I just saw something in such a way as if I had never seen it before. This is going to sound weird but I just looked at my landlord’s face. He’s like a child. I’ve always thought that way about him but I never connected his behavior and the almost infantile things he says to the childlike complexion of his face. He has grown a beard in the last year or so. On account of that I did not recognize him maybe eight or nine months ago. Public records show him to be 76 or 77 years old. He looks better than I do. But then who doesn’t?
As I have no doubt said here and elsewhere my relationship with the landlord has been tangled over the years. I concede that some of the anxiety he has injected into my life springs from within me, with nothing to do with him. Others would be able to simply deflect some of the things he has said. I am not able to do that, not without planning. Angry people say angry things and I hear them. I don’t speak the language of anger. I speak its words but words are anger’s weakest component. I do not perform in the theater of anger.
My idea here is to just sit and talk today. I am dictating all of this, and cleaning things up with the keyboard. You can fill a lot of screens with a lot of text by simply speaking into the microphone. My goal is to restore my discipline. Although I wonder at times if that discipline I thought I used to have was more about escapism, and getting away from the sound of my own life. I am presently ignoring repeated requests from a TV station in Sacramento to talk about (what else?) oh nevermind I’m not even going to say what the subject would be.
I think it was Annie Dillard who said that the way we live our days is, of course, the way we live our lives. I used to think that the “of course” insertion was a bit pretentious. But now it makes perfect sense. A perfectly needful insertion by the author. I think of that quote sometimes when I go out on my directionless and pointless rambles. How did I spend my life? I spent it walking around. I spent my life as a flâneur.
So I’m cheating a little bit on .MOBI charter, but I don’t care. I am expecting to eventually combine most of what is here with my other site, putting them all under Flâneur.NYC. It’s too bad you can’t make URLs with the little special characters over the letters. Putin lets you do that in Russia. I remember hearing that citizens were really spooked by that for some reason, I think because certain words have vastly different meanings when you put something like an umlaut over the A. Authorities were baffled by the reaction.
I was just distracted by screaming sounds from outside. It happens to be an exceptionally noisy day on 29th Street. A lot of sirens, car horns, and amid all that cacophony a freakin’ fistfight. A couple of kids looked like they were about to engage in a full out fistfight, as maybe a half dozen other kids stood around cheering them on. A few punches were thrown but I did not see any contact made. That’s not something I see around here too often.
I saw a pretty ugly altercation outside the gas station on 31st St., which used to be a Getty station but now it is a Lukoil (speaking of Russia). An older guy, maybe in his 50s, was absolutely beating the snot out of a kid who looked like he was 16 or 17. The older guy had the kid in a headlock with and was pounding this kid’s face with his right fist. A couple of dozen people stood around, some of them cheering the older guy on while others begged him to stop. Apparently the kid had done something disrespectful and to some observers the kid was getting what he deserved.
In those days I was using the nearby payphone to call in stories and such, and I called to describe that incident. That was one call among hundreds that I made and will probably never use. I was just corresponding with somebody about this yesterday. My payphone podcast, which I occasionally revisit here at the .MOBI, was one of those things that just never really crystallized. I listened back to some of the calls and found most of it to be sodden and depressing. If it is any level of improvement over that verdict then I guess I simply found it uninspiring.
And of course any pursuit that depends on the reliability of public pay telephones is imperiled right from the get-go. There are so many little vagaries about payphones that most people probably don’t know about because they never use them. A lot of phones are plagued with a “feature” that dates from the 1980s where the call connects but for the first four or five seconds the person you called cannot hear anything. So they hang up. If you really need to talk to them then you are forced to dig up another quarter and make the call again, where I think the assumed behavior is that the person you are calling will be more sympathetic to the silence and let the call continue.
That is one of the ways COCOTs made their money. My favorite payphones were the ones that had Disney radio piped in. There was something almost operatic about it. Line interference was to blame for that. But the sound of the radio made it impossible for you to hold a conversation.
