The thickening doom. I woke up with that phrase in mind. Imagining someone trapped, either in a physical space or in their own life, slowly becoming aware of their dilemma. Being buried alive with nothing but a cigarette lighter to help burn what’s left of breathable air. The phrase is pretentious, but intentionally so. The person, requite with self-loathing, sits naked on the floor of a tiny bathroom. Maybe he masturbated, or maybe he does not remember. Maybe his life was lived already, all objects accounted for by a magical inventory-taker wearing a baseball cap with the name of a baseball team mis-spelled. He got the hat at a discount when a sporting goods store went out of business and dumped its inventory at a thrift shop. The owner of the baseball caps lectured the employees at the store on how the accidental spelling of “YAKNEES” happened. “It had been typed in all upper case, so spell check missed it. We made fun of the kid who did this for years. His nickname was ‘Yak Knees’ but that was only the beginning of our yak fetish. I don’t think there was ever a sporting good store where the employees knew so much about the anatomy of the yak. We didn’t let it go just with the knees, we all gave each other nicknames. I was the Yak Horns, Jim was the Yak Face, Jayme was the Yak Nose. No one wanted to be the yak’s butt so we used it in meetings to refer to someone who was being annoying. You’d think we were all 10 years old with this stuff but we were all growed up and stuff.”
…
Yakkity yak.
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Listening to more music from last night’s new-to-me discovery: Lera Auerbach. Dagnabbit she is good.
Also feeling a rising up of anxiety again. The last 2 days have been pretty bad on that count. I wandered around the upper west side for a couple of hours, this for the second time in a month. I have countless memories from that area, none of them especially happy nor sad, just memories. The first night I spent in New York was at the Hotel Empire, at Lincoln Center. My mother and I stayed for 2 nights (I think, maybe 3) in what seemed like a noisy and somewhat neglected room that was close enough to the street that I could see into windows of passing taxi cabs. Most memorable from that stay was my discovery of a hand-written note from one Ruth to one Peter. It was written on the back of the room service menu. It said something like:
DEAR PETER; I HOPE YOUR SHIT IS COMING OUT REAL GOOD. WHEN YOU COME OUT (AND ON MY FACE) I WILL CLIMAX TO THE MAX. YOUR CUNT, RUTH.
It seemed to have been a note from a hooker to her john. It was classy as hell. I don’t know how I lost that amazing memento but it passed from my possession decades ago. Mother was not pleased with my find but I thought it was a real world window into the gritty, filthy, dirty world of New York. It might have fueled my inspiration to move here, not that I ever needed much encouragement to do that.
We saw CATS, which I remember being an incredible spectacle. I may have been pretty impressionable back then, but however great it might have been it had to have been better than when I saw it again something like 16 years later. When I first landed in NYC I remember thinking “Now I can see CATS any time I want.” Hah, I never went to the show until I heard it was finally closing. By then the cast seemed to be walking through the show like listless puppets.
After the show we made the frugal but generally unwise decision to walk back to the hotel, a distance of about 15 blocks. This was 1985 or 1986, when walking up Broadway at 10pm was not necessarily a good idea. A person we assume was a mugger stumbled toward us, lurching in our direction from a dark recess in the side of a building. Mother made the bold move of grabbing my arm and walking out into the middle of the street, right on Broadway. A bus swerved some to avoid hitting us. It was not a drastic maneuver by the driver of that bus but it was enough to signal that we had definitely ambled into a potentially dangerous spot. I turned and saw that the errant mugger had stumbled backward. Then he turned around, returning to that dark recess in the side of a building.
We had probably just avoided being mugged, but I guess we will never know. I don’t remember if we got a cab after that or kept walking. I know when I got to the other side of Broadway a dude with a classic New York accent asked if I could make change for a five dollar bill. I checked my pockets and, lying, said I did not have cash of suitable denominations. I don’t know if I was outright lying as much as just playing a bit of a ‘fraidy cat. I think I imagined he was another mugger, waiting for me to produce a wad of cash from my pocket so he could see how much I had on me before deciding if I was worth his time. For some reason my mother stepped aside, and even turned away as this transaction was discussed. I was on my own with this guy, but I got out of the encounter unscathed.
We always said that we had had a good time in New York. Mother was proud of that. I think she was more nervous about coming here than she let on. Thinking of those days now it’s like something from a separate life. I had no real business auditioning for Juilliard at that age, but that’s why we were there. I played poorly, and felt intimidated by whoever it was that interviewed me. He kept dwelling on the fact that I was only 18, suggesting (correctly, I think) that Juilliard is a professional school, and that I should come back after 4 years in a mellower environment. I almost called the other conservatories “starter” schools, but I don’t know if that’s appropriate. Hah.
I ultimately got accepted at Oberlin, Eastman, and Peabody. But not Juilliard. I am certain I could have gotten in as a post-graduate but I had no desire. The only time I even remotely considered going back to finishing school was after I got whacked from corporate, in 2002. But that notion lasted about 10 seconds.
Other kids at school seemed to genuinely envy my trip to New York. I wrote a poem for the school newspaper. I think it was called “On Driving Through Queens, New York.” I should find that. That might have been the poem where I discretely hid the words “FUCK YOU ALL TO HELL” down the first letter of each line. I did that because I was ticked that I was not voted Most Talented, or something stupid. I was, at the time, proud to have pulled off that little stunt. I heard later that a couple of kids at another school got expelled or somehow disciplined for doing something very similar.
4 or 5 years later, in the summer of 1990, my mother and I would again drive through New York, though my above mentioned poem was in reference to a cab ride. Maybe the title should have been Riding instead of Driving. Bah.
