44 Chapters About 4 Men - BB Easton Page 0,78
answer anyway.
And when you give your number to anyone and everyone and then don’t answer, you get a lot of voice mails.
Last week, I had a voice mail from a drunken ex—ahem, Ding-Dong—who guiltily admitted halfway through his message that he was in the process of masturbating.
Last night, some poor confused guy Sara picked up on the Las Vegas strip left me a message in which he wondered aloud why the name on my outgoing message was BB. (Sara likes to give her one night stands my number instead of hers because she’s an asshole. I don’t exactly discourage her because the voice mails make me laugh. I am also an asshole.)
And today Sara’s mom left a message, asking me to pray with her that this Alex guy that Sara is kind of seeing gets her pregnant so that she can finally have a grandbaby.
See, Journal? I can’t answer that fucker. It could literally be anybody. There is a very real chance that Satan himself could be on the other line, just waiting for me to pick up so that he can play the first few lines of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” backward and make my head rotate three hundred and sixty degrees while spraying bile like some kind of oscillating sprinkler head from hell.
It’s just not worth the risk.
So, now, you are probably asking yourself, Why doesn’t she just change her fucking number?
I know. I ask myself the same thing all…the…time.
And honestly, up until recently, I didn’t have an answer. The damn thing rings day and night. And every time I see Blocked on my caller ID, I still have to suppress the urge to scream and stomp on my phone as if it were on fire.
But, for some unknown reason, the idea of changing my number has always been scarier. I was never able to cut the cord, but I had no idea why.
Until May 28, 2009.
The call came from my high school buddy, Tim, whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, and luckily, like everyone else under the sun, he still had my cell number. When I called him back after listening to his clipped, foreboding voice mail, he told me what I had been subconsciously waiting to hear since the day I met Ronald “Skeletor” McKnight.
He was dead.
Stabbed to death in a bar fight.
At the age of twenty-eight.
Hasta La Vista, Knight
No matter how nasty our breakups had been, Knight never stopped calling me. No matter how many times he lost, pissed on, or crushed his phone into a million pieces with his bare hands; no matter how drunk he was; no matter how long it had been since we last spoke, Knight always remembered my number. It was tattooed on his brain (probably literally, knowing him).
Eventually, Knight’s calls faded from traumatizing-stalker levels to just typical middle-of-the-night-drunk-ex-boyfriend levels, but good, bad, or ugly, I never answered more than twice a year. Knight was a drug so potent that I knew I could only take a hit once every six months without falling back off the wagon.
Which, I found out once I switched my major to psychology, was just frequently enough to ensure that Knight would continue to call me forever.
I remember the exact moment I learned the term intermittent positive reinforcement. I was a sophomore in college. Knight and I had been broken up since my junior year of high school, so I’d already been trying (and failing) to avoid him for three years at that point.
When the hot young grad student teaching my behavioral psychology class explained to us that the hands-down best way to ensure that a behavior continued wasn’t to reward it every time it was displayed but to reinforce it randomly, my mind immediately conjured a picture of Knight’s icy, spectral face.
Holy shit! He keeps calling because I pick up at random intervals!
The second Cutie Pie asked if anyone had an example, I thrust my cell phone high into the air with a gasp of insight.
I can give you a fucking example!
Knight would typically open our biannual grown-up, yeah-sure-we’re-just-friends-now conversations by bragging about his most recent sexual conquests and exploits. It was like a tic. Then, somehow sensing my agitation through his thick drunken fog, he would change the subject, bragging instead about his recent bar-fight triumphs. After a little banter, Knight would finally pluck up enough courage to bring the conversation around to us, launching into a diatribe about how sorry he was for everything he’d done…blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. When I’d eventually