“Well,” I said, “I’ve got on gray mesh basketball shorts with, let’s see, three thin white stripes down each side, and a Bell’s Pizza T-shirt.” I was quiet for a second, then rushed to fill the silence. “It’s blue. I used to deliver for Bell’s Pizza. We made these shirts for our rec-league basketball team. Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Can I ask you a question? What are you wearing?”
“Nuh-thing,” she breathed.
There was a stirring in my gray mesh basketball shorts with the three thin white stripes down each side. Nicole explained that she’d hit the bars all night with her friends, and that now they were drunk and passed out and she was bored. “Pretend you’re here with me,” she said. “I want to tell you what we would do.”
I’d never had phone sex before. Not that I was opposed to it—it was just one of those things that never came up. I guess it had always seemed sort of strange and silly to me. Real sex was so much more appealing. And in times when that was hard to come by, well, the Internet’s tawdrier recesses offered workable substitutes.
“If you were here,” Nicole said, “I’d lick your lips. I’d lick you everywhere.” She moaned a little. “I’m fucking myself right now. Tell me what you’re doing.”
“Umm, touching my privates?” I started touching my privates.
“I’m sucking your dick right now. Oh yeah, I’m sucking you good. I want you to fuck my mouth like you’re fucking my pussy.”
Nicole’s dirty talk was both ridiculous and oddly arousing. But a part of me wondered if this was all being recorded, if out in the parking lot, staked out in the back of an ice cream truck that had been pimped into a mobile surveillance unit, friends of mine were listening in, wide-eyed and gleeful, headphones clamped to their ears, having a laugh at my expense. It was hard to be serious. “Nicole,” I said, “I’m grabbing on to your titties! I’m kissing you with reckless abandon! I’m pumping in and out of you, like, well … well, like an oil derrick! Or a piston? I’m the sword, baby, and you’re the scabbard!”
Eventually, I grew less bashful and got into it for real, and a few minutes later we came to a happy ending. Soon after, we said good night. The basketball game on the TV had ended long before, and I had no idea who’d won.
At seven thirty the next morning, the phone rang again, jarring me awake; my brother, too. He lifted his head from the pillow and said, “Who the fuck is calling?”
It was Nicole. “Girl,” I said, “I’m sleeping. Don’t you know what time it is?” I was about to hang up, but then, remembering our little moment of shared bliss a few hours before, I softened. “Look, here’s my cell number. Call me later, okay?”
*
A few months earlier, I’d published a book and hit the road with Peter for an eight-month cross-country tour. At each event, I read from my book and Peter played guitar and sang. We burned from one city to the next in an old Dodge conversion van we’d bought on eBay. Mostly, we crashed on sofas and floors at friends’ houses or stayed with folks we’d met that night at our show, though sometimes we’d take turns driving through till dawn while the other slept in the backseat, which folded down into a bed. It was actually so comfortable, a lot of nights I chose to sleep out in the van rather than on a stranger’s sagging couch. Once a month or so, dusted from the road, we’d splurge on some raggedy hotel, like that Motel 6 on the outskirts of Austin. The night Nicole found me, Peter and I had been on the road for six months; we were about a hundred shows into the tour.
Three nights later, in Oklahoma City, I was getting ready for bed out in the van when my cell phone rang. PRIVATE CALLER, it said. It was Nicole. She was still whispering. “What’s up with the whispering?” I asked. She said her roommates were sleeping in the next room. We chatted for a few minutes, then got into the phone sex again. She told me she was tonguing my balls. This time I went Shakespeare: “Oh baby, wherefore art thy labia?” Afterward, she was about to hang up, but I said, “Nicole, that’s so impersonal. If the fantasy is that we’re having sex, I don’t want to just zip up my pants the second we’re done and leave. Can’t we just talk for a bit? You know, cuddle?”
*
I was curious about Nicole. Now that we’d had sex a couple of times, I wanted to know what she was all about—I wanted to know where she worked; I wanted to know what she was into (besides having phone sex with strangers); I wanted to know what kind of person calls hotel rooms to have phone sex with strangers. She told me she’d studied psychology at the University of North Texas and that now she worked as a nurse at an old-age home in Waco; she’d just been down in Austin visiting friends. She also told me that her mother had passed away recently and that she’d been having a tough time with it—they’d been especially close.
