“John?”

“No, it’s Pearl.”

“Pearl? Why do you sound like a man?”

“That was Earl. He’s on here too.”

“Hey y’all.”

“Earl, how’s that gout?”

“How many people are on this thing?”

“Gout’s doing great, but I’m not doing so good.”

“I need to use the line, please.”

“Who were you calling?”

“I wasn’t calling you. I need to call my grandson.”

“He still in Tuscaloosa trying to get above his raisings?”

My grandmother had a party line. Some called it a multiparty line or shared service line. Basically several customers were on one phone line. In a cell phone world, few people today have ever experienced such a thing or participated in the total confusion and wicked gossip it can cause. In other words it was awesome. There were no secrets on the party line.

“Pour the neck out of that RC and fill it up with Early Times,” said a man who sounded like Percy Walker, but who had likely never read anything stronger than the instructions on a snuff can.

About eight people were on my grandmother’s line. If you picked up the phone while two of them were talking, you had to wait until they finished. Or yell at them to finish. Or, better yet, just listen and try not to let them hear you laughing. What I heard was better than television. There were divorces in the making, Bible thumpers, and insane babble, cheating preachers, cooking advice or detailed descriptions on the location of a rabid dog. To hear old people talk, we had a lot of rabid dogs loose down in Lower Alabama at the time. Yet I never saw but one, and he was freshly shot by a man who some people said stole cars, but I never believed it. Sometimes the conversation on the party line would be about me.

An old woman complained about how long my hair was, and how fast I drove my old 1962 Galaxie 500 that had belonged to my grandfather, and how it was a shame that a heathen like me was driving my grandpaw’s car “straight to hell,” and on the way I was probably making multiple stops at liquor stores and “beer-and-a-beating-for-a-dollar” joints with “them nasty neon signs advertising sin and inebriation to the wicked.” I actually heard those last words exactly as I typed them. You tend to remember things like that when you are bored and live out in the back forty with pigs and chickens and enough ammo to shoot everything you have ever seen in your life.

Things said on that line defied the laws of Southern hospitality. Face to face, folks were genteel, but if they stayed too long on the line, words became heated.

“Lilly, don’t make me come down there and snatch that phone off your ear.”

“You think I caint hear you listening to us?”

“I heard what you said about me last night and I’m here to tell you that if I hear it again on here, I’m going to tell everybody about you and that preacher.”

After that exchange, I heard the preacher cussing a man who ran through his wife’s clothesline on a tractor.

“”Your wife was on the tractor too!” yelled the man in guilty defense.

This type of entertainment went on day and night. It was better than movies at the Martin Theater and cost nothing but a skinny phone bill, which my grandmother paid.

One day the phone company came out and gave everyone their own private line. It broke my heart. A few years later I asked a woman at the A&P about how she liked her private line.

“Them changing that thing was the worst day of my life,” she opined. “I had to start going to church to hear gossip that good.”

{NOTE: The pic up there is my grandmother’s old phone. It is in my house now, and still works perfectly minus the drama coming through the receiver.}