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- Find a pay phone, dial a toll free number and say goodbye to someone. That’s the premise of the Goodbye Line, an art project that utilizes pay phones across L.A.
- Anyone can listen to the messages of grief, loneliness and introspection that are posted on social media. The creators are learning that mourning can be communal.
Alexis Wood received a notification on her phone. It was an anonymous call from a pay phone. She listened and was momentarily paralyzed. And then she couldn’t stop crying.
The call wasn’t completely unexpected. Days earlier, Wood and her partner Adam Trunell had gone prowling for working Los Angeles pay phones, placing stickers on them that invited passersby to make a free call to a recorded line to “say goodbye.” What surprised her was the message.
The voice on the other end of the line sounded like a young man, who confessed that he thought the toll-free 888 number would allow him to call his mother. Once he realized it wouldn’t, he pivoted and followed the recorded prompt to say goodbye — “to remember, to pay respects, to turn the page” — to a loved one or part of yourself.
“I’d like to apologize to my family,” the voice said. “I hope y’all make it to heaven. I’m sorry I didn’t make it.” It was short but powerful and Wood listened to it again on repeat.
An art project called the Goodbye Line prompts passersby to make a collect call and say goodbye — to a loved one, a pet or maybe a part of themselves.
“I started to cry,” Wood says, sitting with Trunell in a downtown coffeeshop. “I didn’t realize this was going to have that effect on me, that this was a very real, authentic moment for someone.”
Alternately rebellious and nostalgic, the Goodbye Line is a relatively new art project found on pay phones throughout the L.A. area.
“Yes, this payphone works” the stickers read in blocky text against a red and white backdrop. The instructions continue with the line, “Someday, these will be gone, like you, me, and everyone else,” prior to inviting readers to leave a message “before it’s too late.” People are calling.
“Goodbye is such a part of life,” says Trunell, a documentary filmmaker who started the experiment with Wood last year. “It’s all us coming and going, coming and going. We all share that. And it makes it less lonely, less scary. Not that it makes it easier.”
Calls do range in tone. At a pay phone in Hollywood, someone says goodbye to their best friend. At downtown’s Pershing Square, two women say goodbye to pay phones, lamenting the loss of anonymous calls.
A caller reaching out from Altadena’s Chaney Trail sings a song, urging people to say goodbye to “anyone, anything ... cuz you never know when it’s your time.” And “it’s not the same without you,” says someone from West Hollywood’s Plummer Park in an ode to a lost pal.
Goodbye is such a part of life. We all share that. And it makes it less lonely, less scary.
— Adam Trunell, the Goodbye Line
The anonymous messages are edited and posted on social media for all to hear and share. (Those who wish to keep their messages private are instructed to say so on the call.) They are snapshots of grief, and our desire to connect, but also audio logs of loneliness in Los Angeles. Pay phones — or the neighborhoods they’re in, rather — have personalities, and while messages have spanned the spectrum from light to heavy, they’re almost all rooted in a desire to tap into a broader community.
“We learned that loss and grief is a process, and mourning isn’t something that’s purely private,” Trunell says. “It’s deeply communal. When you see the likes, the comments and the shares, even if you’re not the one leaving the message, you hear yourself in the goodbye.”
Pay phones are rapidly disappearing.
Though there were more than 27,000 statewide a decade ago, the California Public Utilities Commission reported that, as of March, there are 2,525 active units in California, with 484 in Los Angeles County. In Los Angeles proper, only 149 remain.
There are reportedly more outposts of Starbucks in the city than working public pay phones.
As the Goodbye Line is now more than a year old and finding a broader audience, calls have started to stream in from cellphones. Trunell and Wood encourage its spread, of course, but it’s the pay phone calls that hold a special place in their hearts.
They used to be everywhere.
“I’m not trying to draw any science around it, but it does seem like people who go to pay phones are more in the moment,” says Trunell, noting that the cellphone calls tend to be a bit longer and a little more considered.
