Phone Company Daze
The first Frame was Rampart. Yep, in the area of the infamous Los Angeles Rampart Police Department. Luckily I had no run ins with them. While I worked there my father was killed and I mourned him with many trips to the bathroom to cry. One co-worker Raoul walked around for months holding his stomach, then was diagnosed with stomach cancer and soon died. We all went to his funeral. That was my first notion of how deadly cancer could be. I met many people as different workers would come and go. Like James, who became my boyfriend and later a serious drug addict. Mike B., who had a foot fetish. He would linger at the lockers where we changed shoes and beg to look at and touch our feet. Feet that have been in sweaty sports shoes for more than eight hours. Um hm.
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| The Frame. That's not me of course, but that's what it looked like. |
I smoked a lot of weed there. I refined my fine skills of speed joint rolling there. I remember taking a walk with a couple of the guys to smoke one. A random guy was walking toward us and I smiled at him. He swooned and kept going. That's what I wanted. Him to keep going, so that our weed smoking would go undisturbed. One of my fellow smokers asked what I had done. I remember saying I only gave the guy a partial smile, not the full mega-watt smile that could have devastated him. LOL! High and full of myself!
It's a wonder the Rampart area's phones worked at all. We ran in the Central Office inside wiring that made residential and commercial phones work. We added lines we disconnected lines. Commercial line work orders were complicated so we usually had a team of two running in the wires. Many times both of us would be high. I often thought that my safety glasses would keep my supervisor from seeing my tight, red eyes. Pot-head logic.
We had a lot of fun doing disconnects. Before lifting the wire we had to test it to be sure we were disconnecting the right phone number. Many times the customer would be in the middle of a call. If it was a juicy conversation we would listen in. Many times I interrupted phone sex. We would share those with our co-workers. Sometimes the caller would get angry about the coming disconnect and curse us out. Those were super fun to disconnect. I'd snip that wire right in the middle of their tirade. Snicker.
While there I had to file a worker's comp case after slipping on a banana peel on the parking lot. Boy did they resist that. I finally got a few days off to rest my twisted ankle. The phone company tried to tell me that I should have seen the peel and avoided it. I told them that it was rotten and as black as the asphalt parking lot. Give me some time off please!
I had a good friend Margie, who I hung out with a lot. I wonder where she is these days? Our kids played together. I went to her house a lot. There was always something going on there. Margie and I and a couple others used to sneak away to a tiny food shack nearby. We'd wear our tool belts so we looked like we were just going on break. We weren't supposed to leave the building. On our actual lunch hour we'd go over to a little bodega type store and play Pac Man until we ran out of quarters.
One Saturday when Margie and I were supposed to be working some overtime, we were in the restroom applying blush to our non existent cheekbones, when we noticed that someone had made line drawings of us on one of the stall doors. The Balloon Sisters they called us. One figure had my name under it and the other had Margie's. We'd gained a lot of weight hanging out at the food shack. My feelings were really hurt that a grown person would do such a thing.
Once I had a seriously bad case of diarrhea. I had to go home. It was terrible. On my way home I stopped for medicine. That's when I discovered the wonders of Imodium. It worked instantly. Didn't go back to work though. It was rare that I left early or didn't report to work. I guess that's why I remember this. Pac Bell had a strict attendance policy. I was not trying to get fired.
I met a guy whose name I can't remember but he had a million funny sayings. One was, "If she's old enough to pee, she's old enough for me." and "As long as I have a face, she's got a place to sit." I guess today that would be called sexual harassment. Sigh.
Then I transferred to Melrose Frame. In the heart of West Hollywood at what would soon be the height of the AIDS epidemic. Watched up close and personal as one of our co-workers went from a buff healthy man to a withered, emaciated, addled old man. It was hard to watch. Eventually he was so incapacitated our boss had to force him to go home. All the way to the end of his life, he would call the job and ask to speak to each of us saying the craziest and many times brutally truthful things.
I met my "identical twin" sister Suzanne there. When she first arrived on the Frame I decided that I hated her and as I got to know her I realized that we had so much in common I grew to love her. She is the one who got me hooked on cross stitching. She had to stitch a bunch of Christmas ornaments and her deadline was coming up soon. She gave about five of us a quick tutorial and we were off and running, stitching tiny patches of cloth. Each one took about an hour to finish. We, of course, turned it into a competition.
We were supposed to be answering the phone on the frame. "Shoes and shorts" is what that job was called. The guys who worked outside on the poles would call in to ask us to test lines for them. We would answer the phone and put them all on hold. "Melrose Frame, you're number 2. Please hold." "Melrose Frame, you're number 3. Please hold." And on it went up to number 5. Meanwhile we were cross stitching our little hearts out. We got them all done for Suzanne. Suzanne and I were pretty close for a while. I even told my mother that I had an Identical Twin Sister. Never mind that she was blond and blue-eyed and I was not.
