Barrodale, Amie

Tarun Reddy

0:00

Audiobooks

Description

– “William Wei”

Vocal Characteristics

Language

English

Voice Age

Young Adult (18-35)

Accents

Indian (General)

Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
William Way, Amy Barrow Dale. I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled on my mattress or draped over the open door of the microwave. I guess the girl with the pink high heels woke up in the middle of the night and didn't remember where she was. She went out naked in the hall and closed the door behind her. She said that she'd asked me and I told her that was the way to the bathroom to go out the front door. I don't remember doing that. I remember I woke up with the cops in my house asking me if I knew this girl. I said of course she was the girl with the pink high heels. They thought that was really funny after that. I didn't drink for about five months. I was mostly celibate except for my upstairs neighbor until she moved away. She was this Indian girl. She liked to do it from behind in this one position. That was the only thing she wanted to do. The other things were boring. She said when I went to the shower, she got on all fours to masturbate. I was alone for a while. After that. I got rid of everything in my apartment. I worked 10 and 12 hour days. Each night I went to hot yoga. They had a studio between my home and work on the 15th floor of this building. So that across from you while you were sweating, you could look in at people living their lives and see all these slow moving domestic scenes like a man standing in front of a microwave after yoga. I like to walk home. I like the cold. I bought a Mediterranean style salad from the same place. Every night. The woman who worked there was Lebanese and studying to be a doctor. I ate my dinner in front of the TV, watching. So, so it was a week night around 10 PM. The first time she called, I let her go to voice mail because I wasn't expecting any calls. But when I went to get the message, it was just quiet for a while. And then the person hung up. At that time, I slept on an army style cot. I ate on it too, lying down with the food under my face and the posture of a dog. This was the posture I was in several days later, the fourth time she called and I answered, who's this? I asked, she said it's cocoa, cocoa. I don't know any cocoa. I saw you at a party. It was a long time ago. Oh, so I gave you my number. No, I got it from one of your friends. I don't understand. He told me your name is William. Who was he? I can't tell you that. He said, I couldn't tell you that. He said he was only telling me because he's worried you don't go out anymore. He said you just lie around watching the same movie and eating the same food. That's a lie. I said, she said, he said you do hot yoga. I don't even know what this is. I said, hold on. I reached out an arm and put the movie on pause. I put the container of salad under my cot and propped myself up on my elbows. What do you look like? Anyway? Maybe I remember seeing you. I'm about 48 years old. No, I flipped over on my back and put my arms over my eyes. I can tell from your voice. You're younger. I'm attached to a breathing machine. Ok, fine. Don't tell me. Look, I've gotta go, what do you mean? Just that kind of joke? I mean, everybody says stuff like that. Why can't you just tell me what you look like? Ok. She said she sounded shy now. She thought around and said, I guess I'm normal looking. What's normal. I'm 25. I have my hair cut into bangs uh-huh. I don't want to say any more than that. It was weird because I looked at pornography pretty frequently at this point. It was even a problem so that I would spend an hour looking for the most disgusting pictures I could find maybe disgusting is not the word. For example, I liked a short video where an older man was ******* a girl in the *** while he put a blow pop inside her. Then he stopped and put it into her ***. Then he put it into her mouth and he started to **** her again. But somehow this conversation, we talked for a long time more than an hour until I got sleepy. So I started to fall asleep with her on the phone. The next night around the same time she called me again. I was really happy. She did that. We had a nice conversation. She told me this story how she used to prank call a math teacher of hers in junior high. She did it so much. She figured out how to reprogram his outgoing message using his two digit remote access code. She redid his outgoing reading said things that were explicitly sexual. Her teacher didn't understand technology or remote access codes. He assumed someone was breaking into his house each day to rerecord his message. It filled him with fear and paranoia. He bought a dog, he got an alarm installed and got a prescription for sleeping pills. It was a long time, nearly a year before the police identified Coco and got to the bottom of the mystery. I love that. I have stories like that too. I told her the thing I did to my video teacher at an arts festival, the things I used to say to my science teacher and to the owner of this antique store called Jane B Lauer. I said, why don't you come over here right now? And she told me she lived five hours away by train. She had a business selling old clothes on the internet. She was a night owl. She stayed up until sunrise pretty frequently working