The getaway bag got away from me. Walking on Crescent Street near Hoyt Avenue and reminiscing about parties I used to go to at one of the apartment buildings I felt the bag strap disconnect, sending the bag to the ground. Nothing damaged. But I came up with what I consider a damn ingenious fix, one that is too hard to explain but which just freakin’ works. I went to Staples anyway to look at similar bags but saw nothing that would work.
I call it the getaway bag because i thought it had a sinister air about it when i found it after my father’s suicide. It made no sense being where it was. I imagined that dad left it there so that after his soul left the body he could pack this bag with anything he might need on his journey into the afterlife. Whiskey, cigarettes, maybe plane tickets to one of the places where the dead spend their individual eternities.
But the bag was empty. Dad never followed through on that plan.
It does not surprise me if this bag is cheap crap. Most of what dad bought was cheap crap. The getaway bag has no brand name or tags anywhere on it. it resembles a bag I bought at a Salvation Army, and which did break off at the strap in a way that my survival skills which emerged today could not repair. The material physically snapped. This break was at the ball bearing.
More thoughts about the outline: I already wrote most of what I have to say about Apology, just need to recycle and or find stuff I wrote but forgot about. There is plenty of that to go around.
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Wrote tha above yesterday. Got some good quick research in today for a payphone anecdote that haunted me almost from the day i got here; PRAY, the graffiti artist who scratched the words PRAY, LOVE GOD, LOVE JESUS, etc into every phone booth in town. Found some good primary sources, whatever those are. Someone contacted me a few years ago saying he was writing a story about PRAY and I was all into it but he disappeared. Apparently PRAY was an 80 year old woman who’d lost her marbles, but cops never bothered her because they didn’t think someone like that was scratching out graffiti on phone booths, subway car doors, light posts, etc. Other graffiti artists were astounded that she got into places no white woman should have been — this was 1980s NYC. I remember being on 33d Avenue once when an elderly woman standing on the corner just started talking to me, telling me she was 101 and just talking a mile a minute, reasonably coherent and all, but kinda conspicuously uncomfortable after a while. I remember thinking hey, if I was 101 I’d probably stand around talking to whoever walks past because who cares, what the hell are they gonna do to me?
Anyway, PRAY fits in with Apology, the rotary dial revival of 1994, the shutting off of incoming calls in drug-infested areas, all these things that made the payphone seem like an object of obsession and preternatural fascination for different elements of society. And to me, a law-abiding citizen who doesn’t get into that kind of stuff, I felt it was safe, discrete, and lowest common denominator way of connecting with that world. Apology opened up a window into the world of the depraved and debaucherous, but from a discrete distance.
And then there was Letterman, turning the tables on that veil of anonymity by calling payphones and raising the unsuspecting citizen who answered from obscurity to minor celebrity. Letterman was certainly not the first on-air personality to do such gags, but I think he was the best. Candid Camera’s Alan Fundt had all kinds of fun with phone booth, and countless radio show hosts did the same. indeed, during the early days of The Payphone Project some radio personalities availed themselves of the phone numbers listed on the site and mined them for comedic gold, ringing public telephones across the land in hopes of a laugh at someone’s expense.
But Dave did these gags with some level of respect for innocent people who answered, avoiding the more peurile prank calling bucket that others folded to — at least as far as I can recall. Most of that stuff was on NBC and might never be seen again. It is not too much of a stretch to say that Dave inspired the Payphone Project in its initial incarnation, where visitors to the web site were encouraged to pick up their phone and call a payphone to make contact with a random stranger somewhere in New York and, as the site developed, anywhere in the world.
One of the most electrifying moments I ever saw on TV did not involve a payphone but it did include Dave and a telephone — COPY AND PASTE SID TUCHMAN STORY HERE
NPR was a memorable example of that. The guys at “Whad’ya Know?” came up with a skit that was so uncomfortably lacking in humor that people e-mailed me after the spot aired to say they were sorry for me. I had not even heard or known the segment was going to air so the condolences were offputting at first. I listened to the segment and had to agree: a small amount of planning could have made this something.
Come to think of it I think one of the numbers they called where someone actually answered was at the Trump Tower, or maybe another Trump property. Donald Trump needs to fix his payphone at the Trump Tower. He probably doesn’t even know it’s there.
The great tantalizing mystery of the telephone, for me, was its randomness. At my first desk job in New York I sometimes whiled away the idle hours dialing random numbers in Manhattan, picking exchanges that I knew to be in high-crime areas like the South Bronx and East New York. Before cell phone essentially made area codes and local exchanges irrelevant you could glean some sense of where a phone number was located by its area code and, more precisely, the first three numbers of the 7 digit phone number. As for South bronx and other such areas nothing ever came of my dalliances in ringing house phones. As far as I can recall pretty much everyone just hung. It was calls to the wealthier neighborhoods, where people had answering machines, where I found the real charm. Outgoing answering machine messages, i came to realize, were most people’s only public speech, their only formal rhetorical presentation. It was their little theater performance, and I could tell from listening to enough of them that some were very carefully rehearsed, others intentionally provocative. Oh how I wish I had a recording device for those recordings.
I am connecting all these disparate strands of 1990s-era payphonery and general telephony to illustrate how, taken together, they seemed to offer new venues for random communications and the intrigue of interacting with strangers at a safe distance.
