Innocents and Others (10 page)

“You want someplace simple and quiet, away from work and obligations. No pressure, no shopping centers or traffic jams. Somewhere you have time to relax, but also do something you love and are good at, like play your guitar and fish,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Sometimes doing something you love is the most restorative thing. TV seems to relax you, but it is the relaxation of being drugged. It deadens you, and you want something deeper and more satisfying.”

“It hypnotizes you. I don't even care what I watch. We watch—me and my wife—Johnny Carson and the news and before that whatever nine o'clock drama is on. They are all the same, really. I just hate those comedy shows the kids watch. I can hear the canned laughs in steady bursts, drives me nuts. God, I hate it. Like nothing is worse than hearing laughing when something isn't funny. And I wonder what it does to them, day after day, watching that garbage. All of us, hypnotized by lousy television. I tell you.” David in the doorway of the sad room. Watching his kids watch TV. Their faces impassive as staccatos of laughter erupt from the TV speaker.

Something would happen between them, a transaction. It didn't matter if the time-share was not a cabin by a lake but a condo by the beach. It would suffice with the right emphasis. You don't need to answer their answers so much as repeat the answers back to them. To be heard is a gift you can give them, and after, they will then do what you suggest. Don't let them defer to a later time. Use a personal story to humanize yourself and relate to them. (“My own time at Outer Banks Escape is spent walking by the water early in the morning. I hear waves instead of traffic. The rhythm of the waves has been shown to mimic the rhythm of the heart, did you know that?” Jelly said.

“I do think I heard that somewhere.”

“Yes. It soothes us the way we were soothed before we were born. But I also love to walk to the bay side and the docks, where people take out small boats and fish. Or fish from the dock.”)

Always get the credit card numbers. The advantage was all hers—she did it dozens of times a week, while the people she called were not sales experts at all. They were just predictably human. It made her vaguely sick. What she liked was the connection she felt with them—and that's what it was, a genuine connection between two strangers when they buy something. They trust you: it moves from transactional to faith. She liked that, and she knew that on the phone she was irresistible. She didn't even mind making things up (her own experience at Outer Banks Escape, for example, was limited to emotive elaboration of the photos on the brochure). Making things up was okay because it was all about feelings, real feelings and real longing. How they came about, fantasy or not, didn't matter to her. What she hated was that it was all for money. She hated that it all got reduced to numbers in the end, quantified. She had a quota, and she found this humiliating and stressful. Then one day she began to call strangers for fun, not money, from the call center. It felt a little rebellious, and it also felt good.

The first time she allowed herself a nonsales call was with Tim Estes. Tim was forty and lived in Mamaroneck, New York. Divorced father of three in the upper middle-income bracket. A handwritten notation on the card indicated that he had a gatekeeper—a housekeeper or girlfriend who kept deflecting calls. This was not promising.

In any case, she called and to her delight Estes himself answered the phone.

“Hello,” he said

“May I speak to Tim Estes?”

“This is Tim.” There was something sad in the tone of his voice
that made Jelly not want to sell him something. But what then was the purpose of her call?

“Hello, this is Nicole Lamphor.” Jelly hated the name “Amy,” and her phreak nickname, “Jelly,” was too weird and, well, private. She used “Nicole” for sales and now this, whatever
this
was.

“Do I know you?” he said. She paused and smiled into the phone. Jelly knew that he could feel her smile through the phone—it changed her breathing and then the sound of her voice.

She just said—quietly, slowly—the truth. “I don't think so, but it is the strangest thing. You sound very familiar to me. Where did you grow up?”

A pause. “In Albany,” he said. “Just outside Albany. In a boring suburb called Guilderland. But I guess all suburbs are boring, right? It's their point, really.”

“That's funny. I'm from an upstate suburb too,” she said, “but not that one. I grew up in a suburb of Syracuse called Solvay.” All true.

“And was it boring?” Tim said, a little tease in his voice.

