Phoneman---stories from the boiler room and below..

    My name is George Katz; age 57. I am starting a new blog that will focus on my years working in a series of sleazy phone rooms on the West Coast. Like the carnival, the boiler room scene is a way of life that is dying out and should be documented. Primarily, you will see a series of anecdotes portraying some of the characters I used to work with. The action will not be in any chronological order; and the characters will be "unstuck in time" a la Vonnegut. The timespan is roughly 1980 to 2010.
   In addition to the phone room stories, I will occasionally be digressing into some rock and roll filth centered around playing toilets like the old Satyricon in Portland.
  
   Oso Sanchez had returned from break.....but not with his hands empty! The heroin-addicted 'Nam vet would often prowl and clumsily break into cars within a block or two of the office at 2nd and Oak, then duck back into the building with his pitiful haul. I recall him breaking into the trunk of a car near a different office off Powell Blvd. about eight years before; that time he ended up taking three different busses to sell a jack for five dollars. So now he comes into the office glasses fogged, sweating from the drugs and exertion, clutching an obsolete am/fm car radio still trailing wires. What caught my eye was not the radio, as he often displayed various questionable electronics for sale. Covering his head like some kind of obscene parody of a baby bonnet, was what appeared to be an old lady little-house-on-the-prairie type of 19th century frilled night-cap. It was in the car with the radio, so in a jaunty act of joie de vivre, he chose to wear it on in to the phone room. No-one working there gave him a second look.
   At this particular office, Oso would sometimes show up with visible injuries. When questioned as to the origin of the scrapes and bruises, he would go into an elaborate story about getting into a wreck on his bicycle. It didn't take long to figure out that he was getting sloppy with the car prowls and being caught in the act. For some victims,  it made more sense to just beat the heck out of him instead of calling the law.
  When Oso eventually did get caught by the police, an officer informed our boss Ophelia that they believed he was responsible for a significant percentage of the car break-ins in the immediate vicinty of the office.