“Harmless”
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment