22 January 2001 ~ Jayden, the payphones, a Honeybaked Ham, and learning to get in trouble...

In 1994, I learned how to get into trouble.

Jayden taught me how.

It began innocently enough. Jayden had some books about witchcraft, and we were going to put spells on people in order to get ourselves boyfriends and generally harass people we didn't like. I don't think it ever really worked, because neither of us had boyfriends for a long while (and when we did get them, they were dirtbags), and nobody we didn't like suddenly ran down the halls of our high school screeching that there were bugs in their clothes. Oh well. Can't say we didn't try.

After our brief -- but all too intriguing -- experiments in spell-casting, we began the phone calls.

It began one day when we were pissed off at our music teacher. (GAHD, I hope he's not reading this...) We'd auditioned for something -- Jayden got in, and I didn't. Out of loyalty to me, Jayden agreed to help torture our teacher in the worst possible ways. Of course, I was in favor of casting a spell on him, but Jayden -- ALWAYS the logical one -- had much more practical ideas in mind. After all, no vicious skeletons from hell had attacked our friend/enemy Julie after we'd focussed our powers on that, so we figured it wouldn't work on the music teacher. Jayden knew of better pranks.

First, she gathered twenty or thirty 800-numbers. I have no idea where she got them, or why she selected the ones she did, but she wrote them all out on sheets of notebook paper, and passed them to me in the hallway at school. We walked to the mall one night after school, and proceeded to call --from a payphone, so as not to get arrested -- all of the numbers and order catalogues from ALL of the 800-numbers, and have them sent to our music teacher. Now, in retrospect, it's kind of stupid, but at the age of almost-fourteen, it was hilarious, especially when we ordered him a Victoria's Secret catalogue. The best, however, was the Honeybaked Ham.

Honestly, I cannot remember if we ordered a ham sent to his house, or if we only sent him a booklet, but I DO remember laughing about it until we cried. Imagine, our poor music teacher opening his door and finding a HAM on the front step! I really think we only ordered him a catalogue, but still... I bet you ANYTHING if I sent Jayden a Honeybaked Ham -- even NOW -- for her birthday, she'd have an absolute hysterical fit remembering the stupid phone calls we'd made.

When we ran out of 800-numbers, we dialled them at random. Any seven-digit combinations that struck our fancy. Once, I dialled a sex-line by mistake: 1.800.9494.ASS -- I TOTALLY dialled that by accident. I got so scared I hung up immediately, but Jayden thought it was hilarious and called back again several times. Each time we got a business on the telephone, we requested "information" sent to "our home address," which was, of course, actually our music teacher's.

But soon enough, we got tired of that.

Jayden, who was in charge of coming up with all our schemes, next had the idea of calling the BoysTown National Hotline. WHY, I will never know. In case you're unfamiliar, the BoysTown National Hotline is a crisis-type line for kids having problems. I guess if you're about to kill yourself, or if your parents are beating you, or whatever, you call their number and they talk to you about it. Anyway, Jayden dialled the number from her house, and handed the phone to me. We thought this was unbearably funny. But of course, when actually presented with the phone, I had no idea what to say. The lady on the other end seemed kind and asked my name. "Jenny," I told her, giggling silently at Jayden. "And how're you feeling today, Jenny?" asked the lady.

"I'm really sad!" I whined, face aglow with Jayden's and my secret prank. I was really hamming it up, whining unbearably, desperately, pathetically. "I have no friends."

"Now, I can see here, Jenny, that you called us before, a couple of months ago. You number shows up here a couple of times. Can you tell me how you've been doing since the last time you called?"

Horrified, I looked at Jayden. She'd pranked them BEFORE? She'd called before and they had a CALL-TRACER? What had she SAID? Desperately, I tried to whine harder: "Um, I guess I um... I don't really know..." I sputtered, carefully holding onto my pathetic voice. "I never called here before, I swear!" Jayden started giggling and doing a little Jayden-happy-dance.

"Well, it says here that you called, Jenny."

I hung up. What was I supposed to SAY? I was freaking thirteen! I couldn't improvise a PRANK CALL! Especially not a prank call that had been pranked before!

Jayden stopped doing her happy-dance and looked at me in fear. "Why'd you hang up?"

"You called there BEFORE!" I shrieked at her. "And she asked what I'd talked about LAST time I'd called, and YOU were the one who called, so I didn't know what to say! Why didn't you TELL me you'd called them before! They have a CALL-TRACER!"

"NOW what're we going to do?" Jayden asked. "What if they think you killed yourself or something!? If they have a CALL-TRACER, they could get my address and send the POLICE here!"

