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December 15, 2001
mark thomas Once in a while, telephone numbers from the past flood my mind. Last week it started with the phone number of a friend from high school. Sitting at work, suddenly I could not get that phone number out of my thoughts. From past experience I know that the only way to stop thinking about it, or to at least start thinking about another telephone number, is to pick up the phone and dial the mind-occupying telephone number. So that is what I did. I used to dial this particular number in Tampa, where the area code is 813. On this day I picked up the nearest telephone and dialed the old number, but from the 212 area code. I dial and the phone somewhere rings and rings. One of the first things I did after moving to New York in 1990, in fact it may have been the very first thing, was go to a payphone and dial my home telephone number and the phone numbers of all my friends from Tampa. To me, this was a way to meet people. A way to connect the past with the future. I called my old home phone number from Tampa in the 212 area code and intended to ask for myself. The number was invalid, as were the numbers of my friends, but I have continued to dial those numbers in the 212, 718, 917 and 646 area codes ever since reaching New York on October 20, 1990. I also make it a point to dial these numbers any time I visit a city in a different area code, and I have dialed those numbers from dozens of localities. Later during that 20th day of October, I found a copy of the Manhattan white pages in the phone booth at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. I spent 2 hours rifling through that book with its missing pages and unnamed stains and hand-written gibberish and peoples' names circled. I looked up the names of my friends from home. I looked up my name, and the names of people I knew in grade school, high school, college, and in the months since graduating from college. I looked up names of people I had known of but never talked to or acknowledged. I looked up names of famous people, composers and musicians, famous actors and cartoonists. So many of them were listed right there in the phone book, and they were famous famous famous. Most of my friends' names were listed. I called their many numbers and let the phones ring and ring, sometimes letting an answering machine pick up, allowing for me a glimpse into the lives of whoever in New York had the same names as the people I grew up with. Their lives in this town, I wagered, were different from the lives of the people I had known. Most obviously, their phone numbers were different. Jarringly different. Over the next year or so the connection I so desired between the people I knew and these who I did not know vaporized. I thought of Julia's Room, by Robert Hillyer: |
He went up the dark stairs and knocked at Julia's door;
It opened, and a blade of light cut the dim hall,
But the girl was a stranger, and when he spoke to her
She could not - or would not - understand at all.
She looked at him a moment - horrified, he thought -
Then slammed the door shut.Bewildered, he guessed that while he was away
Julia must have invited a friend he had never known;
Sometimes when she asked an old friend to stay
She moved to the attic room and gave up her own.
So he climbed to the second flight, but the floor was dark
As rain-drenched bark."Julia!" he called, but no light flashed on.
"Julia!" he called down the stair-well gloom.
... "Whoever you are, for God's sake be gone!"
The strange woman cried from Julia's own room.
Then he remembered it was fifty years ago,
And he melted like snow.
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I was listed in the phone book a couple dozen times over, with several
residences on the Upper West Side, 2 on the East Side, 3 in Harlem and
Washington Heights, and 4 in what I then only knew of as Manhattan below
14th Street.
I sent a few items via postal mail to myself at the many addresses I appeared to occupy. That very 20th day of October, 1990, I tore a page from the Manhattan white pages, the page with my name listed over and over, and I mailed that page to one of the addresses on that page. For weeks and weeks I needed ways to look busy while wandering the streets heading nowhere, and when that necessity struck I ducked into a phone booth and called that same individual's telephone. I did this persistently for weeks, but there was never an answer. I don't recall that telephone number now, nor do I remember his address. But his name was Mark Thomas, and I felt that we should get to know each other.
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