Phoning Home: Essays

Phoning Home

Phoning Home During the summer following my seventh birthday, my parents began receiving prank telephone calls from an anonymous source. These calls ranged in frequency from once in an afternoon to many times in an hour, and the barrage lasted for several months, until eventually my parents changed their phone number—to an unlisted line that they still give out on only a selective basis. After that the calls stopped abruptly. Never again did we hear from the mysterious “crank caller” who had disturbed our dinners so effectively in those early days of the Reagan administration. Nor did my parents ever learn his identity, despite a dogged police trace. In the years before caller ID and computerized tracking, our tormenter appeared to know precisely how long he could stay on the line until the authorities trailed him to his lair. Mom and Dad harbored suspicions, of course. Or at least Mom did. She blamed 2 Phoning Home my father’s estranged brother, a rather peculiar and troubled man who had disappeared from the lives of his own parents and siblings shortly after my birth and then reappeared eleven years later without offering any explanation. Why my uncle would bother to phone us incessantly, if he did not wish to communicate with us, has never been entirely clear to me—it seems to me that, since he wasn’t on speaking terms with my father and had actually hung up angrily when my grandfather called him, my uncle would have been the last person likely to contact us by phone—but at the time my mother found considerable comfort in blaming her absent brother-in-law. I suppose being the target of an irksome relative is far more heartening than being stalked by some unknown sex fiend or hate group. Our caller’s modus operandi lacked much of the panache of more celebrated cranks. He neither panted nor grunted suggestively. He didn’t ask after men named Al Coholic and Jacques Strappe or inquire if our refrigerator was running and then urge us to chase after it. Not once did he dish out a slur, level a threat, or laugh maniacally. The man merely waited for one of my parents to answer our rotary phones—either the olive-green wall console in the kitchen or the canary-yellow extension in the master bedroom, both rented from Ma Bell for thirty-five dollars a month—and he hung up. My father’s shouts into the receiver were invariably greeted by a long interval of silence and then a polite click. If my mother happened to answer the phone—and she did so with less and less frequency —she tried to reason with those intervals of silence, the same Phoning Home 3 sort of futile negotiations she often conducted in attempting to lure our pet rabbit up a staircase. When under heavy stress, my mother has a voice that could tarnish copper. I can still hear her pointing out the flaws in the caller’s methodology, as though it were a mathematical problem: “You wouldn’t be calling us if you didn’t want something. But if you don’t tell us what you want, we won’t know what it is. And if we don’t know what it is, we can’t give it to you. So why are you calling us? Explain yourself, please.” Did my mother really expect an answer? Or was this merely her version of repeating “hello” into a dial tone? All I can say for certain is that she didn’t learn our caller’s motives. I still have no idea what made this creature tick—what drove him to torment an otherwise inconsequential suburban family who had done him no harm. And if I don’t know, I imagine nobody will ever know. Because I was him. I am now thirty-two years old, and, for better or worse, people consistently turn to me when they want to share their secrets. Sometimes I flatter myself into believing that this reflects esteem for my discretion and empathy—or a misplaced confidence that as a writer I am somehow above the fray of judgment . Often, of course, people trust me because they think I also harbor deep secrets of my own . . . and they’ll even tell me so, readily, as did one colleague, who took the liberty of informing me that he knew he could...