Read Online 1982 by Jian Ghomeshi - Free Book Online Page A

trip to the drive-in. I couldn’t drive. I was barely fifteen. But the agreement was to meet at Finch subway station and head down to the CNE. That was good enough. I was the king. I called and got tickets. They weren’t cheap by my standards. It didn’t matter.
    As the weekend of the concert approached in early August, I did a lot of planning for what I was going to wear. It was a month since I’d asked Wendy to go, but I called her once in July to confirm that she was coming. To tell you “I called her” might sound like an innocuous bit of information. But it isn’t. Calling Wendy was no simple task. These kinds of phone calls were not easy in 1982. We didn’t have text messages or Facebook or IM-ing or DM-ing or BBM-ing in the ’80s. Communicating with someone you liked involved high-stakes exposure and risk. To get in touch with Wendy, I had to call her house. This left me vulnerable on all fronts—to the other residents of her house, and to anyone at my house who might hear me. The chances of being discovered, judged, or ridiculed were massive.
    We didn’t have mobile phones in 1982. You probably guessed that. But we also didn’t have any kind of cordless phones at all. Not yet. Not in my house. In other words, telephone receivers were attached to wires that went into a box with a dial pad on it, and that box had wires that came out of it and went directly into the wall underneath the box. The wire that was attached to the telephone receiver was called a “phone cord.” That’s right: phone cord. If you are a teenager today, you may not have ever seen those two words together. But I can assure you that these phone cords once existed. Almost all phones had phone cords in 1982. These cords were usually curly. I’m not sure why. Perhaps they were curly so that when people were on the phone they could try to uncurl the phone cord as a game during boring parts of the conversation. That’s what people did. But the point is, the phone cord meant that you couldn’t make a call or answer one just anywhere youwanted. You had to be near the phone box that the phone cord was attached to in order to speak on the telephone.
    By the 1990s, even before everyone had mobiles, many families had multiple telephones in their house or a cordless phone or two that they shared. So, by the ’90s, when there was an incoming phone call, people began saying things like, “I’ll get it and take it into the downstairs family room, Dad!” But this wasn’t possible in my house in 1982. You spoke where the phones were. At our house, we had two primary phones attached to the wall. One was in the main hallway at the top of the stairs. The other was in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Both were in the middle of the house so everyone could hear every phone call that was being made. Both had curly phone cords.
    I knew I had to call Wendy to confirm our date at the Police Picnic. To maintain a semblance of privacy when speaking to my dream Bowie girl, and to minimize my exposure and embarrassment, I had to be careful. I had to time my phone call just right so that no snoops in my house heard me and so that Wendy would be at home and available to take my call. This was near impossible to do. We didn’t send messages to make appointments for phone calls in the early ’80s. The phone call was the message. And also, most people didn’t have answering machines, and there was no such thing as voice mail. So, if the intended target of your phone call was not home or unavailable, messages had to be communicated directly through humans. This was terrifying and fraught with potential pitfalls. The objective was to find the perfect sweet spot when various factors in play would lead me straight to speaking with Wendy. A goal that would prove too difficult to meet.
    The first time I tried Wendy, things ended fast. It was in mid-July, and I had waited for an afternoon when no one was home and I could use our upstairs phone. A woman that