The Magic Jack | Sequence 8

Breaking and repairing

Being a regular guest at Annie’s meant eventually meeting her paternal pattern. In the realm of ordinary existence, my guardian angels and curators of my experience, through a minuscule device known as the Magic Jack, orchestrated my meeting with the one and only Robert Cobb, at the same picturesque lakeside home where I previously spent the night. Robert came off as a jovial, successful business guy in his 60s and wore the same outfit every time. Brown boat shoes, khaki shorts, a yellow Harpoon Harry’s short sleeve polo shirt and a neatly groomed gray toupee. Like a Lego man but with an appetite for pork chops so he has a little belly too. Who would’ve guessed that sometime later I’d be driving that toupee to be groomed? Robert liked Michigan, but also believed the State’s motto is: “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, move to Florida.”

For those unacquainted with the wonders of Skymall, way before Amazon some people, while traveling, elected to shop at 30,000 feet by catalog. The Magic Jack was a device capable of initiating voice-over-IP calls to any telephone number. As for the reason behind Robert's desire to place a 305 call from a Michigan-based 248 number, it mattered little to me. The nostalgia that may have seemed impressive decades prior had now dissipated. In the era of cellular phones, it merely required a leap through time or a momentary teleportation through space, to transcend the confines of area codes.

Robert possessed a remarkable talent for breaking things easily, particularly electronic things. I possessed a deftness for mending shattered circuitry, which was sometimes as easy as resetting the device. With every call from Robert that summer, my internal dialogue admitted to have questioned, “How can you break the same thing over and over again?” But also I’d at least be treated to a good story.

While diagnosing the problem, Robert would tell me about the San Francisco of Birmingham, which he called “The Hills”, the time someone attempted to murder him, 1970s Detroit, when he would carry a “six shooter” along the Cass Corridor because seeing a murdered corpse on his way to work was not so unusual, and the time his restaurant burned down. If you grew up boating during the 1980s on the “East Side” of Metro Detroit, you may have eaten at his restaurant The Lighthouse Inn, in St. Clair. The restaurant burned down in 1991. But no one seemed to connect the dots that Robert acquired his even more famous “Cobb’s Corner” in 1971, after an arson, maybe restaurants come and go by way of fires, or this detail fell by the wayside of the unspoken, self-muted, willful ignorance of past.

At every successful completion of solving Robert’s Magic Jack issue Robert would separate a twenty dollar bill from a large roll of many bills. But the work was too easy, sometimes completed in less than five minutes, and I kindly declined. That caused Robert to add another twenty, insisting I take it. Literally putting the bills directly in my chest pocket. Solving Robert’s problem was sometimes as easy as plugging the Magic Jack’s phone line adapter back into the phone. In order to validate my triumph, we habitually dialed Key West.

“Hello Ron,” Robert would begin by calling his business partner and manager.

“It’s me.”

“Oh Hey Robert!”; Ron said with a perky smile.

“Guess where I’m calling from?” Robert replied.

“I don’t know Bermuda?” and we all started laughing.

“Close. West Bloomfield!” 

And we laughed some more.