“More awful than boring. It was built to make soda ash out of the local salt beds. I never understood what soda ash was, but growing up there everyone knew the mining had leaked toxic chemicals into the groundwater and the lake. We used to say the kids from Solvay never got lost because they glowed in the dark.”

He laughed. “Well, Guilderland's main feature was easy access to arterials. Nothing going on, but you could get the hell out of there in any direction. And most everyone does. Leave, that is.”

“Everyone also tries to leave Solvay because there are no good jobs anymore. Depressed economically and poisoned environmentally, instead of merely depressed like most of central New York.”

“Okay, you win, but the name's nice. Sol-vay.”

“It sounds French,” Jelly said. “Isn't it cruel to give cold, toxic cit
ies in New York exotic-sounding names? Like Rome, Syracuse, Troy, Solvay?”

“Cruel, yes. But Solvay also sounds like solvent, so apt enough, right?”

“I never thought of that. Oh, gross,” she said, laughing.

She heard Tim laugh. The sound of the laughter released them and made them laugh harder. They talked for twenty minutes more, and when she got off the phone, she promised to call him again soon. He never asked why she had called and she never told him. It was her first “pure” call experience. It was its own reason and there was no “why.”

Jelly loved it: a man giving in to her, falling deliciously in with her. The feeling buzzed through her the rest of the day. Like the sex scenes she used to daydream about, the talk on the phone made her feel a tiny bit radiant and high. The feeling continued when she got home to Oz, and she found she didn't resent his not talking to her as much. She couldn't talk to him about it anyway. The past few months a pattern had emerged between them. She wanted to hear someone's voice besides her own when she got home. Oz was not willing to say more than a short closed answer to her questions about his day, or about the world (so much to be discussed: Nixon, the women's strike, the war, the Beatles breaking up—although Oz didn't care for the Beatles, but still). She wouldn't mind if he shared an idea, or even a joke. So most nights after dinner she dialed into the open-sleeve phone line to listen to the unmoderated free talk. No sales, no money, just people telling stories, talking over each other, talking politics. She called in even though it irritated Oz. He would always leave the apartment for a couple of hours. She couldn't help it—she really needed it. But on the day she had talked to Tim, she didn't feel the need to patch into the open sleeve. But Oz went out anyway; it had become his evening habit.

Tim was the first one, and she moved on to others. There was a life expectancy, or a limit to these connections. Soon, very soon in some cases, he would try to see her in person. Or ask for a photograph. This took all the mystery out of it for Jelly, and she would say she would arrange a meeting or send a photo, and then never call again. She started over with someone new. Each time she did this, she became a little more agile at deflecting, a little better at postponing the inevitable escalation. They were at her mercy: she had done this over and over, while it was all new to them, just like the sales calls.

After a few months, Jelly found that almost half her time at the call center was devoted to nonsales calls. Her commissions went down, which she couldn't afford. But it was now a part of her, a part of how she saw herself. Stopping would be too hard. She cut back; she limited herself to one pure call a day.

She thought it would be good for them, for Oz and Jelly, because she no longer needed the conversation with the phone phreaks in the evenings. Her need for conversation sated, she could stop driving Oz from her house. She even told him she had lost interest in the open sleeve, but to her surprise, Oz still continued to leave the apartment most nights for several hours. Was he with someone else? He vaguely described meetings and a singing group he liked to attend, but he never invited her.

Soon Jelly began going to the movies when Oz went out. She hadn't told Oz, but her sight was steadily improving. She could see things more clearly on the giant screen. Sometimes she saw white spots or streaks that obscured the image. But she could see the image, if not the details, and she could hear everything. She was so grateful that she could see movies again. When she was growing up, she would spend all her baby-sitting money on movies, usually devoting all of a Saturday to watching one film after another. When she got sick, she thought
she had lost the movies forever. But now she went nearly every night. Sometimes she saw the same film two days in a row. This went on for weeks.

