Afternoon coffee with a friend was nice. It is nice being with someone where continuous conversation is not expected, but where the conversation flows anyway. I left feeling energized, in a positive way. I went from there to the NYPL, where I renewed my library card. Then i went hunting for God. Didn’t find It but I did discover that the Port Authority Bus Terminal’s payphones have all been disconnected. they are still present, and quite homely to look at, but they do not make calls. GTL, the company better known as the prison payphone extortionaire, left dozens of these phones in working order until as late as February, 2015. Why they could not clean up after themselves is another matter. One would think the Port Authority itself had an interest in seeing them removed. Maybe they intend to revive a quantity of these phones at some point. As a transit hub I think they could stand to retain 2 or 3 working phones. How they retained roughly 60 of them all the way into 2015 must be a by-product of a long term contract or something. Now the PABT is like a payphone museum.
Remembering today my enduring fetish for 7 letter words. Since high school, when I discovered toll-free numbers, I would dial the numbers which spell those words on the telephone keypad. 1800ABCNEWS reached, what else, ABC News. I called numbers lik this almost obsessively, but rarely from home. I was unclear how toll free calls were handled when calling plans came with a limited number of minutes. Did toll free calls count against the minutes? I dialed 0 and aske thi question of an operator but never got a straight answer. “Toll free is toll free” was as erudite a response as the operator could muster. Calls to 800 numbers were free of long distance charges but out of fear that it would eat up calling minutes and lead to overages I made these calls almost entirely from payphones.
Who actually paid for the calls? The company you called, of course. In those days I guess it didn’t matter if I called from a payphone or a home landline. Today, and since 1996, when the FCC mandated what is called dialaround compensation, payphone owners earn 50 cents for every toll free call made from their phones. On account of this fee a number of companies have blocked incoming calls to their toll free numbers from payphones. Abuse of this compensation fee was probably more widespread than it appeared. Already wrote all this will append it to the outline later. But the 7-letter word thing is funny. To this day I cannot see a 7 letter word or phrase without imagining what it would connect me to should I dial its toll free numeric doppelganger from a payphone. This fascination ultimately led to the Secret Service and FBI investigations, which I hesitate to include in this except in passing. Maybe I care too much but those kids who glommed on to all that are adults now, with reputations.
Hah, originally spelled “but those” as “butthose”. At that I presently laugh. BUTTHOSE KIDS WHO GLOMMED…
The record for the case is sealed. The only way anyone could be associated with those affairs would be for someone like me to bring it up. I just wonder how many of those kids had any idea just how close we were to being in prison today. We might be getting released right about now, come to think of it. I remember glossing over the matter when the NY Times reporter interviewed me. He concluded that it ultimately did not matter with respect to the story he was working on. But i respected him for throwing his pen down and listening to my summary of the affair off the record. I disagree, actually, with his assessment that it didn’t matter to the story, but he kept it off the record and that was cool. I guess it’s a question of how revealing I want this narrative to be. I’ve never been shy about laying it all out there on the WWW, but a printed book is different, i think.
Talking about the outline and the book idea with David today. He perked up at the subject and said he wanted to help. i gave him a couple of things to look out for. Obscure things. He says he goes to therapy twice a week now and that it is very hard. I said that sounded like a good thing. nothing worth doing is always easy. it takes work to make things easy. i think that is the fundamental takeaway from studying piano all those years. your work is a continuous series of compromises, accommodations, and compensations. you could call it a high-falutin form of laziness in that you are constantly looking for the easiest, simplest way to get something done.
at the coffee shop today we met a clarinetist. a Juilliard graduate. he looked about our age, maybe a little older. David is 53. I will soon be 48. This gentleman, William, looked somewhere around that range. He said he gave up the clarinet and presently was substitute teaching in NYC. it sounded like hell on earth. i’ve known a number of teachers in New York and most of them were ready to eat a gun for breakfast. the teachers who taught 4th grade and earlier all seemed to like their lives and their jobs but anyone teaching 5th grade and up just wanted to die.
