Phone Home: The business of cell-phone storage for students : The ...

?Hello Angel! Doesn?t he have a great voice? I told him he?s gotta start doing voice-overs. I?ll be your agent, man. We can make things happen, brother.?

?She brings me flowers sometimes. I?m like, ?It?s not gonna get you free phone storage!? It?s awesome. You gotta be careful with these kids, though?make sure that you?re properly handling them in a professional manner.?

?Where you been at, man??

?I?ve been at home.?

?Home is not good! You should be in school, brother!?

Jhonn de La Puente, owner of Safe ?n? Secure Cellutions, a megawatt smile, and sharp shoes, could be the most appealing man ever to spend nine hours a day, five days a week, sitting inside a vaguely ominous white cargo van.

The van?with its seven-by-fourteen-inch pass-through slot, three security cameras, and laminated Barack Obama quotes?is Puente?s cell-phone-storage business. He parks it daily on Brooklyn?s Washington Avenue, in between the Brooklyn Botanic Garden?s new visitor center and Dr. Ronald McNair Park (named for the second African-American to travel to space, and the only one to lose his life in the Challenger explosion), earning a dollar a day from kids who attend high school across the way, on Classon Avenue.

Puente hustles. He greets each kid with a hearty ?Good morning!? and demands one in return; he asks about their mood, their allergies, their truancies. He clucks if they curse in front of the window. He gets to know them one dollar at a time.

He once had to move the van to make way for a location shoot for ?The Americans,? but his gift for relationships leaves him largely undisturbed, even if he parks in front of a hydrant. Business is brisk, beginning around 7:30 A.M., with a steady stream of young faces peering through the slot until around 11 A.M. At peak times, the line stacks up six or seven students deep. He stores an average of seventy-five to a hundred devices a day.

Cell phones in schools are controversial, to the point of being a mayoral-campaign talking point. Of course, they tempt texting and exploring the delights and dangers of the Internet during class. But aren?t they also vital to safety, a crucial link to family, a tool of empowerment and self-expression, a basic twenty-first-century right? The debate intensifies when you consider that the cell-phone ban, in place since 2005, is, like many things in a city with a wide gulf between rich and poor, unevenly applied. At schools with metal detectors, security guards must confiscate anything that sets them off. Elsewhere, unless you?re flaunting it, your device is safe.

Students find many babysitters for their most precious possessions?bodegas, shoe stores, and restaurants, such as Sal?s on Brooklyn?s Franklin Avenue, where you can store free all day with the purchase of breakfast. But one-dollar-a-day device storage is a growth industry unto itself. According to a 2012 New York Civil Liberties Union survey of New York City public middle and high schools, a hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-four students, at two hundred and forty-two schools, go through metal detectors each day.

Pure Loyalty, in business since 2007, serves a decent chunk of them, with big blue trucks at seven schools throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. Rates are a dollar per device per day, four dollars for the week, fifteen dollars for the month, and forty-two dollars for a three-month plan. The company refused to comment for this story, but unconfirmed reports put their revenues at around five hundred to seven hundred and fifty dollars per truck, per day, and the lines in front bear that out?as does their reported two-million-dollar insurance policy.

Safe ?n? Secure, around since 2011, is still in start-up mode.

?I thought I invented the wheel, but come to find out I didn?t,? says Puente. ?But I can tweak it a little bit.?

His tweak is a gift for customer service honed by time managing Starbucks, Fossil, and Pier 1 Imports stores, coupled with the heart of a youth outreach minister. ?I want to make sure they walk out of here with a smile on their face, because a lot of these kids, you don?t know what they go through at home,? he says. ?They?re good kids, just misdirected. So you have to figure out a way to get to them.?

