In his 1997 novel Straight Man, Richard Russo describes “an old-fashioned telephone booth … you can enter and close the folding door behind you.” I paused when I read that passage, remembering just such a telephone booth at Jack Patrick’s Bar and Grill in St. Louis, Missouri.
I have written of having become enamored with a bar that I noticed on my walk to and from work and home. I had a habit, which rarely proved to be dangerous, of reading as I walked. I missed some things that fell outside of the pages but when I glanced at the window of a newly opened bar, I noticed my favorite game had been installed. I paused in my walk, entered the bar, and asked the man behind the counter if they served Rolling Rock beer. He replied that they did. “Put a cot behind the counter,” I told the man. “You have pool tables and Rolling Rock: I’m never leaving.” And though I did, on occasion, leave, I spent many happy hours in that bar, shooting pool and drinking beer. A friend of mine lived across the street from the bar, and she would sometimes call me at midnight, saying that she wanted to shoot pool. I would hie, post haste, the five blocks that separated me from the bar. (Jack’s was a 3:00 a.m. bar, so there was really, no hurry.) Once there, we would exercise our skills on the table. This was also before our culture became immersed in the cellphone, and she called my home phone from hers.
Jack’s had the old-fashioned telephone booth described in Russo’s book. I believe that the original sign on it read “Telephone Booth,” but at some point. it was changed to “Cellphone Booth.” The wooden booth was reminiscent of the ones that Clark Kent entered, subsequently emerging as a man in tights, faster than a speeding bullet. I rarely saw anyone in that booth, but as the usage of cell phones became more fashionable, people would use the booth for quiet communications. There were some who used the booth for shenanigans, but hey: Jack Patrick’s was an Irish bar, after all. And, I may have been one of those shenanigan people…
I discovered the bar in the late 1990s and adopted it as my go-to place. (It had pool tables, remember?) That old telephone booth was a quiet, hulking presence on the rear wall, near the corner pool tables. There was also a pay telephone mounted on a wall, near the phone booth. I wondered why the phone was not in the booth itself, but I did not wonder long: I had pool to shoot. Jack’s was a noisy bar, and when cell phones began to appear in the hands of patrons, some would retire to the quiet of the old phone booth. Today, cell phone users just bellow into the devices, sharing intimate details of the days of their lives with dozens of nearby listeners. When I read the lines “old-fashioned telephone booth,” I imagined just such a booth that would magically appear and surround a public user of a cell phone, a mystical cone of silence that would serve to isolate us from the unintentional listeners of private conversations. I can see myself sliding onto that wooden seat, lifting the receiver to my ear, and hear the ringing acceptance as I drop quarters and dimes into the phone. “Operator, won’t you help me complete this call…”
Maybe the pub should paint the booth to look like a 1960s British police call box and rename it TARDIS. You never know “Who” will step in.
cjon3acd@att.net