How Did You Get This Number Read Online Free PDF Page A

tightrope and his groin.
    “Never play leapfrog with a unicorn, huh?” I asked under my breath.
    They ignored me and kept drawing, interrupting each other with gobs of Portuguese. By the time they finished, their doodle looked like an early sketch for The Scream. Overlaid with an early sketch for a three-ring orgy.
    “Frankly, there’s just not enough midget sodomy in this picture,” the first girl instructed the boy, “and ask yourself: is that really where cotton candy is meant to go?”
    “It melts in more places than your mouth,” said the boy, defending his contribution.
    For all I knew they were just discussing the weather. They rotated the paper on the table without picking it up, their row of smiling faces like telephone wires.
    Would I like to see a three a.m. performance of amateur Portuguese circus clowns? Oh, no, thank you. I declined for the same reason that I had run from the man in the alley. For the same reason I flew to Lisbon to watch hours of QVC porn. The freedom of being an adult, that condition which landed me here to begin with, came with a heavy price. I was beholden to no one. My family and friends back home had flight numbers and dates, sure, but I could be absolutely anywhere. Or, as my father used to put it, “dead in a ditch on the side of the road.” As opposed to all the ditches built in the centers of roads. Point was: who were these clowns? If I went with them, I could wind up in a basement somewhere, unable to call for help in the proper language. Or, knowing Lisbon, the catacombs beneath the cellar beneath the basement.
    However, with each glass of wine, our communication morphed from frustrating to liberating. The stick figures became increasingly elaborate, bordering on perverse. They went through puberty, developing scalloped breasts and generous crotchal endowments. It was enough to make you wish all human relations could be boiled down like this. We should all have to carry around paper-doll versions of ourselves, pointing to what hurts, pointing to what doesn’t. It was like those ridiculous ABC After School Specials on AIDS and child abuse and class warfare, the ones that made Degrassi High look like quality programming.
    “Show me, Suzy,” said a permed and frost-tipped child psychologist. “Show me on the doll where the bad man touched you.”
    And Suzy would point. And the adult in the room would nod. And Suzy’s hair would get tousled, because everything was going to be okay. She didn’t have to be afraid anymore. How nice that must be, I always thought. Not the scarredfor-life or my-stepfather-is-up-for-parole part. But the part where you could momentarily explain all your vital information with the extension of an index finger. All you have to do is point, and with the speed of a near-death montage, every issue in your life is transferred to the closest listener. For a brief moment, the brain you’ve made such a mess of is someone else’s problem. Here, you take this. I’ve been living with this model for thirty years, and I don’t know what to do with it anymore.
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Okay?” asked the girls in unison.
    I pointed at the surrealist orgy sketch and made a walking gesture with my fingers. There’s no such thing as a stockpile of missed opportunities. You just have to trust that the world knows what it’s doing when it sends a bunch of circus freaks your way. Also, I had never seen cotton candy used like that before.
    “Okay, I’ll go with you.”
    They embraced one another and then me. We had time for one final round before clown practice, and I watched my first friend’s eyes flicker beneath her beanie bangs. A wry smile came over her face. She grabbed my book and pinched the acknowledgments page, poised to tear it out.
    “Si?” She looked at me.
    “Go for it.” I nodded.
    She clutched the pen and scribbled, blocking the others with her elbow. When she was done, she revealed a doodle-confession regarding an affair with her teacher