Your Phone's Wallpaper is Telling Your Secrets
Selfies, spouses, pets and apple pie.
1.
I used to be quietly judgy if I noticed that the background photo, the wallpaper, on somebody's phone was a selfie.
This went on for a few years. Especially during Covid when I went on more dates than any point in my life.
Now I work retail and customers use Apple Pay at the register, meaning they just tap their phone on the little credit-card reader and the payment bloops out, so I see it more than ever (the selfie background) and it occurs to me now, perhaps in this humbler position, that the selfie background photo, the Me-At-My-Best wallpaper, is less a flag signaling vanity than an emotional version of that steel bar my grandmother had to install beside her toilet, to help lift herself up.
When customers use Apple Pay and I see their background photos they’re usually photos of
the cardholder’s kids
spouse
pets.
Then selfies after that.
Women use Apple Pay far more than men, so that might be a gendered read.
I see with straight men sometimes that their background photo is a vehicle or a Punisher logo.
Gay men often have as their background photo some very-vintage photo (sepia, curlers) of the first woman who loved them dearly.
2.
My college roommate, senior year, was a 6’3” Russian called Nijat. His English was bubbly and fluent but had some hitches. One time we were at a bar and I thought we were friendly enough that I could casually mention that he punctuated all of his sentences with one of three phrases:
“basically speaking”
“kind of a thing”
“sort of a way.”
Instant devastation. Like Lisa dumping Ralph. His face did what a car window does when firefighters tap that spike on it. I hastened with a “no no no i’m not making fun” but it turned out his accent and his English was a really tormented inner terrain for him. I had ruined the evening.
This conversation was held at an Applebees in Kendall for some reason and it remains the only time I ever sat across from somebody who ordered an entree, ate the whole thing, and then ordered a second one.
The server took the order for that 2nd meal casually enough but asked if he “wanted it to go.”
Nijat scowled. Not angry, just puzzled. “Go where?”
She said, “No, like…in a doggy bag.”
He made eye contact with me for the first time in minutes, the first time since I hurt his feelings with that remark about his verbal tics, and he looked like a person who'd been cornered into one of two options: shame, or rage.
3.
The one really notable background photo I see every couple days belongs to an older woman. Maybe 70. She comes into the grocery store armed with smiles and “hi"s. Grabs a basket and goes. Less walking than wafting. A stewpot for a purse and a ladle in her hand, dolloping goodwill and compliments on the heads of passing children. She does her shopping and then rolls up to the register with her Grandma Haul.
A Grandma Haul is a cart full of groceries in which no single item is ready-to-eat; everything is an ingredient for something larger, more nourishing.
It is a phrase I invented but you may use it.
This customer I'm talking about is a tall woman. Thatcher-stature. She makes chit-chat and rests her heavy hand on you. She asks questions. You talk faster.
It is — you won't believe this and I am not happy to report it — erotically charged.
I ring up her items and tell her the total.
She says “oh thank you,” hunching her shoulders and digging into her purse, “oh perfect,” and with her smile still smiling she takes out her phone and taps it to the credit card machine and when the phone lights up, confirming purchase, I see, gazing back at me, the villain-lighted scowl of a very-old man from Queens.
4.
One day Nijat and I went to Publix together and Nijat went for the bakery where a woman in a hairnet and smock was cutting samples of apple pie into pillcups. Nijat got close. He bowed at the neck and the sternum and scowled at it.
The woman said, “That’s apple pie.”
Nijat took a sample and chewed it with stops and starts. Gulped it. Thought about it. Scrunched his brow and pointed at the pie and asked the hairnetted server if he could have a sort of like a ~second bite~ basically speaking.
She said sure.
Nijat bought an apple pie and, on the sofa that night, he watched Exit Through the Gift Shop and ate the entire thing by himself with several glasses of milk.
Afterward he spent at least two days in the fetal position, frowning into his hands, making redfaced birdcalls in the bathroom.
5.
He was recuperating on the sofa at some point that week, bundled in a comforter, scrolling on his phone when he rolled to me and said, “Look,” holding up a photo of a motorcycle. I told him it was very nice. Handsome. He laughed. Brought it back and held it at his nose and shook his head. “That bike is like…” He slapped the phone down on his chest and wrenched his jaw at the ceiling and made a questing poor-Yorick with his left hand: “it’s like… female orgasm inside of my body.”
He stayed in that pose for a while. Grinning. Eyes closed. Chin at the sky like he was ready for more of it. Pies. Bikes. Life.
Thanks for reading Big Reader Bad Grades. This is a free-to-read, reader-funded newsletter. I hope that, if you're liking it, you'll consider a paid subscription. And also that you'll check out my new/debut book, CUBAFRUIT.
enjoyed reading, thought this was fun! However, mildly offended by the idea of a "grandma haul" which in the distant past used to be known as "cooking ingredients"
I really, really enjoyed this. Funny, honest, a great rhythm.