Sleep was a strange beast last night. It might have gone better than usual because I took 2 Ativans, or it might have just been a general arc of exhaustion and malnutrition over the past several days. Either way last night felt like I was wide awake the whole time, monitoring myself for actual moments of sleep, but of course not being conscious when said moments occurred. At some point I said to myself, you can’t possibly have not gotten any sleep these past 6 hours. My BP had been something impossible, like 210/101, though those numbers have to have been inflated by circumstances. I guess I am closer to normal now, I did not check, but I do not feel my chest about to implode or my eyeballs taking needles into them. As always I waited too long to take the pills. I get into the most trouble with this stuff when I fail to eat, and the anxiety stoked by knowing that the CBS spot was going to air and that I had no idea what I was going to be heard saying in front of 6,000,000 people seems to have had the effect of making all food taste like dirt.

I made it over to the Rose Main Reading Room, where I am sitting in the North Hall. I think this is the one where no tourists or cameras are allowed. I tried to get seat #181 but it was not available. So I am at seat #239. I passed by the phone booths where we did the CBS filming. They are still there, looking good. Someone added a graffiti sticker to one of them but otherwise they look the same as ever.

I expected the welcome of a hero’s return, with the security guards and everyone stopping to point and scream, squeal with delight, and give me a foot-stomping, Schwarzman-shaking standing ovation. I am sure all those orgiastic festivities and bacchanaliæ happened internally, and that folks were just being respectful in restraining their enthusiasm and love for phone booths and, by extension, me.

Oh yeah.

There was a lot of stuff I said at the interview that did not make it. I thought it would be news to that audience that the cell phone is not the only villain in the payphone’s near-demise. The Lifeline program, which gives free phones to the poor, essentially kidnapped the payphone’s last reliable customer base. I also made an extended point of informing all out there that payphones still exist, with thousands of them nationwide run by hundreds of companies of varying profile. Some are basically one-person operations where a few dozen phones are maintained as a hobby. Others are operated by larger telecom concerns, with the payphones left out there essentially as a public service.

I made what I guess was a rather contrary point about how I basically cannot stand phone booths anymore. I don’t think it was ever really any different. I have no false nostalgia for them, and I suspect that most sentimental retrospective looks at them comes from that quality of falseness. Stepping into one of those wood booths downstairs here at the NYPL feels like I am stepping into a coffin. At the interview I said “Maybe they should bury me in one of these,” to which Mo Rocca reacted as if we had just struck comedy gold. He said something like “Mark Thomas I hope you live a long life, but when you die I hope they bury you in a phone booth.” We also did a funny bit about the codewords we used to collect call our mothers, but without them having to actually accept the charges. So if a collect call from “Lucifer” came then my mom would know it was time to come get me at school, or wherever. I guess my claim that the phone booth scene near the end of “Dr. Strangelove” is the greatest phone booth scene in all moviedom was not worth it, either. Come to think of it I’m surprised they used anything of mine.

Anyway, I’m over it, I think. Mostly writing these notes here so I can edit and reuse over at the Payphone site, where traffic seems to have slowed back to something almost normal. I don’t care about monster blasts of traffic like this. It’s not an enduring crowd of people that passes through.

…

Aha, so I contacted the angry landlord today, feeling like a child about to get his head bit off by a tiger. Tiles fell off the bathtub wall and it looks like the whole wall could come down. And the sink is clogged so hard you’d think there was a corpse down there. He called back and repeated what he said on the phone a few weeks ago, that the only way to fix my  bathroom is for me to get out. But this time he had more palatable suggestion: Move me into 4B, right across the hall, which is recently vacant and being renovated. I should probably do this, though moving even just 20 feet can be a big deal, right? I have moving gear, like those Moving Men things or whatever they are called. I’ve used those in the past to move full bookshelves around the apartment. Don’t know why I couldn’t do the same in getting them across the hall, save for the little bumps in the doorways. I also have a pretty boss hand truck.

I’ve never cared much for my view onto 29th Street. Just kind of nothing there, except the tall building across the street sometimes has interesting vignettes appear in its windows. The new view would, I assume, be toward Crescent Street and Manhattan.

Fanning my questions out to some friends to see what they think. Some would be skeptical that this is just a ruse to allow the owner to do a switcheroo at the end of the lease but I don’t think the guy is that scheming. Looking for free legal advice, since I have no money.

…

The way I look at it, and I say this knowing the angry landlord a little bit, it need not be complicated. He could just change the apartment number on the lease and be done with it. It’s not like he is encumbered in such a move by stabilization rules. He is the owner of the place and can do whatever the hell he wants with this sort of thing, charge whatever rent he wants regardless of market rates. And I have heard him say in other contexts that he does not care about leases, that they are “for you” the renters and not something he would have trouble letting you out of. People move out mid-lease all the time and they get their deposit back. He is not the sort to chase after them demanding full payment of the balance of the lease.

I moved from 1466 (I think) at the Parc Lincoln to a smaller room, 317. But that was 1991, when all I owned was the content of a couple of bags, and I moved for cheaper rent. If this works out I’ll get a nominally new “renovated” place for what I’m paying now, which I suspect has long been a little too high. I put “renovated” in quotes because the work this landlord does is not always of the highest quality. But whatever, it’s better than I could do. I bet the bedroom on that side of the building is even darker in the AM hours, facing to the west as it does.

…

Aaaaanyway… still in midtown, now at the 181, or near it. Had higher hopes in mind for today’s writing exercises but these brief bits of reality intruded.

Spirited e-mails and messages seem to say that troubles with this arrangement are probably a long shot. I should add a clause to the lease saying that the owner and I agreed to a unit change and say that all rights pursuant to the original lease remain in effect. I think the risk here, however remote, was that 4B is not rent stabilized. But I don’t think anything in the building has crossed the threshold into market rates. But then when is the last time I looked for an apartment in my own building? I do not want to live in this building forever, but if this works out then this change of place, however minor, is starting to sound like fun. I think I can see the Hour Children shop from there. And I should get the vaulted entryway I was denied in 2B, though I did not know I was denied it until years later.

Sitting at a midtown Starbucks, maybe my favorite Starbucks, with its cushy seats that are probably filthy with the butt of Manhattan. Not sitting in one of those, though. The filthy butts are. My butt is filthless.