Vernon God Little

'Oh, it's – Danny Naylor here, excuse me.' Big fucken mistake. Her voice immediately gets all relaxed and intimate.

'Well hi, Dan, I didn't recognize you at all – how's life treating you up at A amp;M?'

'Oh, great, great, I'm loving it, actually.'

'I saw your mom at the New Life market the other day, and she tells me you're coming down for the bluebonnet cookout.'

'Oh, sure – you know me.' Sweat runs down my fucken back, my vision gets metallic, like I just downed forty cups of coffee.

'Hooray,' she says. 'I'll be seeing your mom at the committee meeting tomorrow, I'll let her know you called, and that you're fine.'

'Oh, great, thanks a lot.'

'And I just know Tay 'll be pleased to hear from you – hold on, I'll get you her number.'

Now there's a fucken thing. 'I just know Tay 'll be pleased?' I get a sudden twist of the knife over that. Typical of asshole Naylor to horn in on my thing. Like, he only ever had one good joke in his whole school career. It makes me want to go, 'Yeah, I'll just update her on my genital cancer,' or something. Fucken Naylor, boy.

'Here it is Dan, she's still down at UT Houston – I know she has a lunch date, so you'll catch her then, if not right now.'

I list the number under 'T', and under 'F, in case I get amnesia, then I write it across the cover of the address book as well. 'Thanks Mrs Figueroa – you take care now, and give my love to Mom.'

'Sure, Dan – see you at the cookout.'

I hang up the phone, shaking my head from the dumbness of it all. You can picture Danny arriving at the cookout and going, 'What fucken call?' Or everybody finding out he died in a line-dancing accident a week ago, or something. I just take the fucken cake, boy. I mean, there must be some highly twisted gangstas out there, really hard cases and all, but I bet they never got involved in a dorky piece of slime in their lives. Like, I bet ole Adult Hitler, a nasty piece of action, never had anyone looking out for him at the cookout because he called pretending to be Danny Fucken Naylor.

Having Taylor 's number makes me look like I've got Attention Defecit Disorder, or whichever one it is where you freeze on the spot, or do mime acts or whatever. I devise a facial expression to cover it, frowning like I'm calculating Pi to eight billion decimal places. Underneath my new expression, I run all the thoughts that would've made me look stupid. Like the thought that my ole lady will be up by now. Probably being fucken defibrillated already, or whatever it is when the paramedics yell 'Clear!' I shuffle to the terminal doors, where a bus schedule is displayed. Buses leave regularly to Houston, which means I have plenty of time to call my ole lady. And buses from Houston leave regularly to Brownsville and McAllen, down by the Mexican border. I'm tempted to buy two tickets to the border, and just present one to Taylor, like a wedding ring or something. But my brain says no, don't even buy one yet. Chill for a second. Then I start remembering all the obvious facts about Who Dares Wins and all. Like, maybe the fact I don't take a ticket means I won't get her to come. I end up frozen at the fucken door, re-calculating Pi.

Say, for instance, two guys want to drag Taylor Figueroa to Mexico right away. One brings her roses, and says he has this plan to go to Mexico, and would she like to come along. The other dude turns up with a quart of tequila, a joint, and two tickets to the border. He doesn't show her the tickets right away, but says, 'I have hours to live – help me kill the pain.' He gets her wasted in three minutes flat, sucks her tonsils out of her throat, then pulls out the tickets and says, 'Ten minutes till the cops arrive and take you in as an accessory – let's jam.' Which one does she go with? You know the fucken answer, I don't have to tell you. And let me say, it ain't all on account of one being nice, and one being a slime-ball. It's because one of them knew she would come. As Americans, we know this to be true. We invented fucken assertiveness, for chrissakes. But in amongst all the books and tapes, in between that whole assertiveness industry – and I don't mean how to fast-talk people, and increase sales and shit, like, that's a whole other industry on its own, I mean in the industry where you end up knowing like day is day that something's going to happen for you – you never once hear how to actually fucken do it. Like, for my money, just thinking positive doesn't cut the ice at all. I've been thinking positive all year, and fucken look at me now. My ole lady thinks a new refrigerator will turn up on her doorstep, but you ain't seen the fucker yet.