Another day another payphone documentary. This one should be easier than an earlier one, not that I objected to the time spent on “Hang Up.” This should just be a quick conversation about the poetry and pathos of obsolescence and changing times. People always come to me for that. Hah. We are filming at the same strip mall where we filmed part of “Hang Up” and apparently she is shooting in black and white on film.
I got part way over the Triborough bridge today before turning back. Just didn’t feel like it, and wanted to be closer to home should a certain somebody contact me. I spent much of the afternoon at the piano, catching up on the music of Amy Beach.
I seem to find myself, all of a sudden, at the center of a somewhat unpleasant gossip mill. I guess that is wht I get for leaving the apartment. It is not a horrible, wretched, embarrassment of a gossip mill but it has that potential.
I had an idea for another radio script, based loosely on some bits of reality but strung together with fictions. A man sees a beautiful woman on the street. She is talking on her phone, or appears to be. He actually suspects she is of that ilk which only appears to be talking on the phone as a means of departure, or of keeping a distance from anyone around her.
He follows her a half a block, where he sees her enter her apartment building. He notes her street address, and through the magic of ancestry.com or similar online resources he learns her name and certain things about her background — among other things he learns that they share a handful of mutual friends from the neighborhood. Long story short he uses the tools of the predator to make himself available to her, without it ever looking like he wanted her. This is how child molesters work. The notion of the pervert hanging around the playground luring kids into the car with promises of candy and television, while not without its anecdotes to back it up, is largely a fiction. Instead the more common approach is for the molester to make himself available, letting the kids come to him for story book reading or something involving sitting on the guy’s lap. Fucking disgusting to think about, but the technique is at the crux of this story about the man’s pursuit of the woman. He is conflicted about it, but perseveres anyway out of what he feels is a real possibility for love.
He “makes himself available” by passing her apartment, almost compusively, 7 or 8 times a day. He has all his stories straight: She lives on a relatively untrammeled side street but he passes by frequently on his way to or from the bar down the street. Or, he goes to the library also nearby. His stories are all perfectly innocuous and credible.
After months of passing by her place it finally happens. The miracle he anticipated and even helped create. She was walking the opposite direction in the company of one of their mutual friends. He stopped to say hello to the mutual friend, as the woman he really wanted to talk to listened in. He introduced himself. There was conversation. Knowing what he knew of her background he peppered his comments with references to the college she attended, to her home town, to the industry in which she worked. She lit up. The conversation was real.
The three people parted ways, but his success felt real. Very real. He continued his availability charade, passing her building numerous times a day, even passing by on the next street over to see if he could glean any clues about what her apartment was like. He considered crude techniques of keeping him on her radar. Dropping his business cards on the sidewalk around the area. Something involving misdirected mail that was not really misdirected. But these techniques were for less determined folk who wanted to get caught in their pursuit rather than discovered.
Anyway, it’s a crude story line but the conflicted man eventually gets through to her. They slowly fall in love, for real. But any time they approach her apartment he feels a coarse sense of being a predator. The countless times he walked this street alone never left him when he was finally in her company. Had he fooled her into loving him? The relationship is healthy so why feel guilt over how he made it happen? He concludes that the foundation of loneliness and the solitude of his pursuit never fully retreated as the foundation of the relationship.
Holy crap it is still 74 degrees even after a thunderstorm. At the ghetto coffee shop, heading out and out and away.