The next few times we talked, she was still whispering, which was starting to seem a little suspicious. She claimed her boyfriend was studying just outside her bedroom door. It was hard to place, but something about her whisper sounded almost … husky. I got a little freaked out—was this a guy I’d been talking to?
“Nicole, what the fuck?” I said. “Just talk out loud for a second so I can hear your real voice.” She refused. Still, she seemed like a girl—there’d been a few times when I thought I’d heard her real voice, times when she laughed, times when she moaned. So I went ahead and had phone sex with her anyway. It wasn’t as good as the real thing, but it was better than getting myself off all alone. Her company was growing on me.
*
Houston, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Tampa—Nicole and I skittered across the South; it was like Badlands for the new millennium (less killing, more “anytime minutes”). Every few nights, I’d be out in the van after a show, making my bed in the backseat, when Nicole would call, and we’d get hot and heavy. I was still wary that this was all some crazy prank by my friends and that our calls were being recorded, so during phone sex I kept things tongue-in-cheek, as though hamming it up for an audience. Nicole would be talking dirty, telling me how she wanted to squeeze my dick with her pussy, and I’d just start riffing on some goofy shit: there was NASCAR-themed pillow talk (“Straddle my throttle, Nicole. Take me to the checkered flag!”), and then sometimes I’d do it up in a stiff, upper-crust British accent (“Oh, God save the queen, I’m coming, I’m coming, tea and crumpets for all!”), and then other times, I performed in the voice of a black comedian making fun of the way white people talk, overpronouncing each word (“Oh yes, baby, golly gee, keep licking my penis, that just feels absolutely stupendous!”). Only irony could distance me from the sad truth of what I was really doing: jacking off in the back of my van in a Taco Bell parking lot in Jefferson City, Missouri, while talking on my headset to someone who was possibly a man.
My brother gave me shit for it. “I can’t believe you still talk to that dude,” he said.
“It’s not a dude,” I said.
Over the phone, Nicole had more of the resigned spirit of a woman who’d had a lot of attention from guys in high school but then, knocked around by life, had let herself go. She described herself as “pretty enough,” and said guys often hit on her at the bar, but I knew this was no guarantee that if we ever met in person I’d be attracted to her. Ultimately, it seemed to me, phone sex was really about the power of the imagination, and in that case I could imagine her to be whoever I wanted. After I’d first seen, years before, the video for Fiona Apple’s song “Criminal,” Fiona Apple had become the girl who best represented my physical ideal. On those late nights in the back of the van, it wasn’t hard to imagine Nicole as Fiona Apple’s double.
*
Our relationship deepened. My phone had a special ring for PRIVATE CALLER, and since Nicole was the only one who rang like that, I could tell when she was calling. I started looking forward to her calls. She finally gave me her number so I could call her, too. I dropped the funny guises and just talked to her genuinely—sometimes we’d talk for half an hour before phone sex. Some nights, she’d tell me stories about work and share favorite memories of her mom. O
ther nights, out in my van after a long night in Phoenix or Des Moines, I’d be lonely, drunk, and depressed, and tell her about my problems. Nicole was a great listener, willing to indulge each tangent of every story she was told. She was as curious about my life as I was about hers. In a fucked-up way, this was the closest I’d had to a real girlfriend in years. Living on the road, a new city every day, she was one of the few constants in my life, and I both came to depend on her and, in our shared fantasies, dependably came on her. And the more we got to know each other, the more the sex improved. Nicole was insatiable. She started calling me every day, a half hour before my reading, when she knew I’d be out in the van getting my notes ready. “Hey, Davy,” she’d breathe, “how ’bout a quickie?”
