In December I cleared out a storage locker, reviving objects and detritus from as far back as Kindergarten. I threw out a healthy chunk of that stuff but for the most part I set aside what remains, which is still a lot of crap.
I don’t know how long I’ll let this stuff fester without manning up and throwing stuff away. Just now I discovered that at some point I thought I needed to make about 100 photocopies of my college diploma and transcript. I can get rid of those now, right?
Here is a Polaroid shot of me outside the Juilliard School in what I am pretty certain was early 1986, during my senior year of high school. I was wearing an Oxford University sweatshirt because for some reason that was a fashion in the 1980s, or at least I thought it was. I never visited Oxford. I got the sweatshirt at a mall in Tampa.
Outside the Juilliard School, 1986
I auditioned for 4 of the major conservatories: Juilliard, Eastman, Peabody, and Oberlin. I got into all those except for Juilliard. Even in the rejection-sensitive days of high school this never bothered me, and my mother and I both knew that coming to New York to audition for Juilliard was more about coming to New York than anything else. One of the interviewers at Juilliard droned on and on about how I was only 18, and that he considered that awfully young to be rattling Juilliard’s cage. He was right, at least with regard to my level of development.
I assume I played Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61; and the B-Flat Prelude and Fugue from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The expectation for these auditions was that you’d play one piece representative of the major eras in classical music: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th Century. So Bach was Baroque and Chopin was Romantic but I have no memory of what other two pieces I might have played, and I have zero memory of the audition itself.
The front of Juilliard no longer looks like it does in the above photo, since the compound has been renovated. This was technically not my first trip to New York but it might as well have been. The family came to New York to visit a friend of my mother’s in Forest Hills, but I was 4 or 5 at the time and have zero memory of being here. We were getting ready to drive cross-country to San Francisco in a Winnebago, then on to Laos.
4½ years after this picture was taken I moved to New York and got a job at Tower Records, right across the street from where the picture was taken. My mother and I must have gone into Tower on that visit in 1986 but I do not remember it. I clearly remember visiting Patelson’s, the sheet music store on 56th Street behind Carnegie Hall. That place is also gone now.
In these storage boxes I am hoping to find evidence of Ruth. Mother and I stayed at the Empire Hotel, which is still present at Lincoln Center. I picked up a room service menu and noticed that on the back was a hand-written note from someone named Ruth to someone named… I think it was Peter. It said, as best I can recall: “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.” There was a little more to the love-letter that I don’t remember now but it was signed, tastefully, “Your c*nt, Ruth.”
I showed it to my mother, thinking it was hilarious and magnificent, but she was reviled. I was 18 years old at the time and I don’t know now how fully I understood exactly what I was looking at. But I brought that room service menu home and showed it off to friends, like I had fresh street cred for having encountered and returned with real New York grit. I think that piece of paper is in one of these storage boxes but it might have been lost a long time ago.
Something else I hope to find in these boxes (or anywhere) is evidence of the phone number for the company at the center of “The Case”, that episode which landed me and a bunch of others in a lot of trouble but no jail time. Part of our shenanigans involved dialing, OCD-style, every toll-free number within a given range, such as 1-800-234-0000 to 1-800-234-9999. The range of 1000 numbers were printed up on what we called “thousand sheets” and we would dial the numbers and make notes on the sheets about what they led to. All that and a bunch of other stuff was seized by the FBI never to be seen again but the notes would have involved what kind of voicemail system was present, if there was anything else interesting about it that seemed like something we could exploit, etc.
I used those sheets but I had a thing for 7-letter words and phrases. I dialed 1-800-CBSNEWS and, magically, was connected to the CBS newsroom. I think the same went for ABC News. I probably called things like 1-800-DUMBASS and 1-800-FUCKYOU. One time I was with the other phreaks and we called 1-800-BITCHIN’ (minus the apostrophe, of course). A woman answered and one of us told her “You have a bitchin’ phone number!” She had good humor about it, asking what we were talking about. It was explained that the letters of her company’s phone number spelled “BITCHIN”, and she was properly impressed enough to put us on hold and verify this claim. She came back on the line, laughing, saying she hoped we have a good weekend.
I must have dialed hundreds of 7-letter words and phrases like that. To this day I cannot see a 7-letter word without imagining what it might connect to on the toll-free network.
The number that was central to “The Case” was 1-800-4GIBSON, or at least I think that was the number. I have not done exhaustive research but I have attempted to verify the number we called as a gauge of how clear my other memories are. I have found no evidence that this was the number but I am reasonably certain it was, and for good reason.
At the time I had a bit of a crush on the singer Debbie Gibson. In her honor I dialed 1-800-DGIBSON, connecting to the now-infamous CR Gibson greeting card company that would take me and the rest of us to court, incur financial penalties for damage we never inflicted, and generally just lurk over our collective future for years.
