Excuse me, stranger. Could you spare a dime? You see, my mother needs an operation and if I can’t place a call at once, she might never get that new hip she’s had her eye on. You understand. Thank you for the dime. Now if you could just scrounge up another 40 cents, I’m in business. The rates have gone up, you know. Way up. If this keeps up, nobody will be able to afford to make calls and the phone booths may become obsolete.

If you can imagine.

You have no idea what I’m talking about. If you were born any time after 1990, you’ve probably never made a call at a public pay phone. You’ve never had the joy of ripping your car apart, seats and all, in search of a stray quarter to drop into the slot.

If you are 20 or younger, you’ve probably never experienced the eye-popping rage of having a phone booth eat the last of your change without giving anything in return.

Or the fury that comes with being punished for carrying around a Canadian quarter, which a phone booth would spit out like bad food.

Or the fist-pounding frustration of a recorded voice advising you to drop more loot into the slot if you want a few more minutes of precious talk time.

But I remember.

That horrible voice always chimed in just before the best parts of the conversation. The girl on the other end of the line was about to say yes. Or your roommate was just about to cave in and let you back into the apartment. Or, if you happened to be in an action-packed motion picture starring Samuel L. Jackson, the diabolical terrorist was seconds from telling you where to find the next clue.

That’s when the phone people, who had obviously been listening in the whole time, chose to cut in with demands for more pocket change. The sadists. And of course, you didn’t have any more. You might have a thousand dollars in bills stuffed inside your wallet, but the phone people didn’t want your silly paper money. They wanted silver — elusive dimes and big, fat quarters.

You’d turn your pockets inside out and find nothing but lint. You’d have to go into the store to break a dollar and by the time you came back out, some bastard would be there cradling your phone and he’d have enough quarters to pay for a weeklong conversation. You’d try catching his eye and pointing to your watch, but he wouldn’t bite. He’d lean comfortably against a wall just to let you know that it was his phone now and he had no intention of giving it up.

So you’d jog three blocks to the next phone booth. Panting, jingling with all those quarters in your pocket, you’d find one outside a laundromat but there would be a big “Out of Order” sign with a sad, frowning phone drawn by some twit in the phone company art department.

You jog two more blocks, pausing here and there to throw up bits of lung, before finding a phone booth outside a seedy hotel on the edge of the city. This one wouldn’t have an “Out of Order” sign but the actual phone receiver would have been ripped off the cord. At the next one, you’d find both receiver AND cord missing and a big wad of gum (or something) wedged into the coin slot.

And on and on you would go, running from one block to the next until you were in another city altogether and then you’d be lost as well as in desperate need of a phone. Is it any wonder you started drinking at the age of 12?

Oh, the forgotten joys of the phone booth. I remember when they were actual dwellings, tall edifices made of glass and steel you could walk right into and then shut the door behind you. Me, I always worried that the door would shut and then refuse to open again. I’d be trapped inside the claustrophobic booth and I’d have to call for help, only I wouldn’t have enough change in my pocket and so I’d die there. They’d find a defeated-looking skeleton with one nickel clutched between the bony fingers and that would be that.

Plus, the old booths always smelled of cigarette smoke and urine, but if they were good enough for Superman, they were good enough for me.

Eventually, the old-style phone booths transformed into something sleeker — mutant half-booths with no glass and no doors. They wouldn’t shield you from rain and there was very little surface area on which to scrawl your name or a dirty message, but still. They were public phones, available to anybody, and if you had a couple dimes burning a hole in your pocket, you were in business.

I have some really good memories involving phone booths. And some really bad ones.

A good one might include the period, as a teen, when I made the phone booth outside Pizza Ranch in Waterville my own personal space. I used to carry a very professional looking “out of order” sign around inside my coat to thwart others if I was expecting a phone call. It was brilliant.

I realize that a few of you reading this might be from Waterville and you might have been inconvenienced a time or two by that “out of order” phone outside Pizza Ranch. And if so, I’d like to offer my apology along with this sentiment: “Ha ha ha! Are you stupid? I used a green magic marker and a flattened Budweiser six-pack to create that sign. You thought it was real? Damn, you’re dumb.”

But I’m sincerely sorry if you lost your job, your girlfriend or your place of residence due to my guile. In my defense, I was expecting a call from one of the Kellys and I really wanted to take this particular Kelly to the junior high dance. I hope that makes your unemployed, lonely existence a little easier to bear.

A bad memory would include the time I got stranded in South Portland — through a series of unfortunate events I shan’t get into here — and had to walk 6 miles in freezing cold to find a phone booth only to discover that I didn’t have a dime to my name. Not that it mattered one way or another. The phone booth was out of order.

Or the time I called Kelly from a phone booth in Washington, D.C., only to hear the voice of another boy on the other end of the line.

Or that time I did get hopelessly stuck inside a booth after Randy Gooldrup, that weasel, wedged it shut with a broken hockey stick and ran off giggling. And right before the junior high dance, too.

And so it’s with a mix of elation and sadness — but mostly elation — that I acknowledge for the first time that phone booths are dead. You still see them here or there, but they are mere relics with yellowed phone books dangling in protective shells.

These days, if things get hectic and you have to make a call, you can just borrow your 8-year-old nephew’s brand-new Nexus or hit your favorite drug dealer up for his disposable TracFone. No change necessary and you can talk all you want. Technology, baby. All that and no troubling urine smell.

Although, I think there’s an app for that.

* Helpful tip: Wondering if there’s a phone booth near you? Fear not. Here’s a master list, courtesy of Rob Page of Kennebunk.

* Want to hear what others think about phone booths? Fear not. There’s Facebook.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can send urine-smell apps to him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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