In Front of the Payphone
The common room in the dormitory was winding down after dinner.
The smell of frozen pizza microwaved into rubbery submission, mixed with the dish-soap reek clinging to the trays from the cafeteria. From the old leather sofa came the sour ghost of beer spilled during last weekend’s party. Between the cushions, popcorn kernels and a crushed Coca-Cola can had lodged themselves like the room had given up pretending to be civilized.
In one corner of the bulletin board, band-club recruitment flyers, football game posters, and used-book sale notes had been slapped up in a messy scatter, as though no one had bothered to distinguish information from trash.
The place with the most people clustered around it was the payphone corner tucked into the farthest end of the lounge.
Three identical black payphones sat side by side next to the coin changer. In front of them, three or four students always stood in line, waiting their turn—fingering quarters in their pockets, or staring hard at the collect call stickers plastered over the handsets.
Someone had scrawled graffiti on the wall beside the phones.
“Keep it short, dude! 3 mins max or the guy behind you gets to smack your head. No exceptions!”
I took my place at the end of the line.
The only thing that’s really inconvenient after regressing is not being able to use a cellphone.
In this era, even making a simple call was work. Mobile phones were unimaginable; even beepers were still rare. If you wanted to reach someone, you started with a letter. If you wanted to hear their voice, you had to spend the time standing in line, feed in your coins, and jab at the worn-down dial buttons one by one.
There were two students ahead of me.
One looked like he’d just had a fight with his girlfriend and was now scowling into the receiver while making excuses.
“No, Cynthia, I’m telling you, I didn’t do it on purpose. I was busy with a group project.”
The other was trying to squeeze more allowance money out of his parents back home.
“Mom, the textbook bill was way higher this month. Huh? I should’ve bought them with what you sent last week, but— um— there were just so many parties lately…”
After about ten minutes, my turn was finally almost here.
I had just reached for the receiver when—
“Sanha! My bro!”
Someone came sprinting toward me like a madman and seized my hand.
Victor looked as though he might burst into tears at any second. He practically begged me on his knees.
“Please, just this once, let me cut in line. I think she’s about to dump me. I might actually die if that happens!”
“…”
It didn’t seem urgent enough to matter, so I gave him my spot and went back to the end of the line.
Victor began pouring out tears and snot into the phone.
“Becky! Please, just listen to me. Why are you doing this all of a sudden? We said we’d keep going together even after college! We just became freshmen—how long has it even been?”
It was a tragedy all too common in American college life: the couple that had sworn eternal love in high school only to split up after entering university.
It was even known by a name—Turkey Drop.
They went home for their first Thanksgiving break, only to come back to the phone and hear, “Let’s just be friends.”
After the first long holiday since entering college, they returned to their hometowns, spent two or three months apart, adjusted to different environments, met new friends and new romantic prospects, and naturally changed their minds.
It was so common that a survey of American college students found more than 80 percent of high school couples broke up within their first semester, which was how the slang had come to exist in the first place.
And Victor was experiencing it before Thanksgiving had even arrived, over the phone.
“Waaah! Becky! Why are you doing this? I gave you a ring, didn’t I—my class ring! What do you mean there’s someone new? Who is it!? Jacob? Jacob Miller? The Jacob Miller I know!? The one on the football team? The one who goes to the same college as you? The bastard who always called me a nerd!? No way!”
Victor leaned against the wall and wailed.
Even while sobbing, he kept feeding coins into the phone, and every person waiting in line closed their eyes and turned away as if witnessing a public execution.
“No! I’m not yelling! No, sorry. I’m sorry for getting mad. Becky, please. Think about it one more time. I’ll come by on Thanksgiving. Let’s talk in person, okay?”
But the call cut off just like that.
Victor collapsed beside the phone like a man whose soul had been yanked out through a paper straw after only thirty seconds, never mind three minutes.
Then he caught my eye.
“Sanha. Becky—Becky Thompson, I mean—she was blonde, with blue eyes, and captain of our high school cheer squad. She won first place for prettiest smile in the yearbook, and she was a Homecoming Queen nominee. Everybody wanted Becky. But get this—she came up to me first. In the library! Asked me to help with her chemistry homework! At first I thought she was just using me. I’m a nerd, after all. But she wasn’t. At junior prom, she asked me to dance, and we were like something out of a movie…”
By then it was my turn, so I headed for the payphone.
Now that the line had cleared, I thought I could use it in peace.
But then, from beside me, another voice cut in.
“Oops! Excuse me for a second! Are you Sanha Lee from the economics department?”
