30
The Drunk Dial
THE THREE KEY FORMS OF THE DRUNK DIAL:
The Lonely Drunk Dial
The Angry Drunk Dial
The Weepy Drunk Dial
Call 1: Eric
“Hey,” came Eric’s voice. “Here, someone wants to say hi.”
“Hi, Norris,” came the anonymous happy voice on the other line. Who the fuck is that?
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Oh, I’m Marc-André,” the voice introduced itself. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“Yes, hi. Eric now, please. Cool, thanks.”
More shuffling. Eric came back on the line.
“Are you in danger?” Norris asked.
“What?”
“Is this a dangerous situation for your personal safety?”
Eric laughed. “You called me, asshole!”
“Oh.”
That’s right, he had. Jesus. Bloody goddamn hell, how drunk was he right now?
“Are you on a date right now?”
“Um,” Eric said. “Yeah, kinda. Are you in active danger?”
This entire state was a goddamn war zone, so yes, he very much was.
“Norris?”
“No,” Norris managed after a moment of assessment. His blood sugar couldn’t be amazing, and he was pretty sure he would be constipated this week, but there was no active danger. Apparently, the human body started to break down at age forty, so he was still ahead of the curve on that score.
“Are you sure?” Eric repeated his question.
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because you called me.”
“That’s a little didactic. Darmactic. Dramatic.” Words were hard tonight.
“Well, you don’t normally call,” Eric pointed out. “Even when you lived here, we didn’t. Or, you didn’t. You text and you email, but the voice-to-voice thing isn’t your forte. Norris Kaplan 101. So, what did you call me for?”
Am I an asshole? Did I totally just fuck things up with the most amazing girl I’ve ever met?
“Pocket dial.”
“Oh, bull-shite.” His best friend didn’t believe him for a second. “Tell me what’s wrong. Is this Aarti-related?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Norris denied. “I’m at the prom with my friend Maddie. Her friend’s having some sort of drama.”
“What about Aarti?”
“What about her?” Norris echoed, defensive. “Man, that is the oldest of news.”
“If you say so . . .”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Norris hung up, quickly opened his camera, and took a selfie of himself brandishing the champagne bottle. Hmm . . . He rubbed his eyes, straightened his collar, and snapped another. Then another. And another. Eventually he captured one that looked decent enough. His eyes were less red in this shot. It was enough to assuage Eric, thousands of miles away and about to get laid.
Norris typed quickly:
Legit pocket dial. I’m totally fine. Go bk to your date!
Eric’s reply came a few seconds later:
K. Let’s chat tomorrow. Nice tux.
When had Norris turned into such a good liar?
Call 2: Dad
Austin, for all its many flaws, had a crap ton of active pay phones. Good pay phones too. Ones you could easily step into if your own phone’s battery was in the red and your reception nonexistent in this part of the city. A part of Austin that Norris actually didn’t recognize. From the soreness in his feet—stupid dress shoes—he had walked for quite a bit. Almost two hours. No, that couldn’t be right. The clock was a liar. For a moment he strongly considered the possibility that he might have walked all the way to Houston, which confirmed that he was definitely still tipsy. He was exhausted and restless all at once. Stupid Maddie. Stupid Aarti.
Anyway, the point was that Norris still remembered and appreciated pay phones. For the longest time, he’d gone without a cell phone back in Montreal. He might have been part of the very last generation of kids to remember life without one. It wasn’t until the fourth grade that he’d walked into school one September to find every other kid suddenly connected to the world wide web and constantly checking their black screens for updates of the three to nine people they probably each knew at that age. Much like the Xbox, getting one from Judith had mostly been a matter of fitting in, something he’d wasted an obscene amount of energy trying to do over the years before realizing that it wasn’t for him. In the end, he really was an origami person after all.
The stray pay phone he stepped into had been flooded by a streetlight, otherwise Norris might have walked right past it. Luckily for him, it was both trash- and urine-free, save for an empty soda cup and lipsticked straw forgotten over the console. Maybe they were making a comeback among the cool twenty-somethings this town seemed overrun by—retro technology that allowed you to live without constant notifications and alerts and a GeoPin so that everyone always knew who you were and what you were doing. Norris could definitely see the appeal to that.
There was only one number he’d bothered to memorize. Months ago, when he thought he would be dialing it every day, and it felt important to know by heart in case of situations like . . . well, situations like these.
“Oh, hello, deadbeat!” Norris hailed when his father picked up.
“Norris?”
“Correct, yes: Norris. Nor . . . iss.”
“Are you okay?”
“Nohr-hissssss,” Norris repeated, stretching out his name. “By the way: stupid name. Like, definitely the wrong call. Do you know how many people squint at me and then think ‘Morris’? I’m going to have to deal with that all my life, fuck you very much.”
“Noted,” came the voice on the other line. “Anything else?”
Norris thought for a long moment. “Butane is a really funny word.”
“Are you drunk?”
His father sounded more amused than anything else.
“Mm. Little bit, maybe,” Norris conceded. “And see? That right there: What kind of shit dad gets a call from their only child in a different country, sauced out of his mind, and finds that ’musing?”
“I’m in a different country, kiddo, like you said. Are you safe?”
“That’s not the point. We’re never going to live in the same house again, by the way.”
There was a pause on the line, some light shuffling. A phone passing from one shoulder to the other.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Oh, so you know already? Right, obvi. I guess I thought I’d be unleashing some profound wisdom on you, but of course you already know. Your oldest kid, sixteen years in, just flies off to America and you’ll never see him again, but whatever. You have a shitty little sequel in the works, so what do you care, right?”
“Obvi?”
“Yes, Dad. I hang out with cheerleaders and football players now and use the word obvi. I like a good abbreviation. It’s elegant. Saves me time.”
“Where is your mother?”
“They’re all going to hate me after tonight anyway, so I guess I should say I used to hang with cheerleaders and football players.”
“Where is your mother?” Felix repeated.
“On a date, probably.”
Silence. Norris could almost hear the frown on Felix’s brow.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?!” Norris snapped. “Jesus! How—”
His father cut him off. “Where are you?”
“’M cold,” Norris answered. Tee-hee, butane.
“That’s not what I asked,” Felix said, his voice taking the tone it did when Norris came home late from the ice rink and hadn’t bothered to call. But that was all before. . . .
“Somewhere that’s cold,” Norris doubled down. Because, really.
“I’m fine,” Norris said, rubbing his face. He was sick of Felix’s voice, of the fake concern, of the way his head spun when he tried to look for a street sign. He was in Texas. Felix was in Vancouver. What was the point of this? Of any of it?
“Forget it,” Norris said. “I’ll get home fine. It’s all fine.”
“Norris—”
“Go look after the kid who still cares what you think,” Norris lashed out. “Or maybe get a head start on that third family for when this one blows up in your face. Bye, Felix.”
There was something soothing in the dial tone when it came. It rang at the exact frequency of the throbbing migraine in the back of his head. Norris wondered why he hadn’t hung up sooner.
Car lights blazed over him, searing his retinas as a siren screamed. The overwhelming sensory assault of blue and red and loud, Jesus Christ, so freaking loud, made Norris feel even sicker.
“Hey,” a low, manly voice came, stepping out of the car and pointing a flashlight at Norris. Definitely not helping the retinas situation. “Are you all right there?”
Norris took a deep breath, trying to align his thoughts as best as he could in the moment.
“What the hell do you want, assface?” was all that came out.