How Did You Get This Number Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Show Me on the Doll

  Lost in Space

  Take a Stab at It

  It’s Always Home You Miss

  Light Pollution

  If You Sprinkle

  An Abbreviated Catalog of Tongues

  Le Paris!

  Off the Back of a Truck

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY SLOANE CROSLEY

  I Was Told There’d Be Cake

  In the interest of privacy, names and identifying characteristics have been changed, timelines have been compressed, and same of the dialogue is more exact than some of the other dialogue. Although subject to impression and memory, this is a work of nonfiction. The events described have happened. Except, of course, for a couple of passages, which I’m pretty sure have been so distorted by interpretation that no place and no one involved with them actually exist, including myself including you.

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  The following stories have appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following publications:

  “Lost in Space” in Salon

  “Light Pollution” in Vice

  Copyright © 2010 by Sloane Crosley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any

  printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy

  of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Crosley Sloane.

  How did you get this number: essays / Sloane Crosley.

  p. cm

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18828-6

  I. Title.

  PS3603 R673H

  814’.6—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

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  To my parents. For everything.*

  * Everything except the two-week period in 1995 directly following the time you went to Ohio for a wedding and I threw a party in the house, which is the most normal thing a teenage American can do, aside from lie about it, which I also did, and Mom eyed me suspiciously for days, morphing into a one-woman Scotland Yard, marching into my bedroom with a fistful of lint from the dryer to demonstrate that I had mysteriously washed all the towels, and then she waited until we were in a nice restaurant to scream, “Someone vomited on my couch, I know it!” and Dad took away my automotive privileges straight through college so that I spent the subsequent four years likening you both to Stasi foot soldiers, confined as I was to a campus-on-the-hill when I could have been learning how to play poker at the casinos down the road and making bad decisions at townie bars. I think we can all agree you overreacted.

  For everything except that, I am profoundly grateful. I have only the greatest affection for you now. Also: I vomited on the couch.

  He had no especial desire to meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant.... He was now entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.

  —WILLA CATHER, “PAUL’S CASE,” 1905

  Show Me on the Doll

  There is only one answer to the question: Would you like to see a three a.m. performance of amateur Portuguese circus clowns?

  But as I sat in an open-air bar on my last night in Lisbon, drinking wine with my coat still on, I couldn’t bring myself to give it. These weren’t the universally frightening species of clown, the ones who are never not scary. No one likes a clown who reminds them of why they hate ice-cream-truck music. These were more the Cirque du Soleil—type clown. The attractive jesters found on the backs of playing cards. They had class. They had top hats. And I? I had a pocketful of change I couldn’t count. I had paid for my wine in the dark by opening my hand and allowing the bartender to remove the correct coins, as if he were delousing my palm. It was the December before I turned thirty. I was in a place I had no business being. The last thing I needed was a front-row seat to some carnie hipster adaptation of Eyes Wide Shut.

  Besides, I had nothing left to prove. When you spin a globe and point to a city and actually go to that city, you build an allowance of missed opportunities on the back end. No one could accuse me of not living in the moment if I opted out of one lousy underground freak show. I had done enough on the risk-taking front just by it being winter and me being the sole American in all of Lisbon. If you had taken a flash census of the city, you might have found a few other Americans, businessmen and women holed up in three-star hotel suites, surrounded by a variety of ineffective lighting options. But I knew in the pit of my stomach that I was the only tourist from my country drifting around Europe’s sea capital.

  While the emotional sum total of my trip would eventually add up to happiness, while I would feel a protective bond with the few objects I acquired in Lisbon—a necklace from a street fair, a piece of cracked tile, a pack of Portuguese cigarettes called “Portuguese”—hidden between the cathedral and castle tours was the truth: I have never felt more alone than I did in Lisbon. A human being can spend only so much time outside her comfort zone before she realizes she is still tethered to it. Like a dog on one of those retractable leashes, I had made it all the way to Europe’s curb when I began to feel a slight tug around my neck.

