Emergency Breakthrough for Scott

 S.E. Schaible

September of 1976 marked the start of junior high school for me. The school year started just weeks after the debut album by Boston, and I dropped the needle onto it each day when I came home from school. Where I grew up in northern New Jersey, junior high encompassed grades 7-9, what today is commonly referred to as middle school – although middle schools now span grades 6-8. It was a time when I was simultaneously afraid of and obsessed with girls. As an example, in the spring of 6th grade, lots of boys and girls started “going together.” I wanted to invite my classmate, Jill, to go to the annual Kiwanis Carnival in our town, but each time I tried to get up the nerve I vapor-locked when I approached her. I couldn’t enunciate eight simple words: WilI you go to the carnival with me? It would have barely resembled a proper date: I would have put on some of my father’s Brut or English Leather cologne, we would have bought hot dogs or funnel cakes, and I may well have had an aneurysm over questions like, should I hold her hand? My friends would have high-fived me when they saw us and later quizzed me about what base I’d gotten to with her; her friends would have asked her if we had kissed after dark while riding the Himalayan or the Tilt-a-Whirl.

I confessed this (not to this level of detail) to Jill via Facebook Messenger 34 years later, after a brief sidebar about a class photo I’d posted. Nothing lame, not probing for a hookup, just candidly dishing with an old friend. She was living in Europe and we were both married by then with kids going through their own coming of age challenges, and we had a brief chuckle over it. Back when I was too chickenshit to ask her out, I was introspective enough to seek advice from some friends who always made dating look easy, including Adam Shapiro and Danny Zuker. Starting in 5th grade, those guys routinely held hands with girls at parties and – importantly – didn’t seem to fall apart or have any issues moving on when the inevitable breakups occurred days or weeks later. Thanks to you both for helping a brother in need. I suspect multiple years of summer camps and teen tours made them my resident experts.

I was reasonably popular, I played the drums in a string of decent bands, and I had no reason to question my mother who frequently described me as handsome, so I don’t know why I was so shy about something I wanted so badly. My older brother Chuck was popular and one of the best lead guitar players in the area, winner of several battles of the bands. He always had girls calling the house, and a string of hookups when he was in between serious girlfriends. When I would ride my bike to the town pool, girls in my brother’s class would circle me and interrogate me about where he was, who he was dating, and when his band was playing next. In fairness to myself my brother was 5 years older than me, so whatever his arc toward becoming rock star boyfriend material, it happened when I was a clueless younger boy. I wore a tiger’s eye Italian horn necklace purchased at a gift shop along the old, trashy Fort Lauderdale strip when visiting my grandmother, and I had the full Shawn Cassidy feathered long hair thing dialed in. I had the obligatory Farrah Fawcett t-shirts and wore button-downs with a minimum of the top three snap buttons undone. My voice changed earlier than most of the boys I knew. Nobody could tell my older brother and me apart on the telephone – not even our mother.

Two weeks into 7th grade at Heritage Junior High, I met several new friends from other parts of Livingston in Mrs. Downey’s homeroom and other classrooms. A half-dozen elementary schools fed into Heritage, and kids from schools on the other side of town funneled into Mt. Pleasant. Among the favorite new girls I befriended were Dana, Barbara, Alanna and Jo Ann, and becoming friends with them helped me gain confidence simply by being around them. They helped me realize that girls weren’t alien creatures – being friends with them helped me demystify the whole process. Somewhere along the line I apparently met someone named Ashley, or maybe she simply spotted me on the hill one morning smoking a joint with my crew, and she began calling my house at all hours only to fall silent when I picked up – just breathing into the phone. A couple of times she giggled but that was the extent of it – it seemed she just wanted to hear my voice.