I turned around to find two girls who looked familiar—probably classmates.
One wore her hair pulled up high in a ponytail, and the other had on a gray Harvard-logo hoodie.
Since this was the shared lounge on the lobby floor between the men’s and women’s dormitories, it wasn’t unusual to run into classmates who lived in the women’s dorms.
“Yeah.”
When I nodded, the one in the hoodie stepped forward.
“Oh wow, it is you! That was incredible in class the other day! A 3,000 percent return? Everyone in our dorm has been talking about you nonstop. Could you sign this? We call you the Midas of Harvard.”
They held out a pen and paper.
I gave a dry laugh and signed my name.
Then the ponytailed one asked, “Thanks for the autograph. But there’s something we’re really curious about.”
“What is it?”
“We heard a rumor. Are you dating Grace Fairfax?”
“…”
When I didn’t answer, the two of them lowered their voices.
“We passed by your dorm the other day, and we overheard you talking. You were even holding hands.”
“Yeah, yeah! So—did Grace write to you? Or call your room in the dorm?”
Harvard’s dorms had landlines installed, so if the distance was short enough, you could talk to someone that way.
Of course, if the other person was farther away, you had to use the payphones in the common room like this.
Or you could send letters through the mailboxes on the first floor.
Still.
“No, nothing like that. We just talked about club stuff.”
“Huh? No way…”
“It’s true. We haven’t contacted each other since. She hasn’t reached out to me separately either.”
Their eyes widened.
“She hasn’t contacted you? You mean you didn’t call her?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“Why not!”
At my answer, both girls practically shouted at me.
“You’re supposed to call first! It’s Grace Fairfax! She came up to you first, held your hand, and sat next to you in class! How many more signals is a woman supposed to send!? What on earth are you doing, turning Grace down like that!?”
The hoodie girl sounded almost scolding.
The ponytailed one clicked her tongue beside her, looking genuinely regretful.
“A woman has her pride, you know. Especially someone like Grace…” She glanced at me as if I should already understand. “You know how loaded her family is. You can’t sit around waiting for her to make the first move. This is on you.”
Without warning, the two of them shoved my back toward the payphone.
“Enough. Call her right now. We’ll stand here and watch.”
“What’s so special about coming from a rich family? Show us some Harvard male pride! You’re the Midas of Harvard, right? We’re rooting for you!”
So I went to the payphone.
The two girls watched as I picked up the receiver, and for some reason both of them wore satisfied smiles—then, as if their job were done, they trotted off somewhere.
“We did it.”
“Let’s go tell Grace.”
And just like that, they disappeared.
I fed a coin into the phone and dialed the number.
At last, the call connected.
“Hello?”
Under my mother’s voice, I could faintly hear the crackle of an old radio coming from the gas station office.
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Oh, my son! What a surprise, calling at this hour! Why do you sound so exhausted? You’re eating properly, right?”
“Of course. The cafeteria food here may not taste good, but they give us plenty. How’s Dad? He’s not staying up all night again, is he?”
“What, your father? He’s in the warehouse staring at machines, as usual. He’s practically moved in with them. He’s been fiddling with that new heat exchanger or whatever it is all day long.”
“And the crude-oil residue? He’s selling that too, right?”
“Of course. Your father is so thrifty it’s almost a sickness. He doesn’t throw away a single thing.”
Refining crude oil didn’t just produce gasoline.
It separated into layers according to boiling point: gasoline on top, then kerosene, then diesel.
And at the very bottom were the sticky leftovers.
Heavy oil could be sold as ship fuel or for factory boilers. The black asphalt residue went to road-paving contractors, and the yellow sulfur chunks were used in fertilizer plants. Even the hardened wax residue could be sold to candle factories or coating manufacturers.
Crude oil had nothing to waste.
My mother continued.
“Kerosene fetches a pretty good price in winter as heating oil, and truckers buy diesel on their own. We sold the asphalt residue to some Mexican laborers who were doing road work the other day. I set aside the sulfur and sent it off to a farm, too—it turned out to be pretty profitable. Your father’s been so excited lately he doesn’t know what to do with himself, honestly.”
“How’s the gas station doing? Do a lot of truckers come by?”
“What’s there to say? These days we only take customers who can keep their mouths shut. We’re deliberately holding daily sales to right around two thousand dollars. If it gets too high, it’ll draw attention.”
“When are the lines longest? At dawn? Or in the evening?”
“Dawn. The biggest crowd is the trucks that come before sunrise, fill up, and head out. Monday mornings in particular are a madhouse. Even chugging coffee by the pot doesn’t help.”
