My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  “What year did you get your phone?”

  “It was 1955,” Pat said. “It was the year that we built the house.”

  “In 1955? That was the year Mary L. Kayes, of Dutchess County, New York, was convicted of refusing to yield her party line to someone wanting to report a fire.”

  “My goodness.”

  “What was it like sharing a phone?”

  “Well, honestly, it was awful. We’d never get to use the phone, because someone was always on it. Plus, the phone rang and rang and rang all the time, since you had ten families sharing it. We did get into counting the rings, though. You’d hear the phone and you’d stop and wait and count to see if it was for you. That was kind of fun.”

  “Did you know that in 1950 three-quarters of all the phone service in the United States was by party line?”

  “No,” Pat said.

  “Pat, can you hold on a minute? I’ve got a call on my other line.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Okay, I’m back. Sorry. So you were saying it was hard to share the phone.”

  “Well, it was a pain. When we were on a ten-party line, you could hardly get a word in. And whenever we would pick up the phone to use it, there would already be someone on it. We would pick up the receiver and hear voices—”

  “I’m sorry, I have another call again. Can you hold for one second?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay, I’m back. So you were saying you’d pick up the phone and listen sometimes.”

  “Sure,” Pat said. “I wouldn’t listen a long time, just for a minute or so. But the same thing would happen to us. We’d be on a call and suddenly someone would pick it up and hang up a bunch of times, so there would be click-click-clicking the whole time you were on the phone. This one lady would listen for a long time before she’d hang up.”

  “Did people observe any kind of etiquette about party lines? Did they observe the Emily Post suggestion that if you share a party line and you have an emergency, you should pick up the phone and first say, ‘Emergency,’ in a loud voice and then say, ‘Our barn is on fire’?”

  “No, nothing special like that,” Pat said.

  “Did you know who any of the other people on your line were?”

  “We called once and tried to find out who they were, but the phone company wouldn’t tell us. We could tell that a lot of the families we shared the line with had teenagers. We were getting pretty disgusted, because they would never get off the phone. Sometimes we’d have to make an important call and they’d be on for ages, and finally we’d pick up the phone and say, ‘Can you please just get off for five minutes and let us make the call, and then you can have the phone back?’ And usually they’d say no. This one lady in particular, she would say,‘Well, I can’t get off. I’m in the middle of a long-distance call.’ ”

  “You said that the number of people on the line went from ten to four or five?”

  “In the sixties or seventies, we were down to sharing with just four other families. Then it was just two, and then finally just one. Now we have a party line, but we’re on it all by ourselves. Every once in a while, the phone company—it used to be Michigan Bell, but now it’s Ameritech, I think—the phone company calls us and says, ‘Well, guess what, we can give you a nice new line of your own,’ but we tell them we don’t want it! This is fine for us. And it’s cheap. We pay fifteen dollars a month and that’s it. We can’t have an answering machine or anything on it, for some reason, but that doesn’t really matter. The only problem we have isn’t with the party line; it’s with our phone. We have a rotary phone, and I don’t know what to do when you get these recordings saying, ‘Push this number, push that button.’ We don’t have any buttons. When I really need to use a Touch-Tone, I go to my mother’s. She’s ninety years old, but she has a Touch-Tone.”

  “How many phones do you have?”

  “Are you kidding? Just one.”

  This was when Jim got on.

  “I don’t really know why we got a phone to begin with,” he said. “I think Pat wanted one. I didn’t grow up with a telephone. The first time I ever used one was after I graduated from high school. I’m seventy-three, and I grew up without electricity or running water or even a refrigerator, and certainly without a phone.”

  “Do you use the phone now?”

  “I have a need occasionally.”

  “And what kind of equipment do you have now?”

  “We used to have a black one, I believe, and now we have an ivory one.”

  Jim then recounted the incident of the telephone without a cord with some discomfort. “I think Pat tried one of those touch phones or wireless phones,” he said. “I don’t know where she secured it, but I think she took it back.”

  Pat is more open-minded. “I was with my sister a while ago, and while we drove around she used her cellphone in the car, and it was great,” she said after Jim had turned the equipment back over to her. “The trouble is, if I had a cellphone, I’d probably call people.”

  “Do you wish you’d kept the phone without the cord?”

  “Yes, definitely. See, I thought it would be nice to have when Jim’s out in the garage working, and it’s time for dinner, and I have to scream and yell like a banshee to let him know that dinner’s ready. I thought if he had the phone, I could just call him.”

  “So are you still screaming and yelling?”

  “No, we’ve got something better now,” Pat said. “We just installed a really nice dinner bell.”

