Apparently I Missed Payphones.

Also landlines were kind of soothing.

New York City, 1987. I’m sure my mom used a payphone that day to call my uncle in New Jersey and tell him when we’d be back at his house that evening.

I found out recently that I missed out on payphones. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I was at Kelly’s house watching 90 Day Fiancé and she asked me if I used to call my mom from the movies to pick me up. Apparently movie theaters had rows of telephones that kids could use to call their parents to pick them up. Not quite payphones (I guess they were free for local calls?) but sort of the same idea - a phone for public use.

Apparently people my age (I’m forty-one) used payphones but I can’t really remember using one. I’m sure I did, but not enough times to remember it. And it’s not because I’m too young, it’s because of where I lived and how I was raised. Kids used payphones to call their parents and let them know where they were. They used them when they went to the mall to tell their parents where they were and when to pick them up. They were kind of a pinging device… “Mommy I’m here come find me!”

I didn’t use payphones because I grew up in a tiny village (population: 800 -1200 people depending on the season). And all my friends who lived in Yosemite Village (that’s the name of the neighborhood within Yosemite National Park where I grew up) lived close, less than a mile away. I’m guessing I’d call my parents from their houses from time to time, but my parents weren’t really that worried about us. Nothing bad really happened there. We didn’t lock our cars. We didn’t lock our houses.

The other parents in town were a bit more hovering than mine and sometimes they’d tell me to call home to check in to make sure I was allowed to be at their house. But my parents were both relatively busy and involved with their own stuff until exactly five o’ clock in the evening. They definitely spent time with us but had their own shit to do and didn’t expect us to call them at work every twenty minutes like all the other kids.

I didn’t use payphones in Yosemite Village because I didn’t really need to. We just rode our bikes around and played in the woods. And whenever I went to a place where I might have needed to use one, my parents were with me. I didn’t go to the movies with friends, I went with my family. I didn’t go to the mall with my friends, I went with my family. This changed a bit in high school but even then I didn’t really use payphones because I wasn’t expected to check in all the time. My parents trusted me because I was a good kid and there didn’t seem to be much danger anywhere I was going.

When I was a Freshman, the road to my high school fell into the river. You heard that right, the road to my high school FELL INTO THE RIVER. My high school was a two-hour bus ride from Yosemite Village in Mariposa, California. Given that the drive was already long, it wasn’t ideal that the quickest route fell into the river. Luckily, part of one lane was rebuilt and opened up the next school year. For thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the afternoon so school kids and park employees could leave and enter the park. This means that for the entirety of my time in high school if I wanted to do anything after school, I either had to drive three hours through Oakhurst (the other entrance to the park) or I had to stay at friends’ houses. I plan to write more about the flood and its aftermath because it was a really interesting period of Yosemite history and shows how wild it was to live there. We just sort of went on with life like nothing was happening.

When I stayed at friends’ houses, I’d call home using their landlines. I got a pang of sadness the other day thinking about landline phones. We used to call people and they wouldn’t be home. So we’d leave a message and maybe they’d call us back a day or two later. We weren’t expected to respond the way we are now. We didn’t have text messages flying at us all the time, begging for our rattled brains to satiate their need for attention. We didn’t have email inboxes filled with too many thoughts to ever consider, too many questions to answer, too many commands to obey. It’s possible I feel like this because I was a kid, but I truly believe it was just a less chaotic time for our brains. There were peaceful moments between moments of cacophony. Now it just feels like cacophony all the time.

When I was a junior, Sara and Gianna (two of my many teachers’ kids friends - we tended to stick together) and I started taking math at a junior college in Merced because it was easier than the math at our school (we had notoriously tough math teachers). Before class, we’d go to the Merced Mall. Sara and Gianna would get Panda Express and I would get nothing because I was a vegan. We’d call our parents from there then head to our math class. I think Sara was probably the one calling - my parents didn’t expect me to call because I’d be staying at Sara’s house (remember, road closed) and wouldn’t be home until the next evening. Another opportunity to use a payphone - DASHED!

By the time I was fifteen I had a cordless phone in my bedroom and I used it to call my friend Caitlin every night. Caitlin was (and is) my best friend and I have no idea what we chatted about but we were on the phone for hours. I didn’t really have a lot in common with the kids in Yosemite Village, all my friends lived in Mariposa (the rural town where my high school was) or El Portal (the small town at Yosemite’s Arch Rock entrance that I like to call the “Brooklyn of Yosemite” because all the cool alternative people live there). Caitlin lived in El Portal, which was about thirty minutes away from my house. So phone calls were really the easiest way for us to spend time together.

This Panasonic cordless phone I had in my teenage bedroom.

I bought and paid for my own cell phone, a Motorola StarTAC, before I went off to college. The service from Verizon cost over $150 a month and had very limited minutes and something called “roaming” which I don’t really remember the function of. I loved that phone and I felt extremely glamorous walking around campus gabbing on it. I called my parents on almost daily on that phone, much to their surprise (I think they imaged I’d be a little bit more independent in college than I was). I called my parents from that phone on 9/11 sitting on the lawn of Risley in tears, in my first few weeks of being an RA in a building filled with kids from New York City. It took hours to get through - all the cell towers were overloaded.

I fucking loved that phone. And that phone is yet another reason I never had to use a payphone.

I don’t think many people miss payphones. And I kind of see why. Like a lot of elements of American infrastructure, they started off nice and clean and functional and ended up being broken and dirty and seemingly covered in germs. I didn’t have to use them regularly so I have no right to miss them, but I do.

I miss the idea of going somewhere to make a phone call, making the call itself a destination of sorts. Of making plans with people that had to be solid. “Meet me at 4:30 at 23rd and 9th.” You had to be there or you’d miss each other. And payphones (and the lack of cell phones) meant we had so much time not to be on call. We had moments of breath between moments of speech. We had moments of pondering between moments of pontificating. I don’t want to idealize the past but I do think the current way we intake and output information is making us all crazy.

It feels really hard to opt out the constant connection we are living in right now. I do my best to protect myself from overload and for that I am notorious amongst my friends for being terrible at responding to text messages and emails. Normally I have around five hundred unread text messages. I know what the messages say (you can see it in the preview) but just tapping them to open them can feel overwhelming. Yesterday I went through and erased years of emails without even looking at them. There’s no way I need an email from 2021. And one of the reasons I have a manager is that his team will ping me if I need to do anything. I file away important emails but let the other ones slide. My brain can only handle so much information and it’s my job to gatekeep what I let in.

I feel particularly inept at living in the current iteration of communication culture. I feel constantly overwhelmed by DMs, text messages, phone calls, and emails. I am at capacity with communication. I think over time we will develop more tools for creating boundaries around communicating. We can’t just keep intaking more and more information forever. We have to pull back at some point and say “hey, my brain can only handle this many pieces of information today.”

I wish I’d had more of a relationship with payphones because they seem really calming. I’d love to go out tonight and for no one to be able to reach me. I’d love to yearn to reach out to someone but have to wait to do so, prolonging the urge and thus prolonging the painful-yet-intoxicating feeling of missing someone. I’d love to have to go somewhere and be there on time because otherwise the plan wouldn’t work. I’d love to go out and come home to a message on my answering machine, a little ping of dopamine hitting me as I listened to it intently, as if it were special, because it was.

Also, this is unrelated, but I still cannot believe the fucking road to my high school fell into the river.

Pretending to use a phone with Kelly in 2019.