One of the more intriguing finds among my storage locker detritus is the ever-rising stack of phone records. I can remember who I called when the calls lasted more than a minute but I’m repeatedly puzzled by all the one-minute calls to random places in Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, etc. I don’t remember using a personal cell phone to do any kind of telephone randomness such as I might be inclined to do from payphones or other connections.
Here or there I see the pay-per-minute chat lines I used to call in the mid-1990s. Those were fun, some of them at least. Somewhere else in the coffers of accumulation I have cassette tapes I made of some of those calls, complete with the beeping sound made every 10 seconds to alert all parties that the call is being recorded. That was a telephone answering machine feature that I assume existed to comply with some FCC wiretapping regulation. Whatever its reason for being the beeping sound got me kicked off a chat line once. Someone butted in on my connection and yelled something like “DID YOU KNOW THAT IT IS A FELONY TO RECORD CALLS WITHOUT ALL PARTIES AGREEING?”
I was still relatively fresh from The Case when this happened, so the word “felony” resonated with me. I hung up the phone and don’t think I ever called one of those lines again.
My personal phone records are but a passing curio. I made, as one would expect, numerous lengthy calls to my mother, father, and sister. There are hours-long calls to a woman in California, another in Chicago, another in Texas… But as for the other call I am not going to look up the mysterious numbers or attempt to match them with anybody. The records are mostly over 10 years old and in most cases I would think the numbers no longer connect with whoever answered at them back then.
But the records I found today are another story. I found pages and pages of calls made to and from the Houston area, mostly one and two minutes in length, from a number that I did not recognize as having ever been mine. It never was my number… or was it? That’s the conundrum of identity theft.
Houston Calling
In 2004 my identity was hijacked by somebody in Houston who, armed with what I assumed was nothing more than my name, social security number, and date of birth, walked into a Sam’s Club and bought out the store after having their account approved on the spot. This person went on to buy boat loads of stuff and, using my name, procured a cell phone and calling plan from Sprint. If I ever figured out how all this happened it is lost on me now, and at 14 years later it’s not something worth revisiting in any depth. But the fact that they sent me these call records as if they were really mine revives my foggy recollection that I thought Sprint was at the crux of letting my identity get stolen.
It doesn’t matter now but in 2004, if online phone book resources were anything like they are now, I might have had a chance at figuring out who made all these calls. The number assigned to my stolen identity would be of no use but the dozens of numbers called almost certainly could have been.
By now the trail is probably too cold to follow up on but I got on that Internet thing anyway and punched in a couple of the numbers to which lengthy calls were made. One name, Michelle ____ comes up; as does another woman named Andrea ____.
With nothing to gain in doing so I think no reason exists to call these numbers and ask whoever answers if they remember calls from a particular phone number 14 years ago. But I ask myself now why I didn’t think of doing something like that when this happened. I could have reported it as follow up to the police officers who came to this apartment to interview me about the Houston affair. I remember how much I appreciated the police officers’ attitude about all this. They were genuinely engaged in my narrative and, as far as I could tell, downright impressed with how thoroughly I explained everything.
But when I suggested they might go after whoever did this they kind of laughed, not to be snide but just to admit there wasn’t shit they could do about something like this. If I had actually been robbed of money or assets then it would be different but this was a textbook case of a crime where nobody really gets hurt except the people whose monthly insurance premiums increase on account of this sort of thing. Furthermore as an interstate matter it would have been out of the NYPD’s jurisdiction anyway. I would have had to contact the FBI. None of that seemed worth the hassle, although I might have thought otherwise in retrospect. This stealing of my identity lurked in my credit reports and financial records for years to come, with all the credit bureaus claiming I once lived in Houston when I’ve never even been there, or that I defaulted on a JCPenney credit card when I never had one.
It reminded me of another incident involving phone records, and the evidence they leave behind when involved in crime. I was mugged at knifepoint outside this apartment. I forget when this was but it might have been 2002 or 2003. The kids were after my Treo phone, which was a hot new gadget at the time. They got the phone and got away with the crime, even though the NYPD showed up here and gave chase almost instantaneously after I called 911. They ended up stopping some cars at random, as best I could tell, but really there wasn’t anything they could do. I saw the kids run off toward 35th Avenue but from there it was anybody’s guess which way they went. There’s a long and fairly involved story about that little incident but to cut to the point I got the phone bill a few weeks later and, in the days before I canceled the line (the police suggested I wait a few days) they called a bunch of numbers, some of which I was able to identify as being in and around the Ravenswood houses. For that reason I’ve always referred to the mugging as Ravenswood.
I made the Ravenswood connection either through online resources — suggesting that phone lookups weren’t total crap back then, as I suggested earlier — or else those phone records contained more detailed information than the ones involving the Houston debacle. As with Houston I could have reported the numbers those kids called to the NYPD detective assigned to my case. My guess is that by then I just didn’t care anymore. The muggers, I came to believe, were respectful and professional in their deed. They only wanted the Treo and whatever cash I had. When they discovered they accidentally stole my drivers license they put it in a USPS mailbox, from which it was dispatched to my address. That was polite of them, and it relieved my lingering fear that they might see the exact street address of this place on the drivers license and target it for a break-in and burglary. That, of course, is a whole different level of crime to which street thugs might aspire but I wouldn’t think they would consider it worth the risk to revisit this location.
I also think the knife the one kid wielded was plastic, and that the appearance of a gun in the other kid’s pants probably just indicated he was happy to see me.
That fear of being burglarized, however, was at the core of my decision to rent the storage locker, where I found the Houston phone records and innumerable other bits of trivia from my so-called life. I thought it prudent to have some kind of second roof under which to put my precious valuables, not that I have any. So it all comes around: Houston, Ravenswood, the storage locker… I took a break from shredding documents and cremating my past but last night I resumed the pursuit, still turning up surprises all those boxes later.