*
In December the book tour ended, and I resumed a more regular kind of life—staying put in Michigan, playing basketball twice a week at the rec center, sleeping in my own bed. For the most part, I stopped answering Nicole’s calls. I was busy with work, and I had more interest in local girls I could meet for a drink and try to make out with than in someone across the country I could only hook up with by phone. But I also felt bad that I’d left Nicole in the lurch, and on occasion I’d still have a late-night phone tryst with her. We were like those couples who break up but still end up sleeping together every once in a while. Then, one day, her number was no longer in service. Nicole was gone.
*
One night the following winter, the old Dodge van broke down on the freeway near my house, and as I waited for a tow and the bitter cold edged in, I started playing that game I play when I’m feeling lonely, the one where I review all of my prior relationships, marveling that so many sweet, smart, pretty girls have come into my life and that I’ve found a way to fuck things up with every one of them. This game usually ends with me calling two or three of my exes and leaving miserable voice mails on their cell phones or their machines at home. Inevitably, one of their new beaus calls back to say, “Hey, man, I heard your message. Emilie’s down in Chile for two weeks, but you sounded really down … I just wanted to call and make sure you were doing all right.”
That night, marooned on the shoulder of I-94, big rigs howling past, I thought of Nicole. We’d had kind of a nice connection, hadn’t we? All the funny and mournful stories she’d told me about working at the nursing home flooded my mind, along with her reminiscences of her mom, and I got the urge to track her down and meet her, find out who the fuck she was. I knew she might be four hundred pounds, or my grandma’s age, or a guy, but there was also a possibility that she was, well, hot. So I tried her old number. A moment later, I heard her familiar whisper. “Hi, Davy,” she said. “Been a while.”
“I know! I can’t believe I reached you! I’ve tried you every few months but I always get that lady’s voice saying your number’s out of service. Listen,” I said, “this is gonna sound crazy, but okay, I’ve been doing some thinking, and what I think is, I think we should meet. We should meet up.” There was a long pause, the kind of silence you hear when the TV’s showing footage of a plane crash or a natural disaster and the anchorman’s at a loss for words. “Look,” I said, “I just want to meet you in person. I’ll come down to Austin or Waco or wherever you’re living. It’s fucking freezing here, anyway.”
Another long pause. Then she sucked in a deep breath and said, “You sure you’re ready to meet the real me?”
*
Ten days later, I flew to Austin. I rented a car and dropped my bags at the same Motel 6 where Nicole had first found me. She suggested we get together at an Applebee’s off I-35 at the far north end of town. I pulled into the parking lot at eight; this was one of those grim, anonymous commercial strips where Americans carry out their ordinary lives that appear on MSNBC after, say, a sniper shooting, or a child abduction. I went inside. Nicole knew what I looked like—I’d directed her to my picture online—but I had no idea who to be looking for other than somebody sitting alone. A weary hostess greeted me: “Table for one?”
“Actually, I’m looking for a friend.” I walked past her into the restaurant. The place was mostly empty; on a jumbo-sized TV, the Pro Bowl was on. At a table in the back, gazing at me with an odd smile while sipping a Coke, was a woman who was at least eighty-eight years old. No fucking way. I almost bolted right then. But I’d come fifteen hundred miles to meet the real Nicole, even if the real Nicole had stumbled off the set of Cocoon. I ambled over and stood above her table. “Nicole?”
“There’s no radishes in my soup!” the lady cried. “I asked for radishes!”
It wasn’t Nicole. “Let me check on that for you, ma’am,” I said, and wheeled away.
At another table, sitting by himself and halfheartedly watching the game, was a skinny Eminem-looking kid in a white Spurs hoodie who couldn’t have been out of high school. I went over to him, squeamish and cringing.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Hi. I’m Davy.”
“Okaaa-aay.” He looked at me sideways.
Not Nicole. I felt dizzy with relief, and asked him, so as not to seem like a total weirdo, “How’s your meal, sir?”
“I haven’t ordered yet.”
“That’s great! You need anything, I’m shift supervisor, just let me know.”
Then I saw her, perched on a red stool at the bar, toying with her cell phone—a curvy Latina girl maybe twenty-four years old. No J.Lo, but perhaps a young Rosie Perez. Nice! I felt a little tingle. This was the kind of girl I’d move to Texas for. I wondered if in eighty minutes we’d be having actual sex back at the Motel 6.
