It’s amazing how nothing ever progresses in a straight line. Yet a discernible link exists between effort extended and the results achieved — it’s just that instead of linear motion, right angles, curves, and other irregular routes are far more common. Even though we can’t see the connection, however, a definite cause and effect relationship exists; the ripples might be invisible to us, and we will never know what specifically led to what, but without these efforts, you wouldn’t get any results whatsoever. This truism relates to just about every endeavor known to man, whether work or creative related, or, above all else, pertaining to these wild schemes with the ladies.
By this I mean that I’ve noticed you can put a ton of backbreaking labor hours into projects A, B, C, and D without having anything positive to show for your time. Except in so doing, project E, which you haven’t messed with or for that matter even thought about in years, mysteriously bursts to life again. There is a connection here, yes. We will simply never glimpse the source.
Or just maybe, sometimes we spot the seams, yet this doesn’t make the patchwork any less wondrous. And either way it pounds home the same lesson, that you’ve just got to get out there and start mixing it up, and in some weird way, opportunities begin to fall into your lap. So it is that we’re a couple weeks past having any female prospects on the married man front. The cowboy way hasn’t exactly given us much to hang our off brand Stetsons upon. Jenna hasn’t even called me since around Christmas, which I have to admit, overconfident or not, totally blows my mind, has caught me considerably off guard. I figured she would be begging to come back by now. But here we are on an otherwise normal and boring, winter weeknight, whereby Phil is cooking pancakes for dinner, an old Black Sabbath album cranking from his spaceship sized living room stereo, when the phone erupts to life from a totally unexpected source.
“7734?” he questions, peering down at the caller ID and reciting the last four digits, spatula in his left mitt. Not answering, though, as I’ve already instructed him that this is my preference. Let this flotsam float on down to the answering machine, and then we can sift through the detritus. Thus far he is even acquiescing to this strategy, for the most part, yet another encouraging sign.
“That’s funny. That’s how you spell HELL on a calculator. You remember that from school?” I observe with a chuckle, seated at the kitchen table, then add, “but no, that doesn’t ring a bell.”
After four rings, our old school answering machine does indeed erupt to life, except this mysterious caller immediately hangs up. Upon transferring the latest couple of recently browned cakes over to a plate, Phil finally asks, “hell? No, dude. How does that work? I can’t even picture it…”
“Well, okay, so that would have been a lower case h…”
“Lower case h?”
“…yeah and then upper case…,” I start, interrupted in shrill fashion as the phone begins ringing again.
“It’s the same person,” Phil observes, twisting around to peer down at these gadgets, paired on a little side table between the doorway and the stove. Wordlessly, we stare at one another, like horror movie buffs expecting a jump scare, but if so the scene proves anticlimactic, playing out just as the previous one had. Finally, Phil breaks the silence by concluding, “fuck that. I’m calling them back. Let’s see who this is.”
“Naw, dude, don’t do that,” I advise, though he already has the receiver in hand, punching in digits, with a finger of his spatula holding one, as he reads them from the caller ID.
“It could be Jen,” he says, with a pointed, possibly even mildly panicked glance over my way, “or who the fuck even knows who this is. I’ll get to the bottom of it, dude, trust me.”
Phil connects with the person on the other end a couple of rings later. Following some brief identity establishing back and forth, he says, “Sid Mason? We got a Sid Mason here?” and glances over at me with a toothy grin, a what’s up? type nod. As I stand to accept the handoff, whispering my own inquiries as to who this is, he replies with a half questioning, “Helena?…,” which just floors me. Okay, so I haven’t heard from my most recently disentangled ex-girlfriend, Jenna — instead the one before that is now on the line, whom I haven’t dated in five years and haven’t even spoken to in roughly half as long.
