THE MF BOOGIE BLUES

The next number I choose from the select list of phonephreak illuminati prepared for me by the blue-box inventor is a Memphis number. It is the number of Joe Engressia, the first and still perhaps the most accomplished blind phone phreak.

Three years ago Engressia was a nine-day wonder in newspapers and magazines all over America because he had been discovered whistling free long-distance connections for fellow students at the University of South Florida. Engressia was born with perfect pitch; he could whistle phone tones better than the phone-company equipment.

Engressia might have gone on whistling in the dark for a few friends for the rest of his life if the phone company hadn’t decided to expose him. He was warned, disciplined by the college, and the whole case became public. In the months following media reports of his talent, Engressia began receiving strange calls. There were calls from a group of kids in Los Angeles who could do some very strange things with the quirky General Telephone and Electronics circuitry in L.A. suburbs. There were calls from a group of mostly blind kids in —-, California, who had been doing some interesting experiments with Cap’n Crunch whistles and test loops. There was a group in Seattle, a group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few from New York, a few scattered across the country. Some of them had already equipped themselves with cassette and electronic M-F devices. For some of these groups, it was the first time they knew of the others.

The exposure of Engressia was the catalyst that linked the separate phone-phreak centers together. They all called Engressia. They talked to him about what he was doing and what they were doing. And then he told them—the scattered regional centers and lonely independent phone phreakers—about each other, gave them each other’s numbers to call, and within a year the scattered phone-phreak centers had grown into a nationwide underground.

Joe Engressia is only twenty-two years old now, but along the phone-phreak network he is “the old man,” accorded by phone phreaks something of the reverence the phone company bestows on Alexander Graham Bell. He seldom needs to make calls anymore. The phone phreaks all call him and let him know what new tricks, new codes, new techniques they have learned. Every night he sits like a sightless spider in his little apartment receiving messages from every tendril of his web. It is almost a point of pride with Joe that

they

call

him.

But when I reached him in his Memphis apartment that night, Joe Engressia was lonely, jumpy and upset.

“God, I’m glad somebody called. I don’t know why tonight of all nights I don’t get any calls. This guy around here got drunk again tonight and propositioned me again. I keep telling him we’ll never see eye to eye on this subject, if you know what I mean. I try to make light of it, you know, but he doesn’t get it. I can hear him out there getting drunker and I don’t know what he’ll do next. It’s just that I’m really all alone here. I just moved to Memphis, it’s the first time I’m living out on my own, and I’d hate for it to all collapse now. But I won’t go to bed with him. I’m just not very interested in sex and even if I can’t see him I know he’s ugly.

“Did you hear that? That’s him banging a bottle against the wall outside. He’s nice. Well forget about it. You’re doing a story on phone phreaks? Listen to this. It’s the

M F Boogie

blues.”

Sure enough, a jumpy version of

Muskrat Ramble

boogies its way over the line, each note one of those long-distance phone tones. The music stops. A huge roaring voice blasts the phone off my ear: “AND THE QUESTION IS…roars the voice, “CAN A BLIND PERSON HOOK UP AN AMPLIFIER ON HIS OWN?”

The roar ceases. A high-pitched operator-type voice replaces it. “This is Southern Braille Tel. & Tel. Have tone, will phone.”

This is succeeded by a quick series of M-F tones, a swift “kachink” and a deep reassuring voice: “If you need home care, call the visiting-nurses association. First National time in Honolulu is 4:32 p.m.”

Joe back in his Joe voice again: “Are we seeing eye to eye?

‘Sí, sí,’

said the blind Mexican. Ahem. Yes. Would you like to know the weather in Tokyo ?”

This swift manic sequence of phone-phreak vaudeville stunts and blind-boy jokes manages to keep Joe’s mind off his tormentor only as long as it lasts.

“The reason I’m in Memphis, the reason I have to depend on that homosexual guy, is that this is the first time I’ve been able to live on my own and make phone trips on my own. I’ve been banned from all central offices around home in Florida, they knew me too well, and at the University some of my fellow scholars were always harassing me because I was on the dorm pay phone all the time and making fun of me because of my fat ass, which of course I do have, it’s my physical fatness program, but I don’t like to hear it every day, and if I can’t phone trip and I can’t phone phreak, I can’t imagine what I’d do, I’ve been devoting three quarters of my life to it.

“I moved to Memphis because I wanted to be on my own as well as because it has a Number 5 crossbar switching system and some interesting little independent phone-company districts nearby and so far they don’t seem to know who I am so I can go on phone tripping, and for me phone tripping is just as important as phone phreaking.”

Phone tripping, Joe explains, begins with calling up a central-office switch room. He tells the switchman in a polite earnest voice that he’s a blind college student interested in telephones, and could he perhaps have a guided tour of the switching station? Each step of the tour Joe likes to touch and feel relays, caress switching circuits, switchboards, crossbar arrangements.

So when Joe Engressia phone phreaks he feels his way through the circuitry of the country garden of forking paths, he

feels

switches shift, relays shunt, crossbars swivel, tandems engage and disengage even as he hears—with perfect pitch—his M-F pulses make the entire Bell system dance to his tune.

Just one month ago Joe took all his savings out of his bank and left home, over the emotional protests of his mother. “I ran away from home almost,” he likes to say. Joe found a small apartment house on Union Avenue and began making phone trips. He’d take a bus a hundred miles south into Mississippi to see some old-fashioned Bell equipment still in use in several states, which had been puzzling. He’d take a bus three hundred miles to Charlotte, North Carolina, to look at some brand-new experimental equipment. He hired a taxi to drive him twelve miles to a suburb to tour the office of a small phone company with some interesting idiosyncracies in its routing system. He was having the time of his life, he said, the most freedom and pleasure he had known.

In that month he had done very little long-distance phone phreaking from his own phone. He had begun to apply for a job with the phone company, he told me, and he wanted to stay away from anything illegal.

“Any kind of job will do, anything as menial as the most lowly operator. That’s probably all they’d give me because I’m blind. Even though I probably knew more than most switchmen. But that’s okay. I want to work for Ma Bell. I don’t hate Ma Bell the way Gilbertson and some phone phreaks do. I don’t want to screw Ma Bell. With me it’s the pleasure of pure knowledge. There’s something beautiful about the system when you know it intimately the way I do. But I don’t know how much they know about me here. I have a very intuitive feel for the condition of the line I’m on, and I think they’re monitoring me off and on lately, but I haven’t been doing much illegal. I

have

to make a few calls to switchmen once in a while which aren’t strictly legal, and once I took an acid trip and was having these auditory hallucinations as if I were trapped and these planes were dive-bombing me, and all of a sudden I

had

to phone phreak out of there. For some reason I had to call Kansas City, but that’s all.”

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