  Madame President

  Tiffanie Lewis, the current student body president of Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Manhattan, wrote a campaign slogan for herself and her running mate, Crystal Belle, that went something like “If You’re Not Down with Voting for Tiffanie and Crystal, Then I Have Two Words for You: Suck It.” The slogan would certainly have been popular, since “Suck It” is the motto of the eminent wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin, or maybe of the eminent wrestlers D-Generation X—at the time Tiffanie was telling me this story she couldn’t remember which—and in either case it would have thrown some votes her way. But she didn’t use the “Suck It” slogan. She decided that it was too rude, which is not at all what she and Crystal are like as candidates, or as people, and not at all the image they wanted to put forward in connection with Martin Luther King Jr. High School. When you’re proud of your school but know that it once had a reputation for chaos and violence, and is stuck with the nickname Horror High, you pay attention to these things. Tiffanie ended up using three other slogans. One was “Time for Some Women to Be in Charge!,” which referred to the fact that all past student body presidents of King had been male. She had also considered pointing out that she and Crystal would be the first black students to run the school in four years. But “we thought that wasn’t a good approach,” she says. “I mean, everyone’s supposed to be united.” Another slogan was “Drop the Zero and Get Down with the Heroes.” This was an oblique poke at two other presidential candidates, who had academic and attendance problems and were gaining support by arguing that they were better representatives of the average, imperfect King student than Tiffanie and Crystal, who came to school and earned good grades. Tiffanie’s most popular poster had a colorful background and the slogan “And You Don’t Know? Vote for Tiffanie Lewis and Crystal Belle.” The line “And You Don’t Know?” was the refrain from a hit song by rapper Cam’Ron; it didn’t actually mean anything, but everyone loved it.

  When Tiffanie talks about winning the election, she chokes up. “I’m a very emotional person,” she says. “I don’t know why, but I just am. I cry at a lot of things. I cried at Titanic, and I cried at the lunar eclipse.” She cried like mad when she found out that she had won the presidential election. I almost made her cry when we first met and I mistakenly wrote her name down as “Tiffany,” like the jewelry store, rather than “Tiffanie.” After she corrected me, I asked if people made that mistake often.”All the time,” she said, sounding melancholy.


  Tiffanie is not a tall person, but she has a big body and a cute, booming voice. Her face is sweet and bright and has absolutely no angles. She keeps her hair chin length and chemically straightened and usually wears it down, but when she sweeps it up in a mini-chignon, she looks regal and much older than seventeen. I spent last Christmas Day with her family, and her mother and her sisters and her aunts are all beautiful, and I got the feeling that Tiffanie grew up being told that she was good-looking, but, more important, that she was smart. Her mother, Cynthia Tillman, is a supervisor at an insurance company. Tiffanie doesn’t know much about her biological father. Her stepfather, Anthony, is a store detective, but he isn’t working currently. Their house in Brooklyn is the first one the Tillmans have ever owned. It is a small two-family, with a little spit of a front yard, on a tranquil side street in Canarsie, a working-class neighborhood that used to be strictly Italian and Jewish but now has a growing black population. They had been eager to leave their apartment in Crown Heights, because the building had got run-down and drugs were sold on their street.

  Everything inside the Tillmans’ house is gleaming and large—a large television set, a large dining table, large chairs—squeezed into smallish rooms. Tiffanie’s room has an oversize black lacquer bedroom set, a computer, and very little space for anything else. Because she is president of the student body, head of the school Step Team, and taking extra courses to prepare for her Regents’ exams, Tiffanie spends very little time at home. When she is home, she is often in her room, e-mailing her friends or talking to them on the phone. A lot of her friends are boys, but she doesn’t have a boyfriend and says that this is because she doesn’t have time. She says that she isn’t that interested in guys right now anyway, but the most annoyed I’ve ever seen her was when someone suggested that her favorite male R&B group was gay.

  PRESIDENT LEWIS IS SELF-POSSESSED, and often quite bossy, as in: “Are you-all going to help me move the tables, or are you-all going to just sit there?” (To her cabinet members, before a Student Life meeting.)

  “Crystal, I really, really like you, and you know you’re my homegirl, but we got to get back on topic right now.” (To her vice president, who had lapsed during a meeting into a discussion about reading her poetry at the talent show.)

  “First, how about you say the idea, and then we’ll decide if it’s bangin’.” (To the chairperson of the school store, who announced that he had a really bangin’ idea.)

  “So you’re on the seven-year plan? Let me ask you, Chickenhead: Are you proud of that?” (To a student known familiarly as Chickenhead, who asserted that he knew more about King than she did, because, as he had put it, “I been at this school since before you were in eighth grade.”)

  One recent school day, I visited Tiffanie at the student affairs office at King, and she told me the story of her campaign. “It was very controversial,” she said. Her voice started inching up her throat. “First, my friend Wellinthon and I were going to run together, but then he decided to run with Crystal, and everyone thought Crystal should run for president, because she’s such a beautiful person and everyone loves her, but she didn’t want all the pressure, so then Crystal and I decided to run together, and, oh God, candidates were tearing down each other’s posters and writing obscenities on them, and it just got very intense.”

  A young man who had been sitting nearby listening to a Walkman took off his headphones and said, “Yo, I was Tiff’s campaign manager.”

  “Robert, you were not,” Tiffanie said. “I mean, okay, you were my manager at the end. But, first, Cherie Starling was my campaign manager. Then I had to fire her, because she was slacking.” Robert frowned and then told me that his name was Robert Benton and that he was the chairperson of the school store and also a master rapper named Spade, and that he was available for interviews. A moment later, Cherie walked into the room. Tiffanie waved her over and said, “Hey, Cherie, remember when I fired you?” Cherie is one of her many best friends and is now the chairperson of the School Improvement Committee.

