Possible Storylines for the Stranger Who Keeps Swearing on My Answering Machine
Or: Gifts The Universe Gives to Writers
A few years ago, we had a compulsive caller on our landline who was relentless in his quest to call at odd hours and reveal his life story via our answering machine.
Jamie and I rarely answer calls that we don’t recognize, so for two weeks straight this dude would call regularly, and we’d let the machine pick it up.
It started with him angrily yelling, “Carol, you cunt! Answer your phone, dammit!” Our landline’s answering machine plays to the room, so this fellow’s drunken howling would ring through the house, like carolers at Christmas — except with much more profanity.
Ten minutes after the anger, he’d call back, saying something to the effect of, “Look, Carol, I’m sorry. Things got out of hand. I just need to hear your voice.”
Somedays, he’d ramble on for fifteen plus minutes, slurily explaining his entire life story to the seemingly unaware Carol.
It seemed strange that he felt close enough to Carol to call her a cunt, yet also felt the need to explain that his parents owned a Blockbuster Video in the mid-90s.
So many questions occurred during this answering-machine-era of our lives. There we’d be, drinking wine in our living room, waiting with bated breath for the phone to ring so we could let the machine pick it up and follow the story of Carol and the mysterious drunken man on the other end of the line.
Eventually, the calls ended when Jamie accidentally picked up the phone when it rang one fateful evening, and our enigmatic friend was on the other end. Jamie spoke to him as if they went back for years — asking how his parents were and if he and Carol might make up eventually.
The guy, probably rightly so, was peeved that we allowed his misdialling and numerous confessions to a stranger’s voicemail to go on for weeks. Despite Jamie’s inquiring, we never uncovered the riddle about who Carol was and the nature of hers and the caller’s hot and cold relationship.
Here are my theories:
Possible Scenario #1
Carol was a secret lover of the caller’s. They had met many years before, but their love was forbidden. You see, Carol’s family owned Major Video — Blockbuster’s only competition in the small town they grew up in. There was a deep and foreboding rivalry between the two families and yet, a tiny spark of adoration remained between the two star-crossed lovers.
Now that video rental places are a thing of the past, the caller was trying to get back in touch with Carol to finally confess his undying love for her. Clearly, he wasn’t doing a great job.
I don’t have to tell you, that this is the most obvious assumption.
Possible Scenario #2
The caller was rehearsing for a modern retelling of A Streetcar Named Desire. Instead of yelling “Stellllla” in love lost agony, the modern-day rewriting was to call Carol a cunt then try to woo her by relaying his incredibly dull life story.
Possible Scenario #3
Carol was the 90-year-old woman who used to own my house. I’m not really sure how the caller would have gotten my landline number from this but stranger things have happened. In this scenario, the caller is still a mystery.
Possible Scenario #4
Jamie is a super-secret spy and has managed to keep his identity a mystery from me for the past 13 years. To my uneducated ear, the caller was just some drunken fool. But in reality it was code for Jamie’s next mission.
When he finally picked up the phone weeks later, that was him informing his superiors that he would accept his call to duty.
Possible Scenario #5
The caller is trying to get in touch with his lost dog named Carol. He gets angry with her sometimes, which is why Carol ran away in the first place.
Possible Scenario #6
Carol stole the caller’s dog. This is the only scenario where he is justified in calling her a cunt.
Possible Scenario #7
Or perhaps, the truest possibility is this: the universe decided to send me a gift. A gift in the form of some rando calling my house and revealing his life story to me over the phone so I could turn around and craft a story out of it. Bonus — this specific situation gave me an excuse to use the c-word, like a million times, in one story.
Nah. It’s gotta be that Jamie is a secret spy. And I just really like the word cunt.
We never heard from the caller again, but I think of him often. I don’t think of him fondly. But I do wonder what became of the man who couldn’t understand how to dial a number properly, had some sort of affiliation with Blockbuster Video, and, like me, loved the word cunt.
It amazes me that the guy kept getting the number wrong and getting you. Wouldn't it have made more sense to look up Carol's number in the phone book (another thing of the past) first?