Missed Calling

"It pains me to imagine the very probable truth that over the next 20 or 40 years, children will become completely disobedient to their parents. When they are told to behave, they will, being children, ask why...And when they are told that they must behave in order to please God, they will wail and cry that none of the other children at school don't believe in God."
-From On the Morality of Youth, written by William Goodwin Grant in 1884

I have been receiving missed calls
like the feeling of standing at the airport
holding a sign bearing the name of someone you once loved
who also missed her flight,
I have been receiving missed calls.

I get at least seven a day.
Why am I never there to pick up?

The calls I always miss are always from the same number
which I'm convinced must mean something.
I've taken the digits to the top numerologists
but they have assured me that it is not
the longitude coordinates of a mysterious Parisian apartment
nor all the prime numbers divided by each other
nor the last ten digits of pi
But just an ordinary number from a real
and ordinary phone.

I guess that makes sense.

Then let's try to figure this out logically:
Who has the power to spy on me
so completely
that he knows to call when I am
asleep or in the shower or daydreaming
or all the reasons I am ever away from my phone?
And to remain unnoticed and anonymous?
Does such technology exist?

When I call the number back, you see,
I get a busy signal.
Perhaps he (or she) is placing a missed call
in someone else's phone
or trying to call me at the exact same moment.

My father's twin brother, who is a priest,
told me it is God.
Experts tend to claim all problems
fall within their area of expertise.

He said that the calls are a simple symbol,
that God is calling me but I am not there to listen.
And I told him what my father told me,
what my father learned in school,
that God has not abandoned us
but he is hiding like a squirrel
around a tree trunk
on the other side of the Sun.

My father's twin brother, my uncle,
warned me to be careful,
"Don't be like Pascal
and trade your personal relationship
with God for a professional one."

There is a simple way to solve this.

I know that societies are remembered by their myths
And thus
Ours will be remembered by the ridiculous notion that "a watched pot never boils"
And thus
I place my cell phone on my bed
kneel on the floor beside it
and wait.

But now I've been waiting for years, and
as I grow ever more hungry, ever more gaunt,
I begin to wonder whether my cell phone
or I will run out of battery first
before He calls again.

My Stalker Roger

Exactly four years ago this month, I got the first letter from my stalker. Though I’m not sure that “stalker” is the right term. I was never followed around, I never got a restraining order, and I never even talked to the police about it. My stalker communicated with me almost entirely by letters left on the door of my dorm room. But the first letter that he sent wasn’t even addressed to me. It went to my professor and the Residential College office.

The first I heard about it was when the RC office sent me a vague email just before the holiday break in December. They asked if I could come in for a “discussion” with Jennifer Myers, who runs student affairs. When I sat down in her office, she immediately handed me the letter.

It must have been about three hundred words in loopy font. At the top in said “Dear Leslie Hutton,” who was my professor, and at the bottom it was signed with my name. In between the two was the silliest love letter I can possibly imagine. It had phrases like, ‘Dearest Leslie, O! How I ache for your loving embrace. When I see you, my heart flies over the roofs of East Quadrangle like old St. Nick and his reindeer through the sky. The curve of your dark glasses, the shine of your silvery hair brings a soft joy like the feeling of warm pudding cupped between my hands.”

I’m not exaggerating, it was really that weird.

Jennifer Myers, with whom I was on pretty familiar terms, gave me a few minutes to read it and said, “You didn’t write that did you?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so.” She asked if I knew who might have written it and I said that I had no idea, which I really didn’t. Over the next few days I developed a theory. At this point I was a freshman finishing up my first semester, and I thought that it must have been someone in the class I took from Leslie Hutton. That class had its fair share of weirdoes in it, so it was a little difficult to narrow down. But there was one girl in particular that was my prime suspect.

There were a lot of weird things about her, but we had one majorly strange interaction. One morning, all the students were waiting in the hall before class. I made a casual comment to this girl who was sitting on the floor.

“I like you shirt,” I said. It had the cover art for Quadrophenia on it.

“Yeah I really like The Who,” she replied.

“Me too, they’re really good.”

Then after an awkward silence made it clear that this wasn’t leading to a conversation, I said:

“Well I guess we better not talk about them then.”

She kinda laughed and so did I and that was that. Until she sent me a facebook message apologizing for not being friendlier or more talkative, and then ended with, “I think the Who are a really rockin’ band, what do you think?” I never replied to the message and we never spoke out of class again.

She did some strange things while in the classroom though. She claimed to have a photographic memory but clearly did not. One day she gave a presentation in completely normal clothes, but with zebra print guitar-pick earrings (I do not think she knew how to play the guitar). And at one point in the presentation she said, “There were a lot of facts in my project but it was easy because I have a photographic memory.”

