"I like you S.T., and I've tried, a few times, to reach out and get in touch with you, And now you're addicted to it."
"Howzat?" She was a speck on the horizon.
"We're getting this shit now where you expect me to follow you around. To keep track of where you are, pick up the phone and call you, do the social organizing, set up our dates. And then, when we're together, you give me this gruff shit."
"I do?"
"Yeah. You make me come on to you, and then you pretend you don't want it. I had to put up with that once or twice on the Canada trip and I'm never going to do it again. No way. You want something from me, call me up - you've got my fucking number - ask for it."
After that, my eyes didn't blink for about half an hour. It reminded me a whole lof of being popped by that smart cop when Bart and I were having our boys' night out. You go around thingking you're cool, a veritable shadow in the night, and then you find out that someone's got your number.
Like the Pöyzen Böyzen fans. A band of assholes I probably wouldn't recognize in civilian dress.
"That reminds me of something," I said. "I'm being kind of threatened, kind of, by a bunch of Satan worshippers. I want you to look out."
"How the fuck..." she said, then got up and walked out of the restaurant.
I finished her five-spice chickens and doodled around with my nerd watch. After a major social fuck-up, it's good to have machinery to screw around with. I programmed the alarm to go off in ten days. When it did, I'd give her a call.
Between now and then I could drink a lot, meditate on my own unfitness to live, and get nice and shit-eating lonesome. And worry about the Pöyzen Böyzen thing. When I got done wandering home slowly, I played the tape backwards again, listened to the backwards message, then erased it.