KANKAKEE, Illinois. Kevin Tomlinson will be the first to admit that he hasn’t been the most faithful of husbands, and his record of two prior divorces operated as a warning label when he was courting his current wife, Karen. “I knew what I was getting into,” she says with a jaundiced glance at her mate. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
Karen’s healthy skepticism towards her husband’s “cock and bull” stories about his whereabouts on any given night out “bowling” or “fishing” have caused her to develop a compulsion comparable to Kevin’s lust for sex outside marriage. “She’s always snooping in my phone, seeing if my . . . work colleagues like Tina or Maribeth or Marie Ann have been in touch,” he says ruefully. “Can’t a man have a ‘zone of privacy’ to do things that aren’t criminal and don’t hurt anybody–in fact feel pretty good?”
So the two have developed strategies of pursuit and evasion that caused the male half of the couple to become a compulsive user of “burner” phones–cheap, prepaid mobile phones that are typically discarded when no longer needed. “They’re only twenty bucks at Best Buy,” says Kevin. “Still, that increases your costs per romantic assignation.”
As the couple began to work together on a family budget to pay down their high credit card balances, Karen complained about their lack of free cash, causing Kevin to come up with an idea to cut costs, if not save their marriage. “Messenger pigeons are a low-cost alternative to the man who wants to communicate with others while keeping secrets from his wife,” says Orwell Roy, a professional pigeon breeder in Calumet City. “They’re very loyal, unlike the guys who buy them, they fly straight to their destination without stopping for a beer like a human messenger, and most important they can’t talk so your secrets are safe with them.”
Keeping a pigeon can cost as little as $20 per month, an amount that while comparable to some low-cost phone plans does not come with a long-term contract. “When you’re done with a burner phone you throw it away,” Kevin says. “When you’re through with a pigeon, you can eat it, so that helps cut your monthly food bill.”
Kevin agrees to demonstrate to this reporter his method of keeping in touch his latest heart-throb, Shontelle Pegorago, a hostess at the Steak ‘n Fries restaurant he frequents when Karen refuses to cook for him after an unexplained weekend absence. “Here you go little buddy,” he says as he attaches a “mash note” to the leg of “Air Male,” his current Columba sense stricto mode of communication. “Take this to Shontelle, tell her I’ll be parked under the street light, okay?”
“gloobul, gloobul, gloobul,” Air Male responds, then takes off towards an apartment complex on the edge of town here with a swimming pool and a bevy of young single women who offer him popcorn and bits of hot dog rolls when he visits.
Is Kevin ever concerned that one of his pigeons will lose a message, or get sidetracked on a “frolic and detour” of his own on the way to his destination? “If I wanted those kinds of problems,” he says, “I’d send it regular mail.”