bit," it is not a bit, it is my life — and Duane kept a box of Twinkies on the dash the whole summer as a kind of experiment, he never explained the experiment, he just said "watch this one" and pointed, and I rode that bus every day for a stretch of maybe six weeks because the pool was closed for the chlorine situation, and I watched that Twinkie melt and reharden and melt and reharden through the windshield glass like it was a little yellow hourglass measuring out a summer that, frankly, I don't remember ending, it just stopped, the way summers did before they started making them into content, and Duane — big forearms, sunburned in a way that looked permanent, like a paint job — Duane never once told me what the experiment proved. I asked. He said "you'll see." I did not see. I am fifty-some years old and I have still not seen. That's the whole story. It doesn't connect to Arizona. It doesn't connect to weaponization, anti or otherwise. I bring it up because the word "fund" always makes me think of Duane's dashboard, and I don't control the wiring in here, nobody does, that's kind of the whole tragedy of getting old, you become a switchboard nobody's operating.

Anyway — Blanche. Fine man, probably. Never met him. Never will. But here's what gets me, and this is the part where I'm supposed to have a position, my niece says every column needs "a spine," well here's my spine: you cannot cancel a fund like you're cancelling a magazine subscription. A fund is not Highlights for Children. When Highlights stopped coming to our house it was because my mother wrote them a letter — an actual letter, with a stamp, a Lincoln stamp, four cents, and I remember because I licked it myself and got a papercut on my tongue that made eating Sloppy Joes at the Grange supper unbearable for the better part of a week, and nobody at that Grange supper cared about my tongue, nobody, they were all watching Delores Ferrante try to get the Jell-O mold out in one piece, which it did not, it came out in three pieces, and Hank Ferrante — no relation, or maybe a cousin, the family tree in that town was more of a family shrub — Hank stood up and said "well there's your sovereign fund right there, folks, three pieces and none of 'em match" and everybody laughed except Delores, who I believe cried in the coat room, and to this day I do not know if that comment was about the Jell-O or about something political because 1982 was an election year too and everybody at that Grange hall had a transistor radio in their coat pocket and half of them were listening to the returns instead of the toast — and none of that, not one word of it, has anything to do with an $1.8 billion program in the state of Arizona, except that both involve a large sum of a resource being made to disappear by people in a room you weren't invited into, and isn't that always the shape of it.

And another thing — I haven't even gotten to the "holdout senators" agreeing to anything, because agreements made by holdouts are, by definition, the least trustworthy agreements there are, a holdout who agrees is a holdout who's been offered something, and nobody ever tells you what the something was, they just print "reached a deal" like that's the end of the sentence, like a deal is a weather event that happens to people instead of a thing people do to each other in a parking garage at 11 PM, and I want to know — I will never know, I want to be clear I have accepted I will never know — what happened in that parking garage. There's always a parking garage. Every deal in the history of government had a parking garage phase, even the ones that happened over the phone, the phone was just a parking garage you couldn't see.

Which brings me to the payphone, and I promise this one has even less to do with anything. There was a payphone bolted to the outside wall of the Rexall on Chestnut, cost a dime — a dime, this was right at the transition, some machines still took the dime, some wanted a quarter, and the phone company never bothered to tell you which was which, you just had to know, the way you had to know which pump at the Sunoco was self-serve — and one Tuesday in what I am fairly sure was late spring of '82, though my cousin Reggie swears it was fall and Reggie was not even there so I don't know where he gets his confidence, I fed that payphone a quarter for a dime call and it swallowed it whole, no dial tone, no click, nothing, just gone, the way the $1.8 billion is apparently just gone now, poof, "scrapped," and I stood there and I banged on that Rexall payphone with the flat of my hand — not a fist, I want to be clear, I was raised better than a fist — and a man came out of the Rexall, I believe he was the pharmacist, or maybe just a man who worked there, and he said "that phone's owed me a nickel since March," which made no sense then and makes no sense now, why would a payphone owe a man money, was he keeping a ledger, did the phone have wages, and he never elaborated, he just went back inside, and I never got my quarter, and I want the record to reflect that I am still, this morning, thinking about that quarter, more than I am thinking about $1.8 billion dollars, because I can hold a quarter, I held that exact quarter, I knew its weight, and a billion dollars is just a number some fella says on a webpage that takes eleven seconds to load.

Is the fund good. Is the fund bad. "Anti-weaponization" — against weapons, I assume, or in favor of stopping something being weaponized, which is a different thing entirely, and nobody in Arizona apparently agreed on which one it was either, that's presumably why there were holdouts, and if the people voting on it can't tell you which it is then I don't see why I should be expected to, my niece says that's "not how punditry works," well maybe punditry's the problem, maybe punditry is just a bunch of fellas standing next to a broken payphone insisting they understand the wiring.

I will say this, and then I am done, though I am never really done: whatever that $1.8 billion was going to buy or prevent or weaponize or de-weaponize, somebody in 1982 would have just built the thing with spare parts from a garage and a coffee can full of bolts, and it would have worked fine for thirty years, and nobody would have needed a settlement to unbuild it, because we never had the money to build things twice.

And I still never got the dog's name. The one that used to sit outside the Rexall. Somebody's going to have to look into that.

— Edgar