Hanging on the Telephone                                                              

Karen Lillis

They tell me payphones are inevitably on their way out, just like newspapers, bookstores, indigenous languages only a few aging people recall, and the dodo bird. I’ve loved payphones ever since I was young: when I was small, they signified the public realm, something communal that existed beyond the safety of my parents’ house.

In high school, we prank-called from payphones, or called each other from neighboring payphones, trying to get a collect call to go through. To ourselves, we were hilarious. In college, I once answered a ringing payphone on a downtown street, wondering what serendipity would send me. Jackpot, it was a friend of a friend, a handsome fellow I didn’t know well, but wanted to. Nothing came of that one, but later I conducted at least two romances from payphones (not counting the cross-country book tour where I kept calling my girlfriend in New York from payphones on long Greyhound layovers: El Paso, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Cleveland). One flirtation was a months-long, cross-town, nightly phone date with a goth-punker that started on my home phone, lasted for hours, and was always interrupted by my roommate’s 10:00pm phone call to his long-distance girlfriend (back when roommates shared landlines). Not wanting to sever my connection, I’d trade my apartment for a dodgy Brooklyn corner; carrying at least one quarter and a roll of nickels, I’d feed the phone for an hour—hand over one ear to block out the noisy homeless drunks—until I could leave and speak privately from my bedroom again. Another phonemance was with a fellow I’d met on his way out of town. We fell in love over payphones because I didn’t have enough income to have a home phone at that time. It took about two months to get him to move back to the city where we’d made each other’s acquaintance, and the best payphone from those weeks was the old wooden phone booth in my favorite neighborhood diner. Not only did I spend many summer hours with the folding glass door closed, mooning over the receiver, but sometimes when I passed the diner on my way to or from work, the owner would tell me that my guy had called looking for me. Unlike that drunk corner payphone, which didn’t take incoming calls, this was a full-service phone.

In Pittsburgh, I associate payphones with at least four things. One, calling my boyfriend to meet me halfway when I don’t want to make some lonely, sketchy walk at night; two, calling my shrink in New York when I can find a payphone with either the right amount of busy traffic or secluded privacy; and three, calling cabs, which is an upsetting business in this city. You call the cab company, they keep you on hold for 20 to 40 minutes, they give you a time when the cab should get to you, and then the cab shows up 40 minutes late for that appointment. There aren’t many places you can stand and expect to hail a cab in the Steel City, but the train station is usually an exception. One night, however, I came back from D.C. at 1:00am and was surprised to find a city full of falling snow, and not one cab waiting at the station. Soon thereafter I was on hold with two different cab companies on two different station payphones, one on each ear. To no avail. Eventually I hoofed it over to the Westin Hotel, where the doorman had a direct line to Yellow Cab. A driver showed up within five minutes, and I shared the ride with a woman who had walked all the way from the casino after her shift.

Four is “Rockford Files,” which I often watch at 10:00pm on the Retro channel. Every “Rockford” episode features at least five to eight payphone calls, Jim calling his dad or the Sergeant from somewhere out on a wild goose chase a few counties away, Angel calling for a handout, or the bad guys calling each other surreptitiously from payphones at bus stations, gas stations, motels, or greasy spoons. (The head bad guy often receives a call on a phone which the maitre d’ brings to his restaurant table.) Sometimes when I watch the “Rockford Files” and revel in all its payphones, I wonder if this is exactly what people detest about them. All that communing eventually means mixing with, you know, the wrong elements. Better to be safe than civic.

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Karen Lillis is a novelist and a freelance writer. She is currently writing a memoir, Bagging the Beats at Midnight, about working in a New York bookstore.