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New Yorker Penelope Karageorge is the author of a crime novel, “Murder at Tomorrow” (Walker Publishing) and “Stolen Moments” (Pinnacle Books), a satirical romance/mystery and roman a clef set in the magazine world, published in England as “Winners” and Germany as “New York.” Her feature-length mystery film script, “The Neon Jungle,” placed 7^th out of more than 3,000 entries in the prestigious Final Draft Big Break screen-writing competition. She has written and produced short films including the ten-minute thriller, “Fat Tuesday.” Born in Newburgh, NY, she is a graduate of Simmons College, Boston, Mass. and earned an MA from CUNY. A freelance journalist, she began her career as a “Newsweek” reporter interviewing luminaries including Bette Davis and Frank Sinatra. An award-winning poet, she is the author of a collection, “Red Lipstick and the Wine-Dark Sea.” Penelope is currently at work on a new crime novel, “The Hype Artist,” set in the giddy PR/show biz world.

Psychiatrists really know how to hurt a man. My late shrink, Dr. Mario Spitz, for instance, really enjoyed dragging my traumas through the psychic mud. Spitz with his shrink pabulum about my so-called "phone fixation." What did he know? But don’t get me started.

That fateful February day, I sat in my Madison Avenue office, waiting for the phone to ring.

One two three. Jingle. Jangle. Jingle. My heart danced. "Blodgett Public Relations," I answered, my voice a savvy blend of cordiality and confidence. For a moment, the black thing inside me lifted. "Harrison Blodgett here." My voice oozed charm. What thrill awaited me on the other end of the line?

It was Dr. Spitz, reminding me that I had once again failed to show up at his office for my 12 p.m. appointment.

"I haven't been in your office for three years, Spitz," I chortled. "I prefer to shrink on the telephone. The horn is my medium. I'm a communicator. Get it?"

"Sure, Spitz, but I can't connect. We've been over this ground a zillion times," I sighed, launching into my practiced narrative. "When I was six years old, my mother sent me a toy phone from San Francisco with a note. 'Harrison, darling, when you are lonely, call Mommy and I will be there for you. Love and kisses.' But my mother wasn't there. The toy phone did not work. My mother had run away with a Romanian chef. I would never see her or talk with her again."

"You told me to buy this phone, Spitz," I blubbered into a red Italian telephone, $98.77 from Hammacher Schlemmer. "But has it worked? No. I feel even more alienated. Lately, when I'm with people, observing their grimacing and cavorting, I have the impulse to silence them, say abracadabra and make them vanish. Poof. Me. Harrison Blodgett. Yale, ninety-five."

"You're in bad shape, Blodgett. You could crack like an egg. You even sound capable of violence, like the accountant who gunned down ten strangers in a Seven Eleven."

That's the beauty part of the phone. Click, and instant riddance to undesirable personalities, wretched characters, miserable creeps, schlumps who attempt to take possession of you, body and soul, in shoe repair shops, bars, elevators. Silly Dr. Spitz. Ha! He never had figured out Blodgett, and he never would. I wiped my eyes and pictured the psychiatrist, the oversized horn-rimmed glasses punctuating his sad-sack face, his small nerdy-person's body.

The sun set. On Mad Ave, street lights flashed red, green and yellow. I tried to switch on my own office lights. Blackness. The utilities company, Con Edison, had warned that they would turn off the juice for lack of payment. Sitting in the dark, brooding with rage, I clenched and unclenched my fists.

That morning a phone company representative had called, threatening to silence the phones. My check for $1,378.51 had bounced. Darkness could be tolerated, but to live without the phones was unthinkable. Survival by cell phone was not enough; I needed to connect to terra firma by the precious, primitive land phone, my own Mama Bell.

Through the opaque glass door, the silhouette of a rotund, bearded man with a bald head appeared. In his right hand, he held a telephone, the cord dangling down. Obviously, the phone company executioner had come to physically remove my precious phones, holding aloft a trophy taken from his last victim.

The man knocked. Shuddering in the dark, I did not answer. He knocked again. Before I could move to lock the door, he came in, hoarsely calling my name in an intimate manner. "Blodgett. Blodgett." It was more than I could bear. My primitive instincts prevailed.

Quietly I moved towards him, blindly reaching out, tackling him, knocking his head against the floor. I pushed the phone out of his hand, took the cord in my hands and wound it around his neck, pulling it tight, squeezing, until his eyeballs popped grotesquely.

I wept and panted from exertion and being out of shape, having let my membership in the New York Health and Racket Club lapse.

Finally, my rage spent, I pulled back, lit the candle I kept in the desk drawer for emergencies, and examined the object of my fury. Horror of horrors. Not a breath of life remained in his well-fed body. Reaching into my victim's pocket, I pulled out his wallet and studied his credit cards. I had strangled Dr. Mario Spitz to death. Having not laid eyes on him in three years, how could I know that he had grown fat, cultivated a curly beard, and ditched the glasses for contact lenses?

I picked up the phone that he had brought with him, and wept. It was a red, toy telephone. He had apparently come to me on an errand of mercy, bringing me the toy, hoping to help me exorcise ghosts from the past. Self-loathing overwhelmed me. At that moment, I wanted to scream and pound my head against the wall.

