given you something unnecessary to worry about during your final hours.”
“Except I won’t,” Applewhite says. “Pain almost seems beside the point.
Once you get used to the idea of dying, what difference does it make if it hurts a little? Or even more than a little? It won’t last long, no matter what it feels like.”
“That’s a wonderful attitude, Preston.”
“It’s not going to spoil my ice cream, Arne. I’ll tell you that much.” Driving south on I-95, he slows down when he sees the sign for the Outback Steakhouse, then decides to keep going. There’s a Circle K near his Days Inn, and he can stop there for a pint of vanilla ice cream and bring it back to his room.
7
The first thing TJ tried was the phone number. It was his cell phone, Louise had told us, and the prefix was 917, which is one of two area codes set aside for mobile phones in the New York area. There’s an online reverse directory TJ knows how to use, and that’s where he went, hoping to find a name and address. But there was no listing for that number.
“Might be he walked into a store, bought a phone with prepaid minutes on it. You dealing in product, that’s how you do. Walk into one of those stores on Fourteenth Street, pay cash for a phone, and you in business. Don’t even have to give a name, ’cause you ain’t opening an account, you just buying a phone with the minutes already on it. They start to run out, you go back where you bought it and give the man more money, and they give you some more minutes.”
“And it’s all off the books.”
“Far as you’re concerned, it is. Whether the store declares the cash, well, we don’t care about that part, do we?”
“It won’t keep us up nights. I don’t suppose you have to be a dope dealer to get a phone that way.”
“Way I got mine. It’s simpler and you don’t get no bill every month.
Don’t get no telemarketers, either. Don’t have to get on the Do Not Call list, ’cause you ain’t on the Call list to begin with.”
“Those are definite advantages,” I had to admit. “The only way to All the Flowers Are Dying
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improve on it would be not to have a phone at all. For David Thompson, though, you wouldn’t think he’d want to play hard to get. He’s a freelance copywriter. If nobody knows his phone number, how does he get work?”
“His clients would have the number. Same as the dope dealers.”
“What about new business?”
“Be a problem.”
“He told Louise it’s feast or famine in his line of work. During famine times, I wouldn’t think you’d want to make it hard for people to get in touch with you. He’s got to have more than one phone.”
“ ’Less he stupid.”
“He’d have a land line in his office. He might not give her the number because that’s his business line.”
“Or because he ain’t who he says he is.”
“Always a possibility.”
“Whole lot of David Thompsons in the phone book. Plus all the D Thompsons.”
“It’s a place to start,” I said.
And it didn’t require computer skills, either, just a sedentary version of the kind of doggedness I’d learned fresh out of the Police Academy.
GOYAKOD was the acronym, and it stood for Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors. I did just that, albeit metaphorically, and made phone calls, working my way through the D and David Thompsons in the Manhattan white pages.
“I’m not sure I have the right party,” I’d tell whoever answered. “I’m trying to reach the David Thompson who writes direct-mail advertising copy.”
One man pointed out that the one thing to be said for direct-mail advertising was that it didn’t interrupt your day the way a phone call did. But most of the people I reached were polite enough, if unhelpful; they weren’t the David Thompson I was looking for, nor had they heard of the fellow. I thanked them and put a check mark next to their names and moved on to the next listing.
That’s how it went when I got an actual person on the phone, which didn’t happen all that often. Most of the time I got a machine or a 62
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voice mail system, in which case I left a message saying essentially what I’d have said to a human being, and adding my phone number. I didn’t expect a lot of callbacks, but you never know, and there was always the chance someone might be monitoring his machine, waiting to see who it was before picking up. That happened once; I was halfway through my spiel when a woman came on the line to tell me her husband was not a copywriter but an insurance agent with Vermont Life.
But maybe she could help me after all, she suggested. How long had it been since I’d had a thorough review of my insurance needs?
“I suppose I had that coming,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. I won’t call you anymore, and you don’t call me.” She said that sounded fair enough, and I put a check mark next to her husband’s name.
I’ve known a few people in advertising over the years, but if I’d met them in AA I rarely knew their last names, or where they worked.
