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5 January, 1996, 1:05:25 PM Have had a rotten week. Rotten 1996. Wednesday was a bad day. I missed a spot shaving, a big huge spot on my neck, and all my co-workers and people everywhere I went looked at it. Smirked at me. Some of them made conspicuous tickling gestures against their own neck. Bastards. Sons-of-bitches. Well, truthfully, I don't really care if people comment about things like this, but figure it's reasonably amusing to others to at least act as if i care. Hasn't been a swell week.
Newt Gingrich, god it was terrible, had this dream in which Newt Gingrich offered all Americans a New Years gift. The gift was that he would take all Americans into his office in groups of 4, and he would give each of us 1 free random telephone call. Newt himself would dial the 4 random numbers for the 4 people in the room. The person who answered my random call was a former boss from my previous job. She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, and gave me a lot of big, fat, huge breaks at my last place of employment. We talked for a while, she was extremely surprised to hear from me, and I was surprised as well that she was hearing from me. Something seemed to be going on at her house, something terrible against which she was finding it impossible to maintain faces. i always knew her as someone who tried harder than most to keep the dramas and turmoil of her private life at a discreet and separate place from her professional life. i can't recall what we talked about, but i knew from something she said that something bad was going on. but in the dream i felt exactly as i felt the first time i saw a Rogaine commercial. in that Rogaine commercial, there's this guy talking, and he just looks at you with a crackling glare and says something like "men, there's something we need to stop being afraid to talk about. let's talk about rogaine." then there are several seconds of silence, and the guy just keeps staring, and they never tell you what Rogaine is or what it does, it just seems like all men should KNOW. i first saw this commercial at a very late hour, like 2 or 3 in the morning, which to my mind made it all equivalent to women's douche commercials with their vague references to "moisture" and "wetness." for years i thought Rogaine was used for the treatment of some masculine problem so terrible and so dread ghastly that they couldn't even refer to it by some obscure latin name, as its filth would surface in any language. over time, i learned of some pretty fearsome conditions that men could encounter (polyorchidism, elephantitis of the testicles, priapism), and in the back of my mind i always wondered if Rogaine was supposed to cure these things. Anyway, there were 4 of us there in Newt Gingrich's office, and all at once we each found ourselves talking to someone. I know that one of the other people in the room happened to get Newt Gingrich himself as her random call, and I remember seeing Newt answer his phone and turn around, becoming very quiet as he spoke to this woman. the woman's upbeat fa�ade suddenly froze up, and she looked like the receiver of an obscene call. my attention to her, though, drifted as conversation with my former boss developed. I don't remember knowing who the other 2 of My Fellow Americans spoke with. There were guards and secret service all over the place, and lots of stupid reporters from all the networks standing around hoping for an opportunity to be a spokesperson for The Common Man. I think I know where this dream came from. Sometime around Christmas a radio station sponsored a promotion where anyone who stood in line at a certain place and time could use a certain public phone to call anyone in the world for 1 minute. The radio station paid for all the calls. I've seen this promotion done in several cities, so i'm sure it occurred in more places than Manhattan. Somehow I always imagined that this promotional event seemed like a real opportunity for people who never call anybody or who never called certain members of their family. I know that there was a time a few years ago when I saw this opportunity as an answer to all my excuses for why I hadn't called my mother or father or sister in so long. it's the cheapest logic. "i'll give you a call the next time i find a free phone." I never took any of these opportunities for a minute of free calls anywhere in the world. maybe i should have, but just between us, i'm the type of guy who shows up uninvited (but welcome) at your party and quietly makes several long-distance phonecalls to random numbers in places like the Canary Islands and the Island of St. Helena just for the hell of it, and then i leave your house, maybe scarfing a bottle of wine and a block of cheese on my way out the door. i did this at a party in chicago once. i grabbed a phonebook and looked up the country code and city code for Athens, Greece, and i dialed it and followed it with about a dozen numbers. i was only guessing that it would be a working number, and i hoped that i would hear someone say "hello" in Greek before barfing up a night's worth of White Russians, Doritos and bean dip. i don't know if anyone in Athens ever answered, but i know i made it to the bathroom in time. a lot of people think of long-distance calling as a cash-hose, so the kind of free-call promotion offered by the radio station might look like a rare opportunity to indulge in real