Wednesday, April 1: Tune It Or Die!
THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR
by Rob Lopresti
I recently read a short story about harassing phone calls. Since it was set in current times the writer had to explain all the ways the hero attempted to trace the calls and why they didn’t work in this case. Made you long for the good old days when technology made the villain’s job easier.
And that reminded me of something I experienced back in those dear dead days.
In the early eighties my wife and I were living in a rented house. It contained a single phone, hardwired into the back wall of the kitchen. One night, long after bedtime, it rang.
My wife is a sounder sleeper than I am, so I was the one who got to put on a robe and stagger out of the bedroom, across the living room, down the hall and through the kitchen. Felt like miles. When I picked up the phone the young man on the other end swore at me, laughed, and hung up.
Undropped shoes
Those of you who have experienced this kind of thing know what the worst part of it is. It isn’t wondering whodunit, or what (if anything) you did to annoy them. The worst part is trying to go back to sleep, while at the same time wondering whether the damned phone was going to ring again.
And it did. Not that night, but every few weeks. Nothing like a pattern, and the clown didn’t always do the same thing. I remember one night a man with a thick foreign accent seemed to be asking for someone and after I spent a minute or two trying to explain that he had the wrong number, the rat laughed at me and hung up.
What can you do about this? If you’re a crime writer you start dreaming up plots. Nasty ones. The phone company offered to put a trap on the line but for various reasons it didn’t seem like a good idea.
Eventually the calls died off and I assumed the moron had found some other game to play, presumably involving butterflies and cigarette lighters.
The finale
Then one night, around 2 AM, the phone rang again. I muttered something rude and staggered to the kitchen. I figured what the guy really wanted was for me to lose my temper and start swearing back, so I was determined not to give him the satisfaction.
I gathered what wits I could find in my sleepy skull and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
Nothing but breathing at the other end. I sighed. “You need help. I mean it. This is not the way a healthy man behaves. Get some therapy.” Then I hung up the phone and went back to bed.
Later that day my wife received a phone call from a friend of ours I’ll call K. It seemed that the night before he had been indulging in an illegal substance which caused him to 1) not notice what time he was calling us, and 2) fail to respond immediately when I answered the phone. Now he was calling to apologize. Of course, K. had not known about our harassing phone calls and had been astonished by my little sermon.
If this were fiction I would report that my impromptu intervention changed K.’s life and he henceforward foreswore any substances stronger than sarsaparilla soda, but I’m afraid that isn’t true. This proves, once again, that God doesn’t write endings as satisfying as we fictioneers. You could phone up and complain but I hear He screens his calls.
My favorite aunt lived in NYC where obscene phone calls (some from women) were a way of life. She had a number of strategies for dealing with them. She had a WW-II era Navy police whistle that was not for the faint of heart. It took a lot of lung and gave a hell of a blast.
Sometimes she’d listen for a moment and say, “Really? Tell me more. Wait, let me get my cigarettes.”
Usually the caller, not getting the anticipated response, would disconnect, but if not, the twenty minutes it took my aunt to find a cigarette was discouraging.
Once night she forgot to hang up the phone. She went to school the next day, returned that evening to find her phone still off hook. She started to hang up when she heard noises coming from the receiver. In one of those phone company quirks, her failure to hang up had left the line open, preventing the other party from disconnecting… for nearly 20 hours.
I’m one of those weird people who believe there is no law declaring that a ringing phone must be answered. This, I think, entitles me to go off topic for a moment and apologize, Rob, for not telling you I would have mailed you a copy of a certain book except for one thing – I don’t have any.
This gives me a chance to congratulate Dick. I just read his new story “Jack The Tripper,” which has the lead spot in AHMM this month. And deserves it. It is another story set in Akron in the 1839s, in the days of 19 cent gasoline, and the air filled with the aroma of rubber manufacturing.
Dick’s LAST Akron story, “Panic on Portage Path,” was just nominated for the Derringer Award. I could use a month like that. Way to go, Dick!
Dick, congrats on the Derringer nomination.
Rob, your column resounds with me. I hate those calls. Now that I have two teenage boys in the house, our phone number has been a target of a lot of teenage girls.
The worst, though, are the unsolicited telephone solicitations. We get several of them each night even though we put ourselves on the National No-Call List. My wife’s typical response is to tell the person at the other end, “No, he doesn’t live here any more.”
My favorite response is to tell the solicitor, “Sure, hang on a second.” And then walk away from the phone and back to dinner. After waiting a few minutes, they usually get the point.
A closer reading of Leigh’s comment, above, and I see that Leigh’s favorite aunt had the same idea long before me.
Um…in spite of what I said before, Dick’s story is not set in the 1839s, whatever they were, but in the 1930s. Must proofread.
I miss the prank calls! All I get these days are robocalls!