He once put out a sign-up sheet and recruited forty kids to serve at a soup kitchen, a project he plans to repeat. He holds food drives. On ?free-candy Fridays,? he climbs on top of the van and tosses sweets down. He has his friend Jonathan Arnau play the guitar out front or hand out N.Y.P.D. crime-prevention pamphlets because ?he?s not doing anything else!? De La Puente uses the business as a platform to talk about domestic violence, catching students? interest with a poster-size picture of his sister, Xenia Puente, who died in 1997 at age sixteen.

?She was in a verbally abusive relationship that turned physical. The guy, at gunpoint, took her to the roof of a building not too far from here, actually. I don?t know exactly what happened, but she ended up five stories down,? he says. (The boyfriend was never charged.)

His van is paid for, as is another one, for a second location, when he can afford to staff it. Now, though, that second van holds his worldly possessions. De La Puente is, at the moment, homeless. He spends a hundred and fifty dollars a month to park the two vehicles. He showers at a Bally gym. He has a girlfriend in New Jersey, herself an entrepreneur, who does personal training via Skype. He ?gets creative.? ?That?s the sacrifice you have to make when you?re an entrepreneur and you believe in something, you know??

New customers make up a temporary four-digit PIN, which he records alongside their last name in a chart, handwritten daily in a composition book. Regulars have a customer number to go with the first letter of their last name, and the privilege of paying after school. He stores boyfriends? phones with their girlfriends?, and allows them to pick up for each other.

When a manicured hand reaches through the slot and plops three devices on the narrow wooden shelf, he says, ?Gimme two dollars.? ?I?m gonna give them a discount. I do it all the time. It keeps them coming back. They know I?m not just here to take a dollar from them.?

The van is outfitted with a plywood floor, fleece blankets over the back windows, two rickety stools, a small shelf, a plastic basket overflowing with crumpled bills, and twenty-six hanging vinyl shoe-storage bags, one for each letter of the alphabet. One by one, the pockets fill up. Phones with ringing alarms prompt maddening ?egg hunts.?

Phones left overnight accrue a two-dollar surcharge?which he often waives. ?I?m not teaching them responsibility if I don?t charge them. But a lot of times I?m just a sucker.? Promotional postcards stack up in your pouch if you?re in arrears. At five, he makes them pay. ?I don?t want them to get into the habit of owing, you know??

?Good morning, Jeanette! Ask me the question you ask me everyday.?

?I ask him if his bladder is O.K.?

?She cracks me up with that every single time.?

?I never lock up and leave, no way. I?m petrified. I?m responsible for all these phones. And the last thing I want is for someone to come to the van and I?m not there. Word gets around really quick.?

In the winter, Puente runs the van all day, to keep the heat on and his laptop charged. He passes the time studying business administration online, or reading. A dog-eared copy of Junot D?az?s ?Drown? lies on the console between the two front seats.

Or he?ll do other business: editing photos, or video, like ?Mothers of No Tomorrow,? a 2013 documentary about black-on-black violence that he made with his friend Nicholas ?Sixx? King, with whom he used to crash award shows.

Puente initially thought he might get the schools to pay for his services. ?I wrote up a proposal and everything, but it was a conflict of interest with the D.O.E., because by law these kids are not allowed to bring these devices into school, so they can?t cut a check to me.?

Now, his ?four-year plan? involves going nonprofit. ?You don?t get elevated in this life by just looking out for yourself.? Just this week, he started a Kickstarter campaign.

After the pickup rush, at 4 P.M., plus ?a five-minute grace period,? he closes up shop and goes to get his own kids, Jah?Shua, age eleven, and Jah?Naya, seven, who spend a couple hours doing homework and hanging out before he drops them off at their mom?s house.

That business hours match his kids? schedules is a plus. Soon enough, they?ll be teen-agers clamoring for smartphones of their own. And, like most of de la Puente?s clients?and people of all ages, everywhere?loathe to part with them for even an instant. Or maybe they?ll be in the philosophical minority, like Sheba Baptiste, age fifteen, who says she doesn?t really miss her phone during the day. ?It?s kind of a good thing for me, to have a break.?

Photographs by Ilona Szwarc.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/making-money-phone-home.html

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