So because I wasn’t very nice back then, I wrote down a set of random numbers on my notebook and showed them to her and said I was going to quiz her later. But because, like her, I also I don’t have a photographic memory, I forget to ever do it.

Anyway, though I can’t remember her name, I think she might have sent the letter to my professor. Thus she may have been my stalker, but it’s not an airtight theory. Then about a week later I got a call from my roommate, Ricky Gutierrez. Ricky was a short little bearded kid with a strong Arkansas accent. He went to prison after we lived together, but I think he’s out now.

“Hey dude,” he said. “You got a letter.”

“What do mean? Like in your mailbox?”

“No,” he said, “it was in our door. It’s got a bunch of kisses on it and shit.”

“Excuse me?” I said. It turned out that someone had written me a declaration of love, and then put on lipstick and covered the paper in kissprints. The content of the letter was the same ridiculous metaphors that had been in the letter to my professor. It had things like, “I want to be the morning harbor where you dock your yacht” which I guess is flattering that he didn’t write ‘sailboat’ or ‘schooner.’

I say “he” being the letter was signed “Roger.” And then “p.s: I want to have sex with you” which was a little less subtle than the metaphors, but it got to the point.

I of course found this hilarious and assumed I had just been the victim of an awesome prank. I asked around to everyone I knew who might have done this but no one took credit. As time went on, I became less and less convinced it was a joke.

The letters had been so ridiculous that it seemed impossible that someone had written them seriously. On the other hand, there’s no real point to a prank like that if you don’t come out and laugh at the victim. But no one did. Then things became more unusual.

Roger sent me a couple more letters, one that featured embedded photos of puppies and a rubber glove. Then he opened and IM account called, “iheartbenjamin69.”

First of all, I can’t believe that name was available. And I can’t even begin to recreate all the strange things he wrote to me. I never blocked him, and sometimes wrote back. But he was never much of a conversationalist. Mostly he just made metaphors about having sex with me. This was in the “About Me” section of his profile, and I feel it pretty well represents the sort of topics he preferred to discuss:

Top 10 Reasons Why I Should Be Benjamin Fossitt Townsend's Lover
10. He's single!! go girlfriend
9. He's a liberal - wink wink
8. I think about him every night before bed - and sometimes in the shower
7. he's into random play (I'd like to play with him randomly)
6. I want to caress his large man-meat through his taut jeans
5. We're both virgins - but not for long!!!1!111111!!
4. We both enjoy reading so we can spend long nights in the Greene Lounge caressing each other and discussing our favorite passages of Spanking Kenny's Wife
3. I can't think of any more!! Am toooo horny!!!
2. Because him an me ain't nothin' but mammals so let's do it like they do it on the discovery channel!!
1. Does true love need a reason??/??/?/
HI BENNIE! I N U!!!!!1!1

Now I don’t mean to get defensive, but at least three of these were entirely untrue. For example, I’d describe myself as more of a fiscally conservative moderate with socialist tendencies rather than a liberal (wink wink). Also the logic of number four implies that because I like reading, I’m really into homosexual PDA. But in reality, even if I’m not the one doing the homosexual PDA, I’m not really a big fan. On the rare occasions that I do see two gays making out, I just look the other way. Live and let live. Also, I was not a virgin. I once brought this up to him in our occasional IM chats and asked him to change number five on the list. I didn’t want misinformed rumors spread about me, especially ones that might interfere with me getting laid by someone who isn’t 1) insane 2) anonymous) and 3) a man. But he claimed that I was a virgin because it didn’t count as sex if it wasn’t with him, which I guess makes a certain kind of sense.

There was never any big conclusion to my interactions with Roger. He left me a few more notes, but it started to seem like his heart wasn’t in it. He still made outlandish and suggestive metaphors, but he wasn’t really trying to branch out into new areas. It felt like he was just doing the same thing over and over. Like he was leaving me letters to try and reconnect with that early insane passion he had felt but, let’s face it, had dwindled. Sometimes he would be logged into his “iheartbenjamin69” IM account but wouldn’t talk to me. Was he using it to talk to other people? Were they also named Benjamin?

I imagined that Roger had started to make some friends through classes, and when he gave them his IM account name he just told them it was a joke. He’d hang out with his new friends, perhaps in the basement of the Union where a lot of odd ducks seem to congregate. As time went on and he never contacted me again, I imagined him with his new friends laughing and discussing anime. I wondered if he still thought about me sometimes. Maybe when he was bored he still occasionally put together a list of the top ten reasons he’d like to lick my eyebrows.

I’d like to think so, but probably not. I guess he just didn’t need me anymore. Sometimes people just grow apart.