The Man on Top of the Telephone Pole

by Clayton Smith

The man sitting on top of the telephone pole has become something of a local attraction.

     No one really remembers when he took up residence high above the corner of Blankenship and Elm. Sometime in the spring, we think. One day, he was just there, and at first, we didn’t give it much thought. “A man from the telephone company,” we told ourselves, “taking an ill-timed, poorly positioned break.” But the whole day passed, and then a whole week.

     By June, his presence had become unnerving.

     Not that he’s abrasive, of course. In fact, the opposite is true; he seems quite content upon his perch. He doesn’t pay much mind to us below, but when he does, he tends to regard us with a warm smile, and, sometimes, a tip of the head. He’s a quiet sort, always keeping to himself, and though you can’t hear it below, the way he bobs his head makes you certain that he’s humming a rather merry tune. We don’t feel threatened by the man on the telephone pole.

     It’s just a confusing place for a man to be, is all.

     He keeps rather good care of himself, for a man stranded forty feet above the ground. He’s never asked us for food, and though he is rather wiry, he seems fit enough, and healthy. We’re not exactly sure how he takes his meals. Some say that a neighborhood squirrel delivers him little noshes in its cheeks, but if you ask me, it seems unlikely. I’ve never known a domesticated squirrel.

     The man is well-groomed, too. His hair is neatly trimmed, and his clothes always look clean, more or less. He’s even changed outfits a handful of times, though he has no suitcase that we can see, and there’s no evidence to suggest that he’s ever come down from the pole. Arnold Marsh even started soaking the dirt on the street corner with his hose every six hours, hoping to catch the man’s prints in the mud.

     He’s been doing that for three months.

     So far, nothing.

     We accepted the man on top of the telephone pole good-naturedly at first. We knew he was troubled, and we graciously sympathized, as good neighbors should do. We became experts on various mental afflictions. We nodded soberly when we discussed him and said things like, “It’s so nuanced, dealing with diseases of the mind,” and, “My aunt has schizophrenia, so I understand.” We expressed our great compassion for the man who had taken a vacation from the constraints of reality, and we offered accurate and constantly changing diagnoses. We mourned for his poor family, wherever they might be. “”It’s hard,” we said knowingly.

     But by the time the leaves started falling, so had our patience. Half a year was far too long for any one man to balance atop a utility post, and the only person who seemed to disagree was the man himself. We had crossed off our entire list of mental illnesses, having dredged the depths of Google until we had more words for disease than the Eskimos have for snow. We’d ascribed him Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Parkinson’s disease. We’d diagnosed front temporal dementia, vascular dementia, mixed dementia, and dementia with Lewy bodies, whatever those were. He was schizophrenic, anxious-avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, dysthymic, bipolar, hypomanic. He had amnesia, insomnia, bulimia, dyspareunia, and probably paraphilia. Sometime in September, Melissa from 308 W. Park said he had Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome. We were all jealous for days. We wished we’d come up with Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome.

     We still do.

     When our prognoses had reached their limits, we grew tired of being nurturing and understanding and opted for indignation instead. The man on the telephone pole had outlasted our charity, and we resented him for that.

     “What’s he doing up there?” we began to demand of our neighbors across the hedgerows. “He’s looking in our windows and defecating on our lawns and spitting on our children!” we responded, even though there were no documented cases of the man doing any of those things. “Something must be done about him! He shouldn’t be sitting up there—it’s just plain weird!”

     The local constabulary was less than useless. “We can’t arrest him for no reason,” they said, wringing their hands before the mob. “And he’s not breaking any of our laws.”

     “Defacing public property!” we shouted.

     “But he hasn’t defaced anything.”

     “Trespassing!” we decided.

     “But the telephone pole is city property, no different than a park or a school.”

     “Safety endangerment!” Melissa declared, and we hated her even more, because we all wished we’d come up with safety endangerment.

     “But it’s his own safety he’s endangering,” said the police. “And if you don’t have the right to endanger your own safety, then why even live in America?” We couldn’t argue with them there, and we all took a bit of secret pleasure in seeing Melissa’s idea taken down a peg.

     October rolled around, and we hoped the utility company would solve the issue on their routine autumn maintenance check. But our utility man, Bruce, took quite a liking to the man on the telephone pole, and by the end of the shift, the two men were slapping each other on the back and laughing like old friends. When Bruce descended the pole, we clamored for his attention. “What did he say? When will he leave?”

     Bruce held up his hands to quiet us and said, “Truth be told, I don’t think he’s hurting anyone. Why not let’s let him stay?”

     We stopped paying our utility bills in protest.

     In the interest of being fair, I should say that there is some benefit to having a man sitting atop the telephone pole. Neighborhood husbands who do stupid things to anger their wives have taken to saying, “Well, at least I’m not the guy on top of the telephone pole,” and their wives sigh and agree and say, “All right, you don’t have to sleep on the couch tonight.” He also sometimes throws acorns at the Johnsons’ Rottweilers, which most of us agree is for the common benefit.

     Still, we tried to devise ways to get him down. We tried to talk sense into him, but the man seems to have a stubborn streak. We shook the telephone pole, but its foundation was remarkably solid for a tax-funded project. We threw tennis balls at him, but our aims are not very good.

      Then, one day, the man on the telephone pole made a proclamation.

     “I have something to say,” he said, his thin voice carrying easily on the November wind.

     The people below stared and gasped. Our hearts fluttered, our breath caught. Dogs fell silent, grown men wept, and old Mrs. Rogers fainted on her lawn. We gathered our neighbors, shouting, “The man on the telephone pole is about to speak! Come listen!” We dropped everything and hurried to the corner of Blankenship and Elm. The crowd grew, and even neighbors from two subdivisions down came hobbling down our sidewalk. Soon a sea of suburbanites surrounded the pole, we were ten, no, fifteen—no, twenty bodies deep!

     “What is it, man-on-top-of-the-telephone-pole?” asked Roger from 215 E. Kimberly. We all nodded and were glad that it wasn’t Melissa who had asked.

     The man stood delicately atop the pole and repeated, “I have something to say.” We drew a collective breath, held it in our cheeks, and closed our lips over it, not wanting to miss a single word. The man spread his arms wide, lifted his hands above the assembly, and said, “I have something to say, and I will say it…eventually.” Then he lowered his arms, sat back down on the pole, and stared off toward the horizon.

     The man said no more that day.

     We stayed there under the telephone pole for an hour, scratching our heads and shrugging our shoulders. “What does that mean?” we asked. “Suppose he’ll tell us when he’s ready,” we replied. After a while, we began to wander off one by one, confused, addled, and not a little bit befuddled.

     That was one full year ago today. The man on top of the telephone pole is still there, and he still has not said what he has to say. But we believe that one day he will.

     We complain a little less now. We don’t hurl tennis balls at him anymore. We say things like, “He’s a nuisance, but at least he’s our nuisance.” Because one day, the man on top of the telephone pole will impart his secret wisdom, and we, his grateful neighbors, will reach a new level of enlightenment and being. We know this in our hearts. We whisper about it over fences. In the mean time, the man just sits, feeding himself mysteriously, grooming himself secretly, and occasionally throwing acorns at the Johnsons’ Rottweilers.

     And we agree that it’s all for the common benefit.