A 900 Number I Am Not

Many years ago when I was naive and (sorta) innocent, I got an obscene phone call. It wasn’t your ordinary heavy-breathing kind of thing, though. It was an apologetic(!) young guy who said his friends had told him that he could randomly call a phone number and probably get phone sex out of it. Well, yeah, THAT sounds reasonable, right?

The icing, and perhaps the answer to the reason he thought it would work, is that he was in prison, and his “friends” were his fellow inmates. It seems they got a certain amount of phone time per week or month, and since they didn’t have girlfriends or whatever, this was how they would use their call time. A sort of drunk-dialing, but without the drunk. Slammer-dialing? I didn’t freak out or anything, and politely told him sorry, ew, you poor freak, you no. I never heard from him again, so it appeared he was telling the truth. Still, EW?

I am not eye candy. Let’s just get that out of the way. The normal male response to me is, EW “Oh, she has a GREAT personality. LOTS of personality.” Yeah. It’s like that. Still, my daddy’s warning to his pubescent daughter has held true through the years, no matter how much my personality has continued to be my greatest asset. He said “a hard dick has no conscience.” My daddy was the voice of experience on that one, and although I didn’t know that at the time, I believed him. (Even in my inexperience I understood what he was saying, and I think that’s one reason I have been so guarded about that area of my life. It’s hard to trust any male advance at all with that endorsement ringing in my ears.) In his experience, that’s just what kids did, and I think he figured I was more knowledgeable than I was letting on – he didn’t understand why I looked at him like he was stupid when he joked about finding footprints on the headliner over the backseat of the Mercury. How he thought I was learning those things, I don’t know. It’s not like he didn’t know where I was ALL. THE. TIME. The one time he thought he didn’t, he got mad and took my car keys…until he found out he had just forgotten I had told him I was going to be at church late.

I ran into a lot of promiscuous people at college. No surprise there, I know. I was appalled to find out my 19-year-old suitemate and her long-term boyfriend were “doing it,” but by the time her room mate got it on with some foreign exchange student, I was jaded. My sophomore year in college a drunk friend and classmate wanted to sleep with me because he was so “needy” he couldn’t “stand it.” I invited him to help himself out and leave me alone. Likewise the next-door neighbor who came over, drunk, to get a little action from what he assumed was a lonely and desperate woman.

The ‘best’ offer I had was one that came after weeks of build-up. I was clueless as to why this neighbor was offering to help me in the yard and being SO sweet. He was 40 years my senior, at best, and once asked permission to shoot “near” my cats to scare them away from the chickens he had in his in-town back yard. When the call came late one Saturday night (surprise! drunk!), I was utterly unprepared. “I was wonderin’, Miss Girl, if I could come over an’ keep you company.” I asked him what his wife would think of the idea, but he assured me she wouldn’t care. It took me a while to politely decline – he was pretty persistent.  He didn’t offer to trim my hedges anymore, though. A friend later asked me just what I thought the guy was doing, being so friendly beforehand. I honestly didn’t know – it never occurred to me that he was flirting.

Hm. I have so much personality that the only was a guy can consider me as a partner is to get sloshed first. THAT’S good to know.