Loonie Call?

According to a teeny blurb in this week's issue of The Grid, Bell Canada is looking for permission to start charging a dollar for a pay phone call, up 100% from the current cost of 50 cents.  "Bell says the money will pay for upgrades to the GTA's 22,000 payphones."

Does this mean they want to save them?  Likely the opposite.  The increased cost may drive usage down giving Bell more reason to get rid of them.

Aspirations by Liz Worth

King St W & Portland; photo credit: Liis Toliao

4.

Persona amplified at the corner of King and Portland,
still early enough to pretend
the streets were only ours: holy our.
You stretched and caught the sun in
blond hairs low on your belly.
Panting, we let sentiment atrophy,
aspired to lightning. Detour #1

We ran into R. wearing anorexia and Victorian boots. She’d been to the forest electric, had her pace timed by a rush of tongues.

We knew hers was a deceptive cadence, but we followed anyway through lost time and narcotic fascination.

This is from a poem by Liz Worth situated near a booth at King and Portland. It offers both a familiar and distancing view of a neighbourhood that's hosting a pack of suburban girls on a night out on the town.

The Cherry Beach Express by Cathi Bond

Cherry St & Unwin, Photo credit: Liis Toliao

The payphone screamed like the gulls and Cope rocketed out of the car, running into the booth snatching the receiver. The tails of his long black leather coat nearly got snapped as the door folded shut. All I could make out was Cope saying, “About fucking time!” and then the closing door drowned out the rest of the conversation.

I got out of the car and started dancing around the Cougar. We were going to get high, oh me oh my, as high as the sky. Charlene started waving the red nail polish brush like a wand, telling me to stop drawing attention, but nobody was down here. Nobody but us chickens. That stopped my dancing. I got back in the car.

“What’s wrong?” Charlene asked, leaning over the back seat.

“Nothing.”

That’s what Granddad always whispered when the two of us played hide and seek up in the hay mow, while Mom wandered around trying to find us.

Cope shoved open the phone booth door and strode back to the car. He was trying really hard not to be mad. Cope was always copasetic, which is why he got the nickname Cope, but right now Cope was anything but laid back. He got in the car and punched the steering wheel.

Charlene reached for the back of his neck and said “Baby,” but he brushed her away. Hurt, Charlene dropped the nail polish wand on the floor and didn’t bother to pick it up.

I leaned over the seat. “So?”

“Drought,” he replied.

And then we stepped off the edge of an endless chemical run into the nightmare of a full-out crash.

These lines are part of an excerpt from NightTown, a coming of age novel by Cathi Bond about the mean streets of Toronto during the 1970s.

Clarke Beach/Cherry Street Spit was a hangout for drug dealers, users, bikers and cops during the 1970s. A lone phone booth still stands at the corner of Unwin and Cherry, and it is the setting for a brief excerpt by Cathi Bond; one of two contributions to Tel.talk that weave through the seedy streets of Toronto past. The booth stands as a tactile piece of physical memory from a day when drug deals frequently went down over public phones.

Otino Corsano offers another look for tel.talk