June 7, 2013

From “Yankee Tango Foxtrot Zero Two Eight Eight” by Klaus Ulrich Baden

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I was only calling in response to the job offer in the paper; GesteCo Pharmeceuticals was one of the largest employers in my town, the very buckle of the rust belt. Their toll-free number, 1-555-789-36λ9, was on the ad, after all.

Naturally, me being the complete and utter spaz that I am, I dialed the number wrong. 1-555-789-3λ69. Ordinarily that would have been the end of it; I’d have gotten that irritating “wrong number” tritone or Bert Stanton in Payroll. No.

Instead, I was read the following cryptic message by a synthesized voice with a vaguely British intonation. “This telephone is not authorized to transmit to this number. Yankee tango foxtrot zero two eight eight.”

Anyone who knows me can attest that anything like that is more likely to be taken as a challenge than a rebuff. With a record of the misdial on my cell, I tried 1-555-789-3λ69 from every phone I could think of: the landline at home, the one at work, friends’ cell phones. All of them got the same message: “This telephone is not authorized to transmit to this number. Yankee tango foxtrot zero two eight eight.”

It wasn’t until I was gassing up at the FossilCo station on the corner of 3rd and East, which always has the best prices in town, that I had a brainstorm. There’s an old public pay phone behind the station–possibly the only one left in town–that I’ve never seen anyone use, mostly because it was a mess. But its sign was still legible through the grime: MIDWEST BELL NO. YTF-0288.

YTF-0288.

I slipped in 75¢ (another reason no one used it–the thing was 25¢ more expensive than other payphones, assuming you could find one) and dialed 1-555-789-3λ69.

It rang. Someone picked up.

“Check-in confirmed, 2476. The experiment will now begin.”

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July 5, 2012

From “Secrets of the Marlowe Days Festival” by Melida N. Wrisley

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I even tended to refer to him with the informal pseudo-affectionate nickname “Teddy” even though I knew through a little bit of research that he’d hated being called that by anyone who wasn’t a close family member. Then again, Theodore Marlowe was the sort that knew the value of a name: born John Theodore Marlow, it had taken the judicious dropping of a too-common first name and the addition of an unnecessary vowel to make his a name fit for literary immortality.

Deerton held its annual Marlowe Days events at the same time as the county fair as the only vestige of tourism a tiny burg like that was able to eke out. After all, Teddy had been born at what was then Deerton General (now Infrared Health Systems Mid-Michigan Campus no. 27) and attended what was then Deerton Elementary (now John T. Seymour Elementary) until the age of 10, when his family had moved to Grand Rapids and thence to Detroit. He’d been shortlisted for a Nobel, his novels and stories were still in print, and film adaptations had made millions of dollars over the years.

I prickled a little under the management role I had in Marlowe Days, though, for the simple reason that Theodore Marlowe hadn’t been all that find of Deerton at all. Biographies tended to give us a sentence, if we were lucky, before going into exhaustive detail on Marlowe’s days in Grand Rapids and Detroit. I had been through reams of interviews, and all the man ever had to say about us was negative. There was the CBS interview from 1969 where he talked of “escaping the stultifying atmosphere of small-town mundanity,” for instance, or the 1978 radio talk where he said “everything that made me who I am is of the furniture and automotive cities.”

As in not Deerton.

After moving away, he hadn’t visited once despite plenty of Marlow and Higginsfield relatives. Invitations to speak at DHS commencements or other events were returned unopened. His books, powerful as they were, spoke to the salad days of Michigan industry giving way to the rust belt.

Big city problems.

Only in death, it seemed, did Teddy have anything for us. His estate agreed to Marlowe Days less than two months after the author died in 1980.

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