Call Waiting and the Four-Minute Mile

By Tyler Smith

At this instant, the offices of the Denver Post are burning to the ground. While some of you may rejoice at this dispatching of vapid journalism and a third-rate crossword puzzle, my heart is rent, breaking over and over again. There is no joy in what I have done. There is only the necessity in the doing. I have been betrayed by a shrew of the house of Iscariot, and it's not even holy Thursday. It is every day. And so the Post burns as tears slog down my face like stricken slugs.

I never knew her name. All I know is that my name will forever be attached to hers (whatever it is), and the inevitable file of men and women whose soul she has stung. I envy the man on the cross with his 98 bursting wounds. My wounds are infinite, and I die every moment of every day. This is the story of my demise.

It began when my roommate Rudy and I were counting airline sickness bags in our humble apartment about a month ago. Rudy, for as long as I can remember, has taken it upon himself to break records. He holds the world record for eating the largest ice sculpture in the world, a feat for which he was briefly incarcerated. He is second only to a Danish man in consecutive hours spent inside a Bed Bath and Beyond—Rudy stowed away behind the full-size mattresses for 17 days until he revealed himself by demanding eggs Benedict from the night janitor. And this is where the airline sickness bags come into play. Rudy has amassed a total of 3,007 predominately unsoiled airline sickness bags, currently third in the world. As I was putting the bags into piles of a thousand, the phone rang, as it tends to do around dinnertime, which it was. I picked up the receiver and heard the most angelic timbre, the paragon of compassion on the other end.

"Hello," she said.

"Hello," I replied, like a fool. I was paralyzed with that awkward juvenile buoyancy one sometimes feels at a cotillion or perhaps the "great apes" section of the zoo. Then a pause,

"Hello," I offered again, like some kind of simpering oaf. Then that voice, my angel!

"I'd like to take a moment of your time to talk about a special rate for new subscribers of the Denver Post. Would you be interested in this one-of-a-kind offer?" her voice like the engulfing tendrils of spring mist.

"Yes, uhhh..I would love to chat. I'm sort of in the middle of something but I'd..."

"For yes, press one," she interrupted in her coy, irresistible way."

"You're right, I was rude. Of course I'd love to speak with you. May I avail of you your…"

"For yes, press one," she continued erotically," Para dirreciones en español, pulse dos." She speaks Spanish. How cosmopolitan, how worldly! I tried to pull myself together as Rudy sashayed about the room in his Falstaffian way, making the universal sign for intercourse. How mysterious, this wily little vixen. She wants me to push her buttons. I am, you see, not without a sense of metaphor. I pressed one.

"Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to consider the Denver Post . We are one of the most highly circulated newspapers in the United States, with a readership over…"

"Um, miss," I ventured, throwing caution to the proverbial four winds," I would just like to tell you, if I may be so bold, that you have the most intoxicating voice I have ever heard, only one measure of your bewitching charm." I maintain that while she felt my advances may have been a bit too suffocating for a first encounter, my gumption and forthrightness secretly appealed to her most forbidden of urges. She continued in her cherubic soprano, trying mightily not to betray her reciprocal feelings for me,

"You will save 62% off of the cover price with a thirteen week subscription costing you only $1.53 per week. This offer won't last long so please take this opportu…."

"Kiss me!" I cried, unable to stand the vicissitudes of a lover in prurient purgatory. What had come over me?! I had never issued such a bold decree in all my years. On hearing this even Rudy, usually the picture of adroitness, stumbled about our apartment over the seventeenth highest mound of bat guano in North America and fell to the floor spilling the twenty-four herring he had stacked atop his head, a Colorado record. Then there was silence. I blew it, I was certain. My knees began to buckle like when I have to go to the bathroom and I began to sweat profusely, also like when I have to go to the bathroom. Rudy could see my chagrin and began to sweep up the herring, averting his eyes from my floundering form and whistling the rape scene from the movie "Straw Dogs."

Then I awoke. Rudy explained to me that I had been asleep for almost eight days and as a result of my incessant whimpering and the fact that I was dangerously close to breaking his record of maintaining quasi-normal functioning during a bout of sustained sleep apnea, he was forced to rile me from my anguished hibernation.

"Business is business, man," he explained politely. "You know how it is." Oh, but apnea! From the Greek word, apnea, or "want of breath." My breath is yours, oh gossamer minx! I want of nothing but you, your voice, your provenance! Your you!!!

"She really hit nerve with you, man," Rudy said, half-concerned, half-fixated on the National spelling bee airing on the television.

"How did it end?"

"How did what end," Rudy asked.

"Our conversation? I have to know."

"P.O.C.O.C.U.R.A.N.T.E Pococurante. Mary of cocksucking mercy! The Jesuits, man!" Rudy, erupted. "They got their grimy little hands in everything…they're everywhere. Probably rigged the spelling bee to hinge on a word rooted in Catholicism. Notice, if you will, the Jewess came in third. It makes me sick….What did you say?"

"My conversation with my nameless beauty. Did we arrange a date?"

"No," Rudy said emphatically. "You pissed yourself. Why do you always have to be such a blubbering wet spot? I tried to talk to her and explain why you are such a spastic, but she just told me to enter my credit card and social security numbers."

"Aw, Rudy! Don't you see," I insisted, "She's shy, demure. Classy. She doesn't want to be intrusive, but finds my allure such that she has taken to subtler means of getting by the mystery, the mélange, if you will, that is I.

"Well, I gave her your credit card and social security numbers, so you should be okay, at least in the short term. Hey, did you know she speaks Spanish?," Rudy asked.

"Oh, do I."

"Seriously, though, man. The Jesuits. What gives?"