I swiftly swallowed a tumbler of scotch and actually attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the dead man, a ghastly experience. When the cops arrived, they found me desperately trying to revive the late Dr. Spitz.

Detective Madonna D'Angelo seemed unimpressed. From what I could see of her in the semidark, she was a sexy, thirtyish vixen in a tight blue suit and spike heels who, I intuited, would not think twice about grinding a heel in my eye.

She held a flashlight briefly on herself, revealing a mass of Goldilocks curls, then flashed the light in my eyes. Did I murder Dr. Spitz?

"Absolutely not." I had stepped out for a drink, and returned to find the late Dr. Mario Spitz on the floor of my office, strangled to death.

She aimed her light on my bank of twelve phones, and then the red toy telephone.

"Cute. " She hauled me down to precinct headquarters, where I made a formal statement and signed it.

Sweating and writhing inside, at the same time applauding my own talents as a flimflam man, I left the 34^th precinct. As I walked out, a line of newly arrested men, legs in chains, hands in cuffs, walked towards me, sending a chill up my spine. Almost automatically, I brushed at my Brooks Brothers blazer, as if to remove the criminal taint, but it would cling to me and deepen into a vast, ugly stain that no amount of herringbone tweed would disguise.

Harrison Blodgett, always society's outsider, had become a murderer, a desperado. I needed a new livelihood, one I could conduct from my Central Park West apartment, a small business with low overhead that would keep me out of the limelight.

The late Dr. Spitz, sounding board of yore, proved my inspiration. Why not headshrinking, conducted via the telephone, with me in the shrink's seat? I could tap into the current zeitgeist, the mania for talking on the cell phone. I would reach out towards those intriguing lovelies, so elegantly turned out, who strut through the canyons of Manhattan, phones in hand, carrying on endless, semi-erotic dialogues.

Ballyhooing the "incisive, empathetic Dr. B. Harrison" (a reversal of my first and last names), I wrote ads touting a "therapist who appreciates the value of time in our fast-paced world. Consultation by phone only." The ads appeared in New York Magazine and The New York Review of Books, weeklies that cater to literate, upscale neurotics.

Within a week, several clients were on the horn. My best patient was Cassandra Dodsworth, a fanatically ambitious, deeply conflicted Wall Street trader who consulted with me nightly, eagerly seeking my insights on her compulsions, hysteria, daddy hang-ups, and messy romantic entanglements.

We got along swimmingly, until the day she turned on me, viciously accusing me of being a fake and charlatan. She had searched the internet for me, including seeking out my membership in psychiatric associations, and found I belonged to none. She threatened to report me to the New York Police Department as well as the American Psychiatric Association.

"Cass, dearest," I soothed. "Didn't I tell you? I earned my degrees in England. I have not been back in the U.S. of A. long enough to be fully certified, but I promise you that within a month, you will find a completely documented Dr. Blodgett Harrison."

As Dante so trenchantly pointed out in his "Inferno," the lower you go, the lower you go.

On a fine June afternoon, I took the subway downtown to Wall Street. Gaining admission to Cassandra's office building was no problem. I told the security man I was on my way to visit Cassandra Dodsworth on ten and flashed a fake ID. Climbing aboard the elevator, I rode to the second floor, got off, repaired to an empty stairwell, and stayed there for several hours, reading the paperback edition of the late Dr. Spitz's Positive Egoism.

Five minutes before eight p.m., I moved cautiously up the stairs on rubber-soled shoes. Cassandra called me from her office every night precisely at eight p.m., before taking a taxi home to her East Side lair. Standing outside Cassandra's office, cell phone in hand, I phoned her. "Hello, Cass," I crooned, my voice warm as butter melting on French toast.

Gently, gently, I opened the door to her office. She sat with her back turned to me.

When I taped her mouth closed and tied her to the chair, she struggled grotesquely. Ignoring the awful sounds she made from deep in her throat, I snipped her telephone wire with a pair of metal cutters, wrapped the cord around her neck, and pulled it tight.

"I'm hurting myself as much as I'm hurting you," I declaimed, ever the PR man, trying to put a good face on things. "I am killing myself!" A giggle not of mirth but of madness escaped me as I pulled and pulled, tying her up for eternity. Finally, she succumbed. I stifled a sob. "Sorry, wrong number," I whispered. Draping her body over the desk, I left her with her head resting gently on the latest copy of Standard & Poor's.

The next day, Detective Martin Sampson, a fiftyish, street-tough veteran with a scar over his right eye, brought me in for grilling, having found my number on Cassandra's phone bill.

Well rehearsed in my part, I characterized myself as a friend and "life coach." Looking concerned, I revealed that Cass had been calling me ever more frequently of late, pouring her heart out about a boyfriend, Gary Tonka, a poet notable for his wild verse and violent personality. When pressed, I revealed that Tonka toiled in the editorial vineyards of Frumkin Press between poetry slams.