  The problem wasn’t merely the total annihilation of English, as if English had taken too many sets of X-rays at the dentist’s office and had been radiated to the point of disintegration. I do not roam the planet assuming that everyone speaks English. The problem was I dove headlong into an off-season culture that assumes everyone speaks Portuguese. A delusion that I adopted at first, and that inspired a temporary Portuguese patriotism in me, accompanied by a self-shaming for not being fluent myself. I had traveled to Romance-language regions before, sometimes alone, and found that as much as people like you to
attempt communication in their language, what they like even more is for you to stop butchering it. In most cultures, the natives will let you get about four sentences in before they put you out of your misery. In Portugal, I kept waiting for that kindly metaphorical hand to reach across the pastry counter or the gift-shop register, pinch my tongue, and say, “Enough already.” I was going to be waiting a long time. How poorly did I have to imitate their infamously irregular verbs before someone squished my cheeks into submission? Was this place not “sleepy,” as the guidebooks described, but completely unconscious?

  In the time I spent there, I barely heard Spanish or German or Russian, either. My ears captured the clunky tones of English but once—and from an elderly British couple seated behind me on a wooden tram. With a controlled panic in their voices, they discussed the winding route of the tram and the seemingly arbitrary stops. It was a conversation that might not have caused a fight had it taken place on still ground. But their words were becoming heated as the wife’s devil-may-care attitude clashed with her husband’s conviction that they were being whisked away from the city’s center into sketchier pastures. The tiff ended with the husband making his wife unbutton her coat, sling her purse over her shoulder, and put her coat back on over that.

  “Just do it, Joan,” he said through his teeth. “Don’t make a scene about it.”

  Joan complied, temporarily pacifying her husband. This new costume made her look like one of the ancient Portuguese ladies, their spines bobbing beneath their cardigans as they scaled the city’s steep inclines. The jostling act of transformation, of removing arms from sleeves and slinging bags on shoulders, also made her a more obvious bait for pickpockets. In the end she resembled a cartoon of a boa constrictor that had just swallowed a lawn chair. The resulting image is not one of a pregnant snake but of a snake who has just swallowed a lawn chair.

  I considered saying something, engaging with them. I was relieved by the sound of kindred vowels. Days of talking exclusively to myself and I was finally ready to take the gag out of my throat and rejoin the land of fluency. Lack of human-on-human communication works like a liquid fast—first you miss the solid sustenance, then for a long time you wonder why you ever needed it, then you miss it so acutely it makes you dizzy. I assumed a symbiotic need for these Brits to break their fast. I could be their conversational prune juice. But when they made their way to my end of the tram in preparation for the next stop, I just stared at them with the passive contempt of a local.

  I FOUND MYSELF WAITING ON LINE FOR LISBON’S main attraction: an antique freestanding elevator that springs up the city’s center and leads to nowhere. When I got to the highest level, I climbed the narrowest staircase to the tippy top. America is lacking in this, I thought. All of our public structures are self-explanatory. When you press the PH button, you’re going to the penthouse. Not the stairs that lead to the landing that lead to the lookout above the penthouse. Our basements are conveniently located at the base. No cellars that lead to subfloors that lead to catacombs of ruins. The Goonies was just that one time, and it was a movie.

  The wind blew hard as I leaned on a railing that would have been ripe for a lawsuit if this was Paris’s Eiffel Tower or Seattle’s Space Needle. My calves throbbed from days of rushing through Lisbon’s seven hills as if I had anywhere to go. I was like a cat that urgently needs to be on the other side of the room for no apparent reason. I looked out toward the ocean in the direction of home, squinting at the horizon. Then I apologized to the travel gods for thinking I could do this, remembering there’s a reason we don’t always fulfill the wishes of our younger selves once we’re grown.

  The idea of going to Lisbon began as a bastard idea, the daughter of impulse and video montages with a drop of Casablanca in there somewhere. On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change while you’re not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unsubtle cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don’t notice the time line of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while, time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you’re the boss. Because ... Ooooh. Shiny.

