Playing Telephone

I was just listening to an old 2002 podcast (episode #90) of Chicago Public Radio's This American Life--definitely one of the more worthwhile bits of broadcast out there--and the week's theme was telephones. However, as always, Ira Glass and his crack team of producers took that innocuous everyday item and wove a compelling tale about it and the power it has. This time the main story concerned a Beverly Hills father and son's strained relationship: son's using drugs in an increasingly big way and letting everything else fall to the wayside while father stands by supporting him, seemingly impotent to stop it. Or was he? In a gutsy move that would almost certainly see the FCC knocking on his door, dad wiretapped his son's phone with a voice-activated tape recorder and listened to all the drug talk and party plans, the increasing loss of empathy and subsequent rise in arrogance. He had intended only to use the recordings to intercept his son before the little bastard could get into any real trouble, but the tapes ended up really saving the kid's life after a windstorm revealed the eavesdropping apparatus and he was able to listen to what he really sounded like.

Heavy stuff, actually. It got me thinking, what if my parents were taping my phone conversations? Would they have been worried for me? Probably not, I hope. I mean, most of my phone calls concerned lost Japanese gold on Manila's Corregidor Island, RPG characters for our Friday night dungeon crawls, what twist this week's episode of Babylon 5 was going to take and whether or not my friend Justin's stepfather was the Unibomber. The only drugs talk we ever had was about rare, ridiculous, questionably effective Native American drugs we were going to order out of this or that catalog, but never got around to doing.

There, I've come clean. That's all the sordid business I ever got up to on the phone in high school. I never used the phone to call in any orders for fine Venezuelan cocaine. Never used it to plan any purse snatching sprees. Never used it to ask a girl on a date. Though, thinking about it now, had I done even one of those things, maybe high school wouldn't have sucked quite so badly.

--Matt