Once I got my feet wet in the girlfriend game I took my new found
confidence on the road. By the road I mean I looked up cute girl's
phone numbers in the phone book and cold called them. Girls I knew,
Girls I didn't know whichever struck my fancy. Just so long as they
were cute. It actually went okay at times I would look up someone
with a generic last name though and I would run into troubles. A
Jones or a Johnson might require some calls to wrong numbers before
pay dirt was found. But in these heady times of pre-callerID a missed
call was no big deal just a quick request for the girl and then when
they said I had the wrong number it was checked off the list. One
could only hope that the girl they were searching for had an
alphabetically precocious father. Sometimes I would hit and then
begin an awkward conversation about who I was and why I was calling.
It turned out that my plan extended only so far as a desire to talk
to cute girls on the phone and I had a good plan for getting that
result. When they would ask why I was calling I would usually not
have an answer because I couldn't say my real purpose that is the
first and cardinal rule of the girl game – never tell them what you
really want. I would usually try and make up something about homework
or projects from a class that we had in common and then try and segue
to a regular conversation. It did not work very well or very often.
Once when I actually had some friends over helping me call and talk a
girl who was very cute but unaware of my existence became the target
of our phone solicitations. She answered and I tried to chat her up
with some furor because I had friends on the line in some need of
being impressed by by skill with the fairer sex. She just kept asking
who it was and why I was calling until she put her uncle on the line
and he yelled at us about calling girls we didn't know and bother
them and he ended up by threatening to kick our asses collectively. I
hung up a little shell shocked and embarrassed that my friends had to
hear me wuss out when a angry man yelled at me. In the frantic
imagining of my twelve-year-old mind I thought that he may actually
try and find out who I was and where I lived and try and find me and
follow through on his treats. I gave up cold calling from that day
forward. In a strange twist of fate the uncle of the girl ended up
being my uncle-in-law by marriage. I have never told him that it was
I who was calling girls and needed to get yelled at. He would
probably not remember anyway.