luxury. but they could only talk for a minute, and in that minute all the circumstances of their relationship with the person they called would be thrust into the copper emptiness. Whenever I see these promotions happening I imagine people walking along 5th Avenue and then hearing a familiar radio voice announcing that this promotion is happening. they recognize what it is, then without any hesitation they remember a phone number from 17 years ago and they call it, and in one hysterical and confused moment there's no real conversation that can happen, only a lot of chatterboxing and seasonally adjusted happiness, mimicking the adolescent lustiness that makes kids brag about having had 18-hour phonecalls with friends and relatives. No, it's been kind of a shitty 1st week of the year. You wanna know another thing that happened? The Newt Gingrich dream, that was actually not the worst thing that could've happened. What happened was I was walking up 6th Avenue toward 52nd street, right across the street from Radio City Music Hall. Radio City is where they have that godawful "Christmas Spectacular" every single solitary year at Christmastime. And it's still playing there now, I think it goes until January 10th or so. And I was out there Wednesday night and everyone could hear an amplified Bob Barkeresque voice saying "Welcome to Rockefeller Center, home of Radio City Music Hall, and the Christmas Spectacular. There are still tickets left for Radio City's 1995 Christmas Spectacular..." and I turned around and saw that an office building across the street still had its christmas decorations out, and so did another building, and so did another, and I said to myself "God, isn't this over yet? Aren't they done? Does goddam christmas ever fucking end in this town? fucking oppressive having so much general goddam happiness forced over me." But I feel well right now. I feel splendid, in fact, and have had stretches during the day when I couldn't possibly type fast enough to keep up with myself. I don't really feel this good. No one ever feels good, no one's ever happy. i mean that's how it seems. ask someone how they're doing and they wince, but say "oh, i'm ok." if you miss their facial expression and all you hear is something positive, you probe a little deeper until you find something that's going badly for that person. people do this to me all the time. they ask how the job is going, then they ask how another thing is going, and another and another, and they don't stop until they get to something that's not going well, some part of my life i've neglected as of late (last week someone asked "and how's the piano these days?" and i said "oh, no recitals until April, haven't practiced in weeks"), then all their cheerful demeanor is answered by a grimace of disappointment and consolation, the perfunctory manner with which a therapist responds to your deepest revelations after your hour is up. It's just the backside of depression. The lows are positively pitiful, and the highs make richard simmons look like a Buddhist.
was thinking about all this telephone business i keep going off about. i mistyped (and then corrected) the work "keep" in that last sentence, and for some reason my arm jerked to the right and almost fell off the desk as i reached for the backspace key. my, that's very interesting, I have to say it's the most fascinating thing I've seen yet. but yes, about the telephones, i remember this time i called a nationwide radio show. it was Bruce Williams, this kind of all-knowing guy who could answer or bullshit his way past practically any question you give him. i wonder if he's still on the air. i never liked him much, he always sounded like a blowhard who padded his wallet, the sort who carries a wad of $1 bills around but puts a $50 or a $100 on top to make it look like he has thousands and thousands of dollars at his disposal. anyway, i called to explain this problem i had once, and to ask if i'd been wronged in any way. thing is, i was just as drunk as all hell. well, not that drunk, i don't guess. drunk enough to be more of an obnoxious asshole than i usually am (so i should have fit right in with Bruce's audience), but not drunk enough to be obviously incoherent. before going on the air, I explained my question to the call-screening woman, trying to prove that it was worthy enough for the mighty Bruce. It was, she said "well, this is a very interesting call, why don't we throw you on first..." and then I heard the theme music of the radio show, and I could hear her tell me I was about to go on, and then I heard Bruce bellow "For our first call we go to New York City!" Standing alone in that phonebooth I was suddenly electrified, and saw myself as I sometimes see myself today, on a stage so dark and giant no one could see or even imagine where the stage ends and the audience begins. I jumped up slightly off the floor, and with every word I spoke I remembered driving through Florida late at night and having no company except for the all-night radio talkshows. most of them just played reruns of the day's earlier programs, and were not actually live. I lived for the whiny, feckless calls that tired, despondent people throughout America made to these shows. And the company they made, even as false and meaningless a level of companionship as radio is, is what I imagined myself helping to provide with my "very interesting call."
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