And then there was the matter of progressive deterioration of call quality the longer you talk. If your 3-minute call actually lasts three minutes you can expect the call quality to slowly deteriorate, forcing you to shovel in more quarters in the hope that call quality will improve. Not all phones are like this. Each one has its quirks.
Another time I remember punches being thrown on my street was back when the place that is now the Hour Children thrift shop was a nightclub. It had a few names but it was DNA for a long time. That place was crazy popular. Every Thursday Friday and Saturday you would see busloads of kids coming in from all over the country. A dude who lives upstairs told me he was in Miami and he heard commercials for the DNA nightclub on the radio down there. There are still a bunch of floodlights in front of the place, embedded into the sidewalk. I guess they don’t use those for the thrift shop anymore.
But that club used to draw a not very good crowd at times. Any club will have nights like that. One time I was woken up around 1 AM by the sounds of fists punching flesh. It was an ugly sound. I swear I heard the sound of ribs cracking. I looked outside and saw a couple of very well-dressed men drunkenly stumbling and punching at each other. One of them was the victor, I guess. He shoved the loser into the bushes which are behind a fence outside of this building. That guy managed to get up and walk away but he was lying face up in the dirt for quite a while.
There was another incident that I never got the back story on. I still have a picture of it somewhere around here. I don’t know who was involved or what happened but there was a massive bloodstain on the front door of this apartment building. There was a blood outline of somebody’s hand as they grasped the frame of the door. It was grim.
Off the top of my head I can think of five people who have died in this building since I’ve been here. The most memorable was A.’s father. He was in his 80s, and his death would not seem to have come as a huge surprise. But the sound of her voice was something I might never forget. She kept begging him to come back. “Don’t you leave me” and “You got no right to do this.”
And then there was Jack. That incident might be even more memorable. He had dropped dead of a heart attack and must have sat there on the floor for four or five days. The owner of the building had noticed that he had not paid his rent, which had never happened before. So after a few days the owner entered the apartment and the overwhelming stink of the dead body wafted up, taking over the building. I guess that’s the first and so far last time I’ve ever smelled that. The next day I told my girlfriend about it and she had said “Yeah, you know, I remember when I came into the building last night and all I could think was ‘Something stinks.’” But she did not say anything about it that night. We made love.
Jack was a nice guy. Nice people die, too, of course, just like the rest of us assholes. But in the wake of his death I thought he was treated a bit disrespectfully. The Super of this building helped clean out his apartment, making what I thought was the insensitive and tactless decision to leave all of Jack’s gay pornos out in a pile by the recycling. I can’t remember now if this happened before or after my father died. Probably before. The reason that matters is because as I was cleaning out my father’s apartment I found a stash of gay pornos. It was the first time I knew he had been gay. But I was careful to dispose of them in a way such that he would not be associated with them. I quickly learned what a good idea it was that I went out of my way to do that. When I dumped a bunch of his other stuff out on the curb all the scavengers came out. Everybody was picking through everything, but not my dad’s gay pornos.
But really I did not intend to go off about all the people who died. I started a correspondence with somebody in Oregon who was referred to me by a longtime friend. I could use a good correspondence.
I just had an epic Twitter conversation with somebody in Pennsylvania who considers himself a big time payphone freak. Talking to him about this stuff made me realize, not that I needed the reminder, that I know a lot more about this shit than I realize, and a lot more than I let on on my website. I am still getting fallout from the CBS spot, which I guess people are watching all throughout the week. This is not like the “Today” show where it aired once and that was pretty much the end of that. But “Today” was a long time ago, before networks took the Internet seriously. With the possible exception of a BBC spot I think “Today” was probably the biggest TV thing I ever did until now. Well maybe the “ABC Nightly News” piece, which my dad saw but I never did. I remember he called me after it aired and he said “Did I just see *you* on ABC News?” It was funny. He said he was falling asleep on the easy chair when he heard something on the TV about payphones. He opened his eyes and saw me, for just a half second. All this needless undeserved media attention. At least it is harmless pablum and nothing controversial.
