Free My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays by Davy Rothbart

overpronouncing each word (“Oh yes, baby, golly gee, keep licking my penis, that just feels absolutely stupendous!”). Only irony could distance me from the sad truth of what I was really doing: jacking off in the back of my van in a Taco Bell parking lot in Jefferson City, Missouri, while talking on my headset to someone who was possibly a man.
    My brother gave me shit for it. “I can’t believe you still talk to that dude ,” he said.
    “It’s not a dude,” I said.
    Over the phone, Nicole had more of the resigned spirit of a woman who’d had a lot of attention from guys in high school but then, knocked around by life, had let herself go. She described herself as “pretty enough,” and said guys often hit on her at the bar, but I knew this was no guarantee that if we ever met in person I’d be attracted to her. Ultimately, it seemed to me, phone sex was really about the power of the imagination, and in that case I could imagine her to be whoever I wanted. After I’d first seen, years before, the video for Fiona Apple’s song “Criminal,” Fiona Apple had become the girl who best represented my physical ideal. On those late nights in the back of the van, it wasn’t hard to imagine Nicole as Fiona Apple’s double.
    *
    Our relationship deepened. My phone had a special ring for PRIVATE CALLER , and since Nicole was the only one who rang like that, I could tell when she was calling. I started looking forward to her calls. She finally gave me her number so I could call her, too. I dropped the funny guises and just talked to her genuinely—sometimes we’d talk for half an hour before phone sex. Some nights, she’d tell me stories about work and share favorite memories of her mom. Other nights, out in my van after a long night in Phoenix or Des Moines, I’d be lonely, drunk, and depressed, and tell her about my problems. Nicole was a great listener, willing to indulge each tangent of every story she was told. She was as curious about my life as I was about hers. In a fucked-up way, this was the closest I’d had to a real girlfriend in years. Living on the road, a new city every day, she was one of the few constants in my life, and I both came to depend on her and, in our shared fantasies, dependably came on her. And the more we got to know each other, the more the sex improved. Nicole was insatiable. She started calling me every day, a half hour before my reading, when she knew I’d be out in the van getting my notes ready. “Hey, Davy,” she’d breathe, “how ’bout a quickie?”
    *
    In December the book tour ended, and I resumed a more regular kind of life—staying put in Michigan, playing basketball twice a week at the rec center, sleeping in my own bed. For the most part, I stopped answering Nicole’s calls. I was busy with work, and I had more interest in local girls I could meet for a drink and try to make out with than in someone across the country I could only hook up with by phone. But I also felt bad that I’d left Nicole in the lurch, and on occasion I’d still have a late-night phone tryst with her. We were like those couples who break up but still end up sleeping together every once in a while. Then, one day, her number was no longer in service. Nicole was gone.
    *
    One night the following winter, the old Dodge van broke down on the freeway near my house, and as I waited for a tow and the bitter cold edged in, I started playing that game I play when I’m feeling lonely, the one where I review all of my prior relationships, marveling that so many sweet, smart, pretty girls have come into my life and that I’ve found a way to fuck things up with every one of them. This game usually ends with me calling two or three of my exes and leaving miserable voice mails on their cell phones or their machines at home. Inevitably, one of their new beaus calls back to say, “Hey, man, I heard your message. Emilie’s down in Chile for two weeks, but you sounded really down … I just wanted to call