Detecting A Type
Twice over the past years I coincidentally ran into guys I used to hang out with in ye aulde tymes, but had lost touch with, for reasons or not. Both were in their Fourties when we met again. Both I met in some bar, drank beers, had fun, talked about older and not so older times, and such. They asked for my phone-number. I didn’t ask for theirs.
The first guy then immediately stumbled into a routine that we’d had had much earlier and that – now I remembered – was one reason why I lost touch eventually. He would call me late at night, drunk, wanting to see me, out there or in my home, and I went along. I hadn’t seen him for six years, but he immediately stumbled into this routine again. I was nonplussed. Eventually I stopped picking up the phone late at night. At one point, right after an unanswered phone-ring, my door-bell rang. I didn’t open. I had been sleeping anyway, and everything was dark around me. Our last phone-conversation was something like “hey, it’s meeeee” – (long pause) “Hm. I don’t know what to say.” – (long pause) “Me neither.” (Both hang up.) Then I moved, and my phone-number moved as well. I didn’t tell him.
The second guy I met only last week. This one goes back to even earlier, to when I was about fifteen, sixteen years old. We had a nice chat and he asked for my phone-number. Since that time he called me twice, once to go to a concert (that I wasn’t interested in, no thanks), once just now. I was unfriendly on the phone, telling, in a very angry voice, that I was sick and had already been sleeping, which is exactly fifty-percent true. Then I hung up. Camp visitors may place bets when he will call again. (Don’t get me wrong, he is certainly a very nice person, but this is getting too much for me.)
Slowly detecting a pattern here, esteemed visitors, or a type: the drunk late-night caller from older times, bathing in the time-barrel, in a rater dubious liquid.