“You use a pay phone in a different way than you use a cellphone. It’s not in your pocket. It’s not connected to a camera. You go and do this goodbye in a place that’s different from where you do most of your business. You hear a dial tone. That’s the sound of waiting. Then you leave a message, as if you just dug a hole into the ground.”
As long as the stickers have been active, the couple, who have been romantically partnered for about four years, have received a few each week from pay phones. Every pay phone number is saved in the cellphones of Wood and Trunell with various emojis.
One pay phone is next to a laundromat, “so we have bubbles and soap bar,” Wood says. “You see it pop up, and you know what messages are going to come through.”
And those messages are? “Heavier,” Trunell says.
He notes that in neighborhoods such as Hollywood, Westlake and Skid Row callers tend to get a little deeper into their trauma. In May of last year, a call came in from a pay phone at the Hollywood corner of Yucca Avenue and Wilcox Street. It was a goodbye that had not been able to be said:
“Goodbye, Donny. You were my love from 2017 to a few years ago. But you died last year, and I didn’t know for a long time. It made me very sad.”
Trunell, 46, stresses that the Goodbye Line wasn’t rooted in any personal sense of grief or loss. He and Wood, 37, who has a career in tech, have long flirted with collaborative creative projects, some serious, some silly, such as potentially designing tiny hats for snakes.
Yet being involved with a project that is so intimately voyeuristic into the lives of strangers, sometimes at their most emotional, can take its toll. A recent call caused serious reflection for Trunell.
The pay phone is sandwiched between a Pizza Hut and Faith Sanctuary Community Church on South Leimert.
It was a goodbye to a mother who died when the caller was a teen. Her passing was unexpected, and the caller noted their last conversation was arguing about middle school grades. “You thought that I might kind of squander my education,” the caller said, before revealing that he believes he would have made his mother proud.
“I love you, and I miss you, and this has been a long overdue goodbye,” the caller said before hanging up.
“Maybe it was the suddenness of it,” Trunell says. “You kind of just walk into this and realize how all this feels. It just sort of happens. The reward is unexpected connections, and reminders of your own humanity. I’m worried about my folks dying, but I don’t think how it’s going to change me. This just feels like a very human project. It takes you out of whatever BS is going on.”
Not all the calls, of course, are so deep. The Chaney Trail pay phone, which has been offline since the Eaton fire in early January, long had a persona of its own, says Wood, one that often was a little more lighthearted. Perhaps expected for a phone on a hiking trail, the calls have tended to lean more toward thoughts of self-actualization than tales of grief, such as a caller saying goodbye to his former, heavier self.
Like many in America, Todd Martens grew up with parents who devoted the bulk of their vacation time to Disney’s theme parks. He now understands them as places to make sense of the world rather than to escape it.
“You get surprised sometimes, but Chaney Trail, for instance, is people saying goodbye to my past and hello to my future,” Wood says.
And then, of course, there are the clearly drunk dials, such as two middle-of-the-night rings from a pay phone near a Pasadena police station.
“This girl left two messages,” Trunell says. “You could tell she had been out. She might have had a couple.”
This is such a reminder that everyone walking by is going through something, and going through things similar to what you’re going through.
— S.C. Mero, artist
Downtown artist S.C. Mero, whose own public art often unexpectedly appears on sidewalks and buildings throughout the city, has championed the Goodbye Line on her social media channels. “You walk around every day and you don’t really think about what’s going through people’s minds,” Mero says. “This is such a reminder that everyone walking by is going through something, and going through things similar to what you’re going through.”
She tends to think of each call as a mini short story. “Most art, when you’re looking at it, you’re looking at the beginning, middle and end. It’s all right there. But with this project, you don’t know where it’s going to go.”
Or how, for instance, it may affect a life.
Brittany Khalifa discovered the Goodbye Line a little more than a year ago when she walked by a pay phone at the corner of 5th and Wall streets on Skid Row. Today, Khalifa has an apartment and is rebuilding her life, but the once-unhoused resident was in a particularly dark place when she called the 888 number.
Hooked on “cocaine powder,” Khalifa said, “I came to L.A. to look for a different part of life. I came to L.A. to be a great photographer.” Her goodbye was to her old self, a person that was once “innocent, pure, young.”
