Excerpt from David Giffels’ Be Approximately Yourself: A Rust Belt Memoir, coming in 2011 from William Morrow/HarperCollins, possibly under that title and possibly not.

867-5309: A Love Song

 

            To live in a place like Akron then was to feel unusually isolated. The blossoming of mass media in the early 1980s didn’t connect all places then the way it later would; instead, its growing eminence cast the obscurity of relatively obscure places (such as mine) into higher relief. Everything we saw on television or heard on the radio or read in a magazine came from New York or Los Angeles or, occasionally, Canada. Which made the rest of us seem more disconnected than we really were. But then, in that summer of my 18^th year, I heard this harmonized chorus … a song, a hit on the radio, by the band Tommy Tutone … a song of obsession, of unrequited love, for a girl named Jenny, whose number was found on a bathroom wall:

            Eight six seven five three oh ni-ee-niyne …

            867? I put my ear toward the radio. I heard it again, a startlingly familiar series of numbers. 867 was a local telephone exchange, and not just a local exchange, but the one in my own neighborhood. Everyone I knew in the blocks surrounding my house had a number that started with an 8, and most of them started with that very one — 867. Somebody had written a song about where I lived, and it was a good song, and it was a hit. My slowly emerging sense of art suggested that the most important songs were about real life experiences, which was why everyone seemed so crazy about Bruce Springsteen, because everyone who listened to him literally had a “hungry heart” and could therefore relate personally to his lyrics. But now there was a song about a real life experience that was not a familiar generalization; it actually referred to a specific aspect my own life experience. America was vast and fascinating in its every region, infinite in its telephonic numerology, and the writer of that song (who was from California!) could have picked any exchange to represent any place — or could have picked “555-5309” to represent every place (which inevitably would have represented no place). But he didn’t. This Jenny person could be living a block away.

            We knew what we had to do. We went to the basement. My brother took his position as overseer. I lifted the receiver and dialed.

            8…6…7…5…3…0…9…

            “Hello?”

            I had never really called a girl before, not with direct intent, and certainly I had never cold-called, and certainly not someone famous.

            “Is? … Is Jenny th–”

            Click.

***

It took a while for the news to reach us, mostly because it wasn’t really “news” so much as the opposite of news, but somehow we learned that there were 867-5309’s in other places — apparently lots of other places — and the one that was getting all the attention was the home phone number of the daughter of the Buffalo chief of police, who was pretty unhappy about the whole thing. Which meant we were nobody again.

            We kept calling the local number from time to time, because more than anything else, that’s what teenage boys do: the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. But we never so much as got the satisfaction of being yelled at, and soon we learned that even that part of the unraveling myth was not exclusively ours; apparently everyone in the area code who owned a radio had thought of the same prank and before long the seven precious numbers resulted in three atonal beeps followed by the sad familiar refrain:

            We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.

David Giffels’ latest book is the memoir All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-down House. He is a creative writing professor at the University of Akron, a former writer for Beavis and Butt-Head, a longtime Akron Beacon Journal columnist, an unauthorized biographer of Devo and once, long ago, a Cavaliers ballboy. His next book, a Rust Belt memoir, is due next year from William Morrow/HarperCollins.