The subsequent drive went up I-95, to Connecticut. It was a horrible trip. I was going to face charges of interstate telephone fraud. The case never quite went to court but it was scary for a while. It’s something I don’t really think much about anymore, since it is over and will never come back to haunt me. But it was heavy on my mind for a long time.
I did not like or even especially respect my attorney. As we approached the courthouse he started talking about my balls. He said that the DA who was going to interview me might seem like a nice guy but beneath that affable facade was someone who wanted badly to get me “by the balls”. He punctuated this comment, which he must have uttered a dozen times, with a hand gesture symbolizing the crushing of my balls with his bare hand. This, mind you, in the presence of my mother.
The attorney also never properly interviewed me before the DA questioned me, leaving open possibilities that I might actually have a criminal past he knew nothing about. I did not but it was revealed in the questioning that I once smoked pot in college. The attorney should have known this but, in mocking self-defense, he threw up his arms and said “Alright, I’m outta here. Lock him up.”
The thing was, I was on such thin ice with this line of questioning that something as minor as smoking pot could have thrown into question the image put forward by the attorney that I was as good a kid as you’ll ever find who just happened to wander into something that he shouldn’t have. I had no malice in any of my actions, and the fact that I was tangentially involved with a phone system on the very same night that it happened to get hacked by the real bad guys was just as big a stroke of bad luck as anyone like me could have encountered.
But I should never have been there in the first place, and I make no excuses for that. The trouble I did get into has certainly kept me far, far from the world of phreaking and phone phuckery. In the end I think all involved felt that justice had been served, and that we were not the bad guys they were really looking for. But man, those FBI and Secret Service dudes were hungry. I got lucky in so many ways with how that all turned out.
I could spill thousands more words on all this but, well, who even cares? I mean there’s a story to be told, I think, about why we all did this. It was not just me. There were others involved. We inhabited that weird world for the simple reason that we wanted to maintain contact, and use the cost-free means we discovered to do that. It was all about being friends and just talking, and talk we did. Some memorable exchanges occurred up and down those toll-free wires.
Now I am remembering some of that DA’s questioning, and my answers. I made it clear, and he seemed somewhat impressed, that we made every effort to do what we did late at night, when the possibility of disrupting an actual corporate workday was minimal. We never interfered with actual voicemail messages that came in. Perhaps most important of all, none of used computers to access these systems. Only one of us even owned a computer back then and he got off the hook for that because the computer had no modem. So there really was no way we could have done the malicious things that the other guys did. Worst we could have done was mess around with the voicemail messages, and we didn’t even do that.
Lest it appear that we got off scot-free we did not. Thousands of dollars in fines for all of us, steep legal fees, a whole lot of time spent talking to lawyers and FBI, and I don’t know about the others but I for one had to report to a probation officer for the first year or so I lived in New York. Officially I think probation was supposed to be 5 years but after a while the officer just didn’t care. I don’t remember exactly how it ended but he basically just said I did not need to keep checking in with him. His first words when he met me were something like “I guess you never would have thought you’d get in trouble for this.” He seemed to recognize how much industry had gone into pursuing us over something that had so little merit.
Some years later I was at a corporate job with a voicemail system. It all seemed to have come full circle. I am surprised I never got into any trouble with access to that, now that I think of it.
My mother never complained about this whole affair. I think I know why. She was one of the participants. It never came up in the discussions among attorneys and prosecutors, as far as I know, but she and I left messages for each other on a voicemail system here or there. The system over which the charges stemmed was not among them, so I guess it did not matter. But she could have seen the potential consequences of what we were doing as clearly if not more clearly than anybody.
But seriously (I guess I can say this now that she is gone and none of this matters anymore) she was remarkably naïve about the potential consequences. She talked about the FBI and Secret Service agents like they were buffoons. It might have been her way of trying to stop me from worrying about it all but if so then it came across quite differently to me. I remember when I read the letter from the DA in Connecticut. “This is to inform you that we intend to prosecute this matter.” I pounded my fist on the kitchen counter. Mother read the letter differently, sensing some layer of conciliatory opening for resolution that did not involve prison time. Maybe she was right, and I was wrong. I should see if that letter still exists. But I think I had reason to be concerned.
The other very heavy moment for me was when the FBI agent showed up at my door. He handed me my Miranda Rights. They were printed on a small card. I froze. He saw my reaction and, for some reason, seemed surprised. He pointed to his case file and said “You see this number?” I think it was a 3, handwritten on the first page of the file. Whatever it was it was a single digit. He explained that this number indicated how many cases of this type his office had investigated. He was trying to reassure me, which seemed like a strange role an FBI investigator. His point was that when cases are of a new focus or when they involve new technologies or stuff that has never been pursued before then there would seem to be a better chance than usual that the case will go nowhere. Well, he was wrong about that.
The first time he came I was not at home. I lived on Main Street in Oberlin, above the Army Navy Store. The FBI guy went to the store and asked if anybody there knew “the Thomas kid” who lived upstairs. Someone I knew from the radio station overheard this and the subsequent discussion, which seemed to let on to all who were in earshot that the FBI wanted to talk to me. Because of this word of the investigation got around, and it got around quickly. That seems like bad manners on the part of the FBI guy but that’s of no relevance now.
My roommate at the time seemed utterly horrified to learn about this, and to hear of it from someone other than me. She confronted me as if I had murdered somebody. In her thin yet steely voice she asked “What was the FBI doing here today?” I don’t remember exactly how I explained it but I was never obscure about describing the situation, making it clear that I had done nothing malicious or evil. I don’t recall now if I answered to her satisfaction. She was not my roommate for very long.
