It takes forever to make the connection. Not surprising, really. The pay phone is calling the cel unit built into my Yamaha pocket secretary, which is sitting on the bug-infested bed in my room at The Promise. The secretary is holding that call and using a parallel channel to place another call—that’s multiple call capability, the feature I spent so fragging long looking for in the help files—to a number I programmed into it before I left the flophouse. When the recipient of that second call picks up the phone, the secretary patches the two lines together. Simple (yeah, right).