on her business. All the clothes had to be cleaned, pressed, tried on photographed and entered into our website. But this time I'd seen a lot of photos of her body. She used herself as a model and the way she did it was artistic. I'm not just saying that because I cared about her. I worked with major fashion houses. So I know what I'm saying. She really was artistic about how she did it. Even though she always chopped her own head off, she made it look exciting and interior like she was a party of one. In fact, she had a lot of admirers on the internet. It wasn't just gross men. It was women in fashion too. That's how it happened. We were at the same party. What party was it? I asked, I don't think there was any party. They had set up a small stage on the roof with that carpet, rubber as a stage, that foam stuff they put under carpets. I remember that. That was a terrible party. He looked really drunk. I think I was really sad. I wish you'd come and talk to me. You were talking to some other girls. You were always talking to lots of girls. I didn't think you wanted to talk to me. I'm sure I wanted to. I knew that she drank and most nights she was talking to me, she was drunk and taking pills, but I didn't think anything about it. She never slurred or got sloppy. But she did seem sometimes to check out it was like her heart would go dead. It was one time when she was like this that she told me she had, had other romances on the telephone. I said I didn't care about that. She said you don't understand. I'm a sociopath. What does that mean? Hold on. She was gone for a while and when she came back, she said all, I mean is what if when you see me, you think I'm ugly, I'm not going to think you're ugly. You've never even see my face. I could be completely deformed. I don't care. I said I love you. Even if you were deformed, I guess that was a mistake after I said it, she got really upset. Then she said something weird. She said all my life, I've been looking for my man. I think I finally found you. I think that was the moment for both of us when we realized it wouldn't happen. It was the next day I think. And she started to tell me something about her mother being sick, but I could tell she didn't want to talk about it. Besides, I already bought a ticket on the train. I kept telling myself to just be myself. I had a prescription for a low milligram anti anxiety medication as well as a mild beta blocker. And I kept going into the bathroom to take more. I wanted to get the mixture right after I took a pill, I check myself in the mirror and I'd always be surprised at what I found. I kept expecting to find a monster at the station. I checked my phone and she'd left me this message where she just said my whole name, William Way. She sounded completely freaked out. I knew her pretty well. By this time I could tell from how she sounded. It took everything in there not to run. She was waiting across the street from the terminal just standing there in front of her old car. She had it on a green army coat and paint splattered corduroy pants. Her features were something like I pictured wide eyes, Frida Colo, but she was more beautiful than I expected her to be when I got over to her car before I could say anything. She said. Are you nervous? Are you? We'll go to my house and relax in the car ride. She kept switching the tapes in her tape deck and peering at me while she did it. I could tell she didn't like what she was seeing, but I didn't know what to do. I thought she'd already seen me. I thought I was the one who was permitted to feel some disappointment. She lived on the top floor of a converted flower mill. A sleeping area was the size of an ordinary bedroom divided from the main area by 10 ft industrial shelves full of record albums, the inventory from her brother's store. He was itinerant and sometimes wrote to her asking her to sell so many feet of albums. Her bed was a queen size mattress on the floor. She pointed to the rotary phone beside and lifted her cat to introduce him by name. Then she led me to the center position of the loft past a sliding glass door that connected to another apartment, a place rented to someone named Douglas. He was gone for the weekend. And so I didn't think much about him. I don't think I will describe her kitchen or her work area except a photo on the fridge. It was of an old man in a top hat and tails. She told me that was Douglas. I was about to tell her a story that the photo reminded me of when she handed me a piece of banana bread, a glass of milk and two pills. What are these? I said my mom sent them to me earlier in the week. Something about her bowels. What she can't have opiates. They opium Percocet. I ate the pills and broke the bread into pieces. What I wanted was for the two of us to go and sit by the window and listen to record albums and get soulful. But Coco turned on the TV and slipped through the stations until she found a documentary. When that was over. She got a couple more pills for us and found a medley on a different station. We got take out from a delivery service. And around 11, her hair had fallen down and her cheek was resting on her hand. So the top of her head just touched my shoulder. I still have the shirt I was wearing at that time. It's hanging in my closet. I turned on my side to look at her body and she pretended to keep watching TV. I said