David’s Phone
One of the tasks I’ve tasked myself with as I transition from a mid-20s Bro to something somewhat resembling a semi-functioning adult is to clean up the contacts in my cell phone. Because at 32, you can only have so many Weed Guy 1s and Weed Guy 2s and Weed Girl SFs in your phone.
Especially because, the last time I was back in my San Francisco, Weed Girl SF did not return my calls or even answer when I knocked on her front door. I thought the fact that she gave me her leftover acid from Burning Man for free meant we had something. Apparently not.
I should delete that number. It’s not like she’s going to answer the next time I go back. Yet it pains me to do that. I hate removing contacts from my phone, a list riddled with numbers from girls whose last names I don’t know.
There are so many times I’ve gotten a phone number, gone on a first date, and then never had my embarrassing, desperate texts pleading for sex returned. So, all of them, gone. Tonight. But before I clear them completely out of my contacts and forever eliminate the very distant, very remote (but come on, maybe real!) possibility of us reconnecting for some no strings attached intercourse, I thought we should take a trip down contact list memory lane.
Note: The only thing these women have in common is that for the life of me, even after racking my brain, I could not remember their last names.
Brianne: In the spring of 2008, I had just moved to San Francisco and took a spot in a weird house full of hippies. Real ones. There was a 65-year-old British antiquities dealer named Willy and a 40-year-old Hungarian who sold scarves for a living. A buddy from high school gave me the number of a girl he knew who has also just moved out there. We met at a bar and after five or six Trumer Pils went back to my place. On her way back from the bathroom after we hooked up, she accidentally walked into Willy’s room, crawling into the wrong bed and terrifying the old man. The next day, the woman who rented me the room asked me to move out.
Cyndi: Cyndi couldn’t spell. I guess I should have known that. Cyndi. She gave me her number and when I asked her out two days later told me she has a boyfriend.
Danny: I met Danny at a small, suburban bar. She was much, much older than me. Maybe 38 to my 25. We danced about, stumbling and crashing into tables, that kind of night. She gave me her number and then started texting me really sensually about her unique spins on pesto. Your mouth will melt after a bite of dandelion greens and hazelnut pesto. I can whip up and arugula and walnut blend that will make your whole body tingle. She never invited me over to try any of it.
Hot Aussie: On the first night of my cousin’s bachelor party on Lake Champlain, I flirted with possibly the most gorgeous blonde Australian in the world. She was sailing around the world (I think? I don’t know how she came to be in land-locked Burlington, Vermont on a Friday in August) and we made plans to meet when she stopped in Baltimore (which I also think is not near the ocean?). We spent two weeks flirtatiously bantering until one night she asked to talk on the phone. I called and on the other line was the Best Man from my cousin’s wedding, who was with me when I met her and told me he’d swapped in his number for hers after I passed out.
Jen 3: Jen 3 lived two floors below me, and we met in the elevator. On our first date we walked five miles home instead of taking a cab. I was smitten. On our second, at a bar just down the street, she introduced me to her best friend and her boyfriend, who two hours later shoved me in the back and then took a swing at me because he thought I was coming on to his girlfriend. I was pretty drunk, but I don’t think I was that bad. I liked Jen, whose only other words to me ever again were “Good” when I ran into her in the hallway and told her I was moving out.
Jenna 2: This stunning brunette was standing next to me at a Kings of Leon concert and asked to hit the blunt I was smoking. On our way out, she grabbed my phone to put in her number, only to get pissed to find there was already another Jenna in there. I tried to explain that I didn’t have any say in my older sister’s name, but that didn’t stop her from getting livid and insisting I put her in my contacts as ‘Jenna’ and change my sister to something else.
Jessica: I was hammered, heading home on the Metro around three a.m., but I somehow struck up a conversation with this girl, managing to come across neither completely deranged nor completely shifaced. She asked to come back to my place to go for a walk with me and my dog. We started doing some hand stuff pressed against a chain link fence around the corner from my place. I didn’t realize that the hand of the finger I had inside her was also attached to the wrist that had the leash of my border collie wrapped around it. She (the dog) saw a squirrel and bolted toward it. That was the end of that brief relationship.
Julie Lexington: Julie was another neighbor of mine in my condo. We met in the elevator and she invited me back to her place for sex. Twice divorced, while we were making love, she stopped to tell me about the electrolysis she’d just gotten done on her pubic hair.
Shelley: After a Caps game at a dive bar in Chinatown, my friend walked up to Shelley to compliment her purse. Unprompted to me, she said, “You can have my number if you want.” For our first date I picked a spot right next to her house, because … well, she seemed forward enough. We wound up fooling around in her building’s emergency stairwell for some reason and while her hand was in my pants, she paused to ask where things were going with us. So I took her on a second date. We went back to her house and after furiously making out on the couch, I moved her to her room and dramatically and passionately threw her on her bed. I immediately followed and as we both came down, the box spring splintered and we crashed to the floor. She asked me to leave and I meekly obliged.