I thought for a moment.
If too much is coming out of that little gas station, people are bound to get suspicious eventually. And I’m also worried about Mom, Dad, and Uncle overworking themselves.
Making money was great, but my parents and uncle couldn’t be pushed too far.
I asked casually, “Mom. Are you keeping the secret well?”
“I know, I know. You’re going to start nagging again, aren’t you? Don’t worry—your father’s mouth is as tight as a sealed drum. In fact, the Korean Association president stopped by yesterday and asked around a bit. He said we looked brighter lately and wanted to know if something good had happened. Your father just smiled, and the poor man looked ready to burst from curiosity. Don’t worry.”
“No, that’s not it. Limiting the daily sales to keep the secret is fine, but I wanted to tell you that you don’t have to be so strict about it.”
“What? Why? We don’t even have drilling permits yet, do we?”
“Don’t worry about that. Now that we have the capital, we can set up a proper company soon. Once that happens, we’ll bring in lawyers and get a state drilling permit the right way. What I meant was, I’m going to find a way to increase sales while reducing the hours you two have to work.”
“That’s kind of you to say, son. Your father and I were actually discussing something yesterday, too…”
“What is it?”
My mother hesitated before going on.
“There are a ton of failing gas stations up for sale in this area.”
“!”
It was exactly what I’d been thinking.
I answered at once. “Because of the recession, there are tons of gas stations showing up at auction. Some of them are going for 20 percent of the original price—no, not even 10 percent.”
“Must be because you’re in a big city. Out here, some places are going for 5 percent, and a few owners have even run off in the middle of the night, so there’s nobody left to claim them.”
At this point, rural gas stations were closing one after another.
During the Gulf War, they’d bought up expensive fuel inventories, only for them to become worthless after the war ended. The banks were desperate to call in loans, and owners who couldn’t pay simply mailed in their keys and vanished overnight. Abandoned stations without owners flooded the auction market for a pittance.
I’ll buy them all up and franchise the whole thing. Crude oil can be supplied cheaply from headquarters, and the rest of the stations can be staffed by trustworthy people as salaried managers. Or I could share profits through an incentive system.
It was the same sort of sales strategy that had made famous coffee chains so powerful.
The problem was whether I could find enough trustworthy people to manage the company-owned stores or franchise locations.
A non-disclosure agreement and a fat slice of profits would keep most mouths shut, but… in the first place, I should only hire people I can trust.
That was something I needed to discuss with my father.
Looks like I’d have to go home at least once.
Good. I’ll handle turning Father’s gas stations into a franchise at the same time as establishing the oil company. The money I made from this stock investment will come in handy.
Money could buy procedure.
Complicated administrative work and legal consultation were, in the end, just matters of time and capital.
More importantly, I had one more problem I’d been interested in.
“By the way, how many truckers come in a day? Roughly.”
“Let me think. There are so many I haven’t counted, but… when it’s busy in the morning and evening, we get more than twenty trucks an hour… So even conservatively, it’s easily over two hundred trucks a day. Over a month, that’d be well over five thousand.”
Two hundred trucks a day.
And those were different truckers every time, which meant about five thousand trucks were passing through our gas station in a month.
Fortunately, things on the ground were running exactly as I’d planned.
“Mom. I’ll send you a letter soon.”
“A letter?”
“Yes. There’s a fax machine in the gas station office, right? I’ll send it to that from the dorm administration office. When you get it, show it to Dad and then please do what it says. There’s something I’d like to ask each trucker one by one.”
I was planning to ask the truckers a small favor in exchange for shaving a little off the per-gallon price of gas.
“All right. But what is this about? Nothing dangerous, I hope?”
“I’ll write the details in the letter. It isn’t dangerous. Anyway, take care of yourselves, and don’t keep too much cash in the office. You’ll get robbed.”
“Your uncle even bought a new gun yesterday. He said if he sees anyone suspicious, he’ll shoot them on the spot.”
“Oh, and I’ve got another favor to ask of Uncle. Please tell him I’ll write separately.”
The five thousand truckers who visited our gas station, and my uncle, whose junkyard business gave him a ridiculously wide network of contacts.
I was already combining those keywords into my next business plan.
Click—
I returned the receiver to its cradle.
The spent coin dropped through the return slot with a metallic clink.
As I turned around—
“Hi.”
Someone was standing right in front of me, waving.
Golden hair in a thick sweep, sapphire-blue eyes.
Grace Fairfax was standing behind me before I’d even noticed her approach.
“I was waiting for your call. But you never came.”
Her tone carried the faint sting of wounded pride.