I like your shoes. Those she lifted her head and turned to look at her feet. Those are ballet slippers. I like how you're wearing them as shoes. Everyone does that everyone does what? She shook her head slightly from side to side. Everyone does what I said I traveled business class. She pointed a finger in the air. Un momento poor much gracia. She was singing along with the television, but I stopped her before the next line. I mean, I kissed her. It was a bit like kissing a doll or a timid old lady. I mean that she didn't kiss me back. But I don't know if you know this, that could be very attractive later. Coke and I were together in haze and her shirt was off and she told me how she often induced men to love her and then abandon them. She said, didn't you notice how I forced this on you? I said, I don't know what you mean. And she said, yeah, that's what I'm telling you. So that was where it ended or really it ended in the car. And the first time we looked at each other, I mean, she thought I was ugly and I could see that the thing about a dark truth is it is indistinguishable from doubt. And so since I couldn't just go home, I kept approaching the dark area, not by anything I said, but by what I did and by watching how she reacted, she was nice at times. But at others, when her kindness drew me in, she was sharp and I spent the weekend confused. I kept thinking, but she already saw my face the next morning. I was buttoning my shirt in the mirror. When Coco opened her eyes, she yawned and smiled at my reflection and said, you have a nice face. Then she pushed herself up onto all fours and shifted her butt in the air. She rested her cheek sideways on her folded arms and said we should go and eat eggs. I wonder why I didn't say anything to her then. Like, why are you putting your butt in the air? I guess it was because I didn't know what was going on. I'd gotten clammed up by the stuff the night before it was shaky from the pills. The restaurant was walking distance away. It was one of those local ingredients places. It had polished stone floors and the polish was so high that when the hostess led us to the dining room, I thought there was a step up but there wasn't one. It was just a trick of the light. What are you doing? Coco said, I thought it was a step. You were like she galloped one leg in the invitation. Everything I did made her angry after we had our omelet. She pointed to a place between two of her teeth and said, what's that thing there? I have a large feeling between two of my teeth about where she was pointing. So I told her that it's a filling. She said I can see it when you talk. We went for a walk around the neighborhood. We were starting to feel like spring. We crossed into a residential area on the sidewalk. One leashed dog was meeting another dog and he got so excited. He lost his footing and fell down on his side. An old suburban house was up for sale and we let ourselves into its backyard. Have a look around. One of its windows had been broken from the inside and the paint laid four pieces in the soil of a flower bed. I brushed my hand against Cocos and she whipped her head around and said, do you wanna take mushrooms? What? I have? 10, they were mixed into chocolates. They had been given to her by a friend, a photographer for Playboy. She said that several times. Playboy, she ate two chocolates and I ate one and then we split 1/4. We got into her bed and when I opened my eyes, an hour later, the world was brilliant alien and unformed. And Coco was talking on the phone in the voice of a transistor radio. I'm ****** up. She said, I'm on mushrooms. I'm on drugs. Yes, he's here since Friday. No, I don't think so. No, not anything like that. Hold on. She pushed the phone aside and said, I'm talking to Douglas. I was really confused. So I went to get some air and I stood up out of the bed and went to look out the window. I stuck my head out and looked down at the alley where a homeless man was digging through the garbage for glass bottles. I was really messed up. So I couldn't remember what to do. I was trying to remember if it was proper to throw money down at him somehow I knew it wasn't right. But I couldn't figure out why. So I leaned back into the apartment and went to find my wallet. I looked for it out in the front room and then I remembered where I left it. Yes, I was thinking it definitely was what you did. You threw the money down. That was when I realized that Coco had put the phone down and she was crying. She had been explaining for how long, I'm not sure that her mother had cancer. She told me that her mother had cancer of the bowels. I tried to console her. I sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. She let me hold her for a second and then she stood up and in a moment she had her keys and the door slammed and she was gone. The car was doing a little dance with its claws that dance that somehow associated with cat sex. And I was alone on her bed. It wasn't until recently I realized that whole thing about her mother was a lie. Besides when I was consoling her, I wasn't really consoling her at all. Anyway, it was a long time before she came back. The sorts of things I thought during that time while I sat there, I can never really say it was heavy. I think that's what people say. It was a bad trip. It was heavy. I think I can safely say it changed my life.