Tomorrow I face 6,000,000 people. Well, we record the interview at the NYPL. And evidently there is going to be a follow-up interview. I was kind of blase about this before but today I was actually feeling kind of nerous about it. I did not think this was going to happen, and I go into it with some trepidation. I don’t really need or particularly desire press coverage any more. I wouldn’t say I agree to do it as a favor for anybody, but for the most part I benefit less from it than the people who do the interviews. Unlike the CNN spot (which is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen on television) this one cannot be aired once at 2am when no one is watching. It’s CBS Sunday Morning, which is probably experiencing a ratings boom since the host Charles Osgood announced he is retiring.
Well, it should be easy. They just want me to talk about payphones for a couple of hours. How hard is that? I actually remembered something about my father that I had completely forgotten about. I was reminded of this while doing research for the long-promised book. Someone was quoted in 19984 as saying that he and his son drove around their city looking for places to install payphones. That remindd me of an identical memory from that same time. 1984 is when the coin telephone industry was deregulated. This allowed anyone who wanted to own and operate a payphone do so without approval or regulation by the Bell telephone companies. My dad was interested in this enough to scope out locations, and we spent long hours cruising around Central Florida looking for payphones. He wanted to see if anyone was actually using them, and if there was any way to estimate what kind of money was being made. I don’t know what kind of research he had done but he seemed to think that Central Florida with its tiny towns and crappy motels would be a rich area for payphones. He might have thought that travellers would spend more money than typical payphone users because they would mostly be dialing long distance. I don’t know what his business logic was but he never did buy a payphone route. I don’t think he ever came close. He was intrigued by the idea of making some passive chump change on the side but I think he was turned off by the business itself. He did end up getting into tchotchke machines with a friend who owned a restaurant on the Broadwalk in Daytona Beach. I think he made as much as $100 a month with that, until the friendship with the restaurant owner went sour.
But that memory came back like gangbusters. Memories of dad and me cruising around Florida, looking for payphones. And when we didn’t see one at a gas station or a 7-Eleven we had a running gag: “Why don’t you put a payphone there?” We’d be driving somewhere, anywhere, and if there was a clearing on the side of the road one of us would say “Why isn’t there a payphone there?” We’d be at a restaurant and I’d go to the bathroom. I’d come back and say “I just saw the perfect place for a payphone.” That all started in 1984 or 1985. When I got to high school in 1986 I was almost shocked to find that the campus had a couple of payphones. I was like “Dad, why didn’t you think of putting payphones at schools? We never even thought of that.” It was good for a laugh for a few years. But I can’t believe I hadn’t remembered this until now. It just might help explain my virtual lifelong preoccupation with looking for payphones.
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Change of subject. I have no known allergies. I guess I might have reactions to dust, but I haven’t taken Allegra-D in ages and I’ve been fine without it. But you can have been allergy free your whole life and develop them at any time. So last night I took off my shirt and was alarmed to see several monstrous lumps on my chest. They looked like gigantic mosquito bites. Without a couple of beers in me at the time I might have been horrified, but I was mellow. So I did the smart thing and took photos of them. I’ll print them and take them to the next dermatologist visit. Somehow from the moment I saw them I knew they were going to recede. And they did. But it was pretty damn weird at first. They didn’t itch at all. Today there is no trace of them. So I don’t know if I had an allergic reaction to some beer I had at the bar, or if I got a bug bite and didn’t notice it. I was out at the cemetery yesterday, but I go there all the time and have never come home with mountainous cysts on my person. It is theorized, though, that West Nile Virus got its start in the untended vases filled with sitting water at the city’s cemeteries.
It reminded me that my mother got bit by a moth in Ghana and contracted Loa-Loa, which at the time was considered one of the rarest diseases on earth. I wasn’t old enough to remember the moth bite occurring but when I was 15 or 16 she woke up to find her left arm had swollen like a baseball. It was steadily increasing in size. That was how Loa-Loa worked. You got the bug bite but symptoms would not show up for years. It just lingered in your system. Without appropriate medical attention the effects could be fatal, and in most of Africa it was known to be just that. The doctors at the military base in Tampa had never heard of Loa-Loa but they were appropriately able to reearch it and find a remedy. They were actually excited to be confronted with something so unusual.
I momentarily had thoughts last night that maybe I got bit by a moth when I was an infant in Ghana and contracted Loa-Loa. Maybe this was my payoff, decades later. But that was not it, even if one of the cysts looked big enough to have been something way more than a mosquito bite. I guess I am allergic to something and I’ll have to figure out what. That would be great if it was beer. Actually I’ve read that alcohol consumption increases your risk of reacting to other allergens, whether you’re allergic to alcohol or not. I was about to say that I don’t think I’ve ever experiened sudden cysts or lesions like that, but I actually seem to remember seeing something similar sprout up on my arm one night at Sunswick years ago. Freaky stuff.
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