Part of what’s stringing this event chain along makes at least a modicum of sense, even if unable to see the threads, when considering the way these females think. While it’s true that none of these prop related shenanigans have paid off much lately, they’ve nonetheless kept me occupied. I haven’t felt the tiniest temptation to call Jenna myself, or risk an even greater reach into the past with Helena, and this is surely helping my cause. And though it’s no less astounding, the reasoning behind her call is understandable and not quite so mysterious, after she explains what recently happened.
“I was out at this bar recently, and I saw you playing pool,” she explains, “you and Dylan.”
“What! You’re kidding! Why you didn’t you just come up and say hi?” I exclaim. Retracing the past few weeks, this could only have been one night: the occasion where we’d dressed up as cowboys, then chucked our hats aside and dipped into Club 151 on a whim, along the route home from Pardners. It was our first time into that establishment, and though it had honestly never occurred to me when moving to this end of town, I realize now that Helena does indeed live a whole lot closer now as well. And she’s apparently somewhat of a regular at that place.
“I don’t know, it was just…,” she sighs, “I wanted to, but I was just too nervous or something. Plus, well, I did have this guy I’ve been seeing with me. But yeah…it was totally you…”
“Club 151, right?”
“Oh yeah. Mmm hmm. I knew right away it was you. I don’t know…I just hung out on the other side, like, watching you guys. You were…mmm…”
Those buttery syllables at the end sound an awful lot like the introduction to a favorable review, like when a chick is about to say you look fine or something. If so I’ll take it, that’s for sure, any rating anywhere in that ballpark. Perhaps more importantly, though, I think it indicates that the country hoss getup must itself mostly work, considering that the boots, jeans, belt and snazzy long sleeved shirt with fake rhinestone buttons were all still very much in play that night.
As far as this night is concerned, meanwhile, upon learning where I now live, Helena asks if she might come over here in a few. I have the feeling this was her intention all along, but don’t mention this, and am not nearly insane enough to explain our screening process with the caller ID and the answering machine, that we’d loitered within earshot the entire time. My only hope is that Phil is onboard enough with these concepts to nimbly play along.
Helena arrives, looking just as terrific as ever herself. The formerly ash blonde curls, though just as jauntily wound, are a bit darker now, representing the greatest difference. She still deftly straddles that fine line between skinniness, which I’m not overly into, and having a fantastic figure, which I am. And as always also makes for a fantastic case study for one other, totally unrelated reason, which pertains to these perception differences I find so intriguing. Helena is considered a tall female, and I’m considered a short guy, yet although we’ve measured ourselves multiple instances over the years, the best we can determine is that we are…possibly the exact same height.
As far as what’s motivating this visit, my suspicions are almost immediately confirmed as she asks if we can talk, right away, and we dip into the kitchen for a quick, somewhat hushed powwow. Phil is now chilling in the living room with a can of Milwaukee’s Best and some old horror movie on the TV, i.e. his default evening mode, at least on the ones he’s not out barhopping.
Unslinging this backpack she’s worn over here, seated across from one another at the table, Helena blurts out with little introduction, “do you want to do some ecstasy with me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I cackle and retort, “it’s, like, midnight, on a Tuesday. I seriously have to get up for work in six hours.”
To this, she sighs and shakes her head, says, “I knew it.”
And here we have maybe a boiled down essence of why the two of us are not together. She’s an amazing person and all, fun and smart and interesting enough to endlessly keep one guessing. So clearly none of the above is an issue. This green eyed sprite with the mischievous, somewhat crooked smile also possibly wins the gold medal as the most beautiful chick I’ve ever dated, and that never hurt matters any either. I know she works hard and even owns her own house, too, but yes, the partying lifestyle became a bit more extreme than what a nerd like me was really into. Telescoping outward — or would this make it microscoping down? — though, to this specific moment, we are also on completely different schedules. She’s pulling overnights at a nearby factory and just happens to be off this late evening.
“Well, how about we split one, then?”
“Nah, I’m good,” I tell her with a laugh.