"Oh my gahd!"

"Oh my gahd!"

"OH MY GAHD!"

"Aaaaaaauuugghhhh!"

I had visions of the police coming to Jayden's house and asking her mother who had called the BoysTown National Hotline. I imagined Jayden and I stammering and having to 'fess up to our little crime. Of course, Jayden's mother worked for the freaking PHONE company, and I didn't think she'd tolerate that kind of nonsense. We'd probably get grounded. Or arrested. Or sent to a mental hospital.

(Come to think of it, any of those options might not have been so bad... Would have at least given Jayden and I some things to think about and some time to do it in...)

We decided to tie up the phone lines in case the BoysTown National Hotline decided to call us back and make sure "Jenny" was all right. So we called the one phone number I had memorized: one of the local radio stations. I have NO idea what possessed us. What sick little kids we were! Anyway, THIS prank was passed off to Jayden, because I'd fucked up the last one so badly. Jayden became "Stacy," and decided to try convincing one of our local DJ's that she was carrying his love-child. I don't remember quite how that turned out -- I think she actually started talking to the WRONG GUY, and since we didn't even know the actual name of "Doc Welles," local radio personality, it would have been kind of difficult to persuade him we -- well, "Stacy" -- had been intimate enough with him to be carrying his love-child. I mean, granted, I know plenty of hookups occur between people who don't know each other's names, but how many times does the girl then have to call the freaking RADIO station to tell the guy -- whom she knows only by nickname -- she's pregnant? We'd never seen Doc Welles, anyway. We took for granted that he wasn't like, 80 years old and married with sixteen grandchildren.

(After that little adventure, which didn't work because we never could get the one and only Doc Welles on the phone, I personally went to the radio station and had the good Doc sign Jayden's 14th-birthday card. I told him my friend was his biggest fan. I think he was more than a little amused. If ONLY he knew the kinds of mischief we were up to. The poor man. I still can't type that poor guy's nickname without blushing...)

Jayden, whose mother worked for the phone company, had all sorts of nifty options on her phone. She not only had call-waiting, which I'd never heard of before, but she ALSO had three-way-calling: she could call me at my house, and then call somebody else at the same time, and all THREE of us could talk. So she called me at my house, and then the two of us called the payphones at the mall. The payphones there would ring, and one of us would ask some stupid prank question. Usually, it was, "do you like Elvis?" Then, of course, the person on the other end (and what kind of losers go around answering payphones at the mall?) would either hang up or go on some tirade about how Elvis Presley was over-rated. Duh.

Once, a girl picked up the phone and ended up telling Jayden and I her entire life story. She talked with us for over an hour on the stupid payphone. I think her name actually was Stacy, and she lived in Whitney Point, had a little brother, and loved Disney characters. Something like that. She was awfully cheesy. Also, she told us she wanted to come meet us sometime, but her mother wouldn't let her talk to strangers because she was afraid Stacy's father would somehow kidnap her and... I don't know. It was fucked-up. But what do you expect from a prank that involves getting somebody on the mall payphone and conversing with them for a freaking HOUR?

We stopped the calls after that, mostly. Stacy -- the real Stacy, not Doc Welles' imaginary girlfriend -- kind of scared me out of it. Besides, we were easily distracted, and came up with much more intriguing schemes after that. Like calling the radio stations and dedicating Aerosmith songs to Elvis and O.J. Simpson. (The first night we did that just happened to be the night O.J. tried to kill himself in his Bronco... Logically, of course, we had to dedicate a song to him, right? And logically, it had to be Aerosmith, right?)

(It wasn't until a year or two later that I remembered how much fun all those dumb phone calls had been... It wasn't until I met a man who had a sex-line 800-number on his speed-dial ("I love her voice!") that I really reminisced about Jayden's phone-plots with affection.)

Then we decided to write books. We decided to cast love spells on the object of our lust: a tall, scrawny, geeky-looking guy with a nice voice and a girlfriend named Heather ("Heather the Heifer"). We decided to become Broadway stars to impress boys. (FYI, boys who are interested in Broadway aren't going to be impressed with us for our ravishing figures, Jayden... Just one pearl of wisdom I've picked up...) We decided to leave the damned radio stations alone so we wouldn't get arrested. Or grounded.

Occasionally, I have the urge to call up half a dozen 800-numbers and order catalogues sent to Jayden. Maybe Victoria's Secret. Most definitely the Honeybaked Ham Company. Just to let her know I still love her.

Always,
~Helena*

"Doc Welles says, if you're not crankin' it, you must be YANKIN' it!" --an old radio slogan that just shocked the shit out of Jayden and I...