Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.
The Phone Calls
One night in late summer Elliot
and I were hanging out with Max at his apartment when the phone rang. It was
around midnight. Max answered and a voice on the other end stated each of our
names in turn, then hung up. It was an odd thing, but we didn’t really think too
hard about it. We assumed it was just someone we knew doing something weird just for the hell of it. In our little group of weirdos that kind of thing happened all the time. We forgot
about it.
A few minutes later, the phone
rang again. I answered it this time. Same thing. Our names. Gruff voice, drawing out the syllables. Hang up. It was then that we started to sift
through the possibilities of the caller’s identity. These were seriously
limited by the plain fact that no one knew that we were all there together that
night. Of course, any number of our friends might have guessed that we were, we
hung out there a lot and most of our friends knew that. But why choose this particular
night, this particular time, to make a random prank phone call just in the off chance that we might all be there at once? And if you’re gonna make prank calls, why not at
least have a joke prepared?
A few minutes later the phone
rang again. This time the caller engaged in a peculiar brand of conversation,
disconnected words and phrases, sometimes touching on aspects of our personal
lives - parents & girlfriend's names, our places of work, favorite bands. It
was someone who obviously knew us pretty well. But no one we could think of seemed to fit
the profile of someone who would do something so weird.
During the hour between one and two a.m. the phone rang regularly every few minutes and each of us took turns trying to
identify the voice. It was a male voice. Unusually deep, sometimes sounding as though it had been
treated or filtered through some kind of electronic device. Standard horror movie stuff.
At this point, we were still
having fun. The witty banter was flying. We pestered the caller as to his
identity, to no avail. The caller still refused to speak in sentences, hewing
to stray grunts and seemingly stream-of-consciousness fragments. Occasionally he'd say one of our names, as if to remind us that he knew them, in case we forgot. It was all very strange, but it was also kind of fun.
Then the phone went quiet for
an hour or so. We were disappointed. We waited by the phone, dejected, still
sorting through names trying to pinpoint the culprit, dismissing all of them
for one reason or another. Ronnie Rawlings? No, he's at work, and probably wouldn't do something so odd anyway. One of Emily's brothers? No, they're too young, they wouldn't have the creative wherewithal, or the stamina. Then who?
Elliot sat in a chair with the
phone resting on an arm, and when around three o’clock the phone finally rang
again he picked it up and exclaimed “Thank God, we thought you’d never call back!”
For the next round of calls,
the caller periodically played music – southern rock, country, not the kind of
stuff that us or any of our friends could usually relate to, which further
clouded the mystery. Who do we know that owns a Hank Jr. album?
At one point between calls we
began to jokingly bandy about the possibility that the calls might be some kind
of supernatural occurrence. Maybe a demon or a ghost. Maybe one of us calling
from the distant future. Young and gullible as we were, though, we were still fairly down to earth by nature, so we dismissed that possibility out of hand. No way. Of course not.
At least, Max and I felt that way. Elliot, usually the sceptic among us, in this case held out for otherworldly. "You guys are just dismissing the idea that this might be something supernatural aren't you?"
Well, yeah. But Elliot's willingness to believe must have planted seeds of doubt in my mind. I remembered New Year’s Eve and the ghost in the living room. I remembered the fear and confusion from being lost in
the maze just a few nights before. And I remembered that ominous music from the
dream with the sign pointing towards nowhere. Songs flitted through my head.
Patti Smith’s “Elegie”, that eerie evocation of rock and roll spirits having
flown (“its just…too bad…our friends…can’t be with us…todayyy”). The Meat
Puppets’ “Two Rivers” rolling by, side by side, both flowing into a
netherworld of ethereal guitar sounds and disembodied voices. Run Westy Run’s
“Bye Love”; the far-away stillness in the sound, a farewell from some other
side of what may or may not be this life.
It is, after all, life and life only.
Around the same time as the
night of the phone calls, something horrible had happened in our little town.
An elderly woman was murdered in her car in the mall parking lot. Stabbed to death. In broad daylight. The murderer got away and couldn’t be found.
It was difficult to comprehend. The
town, and everyone in it, was shaken. Our town, like any other small American town, was not necessarily a stranger to violence or
death, but this was different somehow. The sheer randomness, and the brutality of it. The
fact that there was no apparent motive. The fear that
the killer would strike again lingered in everyone’s mind, coloring the
atmosphere in ways both perceptible and imperceptible.
Honestly, I don’t remember if the murder happened before or after the night of the phone calls. So I’m not sure
it was a factor in the way we responded to that night. Maybe it’s just the way
the brain works in retrospect, but the fact of the murder seemed to be in the
air that whole summer, even before it happened.
So when we started discussing
the supernatural possibilities it put a chill into the evening, despite our collective (admittedly somewhat shaky) inclination towards pragmatism, reality, cold hard facts. We knew the caller had to be someone we
knew. But the calls increasingly wore our nerves down and with the late hour
our defenses gave way to paranoia.
At one point, as if to test the
supernatural theory, I picked up the phone and began reading passages from a
Bible that was on hand. The voice on the other end reacted with full-on
Exorcist-style moaning and animal growls. It shouted my name. I wish I could
say that I thought it was just good weird fun, but the truth is it scared me
shitless.
Not too long after that we decided to leave the phone off the hook
and try to sleep. It was five in the morning.
And then everything changes. In the days and weeks after the
night of the phone calls, Elliot and Max and I each experienced unusual
turbulence in our lives. Trouble at work. Trouble with family. Trouble with
girlfriends. It became almost absurd. Jokingly, we attributed all of this misfortune to a malicious spell
cast by the phone calls.
We did that jokingly, sure, but
I think we really did almost believe it was true. Deep down, way deep down, we may actually
have felt that what happened that night had really emanated from beyond, and whatever it was had pulled off some kind of bizarre curse.
Listen, as I write this, I
swear I know full well that a simple explanation exists. I know that it actually was one of our friends or acquaintances playing an elaborate and really
weird practical joke. But that doesn’t change the feeling of that night. Or the
way that feeling colored our lives in the wake of that night.
And it doesn't change the fact that we never did figure out who it
was. And it haunted us. We talked about it often through the next several
years, never arriving at any conclusion, just acknowledging the eeriness and
dread in the air that night and in the surrounding days and weeks.
Even thinking about it now, it still drives me crazy.
Seriously - who the fuck was
that?