But it wasn’t meant to be a permanent goodbye. “Hopefully I’ll see that person again,” she said, noting she was looking for a better life but didn’t see a path. Addiction and sex work to pay for that addiction were fueling her direction.
Reflecting on that message now, Khalifa stops short of saying her message on the Goodbye Line was a wake-up call, but she hears someone who was just starting to learn how to ask for help.
“I felt like, at that time, I was looking for an ear, a listener,” Khalifa says. “Not that many people know what it’s like to be hooked on a drug. It’s its own world. At that time, I was deep into addiction. I was trying to find a way out, but I didn’t know how ... I called it a hamster wheel. When you first do cocaine, you get stuck on it. The hamster wheel keeps turning. In order to hop off, you have to be at that low. When I left that message, I was looking for that low.”
It was such a personal call, Trunell says, that he reached out to Khalifa to confirm she was comfortable sharing it. Typically, it’s impossible to touch base with someone who calls from a pay phone, but on the message, she left her Instagram handle, and Trunell hoped to link to it, to show people her photography work.
“She seems really cool and has good work,” Trunell says. “And we have the opportunity to say, ‘How you doing? What’s up?’ Just to touch base and say, ‘Thanks. You were kinda going through it at that time.’ But this wasn’t a project to make contact. But when you get a call, there’s a humanity that attaches you to it. Somebody is offering you something with an amount of trust.”
And, Khalifa says, it was appreciated. A Florida transplant, she felt alone, and unable to ask her family for a hand in the physical and emotional state she was in.
“I’m the oddball out in the family,” she says. “I’m the only one who has been hooked on a drug. So I felt like, ‘Why not?’ So I called and did it. It was spur of the moment. I told my piece, and I felt better sharing that. Not many people get that side of me. My therapist, maybe.”
Trunell and Wood are still learning what responsibility they have to the callers. They both have day jobs, and editing and posting the messages take work, especially because Trunell is running them through a vintage oscilloscope that he found on Craigslist for $50. He wants the Instagram posts to have a “ghostly, nostalgic” feel.
And some messages will never be posted. One late night, for example, a frightening call came in from a cellphone, one in which someone seemed to be saying goodbye to their own life.
Suicide prevention and crisis counseling resources
“You need to text him,” Trunell recalls thinking at the time.
“It sounded like a kid, and it was a super brief message and you don’t know if it’s serious or not. This is something that might come up, so what do we do? I texted to check in, but you don’t expect the Goodbye Line to call you back. I just said, ‘Did you leave a message? I’m leaving the door open.’”
He never heard back.
Trunell and Wood say they spend some of their weekends driving around L.A. looking for working pay phones to place stickers on. It’s harder than one might think, and over the last 13 or so months they’ve found only 20 active phones out of the supposed 149 around the city.
But they’re making more stickers, and have even incorporated the project into their vacations, leaving one on a phone in Santa Fe, N.M., although they have not received a call from it or know if the sticker is still there. Yet after securing well over 100 calls, they know the Goodbye Line is filling a void.
“Initially, I wanted to hear people’s voices,” Trunell says, noting that perhaps the project was a reaction to our social media-driven age as much as it was a throwback to, say, communal phone lines of yore. “I wanted a place where we would get to hear people saying things. We just didn’t have that. There was no big epic idea. It’s filled in around us. In a weird way, it was like forums online, but we can do that with voices.”
Curiously, the Goodbye Line has avoided posting calls that involve romantic drama. While there are no rules as to what the two may consider fit for sharing on social media, Trunell says that messages aimed at exes and former lovers can feel “trivial” to him.
“You realize they’re mad at somebody or saying goodbye to someone who is still around,” Trunell says. “And you’re kinda like, ‘Go repair that relationship.’”
It reveals, perhaps, an underlying thesis of the Goodbye Line. Its existence is a reminder of life’s impermanence. As much as it encourages us to say goodbye, it’s also a nudge to never stop picking up the phone to say hello.
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