“Harmless”

 A friend recently e-mailed me to share that things around her office were a bit slow this time of year, illustrating her point by telling me that she had received a total of only five phone calls during the previous workday. To add insult onto injury of those five calls two were wrong numbers while the other three “never [had] a voice on the other side of the line”.

Her e-mail reminded me of an earlier time in my life when my roommates and I would receive calls from someone who “never [had] a voice on the other side of the line.” I shared a distant memory with her in an attempt to help alleviate her boredom and, possibly, make her smile...

Living in San Antonio as a single woman over twenty years ago, I had two female roommates. My roommates and I were gainfully employed; however, we were just starting out and made so little money that we categorized ourselves as SLINKs (Single Low Income No Kids).  As such every weekend we had to make a conscious decision between going out and having fun like all our other same-aged peers were doing or paying the rent, electric bill, etc. Most weekends we decided to forego fun in favor of eating which tells you where our priorities were, right? Yeah well, needless to say, we didn’t have too many men beating down our doors to take us out so we were what I affectionately term “dateless queens”.

Wait! Before you feel sorry for us, I will say that we were not totally devoid of male attention. There was this guy who would call us routinely and just breathe heavily into the phone. At first, our “never a voice on the other side of the line” guy scared us. I mean who was he and how did he get our unlisted number? But after a while, when we knew he really didn’t know who we were or where we lived, we took his phone calls in stride. In fact, we actually would joke about it when he would call by holding out the phone and saying, “Hey, Connie, the phone’s for you.” or “Hey, Lisa, I think it’s your 12-year-old brother calling again.” Once our harmless heavy breather called at an inopportune time, but rather than hang up on him rudely, I tolerated his intrusion into my datelessness by laying the phone down on the counter next to our stainless steel toaster so I could continue with what I was doing before the phone rang. When I returned to the phone a bit later, he was no longer on the line, but when I picked up the receiver to set it back on its base, I noticed that the front of the toaster looked like it had fogged over.

Looking back, I have to say it’s a sad commentary on your life when you realize that you didn’t hang up on a heavy breather because you didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But in a weird kind of way, he had become part of our world; he called so consistently that if he didn’t call, we wondered why. Was he out of town or was he ill? I wouldn’t classify him as a friend, but he was a constant in our lives. I haven’t thought about “Harmless” in a very long time. I wonder what ever happened to him. I sure hope he got some help or, at the very least, I hope he went to work as someone’s butler; he would be great at polishing silver.