  “You did?” Cherie asked. She looked puzzled.

  “From my campaign, girlfriend,” Tiffanie said. “Remember? You were slacking.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cherie answered. She shrugged her shoulders and glanced at the wall clock. “Come on, Madame President. Let’s go bust it out in gym.”

  THERE ARE NEARLY THREE thousand students at Martin Luther King Jr. High School, but on the best possible day fewer than three hundred of them will turn out to vote in the student government elections. The others probably don’t remember to, or don’t care, or don’t get around to it because of a million different reasons, like schoolwork or job work or family problems or love trouble; many of them might just assume that it doesn’t matter if they vote or not. King is one of the biggest high schools in New York City. It is in a gloomy rectangular brown brick building resting on an elevated concrete deck at Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street—a structure that in an architectural drawing might have looked monumental but in real life looks like a giant rusting lunchbox teetering on a rock. Maybe because it is set so high above the sidewalk and so far back from the street, it is almost invisible; I had walked by it at least once a month for ten years without even noticing it. Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts is right across Sixty-fifth Street, at sidewalk level. King is also within earshot of Lincoln Center, but it is more attuned to the odd, lonesome neighborhood of looming windowless buildings with sealed loading docks and metal doors to the west. The area has always been a hodgepodge. The 1955 Manhattan Land Book map shows a wide band of railroad sidings along the river, an enormous Consolidated Edison property, blocks of dinky brick row houses, a College of Pharmacy, a High School of Commerce, New York City Public School 94, and a flop called Hotel Marie Antoinette. By 1976, when Martin Luther King Jr. High School was built on some of the Con Ed property, much of the area had been razed to make room for Lincoln Center and the American Red Cross headquarters and the eventual site of LaGuardia High.

  LaGuardia is one of New York City’s prestigious specialized schools: Interested students have to pass a competitive audition to get in. King is a general high school. Any student in Manhattan is eligible to attend, and students from the other New York City boroughs can apply. As it happens, thousands of high school students who live right nearby choose not to go to King—they attend private schools or other New York City public schools, including the specialized schools—and many kids at King come from far away. Tiffanie, for instance, lives an hour and a half by subway from King, but she wanted to go to high school in Manhattan rather than in Brooklyn and heard that King had a good science program. A classmate of hers who lives an hour away, in Flatbush, told me she applied because she liked the idea of going to a school named after Reverend King. Someone else, from the Bronx, wanted to come to King because her best friend was enrolled, and a few others said they were at King because their own neighborhood schools were scary.

  According to the most recent New York City Board of Education annual school report, for the 1997–1998 school year, more than half the students at King are African American, forty percent are Hispanic, and four percent are Asian. Only one percent of the school’s 1997–1998 student population was white—compared with fifteen percent citywide—and Tiffanie said she didn’t think there were any white students at King anymore. She did remember one from last year, a guy whose name was Lucas, and he was Polish or something like that, but definitely white.

  King has never really been a lucky place. A swimming pool built as part of the gym facilities couldn’t open because of flubbed engineering. A small Martin Luther King Jr. museum on the plaza in front of the school was shut down. There were fights, gang rumbles, declining enrollment, rumors that King students were harassing the junior ballerinas at Lincoln Center’s School of American Ballet. In 1990, a student was shot in the stomach at lunchtime. In 1997, a thirteen-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in the boys’ bathroom, after another female student o
rdered her to perform oral sex on several boys. The number of “incidents” and suspensions at King is double the citywide average. About ten years ago, King became one of the many New York City public schools to install metal detectors, and since last fall all students have been forbidden to leave the building during the day. At the same time, there are kids earning scholarships to college and outscoring students at similar schools in New York. This year, there is a popular and enthusiastic new principal, Ronald Williams Wells; and all the time there are toy drives and penny drives and bake sales and student committees decorating the halls and the lunchroom, and there are fashion shows and cheerleader tryouts and student elections—the kinds of cheerful, innocent things that you always picture when you think about high school but that are hard to imagine when what you hear about a school makes it sound like the end of the world.

  ONE RECENT WEDNESDAY, I went to King to sit in on a student government meeting. It was a wickedly cold, blowy day, and the big concrete plaza in front of the school was bleak and vacant. The front door creaked open. A woman walked out, followed by a dallying teenager in a red puffball coat.

  “Honey, I just want you to graduate,” the mother was saying. “Please. That’s all I want. Please.” I found Tiffanie in her senior economics class, taught by Mr. Borak, a wiry man with grizzled hair and rounded shoulders who has been teaching at King for twenty-three years.

  The class was studying free enterprise. On the chalkboard, Mr. Borak had written,”Explain the reasoning for the turnaround in the male black-white wage gap between the 1980s and the 1990s.” There were about thirty students in the class; a few stared into middle space and a few were doodling in their books, but the rest were busy debating the difference between a stockholder and a shareholder. It was noisy but contained, like popcorn. At one point, a student chewing gum blew a huge bubble. “Please cancel the bubble,” Mr. Borak warned. “This is an economics class. We don’t want any bursting bubbles.”