Dirty Old Man
When I was a kid, well before Caller ID, there was a phone number you could call at any hour of the day or night, and a man would answer it.1 I don’t remember how I got the number, but before long I had it committed to memory. So, too, did my cousin, who didn’t even live in town. We would huddle on my grandmother’s basement stairs where there was a phone and dial the number together. When the man answered, one of us would raise his voice an octave—or, more likely, a half-octave—and say, “Hi there! I’m a cheerleader! Let’s have some fun!”
Of course the man knew the game we were playing. I won’t try to invent what was said—my memory isn’t that detailed—but to his discredit, he sometimes played along, and he was filthy when he did it. Other times, he groused and swore at us that he’d tell our parents what we were doing. That hardly mattered, however, because we didn’t know what we were doing. Calling him was wrong, and it was anonymous, and because it was both of those things it was titillating, and that’s why we did it.
How it all ended I don’t exactly remember, though I seem to recall we were caught on the phone one day and warned never to call the man again. We probably disobeyed that order, but we had been found out. The game was no longer just between us and the man, so it soon ended.
1 Neil Young’s “Dirty Old Man” doesn’t really suit the post, but I can’t resist linking to it.
