Phone Numbers
In grade school, I’d ask a girl to write her phone number on a scratch piece of paper or if I didn’t have any, on my hand. At dinner time, mom would tell me to go wash up before I ate dinner, which I did, but not before writing down my new phone number on a piece of binder paper.
My first play-by-play memory of getting a girl’s phone number is in seventh grade. We were both in our county honor band. All of us sat together while the honor choir performed and she sat behind me. If I recall correctly, she asked me for a pencil or a pen, and because she was pretty much the cutest girl I had ever seen in my life, I gave her whatever I had on me and some jokes to make her laugh. When she gave me the writing instrument back, it came with her phone number. We’re actually still in touch to this day, but no longer on the phone. We use Facebook.
When I got to college, I didn’t have a cell phone for the first two years, so I would always carry a pen with me to the club, only to get it confiscated by a bouncer. “Can’t bring in sharp objects,” they would tell me. That was fine, I would just ask my boy to put the girl’s number in his cellphone, then when I got home, I would write it down on a Post-It.
For a while I got a lot of numbers on the back of receipts.
There was the time the woman at the check cashing place asked me if I wanted my receipt and I told her that was fine if she put her number on the back of it. She did.
At a summer internship in Detroit, there was a cute woman who worked in my company’s cafeteria (Detroit has cute women everywhere), and she always smiled whenever I came to her register. One day she gave me a receipt, and I handed her a pen. “Write your number on the bottom,” I said. I can tell she never really traveled anywhere because she didn’t include an area code. She wasn’t used to meeting guys from out of town like me.
During my senior year of college, I worked as a waiter at Applebee’s. The hostesses knew I wanted all the parties of cute girls who came from neighboring colleges in my section. This way, I had the entire meal to work my magic and by the end, I usually got a tip and a phone number. I would determine whether or not I called her by the amount she tipped me.
Now I have a cell phone. I no longer use ink to write phone numbers on the back of napkins, inside my palm, or receipts. I punch them in my phone, where they usually get lost in an oasis of other numbers I either always dial, will never dial, or only dial when I’m drunk. In my cell phone address book, I don’t ever have to be burdened with memorizing a woman’s number, because if it’s one thing I hate, it’s that some numbers in my head will take years to forget. They’re like tattoos.
Sometimes though, a woman’s phone number is worth memorizing.
One time I chatted up a woman I had known for ten minutes about how technology has affected our memorization skills and some people can’t even remember their own parents phone number. Of course I was boring her, and from the looks of things, she was closer to ending the conversation than keeping it going. But I was just getting warmed up, so I made a deal with her.
“Look, the night’s still early,” I said. “How about we make a deal right now. Tell me your phone number right now and I won’t write it down or anything. At the end of the night, if I remember it correctly, I keep it and can call you so we can get together sometime soon.”
She agreed. I remembered it. We dated for a couple months.
Even as the technology and circumstances have changed, phone numbers remain the classic get; a math of new possibilities, the sum of which is to be determined at a later date.
Sometimes the number adds up to a relationship, others are the sum of a one night stand. I’ve had phone numbers turn into nothing more than phone sex; others the combination straight to a woman’s voice mail.
Whatever the outcome, those ten digits (or sometimes seven) are like Lottery numbers: Get the wrong combination, nothing changes, I just play again. But if I get the right one…jackpot, baby.