The cops let me go. While applauding my own bravura performance, I trembled with loathing and madness. I felt horribly vulnerable. The shrink business was finished. Kaput. Sooner or later I would be revealed for the huge fraud I had become. So I metaphorically took down my shingle and phoned my remaining clients to tell them that I was leaving the country.

Now I had no livelihood, and my phones stood drained of joy, no longer delivering that jolly cacophony of bells. I was all alone by the telephone. Unbearable. In desperation, I actually chatted up a few telemarketers.

What did I really want out of life? What turned me on? Why had the life of the psychiatrist manqué appealed to me? Finally, I gave myself permission to admit that what I liked best about the shrink job was discussing sex with women. "But darling," I would say, "Is sex ever safe? When in doubt, do." It occurred to me that the fairer sex would take to the X-rated call like ducks to water, if it was properly presented.

"Call Harry, the tasteful man next door, a regular guy (as in Tom, Dick and Harry) who understands a woman's deepest needs." My rich baritone voice, coupled with my well-bred Ivy League prattle, soon brought me a steady and rather lucrative trade.

Occasionally, sitting in my undershorts and dialing, I paused and contemplated how far I had sunk. Or was it the opposite? Had I finally found myself? Work was play. I had a talent for turning women on. I myself was being turned on, particularly by one steady client, Roxanne.

Roxanne called me twice a week. How I looked forward to those sessions. We began to get to know each other, not superficially, but our true selves. I told Roxanne things I had told no other woman, about my mother, for instance. We entered into a new phase of our relationship, based on a splendid, creative sadomasochism.

"Darling Roxy, some years back, before the advent of the cell phone, when my phones were disconnected for five days, I headquartered myself by a string of phone booths in Grand Central Station, with a bag of quarters," I confided. "My fingers became black with coins, like a Las Vegas junkie working the slots. I was out of control and loving it."

Roxanne called me vile names, and insisted that I abuse myself with the receiver from the red phone. Screaming in pain and rage, I experienced a great release. A flood of confession poured out of me. I let it rip. Spitz! I shouted. Cassandra! I wept, crying and groaning and yes, coming. Yes. Yes.

Roxanne stopped being a paying client and became my phone lover. We called each other several times a day. Out of all of the women in my life, this was The One for Harrison Blodgett. The Real Thing. I wanted to hold her in my arms, to look into those beautiful eyes. Brown? Blue? Hazel? I had no idea.

We arranged to meet in Peacock Alley, an elegant, dimly lit drinking and dining establishment in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. With her black, glossy hair, white skin, ruby red lips and purple blue eyes with their fringe of curly, long black lashes, she looked like nothing less than an exotic princess.

The world spun. All my fears evaporated. In the flesh, I loved her more than ever. We spoke little that evening, basking in the thrill and intimacy of each other's presence. After dinner, I hired a hansom cab to drive us to my apartment.

It was another first for Harrison Blodgett, sex and love. Incredible. When I cried out in ecstasy, it went far beyond mere tawdry physical release. And I know it was that way for Roxanne as well.

Just before we went to sleep she turned to me. "Harrison, you're the most spectacular, loving man I have ever met. Can it be true that you killed two people?"

Getting out of bed, I knelt on the floor. "Yes," I replied. "I took the lives of Dr. Mario Spitz and Cassandra Dodsworth. Can you forgive me? Can you?"

That night I extinguished all the phones, silenced them so that my darling could rest peacefully and undisturbed in my arms.

The next morning, I woke at 5 a.m. and turned to embrace her, but the space next to me was empty. I looked up. I was staring directly into the eyes of Detective Madonna D'Angelo, she of the wild, golden curls. She sat in the small bedroom chair, pointing an automatic at me and holding my red toy phone in her lap.

But before I had even uttered the words, I knew. My Roxanne was, in actuality, Madonna D'Angelo, now with the black wig removed and tucked away in the large pocketbook, which had also contained the gun she aimed at me. She flashed her police badge. From the moment she laid eyes on me, bending over Dr. Spitz, she had suspected me of murdering the good shrink. She, too, had been a patient of the psychiatrist. I had strangled him to death just as she was on the verge of a crucial breakthrough.

"Irrelevant." Her voice stung me like a blast of cayenne pepper. She then read me the Miranda warning: "You have the right to remain silent.…"

"You need not have bothered," I moaned. "I'm speechless. You look so beautiful in the early morning light. I want to grovel at your feet."

My lawyer urged me to plead insanity, but I vehemently rejected that idea. For what is madness? Roxanne/Madonna accomplished what years of shrinking with Dr. Spitz had failed to do. She made me into a human being capable of a close, intimate, loving relationship.

Found guilty of first degree murder, I was given a life sentence without parole. In Sing Sing prison, where I have been confined since January, I am familiarly known as "Bells" Blodgett, and allowed only one phone call a week.

When the story hit the front pages of America's tabloids, my long-lost mother, Eloise, read about me and got in touch at last.

Roxanne/Madonna refuses my calls. The connection with her has been permanently broken. For me, her phone's off the hook. But the memories remain. The ringing. The thrill. The oh-never-to-be-forgotten wonder of The One calling, calling, calling me.