I had my bunion surgery while there and so I was on desk duty for a long time. Dispatching the work orders and such. My then play-son Patrick taught me how to do Synchronized Chair Dancing. With a paper clip on my nose and lovely leg and arm poses, we sailed back and forth in our rolling office chairs, in front of the supervisor's glass fronted office. Patrick later loaned me $1500.00 when I was in dire need. Problems with another drug addict. (That's another story.) Proud to say I paid him back forthwith.
There was more frustration on the Desk than there was in running in the orders. I was so pissed one day that I kicked the fax machine. I kicked it so hard that it flipped through the air and landed upside down on the concrete floor. We all stood there with our mouths hanging open. Then everyone jumped into action picking up the machine, getting rid of the evidence of the broken plastic tray that was on top of the machine and calling the repairman, innocently requesting a service visit.
It wasn't all lovely times. There was one guy who was especially perverse, a bunch of us would take lunch hour rides with him up into the Hollywood Hills on dirt roads near the Hollywood sign. He'd drive at top speed and screech up to the cliff. Scaring the bejesus out of everyone. He thought he was being really funny one time after we had done the Red Cross blood drive. He came and whispered to me that my blood work showed I had AIDS. My heart fell into my stomach and then he slaps me on the shoulder and says he was just kidding. The mother fucker. That shit wasn't funny.
We got paid every other Thursday. Big 5 the sport store, always had a sale on Thursdays. We women would shop the newspaper ads (remember newspapers?) for new and colorful sport shoes to wear on the Frame. We needed rubber soles and of course we wanted the cutest ones we could find. The designated shopper would go to Big 5 on our break and make our purchases. That was kind of fun. There is no shoe shopping opportunity that I will pass up.
One co-worker amazed me with her wedding plans. She had everything planned down to the most minute detail. The colors of the bridesmaids dresses, the church, the food and drink, the flowers, you name it, she had it worked out. Everything except the groom, she had not met him yet. I thought she was a little obsessive, but what do I know? All these years later, I hear that she is happily married, so it must have worked out for her.
Most of the men on the Frame were gay, West Hollywood, right, and all of the women were straight. From time to time workers from outside would visit to check on an order or something and there would be an announcement. "Fresh meat on the Frame. Fresh meat on the Frame." We'd all casually find a reason to be in the area of the back door where visitors usually arrived, to find out what team he was on. A Team, straight, B Team, gay. It was a dull and boring job, we had to do something to amuse ourselves.
We amused ourselves quite a bit in the break room. Especially on Mondays. On Mondays, the gay guys, Danny P. in particular, would regale us with tales of his weekend adventures in the gay bars. He'd also give us girls lessons in certain sexual situations. One story he told sticks with me to this day. He met an extra kinky guy who took him home and down to his dungeon. Yep, dungeon. Had our boy chained up for nearly 48 hours. He didn't think he was going to make it out of there alive!
Melrose Frame was and still is located 2 or 3 blocks away from the famous Pink's Hot Dog stand. I ate a lot of hot dogs in those days. In addition to regular lunches from the "roach coach" that stopped in front of our building every day. And that is where I met a guy that I smoked PCP with on my lunch hour. It might have been these purple jeans I was wearing. He told me I looked like a grape. Yep, it's still a wonder that any work got done. It's still a wonder that I got out of those days and activities alive. Thank You God.
I met good friend Denise L. there too. She has her own story on another blog.
One afternoon, Mae M. came into the break room and invited a few of us to come out to the parking lot. She had something in her car's trunk she wanted to show us. When she opened her trunk she had about 10 or 15 afghans that she had crotcheted and we could take our pick of one. I still have my afghan.
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| My afghan. Thank Mae M. |
I heard a guy in the break room say that his father told him he should like the woman who liked him. That's how you found true love he said. Apparently he found that woman. One of our co workers ended up marrying that guy. Again, you never know.
There is an apartment building abutting the parking lot. For a few weeks we had a flasher living there. He liked to watch us and we watched him. Good thing this was long before social media. He would have been all over the Internet with his nasty ass.
Another day on the Frame we noticed that there were two metal drums that we hadn't seen before. They were leaking. Not a good sign. We were trying not to die from some unknown toxin so we called 911 and out came the Haz Mat team. Turns out there was no danger, but it made for some excitement for the day.
Some weekends we got in a little overtime at the Sunset Frame. On Sunset Blvd. Sounds glamorous, but it wasn't. There I met a guy who was a stripper in his off hours. Overtime on a Saturday was really boring. Basically just manning the office in case of trouble. There was rarely any trouble. So the stripper guy and I became kinda close. He gave me my own private show. Yes.
We were a fun crew. Making the best out of a dull and boring but reasonably well paid job. All of us had degrees that had absolutely nothing to do with the job, we were there for the paycheck. We hung out together fairly regularly, going to lunch and dinners together. Parties at each other's homes. Yard sales, buying each other's furniture. My apartment at that time was mostly furnished with things I was given or bought from my friends and co workers. This was a chapter of my life that I look back on maybe not all that fondly but with interest for sure.
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