So the last couple of days I’ve been wading through a mass of about 100 audio files I made 6 years ago. Unlike the piano recordings from last week, which I had completely forgotten about, I actually remembered this set of recordings. Almost all of them were made from payphones, with two or three coming from the cell phone. I remembered listening back to them 6 years ago and thinking wow, these really suck. I remembered them as being depressing and monotonous. On second pass, and with the perspective of years, I find that while I was not entirely off base in my assessment there is also a decent amount of quality stuff hiding in there. I just have to prune out the drek.
In the first batch I think I am attempting to channel the Apology Line, specifically the voices of the paranoid schizophrenics who called in during the early 1980s. I make for a decent enough schizo, I think. In the spirit of things I made a few calls yesterday and today, circling back on this little episode of talking to myself. I sound like I am talking to somebody but I think that somebody is me. In one call I know I am talking to my dad from the payphone that used to be at 31st Street and 34th Avenue. All these calls went to the Google Voice account, to which I have since assigned my glamorous (212) area code number.
I have a lot of phone numbers memorized all of a sudden. That 212 number; the 646 number that is the secondary Google Voice line; the conference call number, which is actually two full phone numbers and an access code; my own cell number; and others, I think, that escape my hurting mind.
I procured a set of RF (Radio Frequency) headphones. Those things are enough to make me go nuclear. They are wireless, of course, and their signal is transmitted over radio frequencies. But I don’t think I can use them here. There is just too much goddam static and interference. Most irritating of all is a relentless CLICK-CLICK noise the origin of which I cannot determine. I don’t think it is anything in my place.
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The bulge-outlining Shorts That Actually Fit are starting to feel closer to normal. I still take them off at home but I’m not as uncomfortable in them as I had been. So I will buy more. MORE SHORTS. They were cheap at DII, my new favorite place since they renovated. It’s no Lanzee but it’ll do.
At the LIBARRY. Ruminating on a strange exchange with a woman I’ve known solely online for over 20 years. I mentioned the unsettling encounters I had through one of those dating sites, specifically the woman who said her ex-husband beat the shit out of her. The response was of bafflement, but nothing to do with the woman I described. The response was: “WHY ARE YOU ON DATING SITES?”
I have not heard follow-up to my reply but it sounds like she might harbor a 1990s-era stigma associated with such services. I don’t take them too seriously, mind you, and I don’t think I wasted too much time with them. But it’s not like those things are reserved for losers and the socially inept. I feel like almost everyone I know has given them a try, just for the hell of it, and things like Tinder and their ilk are positively mainstream.
As I think I wrote here earlier I was at a bar where I noticed that three or four dudes were sitting there at their phones, swiping left and swiping right. On top of that I noticed a number of familiar faces in my passages through these dating sites. These are people I know, know of, or used to know. These sites might be a waste of time but so is dating in general.
Anyway, I am off all those sites and apps now, though I keep HAPPN around just because I find it interesting. That’s the one that shows you who you’ve crossed paths with. What’s interesting are the demographics revealed. When I’m in AsLIC the faces are everything from white millennial actors to middle-aged Asian punk rockers to 60+ year old Brazilians who appear to speak no English. In midtown the faces are mostly white and people seem to be professionals with office jobs. On the subway it’s just everybody. When I was in Flushing last time HAPPN turned up, not surprisingly, 100% Asians.
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I just sent this email to the Payphone Clearinghouse. See if they just ignore me:
Hi guys. I own a website called The Payphone Project. It’s meant to be a fun yet informative site about the enduring role of public telephones in our society. In the past it had been featured by the APCC in its “Perspectives” magazine, and coverage of the site has reached far and wide. Most recently I was featured on “CBS Sunday Morning”.
What I am writing to ask is if you folks are able to share some facts and figures about the payphone population today. I know you send the FCC state-level stats with independent and LEC ownership numbers, but I was hoping there might also exist more granular stats at the city level, or even down to something so fine as precise locations and companies that own every phone installation. These kind of stats are on the minds of a lot of people who visit my website, so there really is a genuine interest out there. I am also working on a rough draft of a narrative history of payphones in the U.S., so this sort of data would be golden for such a story.
I appreciate your time and consideration.
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But my voice… it’s a strange thing to listen to. Nobody like the sound of their own voice… or do they? I don’t know. I’m not thinking of it as my real voice but as a stage thing, an actor. And these recordings could serve as an audition of sorts for a radio show somewhere.
I had a genuinely troubling encounter with my voice a few weeks ago. An old audio file turned up. It was a friend and I calling payphones around the country. This must have been 10 years ago. In the recording my friend’s voice sounds fine. I mean, it sounds normal. Mine, on the other hand, sounds prepubescent. I sounded so unlike myself I could not make sense of how that was the case. I sounded like I had been inhaling helium. I was not high. I do not smoke pot much but in the company of this particular individual I might have. But I don’t think I did and even if I had I don’t associate pot with making me sound like a little girl.
Coincidentally I happen to have unearthed some audio I digitized for my sister many years ago. It was from a cassette tape of her and me playing Disk Jockey, in which I was the radio show host and she played several listeners who called into the show. It is from before my voice changed, and is probably the only such recording I still have from before puberty.
That’s an OK and even fun thing to hear, at least for a few seconds. But the more recent sound of my squealing voice from adulthood is enough to make me nervous that that might happen again in some undesirable circumstance.
It reminds me, too, of the time I got the field recorder and, just to see if it worked, I recorded myself reciting the alphabet. I played it back and was horrified to hear my voice was very slow and draggy. I sounded ridiculously drunk, and like I could barely speak at all. I thought to myself, Did I have a stroke? Do I just think my voice sounds normal? Does it only sound normal inside my head? Does it really sound like this?
At the time I had just had a brain MRI and was seeing a neurologist for possible evidence of multiple sclerosis and other brain matters.
I was amused but more relieved to find that I had somehow activated a feature on the field recorder that slowed down playback. It’s meant to be used by people who transcribe spoken word recordings. It’s not meant to be used by people like me, who think their brain will one day burst into flame.
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I finally watched the CBS piece, and I wrote a too-long and possibly too-self-congratulatory story about it and that whole experience. Someone posted a link to the video on Twitter the other night and I just said OK, might as well watch this once and for all.
It really is quite good. Well-produced, well-researched (thanks to me, haha), and altogether enjoyable. I think I would have gotten more air time if I had lied, or said the predictable things. My thinking about the subject matter has changed over the years. I’m not much for nostalgia or sentimentality, and that’s not just with regard to this subject matter but all things. Nostalgia is a form of bitterness which, taken to its extreme, implies that only the past is golden, and everything we have now is shit.
I don’t think I will ever forget how goddam nervous I was in the days before that piece aired. I’ve never felt anything like that. It was a burning. I remember sitting on the sidewalk, wino-style, for 20 minutes. Nearby construction workers noticed, but paid no mind. Wandering through Queensbridge like that is one of the more reckless things I’ve ever done, although I have heard that the stray bullets and open air drug dealing days at those projects are a thing of the past.
Then came showtime. Even without seeing it I could tell from reviews that it was good. Redemption? Something like that.
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I need food. Everybody does.
