Three Telephones (a beginning)
So you want to know exactly how this happened right? Anything I’ve said up to this point has been just too ridiculous for understanding is what you’re telling me. You wan the truth, you want to hear about visions, the angels and the miraculous bright stars – this is what you will believe. Unfortunately for my story none of that happened, at least not quite in the way you’re picturing it. Truth is it all started with three telephones or three phone calls to be exact.
At the time I was living in the city, working two part time jobs in an effort to pay back some student loans and a tiny bit of credit card debt that had started to accrue now that I was living the good life. For me that meant being the young, unattached, educated girl that I was. I would see a show at least once a week and the fact that bar close had just moved up to two a.m. and there was no smoking ban in effect yet didn’t worry me at all. My employers didn’t seem to mind if my hair was a little oily and my wool jacket smelled of cigarettes if you stood to close. My jobs were all right, enough to get by, not a chance in hell that they were my true calling, but eh, I’d figure it that out one of these days. I assumed that I’d probably find that right around the same time I met a guy who either didn’t make me want to scream the instant he either started talking about how he was so in love with me, but had just bought his one way ticket to some undeveloped nation to help with subsistence farming, regardless of the fact that he not only couldn’t speak Spanish he had never set foot on a farm in his life. Or the boy who would sing sweetly to me of my various wonderful attributes until the day I would bump into him at the neighborhood coop buying organic pears with his longtime and often live in girlfriend. What I wanted was a revolutionary. One who understood what passion was and would fight side by side with me when the time came. I had no idea that instead I would birth that revolutionary and would have to raise her to leave me just the same.
I remember waking up one morning in my parents’ house with a sudden jolt like out of one of those many visiting at home nightmares. Mine usually are visions of forgetting to lock the bathroom door and your mother walks in to see your now permanently adorned shoulder and upper arm which you had been able to hid so well during the two years of college or the nightmare of mistakenly thinking everyone else in the house is still asleep while you do some deep thinking about being sandwiched by Brad Pitt and your high school chemistry teacher, when your older sister walks in to wake you up for breakfast. So I remember waking up extremely startled, catching my breath thinking “God! If I’m going to bare the next messiah somebody better tell me soon, because honestly – sometimes I like to drink a little and sometimes that little gets a tiny bit excessive and there is no way I want to be the one responsible for fucking up and giving the Christ child FAS.
See, now when I come out and say it like that you stare at me in disbelief. “That was a random though?” you question. Well at the time I figured it was – I mean I certainly had not previously entertained notions of being part of the second coming. You’re starting to humor me now; I can see it in the gleam of your eyes as you ask about the phone calls. You might be thinking I’m crazy, but you’re still hooked.
Ever since I left home I’ve graciously left my parents in charge of fielding all junk mail and solicitous phone calls for me. I’m not sure why, but no matter where I move these things had straight into their ever unwanting arms. Mainly they ignore it, my mother, out of a need for variety I assume will sometimes stack credit card offers in a pile on her desk, just waiting for the next time that I visit so that I may tear them up myself. My father, usually the first to the phone and always the most creative will often times talk for as long as possible with the person on the other end of the line. I’m not sure whether this is purely entertainment for him or if he feels that he is doing the poor kid a favor by providing possibly a break or some entertainment in his cold calling eight dollars and hour life of solicitation.
At the time I was living in the city, working two part time jobs in an effort to pay back some student loans and a tiny bit of credit card debt that had started to accrue now that I was living the good life. For me that meant being the young, unattached, educated girl that I was. I would see a show at least once a week and the fact that bar close had just moved up to two a.m. and there was no smoking ban in effect yet didn’t worry me at all. My employers didn’t seem to mind if my hair was a little oily and my wool jacket smelled of cigarettes if you stood to close. My jobs were all right, enough to get by, not a chance in hell that they were my true calling, but eh, I’d figure it that out one of these days. I assumed that I’d probably find that right around the same time I met a guy who either didn’t make me want to scream the instant he either started talking about how he was so in love with me, but had just bought his one way ticket to some undeveloped nation to help with subsistence farming, regardless of the fact that he not only couldn’t speak Spanish he had never set foot on a farm in his life. Or the boy who would sing sweetly to me of my various wonderful attributes until the day I would bump into him at the neighborhood coop buying organic pears with his longtime and often live in girlfriend. What I wanted was a revolutionary. One who understood what passion was and would fight side by side with me when the time came. I had no idea that instead I would birth that revolutionary and would have to raise her to leave me just the same.
I remember waking up one morning in my parents’ house with a sudden jolt like out of one of those many visiting at home nightmares. Mine usually are visions of forgetting to lock the bathroom door and your mother walks in to see your now permanently adorned shoulder and upper arm which you had been able to hid so well during the two years of college or the nightmare of mistakenly thinking everyone else in the house is still asleep while you do some deep thinking about being sandwiched by Brad Pitt and your high school chemistry teacher, when your older sister walks in to wake you up for breakfast. So I remember waking up extremely startled, catching my breath thinking “God! If I’m going to bare the next messiah somebody better tell me soon, because honestly – sometimes I like to drink a little and sometimes that little gets a tiny bit excessive and there is no way I want to be the one responsible for fucking up and giving the Christ child FAS.
See, now when I come out and say it like that you stare at me in disbelief. “That was a random though?” you question. Well at the time I figured it was – I mean I certainly had not previously entertained notions of being part of the second coming. You’re starting to humor me now; I can see it in the gleam of your eyes as you ask about the phone calls. You might be thinking I’m crazy, but you’re still hooked.
Ever since I left home I’ve graciously left my parents in charge of fielding all junk mail and solicitous phone calls for me. I’m not sure why, but no matter where I move these things had straight into their ever unwanting arms. Mainly they ignore it, my mother, out of a need for variety I assume will sometimes stack credit card offers in a pile on her desk, just waiting for the next time that I visit so that I may tear them up myself. My father, usually the first to the phone and always the most creative will often times talk for as long as possible with the person on the other end of the line. I’m not sure whether this is purely entertainment for him or if he feels that he is doing the poor kid a favor by providing possibly a break or some entertainment in his cold calling eight dollars and hour life of solicitation.
posted by Xtine at 1:06 PM
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