new connection with pg_pconnect

I'm trying to add some new features to an existing project. The project uses pg_pconnect and sets it into a global var... What I'm trying to do is to create a new database class which connects to a different database on the same server. By the time my code gets reached, the pg_pconnect global var $conn has already been initialized. When I try : $dbconn = pg_pconnect("connections vars"); nothing happens...no errors, nothing... as a matter of fact if I do a few echo "sadfsadf"; echo "cn48c43vc"; or even syntax errors echo "dsaf"dds; nothing will happen... no errors are outputted to the screen at all...(this is not my issue) I'm assuming that I need to close the persistent connection before I can open a new one, but from my understanding, persistent connections cannot be closed... Is the persistent connection open only to the database in which it was opened for? How can I choose a different database?