i alluded yesterday to a payphone-related project on which i recently
embarked, or rather re-embarked. i happened to choose earthquake day to
resume the project, but that’s neither here nor there except to note that
i found myself unwittingly hogging a public resource at one of its rare
moments of value.
the project is fairly simple in design. i go out with a pocket full of
quarters and i call a voicemail number i set up for this project. i call
the number, and i talk, talk about this or that — the substance of the
little speeches i record was what i experimented with today, just getting
used to doing this such that i could think and talk freely.
i decided to start following people. i used to do this a fair amount, for
idle interests in the mundane actions of fellow human beings. i pursue
this hobby with no intention of entering the lives of the people i follow,
nor do i have any desire to so much as enter their consciousness, or cross
their radar of awareness. i rarely follow for more than a few minutes, but
i feel like interesting things frequently rise up from these little spy
jobs.
today i turned the plot a few degrees, deciding that if i was calling like
thsi from payphones then i should endeavor to follow someone for the
distance between the payphones, then after i stop following i report in to
the voicemail to recount everything i can remember about that person.
today i followed a woman carrying a Brooks Brothers shopping bag. she wore
flip flops, a one-piece dress. at first i thought she had a limp but i
soon found that it was more of a swagger. it was an odd gait, but not too
demonstratively so. over her left shoulder was a bag, checkered with brown
and black squares. the bag may have been leather, but more likely some
other fabric. there was a broken strap on the bag. i think the broken
strap would have been used to tie the bag shut, but instead it just
dangled off the side of the bag.
not an interesting trail to follow. nothing learned, really. i gleaned
more bahavioural flourishes from a 20-something man walking briskly south
on 3rd Avenue. he poked and picked at everything along the way, punching
buttons on electronic parking meters and picking up payphones for less
than one second before slamming them back on the hook.
i also reported in on memories i had of experiences near the payphone i
was using. one story, vivid in my memory, involved the Tramway Diner on
2nd Avenue. i was there once when it was very crowded, and i was sitting
too close for comfort to two people at the table to my right and one
elderly woman at the table to my left. i noticed the elderly woman but, as
crowded as the place was, i paid her no particular mind. this was probably
in 1994 or 1995.
i dropped something. it must have been a fork or a spoon, but whatever it
was it landed on the elderly woman’s table. she picked it up and, slowly,
began handing it to me. as i took the utensil from her she pressed two of
her fingers into the palm of my hand. making eye contact she asked “Do you
want some company?”
she was a hooker. i looked at her face. the makeup was gaudy and even
ludicrous, like something from a child’s face painting party, or a
circus clown. her fingers trembled and her eyeballs jiggled, but she
seemed confident in what she was doing.
i thanked her for handing me the eating utensil, and acted like i didn’t
hear her question. she did not pursue the matter by asking again or
clarifying. she just sat there alone at the crowded diner, eating her
soup very, very slowly.
the payphone voicemail project could be interesting, if i find the
resources to do it right. it’s a lot of follow up audio editing and
processing, which is painful for me. hell, yeah, but i need a damn editor.
on the other hand the artistry of it all is to be able to deliver short
accounts of the what and where from a given payphone, so maybe the post
processing would be targeted for minimal time investment.
i did feel as if yesterday’s calls made for interesting accounting of the
earthquake, and of my gradual realization that such a thing had happened
with no exposure to media coverage of the event.
blahblhablahbalhbalbhalhbal
today is the first time i can remember being around the road-thrashing
that will end with the T train, better known as the 2nd Avenue
Subway. i think it’s a needless project that few if any normal people
really want or need, but at least it seems to be squeezing the bikes away
to other avenues. it is really, really, loud and obnoxious, though, the
construction, or destruction as it appears to be.
oh, another interesting memory that rose up from today’s payphone project
involved those mysterious tangles of disemboweled cassette tape matter
that litter gutters and sidewalks. one of my earliest memories of New
York was seeing what seemed like miles and miles and miles of this stuff,
cassette tapes freed from the tyranny of the spools that guided them over
the cassette player’s head. i had imagined that these discarded tapes
contained clandestine messages, and a tape picked out of the gutter would,
when carefully re-spooled onto a cassette container, be playable on a
standard cassette deck, whence the mysteries of the discarded tape would
be revealed, linking the listener to where they could find the next
cassette tape in the puzzle and resume to hunt.
i picked up a sliver of such cassette tape today, vaguely imagining that i
might actually do this, conduct this little forensic project of
re-spooling the tape and playing back its secrets.
Alas, I decided against it when I found that the tape was stuck to a wad
of chewing gum, and soaked in fluids originated from God-knows-where. and,
seriously, the scrap of cassette tape is unlikely to hold anything more
mysterious than a few seconds from a Tony Bennett song.
i long to find the cassette tape i know i recorded at the Parc Lincoln in
1991, the day before or the day of my exit from that place. i know the
tape exists, but where? it is probably disintegrated by now, but the tape
recorded a woman talking and rambling like a bored loon, a sullen voice of
inchoate ennui from a woman whiling away her days in placidity at the Parc
Lincoln. cassettes like that are why i still get a bit of a charge when i
see home-made cassettes on sale at thrift shops. i imagine that the tapes
are not simply mixed tapes of songs but genuine expressions of
individuals, or at least some solitary cultural backwash. not bloody
likely, right?