These next weeks I recount to you are fraught with peaks and valleys, paramounts and nadirs, shorts and talls. After my spell, I became frustrated with an ellipsis in correspondence between myself and my true love. And yes, I still believe it was true love. Rudy, skeptic that he is, was nonetheless confident enough to aver that indeed, this liaison had promise. Alas, I will forever speculate as to whether the urgings-on of a man who had spent four days submerged in pudding to be genuine, but there was honesty in his voice. Honesty and tapioca. My resolve exploded like a starburst. I knew my gilded seraphim lay somewhere in the bowels of the Denver Post and I, in a clarion call to arms/ legs/breasts/lips/ touch/ life made a call to the managing editor of the Post.

"Yes, I know you are a busy man, sir," I fumbled. "But you see, I've been contacted by one of your employees and…"

"How did you get this number," the editor shot back, caustically.

"Never mind that, good sir," I continued, "Our conversation was amorous in nature, and I don't feel comfortable divulging any specifics."

"I can have you arrested, you dunce, "said the editor.

"Perhaps she is in your sales department. She hid her feelings under the veil of trying to sell me a subscription. As a matter of fact, she might not have worked at the Post at all," I intuited, aloud. "Good riddance to you then sir, and by the way, your crossword puzzle is an unqualified abortion." And I hung up, rejuvenated at the prospect of the hunt.

After a number of fruitless attempts to locate this enchantress through avenues legal and some not so much, I did something that I shall always regret. In fact, I think it may have caused a permanent rift in our relationship. On the suggestion of Rudy, I dialed up one of those undesirable 1-900 numbers, you know the kind. I felt perhaps a temporary succor to my woes would be to enlist another to take the place of my only. What a calamity that turned out to be! After a series of minutes, for which I now assume I'll have to pay, a young woman took my call, asking me what "turned me on." I am embarrassed even to write the words. I explained to her that all she needed to do was raise her voice an octave or so and offer me a subscription to the Denver Post. Well, bemused as she was at this request, she eventually acquiesced and provided a particularly nauseating rendition of my lover's first sales pitch. I say sales pitch, but I think we all know what that means. I gave her a firm lecture on performance art that caused this unfortunate trollop to break down and I was then forced to submit to her wailing, something about a hostile womb and the fact that she had to take beta-blockers even to be near a turkey (her father apparently suffocated on Thanksgiving Day after a particularly vigorous stuffing incident).

I began to feel uneasy and thought that in a sense, I had betrayed my one true love. How could I do this to her?! I dropped the phone lugubriously like people do in Tennessee Willams plays and in my zombie-like state, perched myself on the already teetering mound of bat guano to think. I believe at some point Rudy picked up the phone and made a pass at the forlorn call girl, explaining how he had spent the summer of '92 inside a Butterball Turkey. Rudy can be shameless.

After a prolonged stint sitting on the guano, the phone rang. By instinct, I jumped down from my perch, ran to the phone and, after taking a moment to compose myself, I took the call.

"Hello," I said, maniacally.

"Hello," she answered. It was she! God be praised! I felt my skin turn to liquid, accompanied by the feeling of being gut-shot with a large caliber rifle.

"I thought I had lost you, my god, my love, my life! Don't ever leave me again. You've killed me once, please don't ever do it again," I cried. Then a pause.

"I'd like to take a moment of your time to talk about a special rate for new subscribers of the Denver Post. Would you be interested in this one-of-a-kind offer?"

"Look I'm sorry," I begged. "You have to forgive me. I get so nervous sometimes, I never meant to hurt you. I passed out. Please, let's not cover this old ground. We've grown, we've loved and we've lost and now we love again. This business about the Denver Post, I mean, let's talk about you." Then my worst fears were realized. She broke in,

"You will save 62% off of the cover price with a thirteen week subscription costing you only $1.53 per week. This offer won't last long so please take this opportunity to consider the …."

"Nooooo!" I cried. "We have suffered enough. Venerable Job knows nothing of our patience and resolve! Why must you condemn me to exist in the past? Let's move on. I have a time-share in Vail. Well, actually it's my parents's, but I'm sure they'll…." Then she cut me off again with some more of that Spanish.

"Yes," I cried, I'll press one, I'll press two, I'll learn Spanish , I'll give up my ghost for you, just tell me your name!!" I began to press the keypad on the phone furiously. One Two One Two One Two. I was a man possessed. Rudy shouted from the kitchen,

"Hey, you know what they say, man: If its got an engine or tits, its gonna give you trouble." He mocks me. And he does this with two pumpkins under his armpits, preparing for the Halloween Endurance Festival. To parrot the popular jargon, I really felt like kicking six kinds of shit out of him. But it does not end here. No, it shall never end.

After I passed out again for a little over a week , Rudy informed me that my dissembling harlot had called every day since I had succumbed to her most recent spell. He said that she had uttered the same cryptic words every time, in an exhausted monotone. That crap about the Denver Post. To his credit, though, Rudy informed me that he had explained to her my condition and lit into her about the dangers of being reckless with people's hearts. But she never cared. Or, if she once cared, she now knew no limits to the blanket of suffering she had woven. I would never speak to her again. The last few weeks have been spent speaking to creditors and remittance men who appear at our door demanding payment for my 7200 subscriptions to the Denver Post. And it is she, who has crushed my spirit, broken my bank and spun me into this maelstrom of despair. I had no other recourse, you see then, but to torch the Post, that bastion of heartbreak and cruelty. Burn on your pyre, horrible Dido! You shall die only once, I for the rest of my days.

When I returned from my mission, confident that the inferno would take down the whole of that devilish place, Rudy greeted me with his usual misguided sympathy.

"7200 subscriptions is a record, man. Can I take it?" How do I say no to a man who has attached 4,000 paper clips to his nipples, also a Colorado record.