We repair to the living room, with cans of Milwaukee’s Best, and join Phil in absently watching this vampire flick while we converse. This rotgut brew is his choice, of course, it totally fits the intense metal guy persona. A case of The Beast maintains its constant presence in our fridge, so much so that if running out or even threatening to, he will leave the house to hit a nearby carryout for some more. I’m slowly getting acclimated to the weird chemical taste, but it takes some doing. During a recent carryout odyssey, Dylan and I both accompanied Phil, and our visiting comrade found this task considerably more difficult.
“If this is the best Milwaukee has to offer, I would hate to see what’s worse,” Dylan observes, grimacing in our kitchen as he chokes one down.
Helena doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, though, as she and I reminisce about old times, with the occasional sideline reportage from Phil. Though she does ask about Jenna at one point, I only offer a vague, “eh, we broke up awhile back,” in hopes of sounding both as though it happened quite some time ago, but the development was also not that consequential and I’m long since over it. While I know guys who would lay it on thick, if not with crying in the beer routines then at least ranting at length, this doesn’t seem like the correct play to me. Instead, I don’t elaborate, don’t ask about her relationship status at all, and attempt steering discussions only into what any of us are doing now, or else some amusing anecdotes from our shared past. As this is the first occasion Phil is meeting Helena, he doesn’t have a ton to contribute, and is a good sport about sitting on the sidelines. Then again, he could always retreat upstairs to his room if really that bored.
“Remember how I used to always call you in sick, at your school?” I’m telling Helena, while she lightly giggles at this memory. Before I add the kicker, “I’d tell them I was your grandpa. But then one day the secretary put your principal on the phone, and he said, you don’t sound old enough to be her grandpa!”
At this she howls and doubles over, laughing still and blushing as she straights back up. “Yes! Totally! Man, I think about that stuff all the time!”
So these are mostly positives to rally around, having moved past the whole ecstasy kerfuffle. Feeling like a stuffed shirt is never ideal, but there are ways to frame this in your mind, I have learned, to turn the tables. Having standards of any sort is actually a badass move, for example, and a high percentage of guys would never say no to a girl who looks like this, in any capacity, for any reason. And I do believe it comes around full circle to where they ultimately dig that someone would tell them no, because they’re not used to it.
Of course, in the moment, this doesn’t prevent her from commiserating to Phil about my lameness just now. Which in turn leads to a heartwarming discussion, between the two of them, about their own histories with various illicit substances.
“All I know is, the next time somebody offers me coke, I’m gonna take my money and flush it right down the toilet instead,” Phil declares, “cause that shit doesn’t do anything. It’s a total fucking waste.”
“Yep, yep,” Helena agrees, nodding and chuckling heartily.
Phil eventually mentions that he just might have a joint in his room, and dashes upstairs to get it. Once again Helena asks if I care to partake — he already knows the answer to that, and doesn’t bother — to which I reply no once again. She rolls her eyes and even kicks me in the shin as Phil lights it, which these two subsequently pass back and forth.
The night, somewhat predictably for various different reasons, doesn’t last a whole lot longer from here. Phil is the first to groggily declare that he has to get up early, and departs to grab some shuteye. Though I’m lucky to live so close to work now, that moment is soon arriving for me, too. But I can’t quite decide what the best move is from here, and am stalling, hoping that an obvious pathway will emerge from the undergrowth. Yet this decision is ultimately made for me when Helena yawns and stretches, declares that even she can barely keep her eyes awake. Asking if she can just crash here on the couch, as I dip into the hall closet to grab her a blanket. And then drift upstairs for some blessed sleep myself.
So nothing all that substantial happens tonight, maybe, apart from reestablishing a long broken connection. But as I leave for work in the morning, glancing over at the snoozing, prone form of Helena before heading out the door, I’m feeling pretty good about how things went and my prospects moving forward. One person who is not impressed by my performance, however, would be Phil, who berates me the instant we meet up at home again in the afternoon.
“Let me tell you something about girls and drugs, okay?” he bellows, throwing his arms in the air to punctuate this point, “when GIRLS offer you DRUGS, you take them! YOU TAKE THEM!”
