There was always a touch of seediness and sadness to pay phones, and transience. Drug dealers made calls from them, and otherwise respectable people planning assignations. ln the movies any character who used a pay phone was either in trouble or contemplating a crime. They came with their own special chewing gum jammed in the coin slot, scattered pamphlets from the Jehovah’s Witness and a single bottle of empty beer, still in the individual, street-legal paper bag. You used to hear people standing at pay phones and cursing them. The frustrated shouting confined by the glass walls or barrier. They were instruments of torture sometimes, requiring fistfuls of change in those pre-phone card days and an operator who was a real person stood between you and whomever you were trying to call. And when the call went wrong, as communication often does, the pay phone provided a focus for rage. A lot of undifferentiated humanity flowed through these places and in the muteness of each pay phone’s little space a lot of emotion. A plaque on every pay phone should describe how a woman broke up with her fiance’ here, or how a young ball player learned he did not make the team. There should be a row of plaques below the sweaty phones used almost only by men outside the maternity ward. Before pay phones became endangered I never thought of them as public spaces. They suggest the human average and belong to anybody who knows somebody who would accept a Collect Call. Now I see they belong to a former commonality our culture is no longer sure it needs.
As featured in Time Out New York, February 14, 2011
Nice. I used to use pay phones. Phone booths, too.