The only time Oz and Jelly spent together was in bed. The sex was still there if she was awake when he got home, but often she fell asleep, and they started to have sex less often. Her orgasms were constant for them when they did have sex, but that meant less than she would have guessed. All the parts between them were becoming less and less. She knew, although she didn't let herself really think about it, that things would end soon. She would try it out on herself over coffee, after she woke next to sleeping Oz and she had worked hard to not wake him. You don't wake him because it is considerate. No. You don't wake him because you don't want him. Don't want to do what you should, wake him with a touch and a kiss—but then she would shake her head and not think about it. Yes, it felt as though things would end soon, but it also felt as if they might go on like this forever.

Then one Saturday afternoon, right after the wall clock chimed three, Oz made Jelly sit on the couch next to the phone. Oz suggested that they both connect with the open sleeve: Jelly on one line, Oz on the other.

“There is a special phone happening in the next few minutes.” Jelly made the free call to information, and when the operator disconnected, Jelly stayed on the open, free line. She used her blue box to make the tones that got her connected to the open sleeve. Oz was already patched in and then there were others.

“Hey, Oz, I'm here,” said one voice. “Slap Dog in Memphis.”

“Me too, as promised. Motor Mouth in Detroit. What's up?”

“Thanks for coming,” Oz said. “This is a gathering, all. We are going on a phone phreak adventure. Get comfortable, as this will last
a while.” More people called in. Jelly soon figured out that without her being aware of it, Oz had connected to the open sleeve number every day for the past few weeks and told everyone to phone in at this time for a special happening.

At 3:30, Oz began to speak. She could hear the delight in his voice. Oz sounded happy, and she realized she hadn't heard him sound that way in a long time.

“Okay, let's begin. Welcome Ma Bell and local phone companies everywhere. You aren't onto us yet, but we will give you plenty of time. Everyone quiet!” Then Oz whistled some digits and soon they were all on the line with a man at the American Embassy in Egypt.

“Hi! This is DJ Oz calling from my radio show on WSYR in Syracuse, New York. Can we interview you about the work you do there? Just some basic questions.” He then asked him to hold on as he connected to another person. Some people at some places said yes, and then Oz asked them to stay on the line too. Then he called another embassy and did the same thing. He was gathering a crowd on the open sleeve, and he was blatantly courting trouble by involving government agencies. Some of the phreaks bailed when they realized what he was doing, but a lot stayed on for the prank's full elaboration.

“I am Professor Oz in Syracuse, New York. This is my talk show with embassies around the world. Please stay on the line.”

After he called a number of American embassies across the world, he then called foreign embassies in Washington. Even Jelly knew that government agencies—certainly embassies—were dangerous places to call using hijacked lines. Any calls to these places were monitored by security. No one knew how much could be traced or was traced, whether it was the phone company or the FBI, but surely this would be noticed. Jelly felt adrenaline raise a wave in her stom
ach. She could hear her heart pumping faster. She was part of it too, and it would not end well. She pulled the phone away from her face and took a breath. Then she slammed the receiver down on the cradle. Oz laughed.

“We're losing some folks, some phreaks, and some embassies. And here we are just about to hit the payoff, the punch line. Quiet, please!” Then Jelly heard Oz sharply chirp into the background hum. He held the phone receiver slightly away from his ear.

“White House switchboard,” Jelly heard a woman say. “With whom should I connect you?”

“This is Citizen Oz in Syracuse for President Nixon,” Oz said. “This is a live interview.”

“I am sorry, the president is not available at this time. I can take a message and give it to his office.”

“We want to know what is going on in Cambodia, can the president talk to us? Exactly what are we doing there?”

Apparently at this point people hung up or began speaking, because Jelly heard a lot of voices on the phone.

“Shhh!” Oz said in a loud stage whisper. “This is on the down low with See-No-Thing, Hear-Every-Thing Blind Oz. What about Kent State? What about the B-52 bombing runs? Can we ask the president about his secret war? His crypto-presidential activities? I mean the activities on the sub rosa, the ex officio, the whispered back channels.”