VR and PPNYC

I. Incantation     A. Story of the mysterious call I answered at a coffee  shop payphone on Broadway.          i. "I may never know what this encounter was about, or who orchestrated it. But despite its veering into luridness I think it represents the spirit of The Payphone Project", a web site I established in 1995 as an extension of my personal web site, "The Place of General Happiness". II. Background     A. I do not know where my lifelong connection to payphones and public telephony came from. I think the first payphone I encountered was in high school. The presence of a phone on the campus seemed like a step toward adulthood. There was no phone  whatsoever that I can recall at the grade school I attended before before. I would describe my connection to telephony and to the mysteries and vagaries of that form of communication as something akin to a hunger.           1. My father used to drive me around Central Florida looking for payphones. This would have been in the late 1980s, when deregulation made it possible for anyone to buy a payphone route and make some chump change on the side. I'll fill in the rest of that story which I wrote yesterday          2. As a young pianist I took piano lessons at the University of Tampa, on Kennedy Boulevard. I was intrigued by a comment I heard on TV one night from a concerned Tampanian who bluntly said that the nexus of prostitution in Tampa revolves around Kennedy  Boulevard outside the University of Tampa.               a. At the time I probably did not even know what a prostitute was but I knew it was seedy, dirty, though I don't remember being aware that it was illegal. i asked my mother was a prostitute and she rolled her eyes, responding opaquely "A woman of the night". In a roles-reversed kind of way our discussion of the matter resembled that of Garp and his mother in "The World According To Garp."               b. Unclear what a hooker was I was nevertheless inspired to go to the red phone booth on Kennedy Boulevard (during daylight hours, when hookerly activity took a break) and get the phone number of the payphone contained within. I would go home and make tape recordings of myself playing piano and, later, I would call the payphone I had heard was surrounded by seedy hookers and pimps and I played my recordings into the phone, so anyone who answered could listen. And you know, people did listen. I'd here whoever answered say stuff "Damn, man, what is this?" and "Nice!" Some people hung up but I was charged by the connection I felt I'd made, anonymously, between myself and the hookers of Kennedy Boulevard. I don't know if I fully articulated it but I imagine I was thinking that I was bringing something beautiful into a murky, derelict world.                    i. In later years I would call corporate voicemail systems and do the same thing, leaving recordings of classical piano music as voicemail messages for random people who worked at these corporate towers. In a similar spirit I guess I imagined I was bringing unexpected, random beauty into a sterile world in need of such graces.          3. So many flashpoint moments and important influences involved the telephone:               a. heavy breathing woman who called at 3am days after my grandmother died               b. voicemail exchange with high school friends through college and into adulthood               c. prank calling public television fund raiser pledge drives just to watch the volunteers on tv answer the phone and try not to respond to me yelling "I CAN SEEEEEEE YOUOOOOOO!"               d. calling public access television psychic and asking her when my canoe would be ready to sail, and watching her face on live television as she tried (and succeeded, I might add) at maintaining her composure.               e. picking up the telephone and hearing, for just a split second, a hive of voices, hundreds of them all talking at once as the telephones lines all got crossed. i wanted to listen to that forever.               f. the hooker who called me thinking i was her pimp to tell what a wonderful time she had with the customer. she had the wrong number.               g. the apology line                III. New York City     A. My earliest memory of payphones in New York involved the so-called "LOVE JESUS" woman who painstakingly etched the words "LOVE JESUS" into what was believed to be every single solitary payphone in New York City. At the time there might have been 35,000 or more PPTs. I remember a manager at Tower Records describing this woman's pursuit with a mix of awe and trepidation, perhaps with a whiff of ridicule as well.          1. The earnestness and gritty determination of this woman's endeavor amazed me, and confirmed what I already thought I knew about payphones: For some of us they are a focal point of obsession.          2. The payphones in the lobby of the Parc Lincoln hotel, a transient/SRO residence I live in for about a year in 1990 and 1991, were nothing less than my lifeline to the world. I had no money for a phone of my own, and would not have such funds for over a year after moving here.                a. Through one of phones I first discovered Apology, the telephone confessional first established in 19890 and which I read about in a 1990 story in the NYPress. Apology would assume a central role in my life for several years to come.               b. Through another phone I called and was allowed to speak live on a national talk radio show, for the first time. It seemed miraculous to me that i could get that kind of audience without paying a dime.               c. A was nearly molested by someone who tried to force his way into one of the booths as I clung to the phone, listening to Apology.                    i. That encounter, scary, was further punctuated by the thumping, dunking sound that I don't think many people heard, even in the early 1990s. The payphones, during normal daytime hours, would give you 2 or 3 warnings that your call time was running out and to please deposit more money. i can hear the beefcake sound of the guy's voice saying "EXCUSE ME!" After 2 or 3 of these interruptions the call would be disconnected. What I discovered was that after 11pm the "EXCUSE ME!" interruptions stopped but the call was never disconnected. it was, however, punctuated by a sound I can only describe as that of a sucker punch, like the telephone trying to swallow my quarters but spitting them back up half way. The call never ended.      B. My earliest and most enduring personal adventures involving New York's payphones revolved around APOLOGY.          1. Apology was a magnet for lapsed Catholics such as I whose small amount of guilt at giving up on regular church involvement was offset by the confidence that I just didn't need that emotional or spiritual safety net.          2. Apology's ongoing conceit was that if you were calling to confess to a crime or misdeed then you should always call from a payphone. This pronouncement, uttered in the God-like basso-profundo voice of an artist who I only knew as Mr. Apology, further defined payphones as objects not just of obsession, as with the LOVEJESUS woman, but also as gateways f
or shady miscreants, such as the hookers who had so conspicuously chosen that red phone booth on Kennedy Boulevard in Tampa to ply their trade.