January 17, 1996 9:25 PM

Anyway... The sad sad news about Payphone America is that it's getting harder and harder to find phones that can accept incoming calls. Trying one of the numbers outisde the Ed Sullivan theater on Broadway you learn that "the number you have dialed: 2-4-6-9-2-4-5 in area code 2-1-2 is not in service for incoming calls." I remember hearing on the radio once that all payphones in the Times Square area had been made incapable of handling credit-card calls, because the phone company determined that some astronomical percentage, like 85% of all credit-card-based telephone fraud occurred in the Times Square area of Manhattan. I just let one of the Shea Stadium numbers ring into oblivion. Now it's the Eugene O'Neill theater, just ringringringring why don't you?? I've got nothing else to do! Ring, dammit! But a lot of times you get that pesky bee-bee-beeeeeep thing. I wonder when that awful noise was introduced, because I remember that it was new at some time, and that it replaced some older notification that they had. Never fear, I'm not about to embed that sound or any telephone-related sound into these words. Once I can get some kind of audio-out thing working from here I wanna start practicing for my recital over the internet. my piano is painfully out of tune, and the sound quality would be intolerable, but it would be kind of fun, and you never know who you might reach. some of the best radio broadcasts i ever heard came in so poorly that i had to strain myself just to understand what was happening. the first time i ever heard Philip Glass' solo piano album was late late at night in Oberlin, listening to WOBC on my clock radio. that Philip Glass stuff has a lot of open air in it, a lot of silence and such through which all kinds of static and hissing and whizzing noises can torpedo about, and that's exactly how it was. for a moment i actually thought this was intentional, and if it was then this was Glass' most stunning accomplishment yet. the desolation of all those hopeless radio signals trapped in a flimsy silo of communication and controlled understanding, buzzing up against itself and bouncing back off. but it was just a bad signal, and in fact the more i listened to those recordings (in which Glass himself plays the piano) the more i wished he could have hit all the notes and not made it sound like such a sermon. but that was a radio broadcast i can never forget. another time, i picked up a talkshow from Detroit. Michigan seemed like an incredible distance from Oberlin. i heard this 70-something year old woman call in and explain that she had been having chestpains and nausea and vomiting for weeks, WEEKS, and she called the radio station to ask the nice talkshow host what she should do. the announcer said she should call a doctor immediately, and that is also what the next several callers implored her to do, but i don't know if word ever came back to the radio show saying whether she had done it or had not done it, or if she was even for real. there were a lot of radio shows in Tampa that i remember very well. there was this one DJ whose last name was Watts, and he did this thing every night called WattsLine, where he would answer phones continuously for 3 minutes and let each caller speak or scream or sing or do whatever they felt like doing until he felt like cutting them off. it was not done live, and i don't think i ever got through the busy signals to say anything myself, but i used to listen to the calls from people who just called to belch, to shout their own name, to say hi to someone, to play 3 seconds of some record - I would just laugh and laugh, and when it finished I always wished that some girl had called the station and said "I just wanted to say hi to Mark Thomas, and that I think he's really cute." as far as I know, that never happened, but one night i listened to the WattsLine with this feeling for some reason that this would be the night that someone called and said something directed at me. I became paralyzed with nervous energy when a woman called and said "This is a message for Marvin Thompson..." i mean i swear i thought she'd said my name, and that she was some pretty 8th grade girl from school who called the radio station on a dare from her friends who had gotten tired of hearing her sit around slumber parties and talk about what a crush she had on me. but that's not who was calling. I don't know who called that night, or who Marvin Thompson was, but i hope i didn't take away any of his excitement at hearing his name on the radio by drawing in all the nervous energy from the entire state of Florida and then expiring back into my usual disappointment and boredom. Now that I think of it, i remember i did get through to the WattsLine once. and i did just that, i called to say hi to this girl i had a crush on. this was in the 9th grade, and i have no idea if she ever learned of my deed, or if anyone on the radio was able to decipher her name through my mumbling voice.