Joey, a guy I knew, used to call every month or so. He hardly ever had an agenda. No, “Can we…” or “What do you think about….” or anything like that. It was just to talk for a while, checking in, letting me and maybe himself know that he was still around.
This was a long time back: before messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all those Internet sites on which you can announce what you had for lunch or saw or, most boring of all, your Wordle score. Joey’s calls hardly ever needed responses from me more than the telephone equivalent of clicking on “Like.”
He almost never asked if I was doing anything when he called. A few times, early in that phrase of our relationship, he did, and I said I was (because I’m just about always doing something), and the call was therefore cut short. After a few of those, he’d just start talking, as if we were already in the middle of a conversation. Sometimes there would be a pause and I’d ask why he was calling. “Felt like talking,” he’d say. I knew that; I was just pulling his chain.
I remember one call in particular. It was about his old boosting buddy, Frankie, who had bugs under his skin. That had been several years earlier, when Joey had been a classic NYC shooting-up junkie. Joey and Frankie used to make midtown camera and record shops together, then they’d go fence what they had boosted and try to score for dope.
One time dope was very short and what was available was very bad. It had been stepped on so many times, Joey said, you might just as well shoot up Johnson’s Baby Powder. Frankie, he said, started shooting speed.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Speed is the opposite of smack. It turns you wide on rather than putting you on the nod.”
“At least it does something,” Joey said. Then he told me this:
…..
Frankie was shooting speed and he was getting weird, very weird. You know when people get weird like that?
“Yeah,” I said.
So one day he tells me, “There’s bugs under my skin.”
I tell him, “There’s bugs in your head, that’s where the bugs are.”
He don’t say nothing but after a while I see him poking at his arm with a knife.
“What the fuck you doing?” I say.
“Killing the fucking bugs,” he tells me.
He’s the goddamned bug, you know. In a couple of days he’s digging at his face with the goddamned knife. Standing in front of the mirror and stabbing at them. About a week later, I took him to Columbus Hospital.
“Why’d you wait until then?” I asked.
Because that’s when I started thinking I had bugs under my skin, too.
So we go to Columbus hospital and there’s this real nice doctor. Little Italian guy. He wasn’t like a lot of people are with junkies, that old fuck-you-creep attitude, you know? He listens to Frankie talk about the bugs and he looks at Frankie’s arm and at his face and he says very seriously, “There really aren’t any bugs there.”
Frankie says, “Shit.”
The doctor says, “Okay, come with me.” He takes us into the operating room and he turns on all the lights. He gets this terrifically bright light and brings it right down on Frankie’s arm so close I think he’s going to burn him. He gets a magnifying glass and looks up and down the arm. Then he hands Frankie the glass and says, “Now you look. We got the brightest lights in the hospital here and I don’t see any bugs. You find me a bug and I’ll take it out.”
Frankie looks up and down his arm. Then he looks up and down his other arm. “I don’t see any bugs,” he says. It’s like he’s really sad.
“Right,” the doctor says, “and that’s because there aren’t any.”
“I guess you’re right,” Frankie says. “But I thought I had bugs.”
“’Glad to be of help,’ the doctor says. “You need anything else, come on back.”
“Well, doc,’ Frankie says, “there is one thing….”
“Except dope. That you have to get on your own.”’ He laughs and walks us to the door.
Frankie and me walk out. Frankie is really depressed. We get to Columbus Circle and sit down and watch the pigeons and broads. I get to thinking that we should start making some drugstores. I tell Frankie that, but he doesn’t say anything. ‘What’s the matter, man?’ I said.
‘Them doctors,’ Frankie says, ‘they won’t do shit to help a poor ole junkie.”
…..
There were other stories Joey told me in those calls, but that’s the only one I remember. Then he stopped calling. I didn’t notice it for I don’t know how long, then I did. You don’t much notice things that don’t happen until something reminds you. A guy I know told me Joey had gotten off into booze for a while, then went back to shooting up. Someone else told me the same thing, and also that Joey had died of an overdose. Where? When? The guy didn’t know.
Even if they had existed back in Joey’s day, I doubt Joey would have had any use for those Internet sites in which one posts advertisement for oneself: my lunch, my Worldle, etc. That wasn’t what he was after in those calls.
I said that in those calls I didn’t have to say much more than the Internet equivalent of “Like.” That’s true, but there’s more to it than that. Those clicks of a button at the bottom of a message already online occur in a different time and space than when the message posted. They’re facts, but hardly connections: they could be minutes, hours, days, weeks after the initial posting. “Oh, I got a ‘Like.’ How nice.”
My occasional questions, or my short expressions—Really? or Wow! or Far out!—were in real time, in response to a thing just said and before the next thing that was said. Even though I didn’t say much, it was a real human connection, and that, I now understand, is what Joey was after when he was telling me those stories. He liked telling the stories, but the telephone calls were about the human connection—in real time. Maybe that’s what all people who tell stories to other people are, at least in part, up to.
Two other things didn’t exist back then: spam calls (which comprise the bulk of incoming calls now, particularly for anyone with a landline) and caller ID (which wouldn’t have been on any phone Joey was likely to use).
That was all back in a time when the phone rang, and we picked it up to find out who was there and what they had to say.