I moved close, and she turned to me with a smile.
“Nicole?”
“No,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
What the fuck? Had she stood me up? I rushed back out toward the parking lot in such an anxious daze, I almost crashed into a guy on his way in. Out in the lot, there wasn’t a soul in sight. It came to me: Nicole wasn’t coming at all—she’d sent me on this wild goose chase as payback for disappearing on her when the tour had ended. I spun dismally in place and saw, to my surprise, that the guy I’d almost run into on my way out was still standing in the doorway, halfway in, halfway out. He was black, with a shaved head, maybe thirty years old, about my height but a bit more stout. We gazed at each other for a long couple of beats. Then slowly, shyly, he raised his hand and gave a little wave.
*
Nicole’s real name was Aaron. We went inside and sat in a booth far from everyone. He ordered a Long Island iced tea; I ordered two whiskeys. The world seemed to rattle and buzz. Each steamy moment Nicole and I had shared over the phone flickered through my mind like a porno on fast-forward. But now, in each frame, I had to replace Fiona Apple with this—HOLY FUCK!—this guy. Honestly, I couldn’t do it. What kind of deranged motherfucker even pulled stunts like this? My neck got hot, and I thought about just getting the fuck outta Dodge, but after a minute, the drinks and Aaron’s bashful, slumping presence cooled me down.
Aaron began to explain things. He’d been doing the Nicole voice since he was thirteen, he told me. His first calls were to a guy at his high school who he had a crush on. Over the years, he’d had dozens of relationships with the same general trajectory as ours: heated phone sex gradually evolving into a deeper friendship, then, after three weeks or three years, an inevitable flameout.
But how had he come to find me that night at the Motel 6? Was he staying in another room and saw my TV on?
“No, I was at home,” Aaron said, his voice soft and effeminate. “There’s five Motel 6’s in Austin; I have all their phone numbers memorized.” These motels were somewhat unique, he said. Calls don’t go through the front desk; they’re handled by an automated system that asks for a room number. Many nights, after the clubs had closed, he’d be bored and drunk and start dialing random rooms. If a girl answered, he’d hang up—Aaron was gay; he didn’t want to talk to girls. If a guy answered and he sounded nice, “Nicole” would start whispering.
He had
dated—by phone—cops, businessmen, students, even a butcher and a baker (truly, but no candlestick maker). “I always want to be able to reach someone when I’m in the mood,” he said. “So I like to have two or three things going at any one time.”
“You mean all that time you were cheating on me?” I said in mock horror. “Whispering to other guys?”
He laughed—a squeaky girlish laugh. I could see how I’d mistaken him over the phone as female.
Aaron revealed more: I wasn’t a very adventurous phonesex partner. Spanking, domination—sometimes his calls veered into these territories. As Nicole, he’d led guys into the shower and had them pee on themselves. Once he’d arranged to have a guy fuck his wife while he listened, without the wife knowing. All of this information was dispensed with the sheepish amusement and reluctant pride of a criminal reflecting on his work at the end of a spree.
Did he think Nicole’s phone buddies knew she was a guy? Some knew, he figured, but chose to ignore it. Others had no clue. A few guys had become so obsessed with Nicole that they’d proposed marriage. One even promised to leave his wife for her. “That’s when I have to tell them who I am,” Aaron said. “I feel bad for deceiving them for so long. It can be really heart-wrenching, because I might have feelings for them, too, but I have to tell ’em, ‘Look, I’m a guy.’” There’d been shock, anger, promises of a beating. A lawyer he’d been screwing over the phone for a year called him a fucking faggot, slammed down the phone, and then, hours later, called back, confessed he’d had fantasies about guys, and asked to meet up. They ended up having sex at Aaron’s apartment. A half dozen times, he said, he’d hooked up with guys he’d met as Nicole. All of them claimed to be straight, only curious.
I still couldn’t understand the allure of all this. Aaron was a handsome guy, fit, with kind eyes. I knew from months of calls that he was a sweet soul and bighearted. Why didn’t he find himself a boyfriend?
My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays Page 6