This article originally appeared in the January 26, 1982 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
…Seconds later, a silky voice answered and I told her what was on my mind. ‘I understand you can help me set up an hour of good chat,’ I said.
‘Sure, honey. What do you have in mind?’
‘I’d like to discuss Melville.’‘
Moby Dick, or the shorter novels?’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘The price. That’s all. Symbolism’s extra.’
'What’ll it run me?’
‘Fifty, maybe a hundred for Moby Dick. You want a comparative discussion — Melville and Hawthorne? That could be arranged for a hundred.’
‘The dough’s fine,’ I told her and gave her the number of a room at the Plaza.
‘You want a blond or a brunette?’
‘Surprise me,’ I said, and hung up…
-Detective Kaiser Lupowitz, from Woody Allen’s “The Whore of Mensa”
As usual, the Woodman was a beat ahead of his time. He first published those lines, in the New Yorker, in 1974; today, the “chat” industry is booming. Although it’s not news that a well-timed sigh, or a sweet-and-raunchy nothing, can be a turn-on, a new breed of sexual entrepreneur has turned all talk/no action into an equation for success. Heavy breathing cum heavy breathing is a big — and ostensibly legitimate — business. Even in establishment circles, the arrival of the new, aural sex is talked about openly.
“Always alert for signs of cultural progress, I was startled to discover recently that it is now possible to dial an obscene phone call,” New York Times magazine columnist Russell Baker recently observed. “This is not one of the telephone company services, like Dial-a-Joke. It is the brainchild of various small-business people who have detected a need and found a way to satisfy it profitably.” He went on to describe the modus operandi of the so-called fantasy-phone services, a number of which advertise in this periodical and others that permit placement of such ads. “You dial a number (and) tell an operator which woman… you’d like to do the talking and how long you want her to talk. Then you give your credit card number. The operator checks a computer to make sure you’re not a deadbeat, then clears you to listen to the amount of obscene phone calls you’ve ordered. The expense is paid at the end of the month when the credit-card company bills you.”
Had Baker wanted to be comprehensive, he could have noted that what passes for cultural progress (“Hot horny ladies want to speak with you right now!”) has spawned no fewer than three pay-to-play ways to get gamy with grammar and sexy with syntax. Fantasy phones are just part of the ears-only sexual revolution. In Boston sex shops, for example, dirty talk comes packaged in an assortment of breathy audio cassettes. In the privacy of your own home, you can replay all your favorite pieces of chat. In the sexual-amusement arcades of the Combat Zone (which last week was blasted in Governor Edward King’s state-of-the-state address as “a monument to the degradation of the defense of free speech”), carnal chatter is available tete-a-tete (almost) in dimly lit booths known as rap-peeps. With a roving eye for ears-only sex life, and nary a care for what this brand of journalistic research did to the once considerable abilities of Gay Talese (can’t you see it now?: Thy Neighbor’s Phone, your intrepid correspondent set out to survey the chat scene. Sure, it was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it. As WBZ’s former arts-and-entertainment reporter Mary Stewart used to say, “I see it all, so you don’t have to.” Or something like that.
If busy signals are an indicator of demand, the fantasy-phones market is a big one. Despite the phone’s nagging tendency to spoil a good time (most people I know get hot by what goes on when you leave a receiver off the hook, unattended, not by what happens when you hang, breathless and earsore, on the end of the thing), it and the libido have been strange bedfellows from the day the instrument was invented. Although he was calling for help because he spilled some laboratory acid on himself, Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephonic transmission, more than 100 years ago (“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you”), is viewed by some devotees of chat as indicative of the sexual energy inherent to the wire. My experience — I called around until I finally made a connection — was the exception to that rule. In fairness to the concept, what happened to me might not have been typical. My fantasy-phone mate and I hit it off not at all. In truth, I never got past my fantasy-phone pimp. Not one to give out my driver’s license/social security number, home address, credit-card information, unlisted phone number, and middle name on the first date (even if I am being charged $35 for the privilege), I might be said to have brought on our incompatibility. Our conversation was brief (I’ve had longer calls to the National Weather Service), and it went almost nowhere.
