Crack Phone

In the era before the cellphone, pay phones were a safety net of communication. You didn't have to stay at home to speak with somebody not next to you. They were often broken and especially in inner city neighborhoods (is it just me or has inner city become a term no longer in use), street kids and drug dealers commandeered pay phones on some corners. You would not be allowed to use them. I remembered some of those uncomfortable interactions – one time I was in a suit and had to call a job interviewer and being told I couldn’t use a phone by a guy with a scar on the side of his face; he was about a foot taller than I and not alone – when I saw this crack phone. I wonder if the graffiti writer here held the receiver horizontally or painted crack vertically. Was the inspiration love of crack or something else? Seems retro, crack enthusiasm, like a ghetto posture by somebody obviously not ghetto, somebody slumming in the slums, although this was in what seemed like a safe and clean neighborhood, a corner near the J.C. Heights, where some guys of Indian and/or Pakistan descent played on the basketball court across the sidewalk from the crack phone.