After a week of these creepy non-conversations, I asked my mother to tell her I wasn’t home if she called again – which resulted in rude hangups. Mom was perplexed by what was happening and more than once asked, rhetorically, “what is going on in that head of hers?” These were the days before *69 and caller ID – and the calls didn’t slow down but rather increased to full stalker mode. When someone was on the phone, Ashley didn’t let a busy signal get in her way; She dialed 0 for an operator and invoked something none of us had ever heard of – the emergency breakthrough. An operator would break through on the call with a beep, and say “this is the AT&T operator with an emergency breakthrough for Mr. Scott, will you accept the call?” The way I discovered it was Ashley calling was, she used her own name by mistake on a few breakthrough attempts. Typically, she’d use a pseudonym – Billy Joel and Debby Harry were popular choices, but there were actors, athletes and others in the mix, including Butch Cassidy. I sometimes caught her staring at me at lunchtime or at parties on weekends and began to realize there was nothing cute or harmless about it. It was a genuine nuisance and a pain in the ass for my family. Ashley isn’t her real name; I track down old friends regularly to fact-check and seek permission to use their names in my writing, but in this case, there was no sensible option but to fictionalize this person. Especially after she showed up at a party one Friday night wearing the Heritage Phys Ed t-shirt with “Schaible” jotted on the crest – the shirt that had gone missing from my gym locker that week, leading to Mr. Myers giving me grief at gym class. “I see you hanging around with those burnouts, Mr. Schaible. Don’t throw away your chance to be a varsity athlete.”

These operator-assisted breakthroughs – easily numbering in the hundreds, often several per night – were an annoyance. Cringing in the other room, I remember hearing my mother ask, “Who is making this emergency breakthrough?” The only word she said in response to presumably being told it was Cher or Carly Simon was a curt, “No!” It went on for months. My father was on a business call late one night – he was in the heating oil business and was coordinating a service call with one of his customers whose oil burner gave out on a frigid night in November – and I heard him unload on the operator. “Hello? What the heck is this? No, the answer is no and I want to know how to file a complaint about this, since there is no emergency. I want to speak with a supervisor.” I think the threat was sufficient to dissuade Ashley from making any more operator-assisted breakthroughs because I don’t remember another one happening. She soon stopped calling altogether – presumably training her sights on some other boy. The net result of the months of harassment was that I got my own “teen line” phone in my bedroom, and my father paid extra to keep the number unlisted. In the landline era, getting another line installed was no simple thing; a technician had to come and drill holes in the home’s exterior to wire my room, and there were costs involved. A recent online search revealed that these operator-assisted breakthrough calls cost an average of $2.00 apiece in the late 1970s, which begs the question of how her parents reacted when they saw all these extra charges on their phone bill. Did they think it was cute and harmless? Were they concerned?

I had a stalker before I had my first real kiss. That milestone happened a few months later, courtesy of my friend Michael’s sister Lisa. We both had braces and rubber bands on our teeth, and it was clumsy and incredible. She was beautiful, fun and frisky, and she had a slight, endearing lisp. As the kiss happened, I had to remind myself to breathe – but breathing meant pausing this sweet encounter. I also had the jarring realization that her brother, my close friend, was arguably the best fighter in our town. Their mom was a soft-spoken woman, but stern Italian would erupt from her and scare the daylights out of us when she had to ask a second time for one her kids to take out the trash. In 7th grade, I wanted to be Michael. He was charismatic, independent, caring, and sensitive even with the bravado and temper he wore like a mask. Instead of threatening a knuckle sandwich when he learned about Lisa and me sneaking away from the campfire in the woods near Collins School, he offered a handshake and a warm smile. We were sympatico. Things were cool.

Michael resides in my pantheon of influential men. I started out as a 90th percentile kid and could handle myself physically until the summer after 4th grade when I inexplicably stopped growing. When someone messed with me, I used to switch from words to fists the way a fighter pilot switches from guns to missiles. But that was when I was tall for my age, and that came to an abrupt end when I was 10 years old. My new modus operandi was to get back at you later on, under more favorable guerilla conditions. I would mess up your bike, trash your tree fort, egg your house or smash your pumpkins. My size and stature forced me to take my payback efforts underground, and got creative with it, but I always admired Michael and certain others who didn’t need to sneak around with their responses to transgressions. I was never envious of Michael; I had mad respect for him.

I miss that guy and any time I run into people from Livingston I always ask about him. I haven’t heard anything reliable about Michael since college. I hope he is happy and well, and unlike a certain other person, I would love to hear from him sometime.

Read my last story- The Wanderer