Off the Cliff

I was feeling really good today, until I wasn’t. I don’t know what hit me, or why. The sudden change from sunshine to gloom? The weather? An unrequited desire to have a conversation with somebody, anybody? This desire followed by attempts to do this.

I found an old outline for the PP thing, about which I blasted out however many hundreds of words earlier today. I simply cannot write at home anymore. Ironically, it might be the desk I was so happy to procure. Something about the posture I must assume, the sort of lowered way I have to sit, I think has something to do with it. It’s obviously not designed for computer use since computers did not readily exist when it was made.

Or it could be the gathering sense of doom that I think has accumulated living in that apartment for far longer than I ever imagined.

So I put that old outline on the cloud storage so I can edit it from anywhere. Welcome me to the 21st century.

A bit of random searching around turned up a funny payphone story I vaguely remember from when it was current in the late 1980s. James Clark was the payphone thief that the phone company loathed yet respected. He was, according to the phone company, the only person in the country who had figured out how to unlock the coin vaults on their payphones. He lived a sort of ragamuffin existence, checking into motels under the name James Bell, as if he was taunting his pursuers at the Bell telephone companies. He was clearing an average of $70,000 a year doing this, presumably paying his way through much of his life with fistfuls, nay bucketfuls of coins.

He was finally apprehended when he peacefully surrendered to FBI agents. But he got away with this for years. It’s the sort of thing he could probably have gotten away with forever if he hadn’t gotten greedy. The investigation actually seemed to have been heating up toward the end when agents feared he was teaching others how to unlock the payphones. Until then he had been doing this scam entirely on his own.

I wonder where he is now.

The case was featured on America’s Most Wanted, which is probably where I heard about it. But the arrest had no connection to that television program.

I was trying to ascertain when, precisely, payphones came to be associated with crime and specifically with drug dealers. I have always found it to be kind of an odd corollary, one which has some grain of truth to it but which is passed off as a universal truth with minimal evidence. I don’t think it was always such an automatic association but I’ll see what mining through newspapers.com turns up. It seems to have come into circulation during the 1980s, which would make for an interesting coincidence if it could be traced to the deregulation of the industry and the increased disdain with which the payphone business was regarded. My theory is that this overarching disdain of “crappy payphones” contributed to exaggerated claims of drug dealing and other crimes.

Or maybe it aligns with another theory I have that the last gasp for the payphone industry was during the pager era, when Important People who were VALUED carried pagers and disappeared into phone booths to call the numbers that appeared on their devices. The thinking in the early 1990s was that converting payphones to rotary dial would foil the work of the drug dealer, who used the touch tone buttons of public phones to connect with whoever they needed to reach.

I don’t know and suddenly it all feels impossible. The sprint through all that text earlier now has me feeling overextended and drowning, as I often feel. To do everything I have started over the last several years would take the work of a dozen people, if not more. I want to make something substantive of those old magazines I spent so many hours scanning, but what? T-Shirts? Hah.

Drowning. That’s a word to add to my litany of sadness that I intend to record at the chapel, based on my upper west side posting from a couple of weeks ago.