Talking (A True Story)
By Todd Colby
He said he could talk with dead people on the phone
and there was no explanation. The dead people on the other end
were heard explaining things to him about
what it felt like to talk on the telephone when they are dead
and what sort of food they ate and TV shows they watched
and what they did in their free time (bathed repeatedly)
and that sort of stuff. They brought in sound technicians with
their mobile labs in big trucks and found that the voices on the phone
were easily matchable with tapes of the dead people talking.
Everyone got totally freaked out by that. Whenever they saw
him on the phone they hoped he was not calling them
or that he would say "hey I'm talking to you on the phone."
It created a hostile environment in the neighborhood
with people all edgy and anticipating some horrifying
revelation that they were just walking around, though dead.
Everyone was also a little worried about what they might
reveal to someone on the telephone if they were dead.
He got a radio show out of the deal and people listened
in record numbers in 2009. He currently lives alone
in Cobble Hill Brooklyn. You can see him with his cell phone
walking down Warren Street talking in a loud theatrical voice,
which is the way he said the dead like to be addressed:
loud and theatrically.