Listen in as Shogu Kobu performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and the theme song from “Titanic”, as heard through the nearby payphone that sits between Mr. Kobu’s performance space and a McDonald’s.
After dialing in from the payphone a mild melee occurred between two men waiting in line at the McDonald’s. One man took a swipe at the other, who responded by pushing his aggressor hard enough to almost knock him over. I couldn’t tell if they knew each other already but the dispute seemed to be over whose place in line came first. They seemed to have patched up their differences quickly enough, with one of the two men deciding to stand in another line.
Fists flying and voices shouting in a public terminal did give me pause, though. I’ve developed an instinct whereby any time I see a fistfight break out I secure my belongings and perform a discrete 360° assessment of my surroundings. I’m looking to see if the brawl is a staged decoy, or a distraction intended to draw attention away from pickpockets or other petty thieves. No such conspiracy seemed afoot in this incident but I have been around fistfights where I see some decidedly circumspect facial expressions among people who did not seem surprised by or concerned about the fight. They wanted something else.
I moved to New York in 1990 and made my arrival at Penn Station. I almost certainly used one of the station’s numerous payphones to contact my friend at Juilliard, who I knew from college, to inform him of my arrival. I stayed at his place for a few nights, as per the post-college ritual among those of us who moved here with no real basis or prospects. A few friends from college put me up at their places in 1990 and 1991, and in the years to come I ended up housing a few college friends for two or three nights each.
Penn Station’s stature in my mind as the place where I arrived here in 1990 still informs the feelings of both optimism and melancholy I felt 29 years ago. I lied to my mother, saying I had all kinds of job opportunities lined up. All I really had was a head full of lies told to me by individuals at a couple of employment agencies, people who in truth seemed peculiarly committed to wasting my time and ambition with false hope and fake job leads.
In time I found jobs, one which involved reverse commuting to Long Island through Penn Station, where I took the Oyster Bay line to Glen Cove. That train was virtually empty any day I went to work out there. At Glen Cove at a small company which promoted the music of living composers. I never got the gist of why that company existed, but it at least seemed to make sense for me to work there given my knowledge of modern classical music, repeatedly described by the founder of the company as “encyclopedic”.
The job turned into an early life lesson for me: Knowing a lot about a given subject does not make you a sure thing for working in the business of that subject. But then my work there involved mostly paper-pushing, and had little to do with the music or the composers we worked with. I got fired after 4 or 5 months. It felt like a mercy killing. But with that little bit of real-world experience I had credibility among temp agencies and the like, one of which quickly lined me up with a job that had nothing to do with music at a company I never would have considered: Avon Products. That job led to other things, and far from reverse commuting to Long Island so I could shuffle papers at a tiny office I discovered the Internet and online BBSes, moving on from Avon to a series of positions at Time-Warner.
I wouldn’t think the payphones at Penn Station are the exact same devices that I would have used in 1990 and 1991, but I would bet the exact locations of the surviving phones have not changed. The number of the phone used for this call — 212-502-5725 — appears twice on this website’s data museum of payphone numbers past and present (mostly past). The first listing gets it right but the other one places the phone at the LIRR Jamaica Station. The LIRR, like the MTA, either had no interest in knowing the exact locations of all their payphones, or they intentionally obscured such data. I don’t know which.