Amie Barrodale: You Are Having a Good Time

I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled on my mattress or draped over the open door of the microwave. I guess the girl with the pink high heels woke up in the middle of the night and forgot where she was. She went out into the hallway naked and closed the door behind her. She told me later that she had asked me, and I told her that was the way to the bathroom, to go out the front door. I don’t remember doing that. I remember I woke up with the cops in my house, asking me if I knew this girl. I said of course, she was the girl with the pink high heels. They thought that was really funny. After that, I didn’t drink for about five months. I was mostly celibate, except for my upstairs neighbor, until she moved away. She was this Indian girl. She liked to do it from behind, in this one position. That was the only thing she wanted to do. The other things were boring, she said. When I went to the shower, she got up on all fours to masturbate.

I was alone for a while after that. I got rid of everything in my apartment. I worked ten- and twelve-hour days. Each night, I went to hot yoga. They had a studio between my home and work, on the fifteenth floor of this building, so that, across from you, while you were sweating, you could look in at people living their lives and see all these slow-moving domestic scenes, like a man standing in front of a microwave. After yoga, I liked to walk home. I liked the cold. I bought a Mediterranean-style salad from the same place every night. The woman who worked there was Lebanese and studying to be a doctor. I ate my dinner in front of the TV, watching The Departed .

It was a weeknight around 10 p.m. the first time she called. I let it go to voicemail, because I wasn’t expecting any call, but when I went to get the message, it was just quiet for a while, and then the person hung up. At that time, I slept on an army-style cot. I ate on it, too, lying down with the food under my face, in the posture of a dog. This was the posture I was in several days later, the fourth time she called, and I answered.

“Who’s this?” I asked. She said, “It’s Koko.” “Koko? I don’t know any Koko.” “I saw you at a party; it was a long time ago.” “Oh, so I gave you my number?” “No, I got it from one of your friends.” “I don’t understand.” “He told me your name is William.” “Who was he?” “I can’t tell you that. He said I couldn’t tell you that. He said he was only telling me because he’s worried, you don’t go out anymore. He said you just lie around watching the same movie and eating the same food.” “That’s a lie,” I said. She said, “He said you do hot yoga.” “I don’t even know what that is,” I said. “Hold on.” I reached out an arm and put the movie on pause. I put the container of salad under my cot and propped myself up on my elbows. “What do you look like, anyway? Maybe I remember seeing you.”

“I’m about forty-eight years old.”

“No.” I flipped over onto my back and put an arm over my eyes. “I can tell from your voice you’re younger.”

“I’m attached to a breathing machine.”

“Okay, fine — don’t tell me, look, I’ve got to go.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that kind of joke — I mean, everybody says stuff like that. Why can’t you just tell me what you look like?”

“Okay,” she said. She sounded shy now. She thought around and said, “I guess I’m normal looking.”

“What’s normal?”

“I’m twenty-five. I have my hair cut into bangs.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t want to say any more than that.”

It was weird, because I looked at pornography pretty frequently at this point. It was even a problem, so that I would spend an hour looking for the most disgusting pictures I could find. Maybe disgusting is not the word. For example, I liked a short video where an older man was fucking a girl in the ass while he put a Blow Pop inside her. Then he stopped and put it into her ass. Then he put it into her mouth, and he started to fuck her again. But somehow this conversation …

We talked for a long time, more than an hour, until I got sleepy, so I started to fall asleep with her on the phone. The next night, around the same time, she called me again. I was really happy she did that. We had a nice conversation. She told me this story, how she used to prank-call a math teacher of hers in junior high. She did it so much, she figured out how to reprogram his outgoing message, using his two-digit remote-access code. She redid his outgoing greetings, said things that were explicitly sexual. Her teacher didn’t understand technology or remote-access codes. He assumed someone was breaking into his house each day to rerecord his message. It filled him with fear and paranoia. He bought a dog. He had an alarm installed and got a prescription for sleeping pills. It was a long time — nearly a year — before the police identified Koko and got to the bottom of the mystery. I loved that. I have stories like that, too. I told her the thing I did to my video teacher at an arts festival, and the things I used to say to my science teacher and to the owner of this antique store called J. B. & Lowther. I said, “Why don’t you come over here right now?” and she told me she lived five hours away by train.

She had a business selling old clothing on the Internet. She was a night owl. She stayed up until sunrise pretty frequently, working on her business. All the clothes had to be cleaned, pressed, tried on, photographed, and entered into her website. By this time I had seen a lot of photos of her body. She used herself as a model, and the way she did it was very artistic. I’m not just saying that because I cared about her; I worked with major fashion houses, so I know what I’m saying. She really was artistic about how she did it, even though she always chopped her own head off. She made it look exciting and interior, like she was a party of one. In fact, she had a lot of admirers on the Internet. It wasn’t just gross men; it was women in fashion, too. That’s how it happened we were at the same party.

“What party was it?” I asked. “I don’t think there was any party.”

“They had set up a small stage on the roof, with that carpet rubber as a stage. That foam stuff they put under carpets.”

“I remember that. That was a terrible party.”

“You looked really drunk.”

“I think I was really sad; I wish you had come and talked to me.”

“You were talking to some other girls. You were always talking to lots of girls. I didn’t think you’d want to talk to me.”

“I’m sure I wanted to.”

I knew that she drank, and most nights she was talking to me, she was drunk and taking pills, but I didn’t think anything about it. She never slurred, or got sloppy, but she did seem sometimes to check out. It was like her heart would go dead. It was one time when she was like this that she told me she had had other romances on the telephone. I said I didn’t care about that. She said, “You don’t understand; I’m a sociopath.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Hold on.”

She was gone for a while, and when she came back, she said, “All I mean is, what if when you see me, you think I’m ugly?”