  One day in November, I came home and saw the desk globe on my bookshelf. Instead of seeing it as my globe in my apartment, where I come home every day, I remembered the globe I had when I was twelve years old. And saw it as a challenge. Confined by perfectly manicured lawns and freshly tarred driveways, preteen me had promised myself that one day I would spin and point and travel wherever my finger landed. I loved the movie Better Off Dead, that self-hating love letter from suburban America to foreign exchange students everywhere. More than just a snow-snorting lesson in obsession, here was a cautionary tale against armchair traveling. A rallying call to leaving one’s immediate area code immediately. If I didn’t get a passport soon, I might grow up and find myself serving French fries and French dressing to visiting Parisians.

  With each passing year, the promise would become harder to keep. I was about to turn thirty. The obligations, they were coming. What they would entail, I couldn’t say, but I sensed they would be obligatory. So I made some rules:1. No traveling to places that would deplete my life savings getting there.

  2. No war zones.

  3. No places I had been before.And finally:

  4. No places so romantic they would depress the foie gras out of me.I closed my eyes and pushed. I was prepared to go to South America or South Dakota. I was prepared to go to Iceland in the middle of winter or to Ulaanbaatar in the middle of Mongolia. Contingent on fare restrictions and blackout dates for Ulaanbaatar Air. I stuck my finger on the spinning world to make it stop.

  It landed at the corner of 20°N and the Tropic of Cancer, smack in the center of the Pacific. For the briefest of moments, I saw myself floating on a raft, gazing at the stars, using coconut shells for a bra.... This wasn’t so bad. Then I imagined becoming a member of that select club of people in human history who have resorted to drinking their own urine. New rule:

  5. No ocean.

  When I spun again, I touched down on Lisbon. Either my globe is especially small or my fingertip especially fat, but you could argue I was also pointing to Morocco. I made a face. Should a woman really be traveling to Morocco by herself right now? Exactly how dedicated was I to this pact business? Reality was pounding with both fists. A few more sensible thought cycles and I wouldn’t be going anywhere.

  So I booked a flight to Lisbon, set to depart in one week.

  Here’s a travel tip: If you’re booking an international flight for no particular reason to a relatively obscure city and do not plan on buying or selling drugs when you get there, try to make your reservations at least two weeks beforehand. Otherwise, your boarding pass will be marked with a secret code suggesting you are, in fact, a potential drug or arms vendor, and you will be taken to a special room and treated as such by airport security. Take it or leave it.

  The twelve-year-old in me was thrilled by adventuring, picturing an animation of my plane hovering over a map of the Atlantic, heading east, a charming single-engine sound coming incongruously from the 747. Back in real time, I packed my things, hailed a cab, sat in traffic, looked out the window, and wondered what the hell I was doing. Then I sat at the gate with a bunch of Portuguese people who also wondered what the hell I was doing. People carry themselves differently when they have a reason to move from point A to point B. Waiting on line for the bathroom somewhere over the Atlantic, I could feel a teenage girl burrowing a hole in the back of my head with her eyes. When I turned to meet her stare, she asked me if I was Portuguese.

  “No, I’m not.” I smiled and turned back around. She tapped me on the shoulder and h
eld her fingers together. She squinted through the space in between to indicate “a little.” That, or she was crushing my head.

  “None.”

  She tapped again.

  “Porquê Portugal?”

  She was probably being held captive on a family vacation and couldn’t understand why a free woman such as myself would go voluntarily to prison when I could be eating dessert first and jumping on hotel beds. It’s how I still feel about Williamsburg, Virginia. But days later, as I stood at the top of an ornamental elevator with breathtaking three-hundred-sixty-degree views of Lisbon, I recalled her incredulous attitude. I struggled both to breathe into the wind and to remember why I had come here. In one of the last scenes of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn is preparing to leave for Brazil by listening to Portuguese on tape.

  “I believe you are in league with the butcher,” she says, proudly declaring the English translation of what she has heard.

  “I believe you are in league with the butcher,” I said to the air. And the air blew my words back in my face.

  I gripped a rusted railing and walked down to a small café, where a three-person band played fado music for the tourists. Except there were no tourists at the café. Just a handful of Portuguese families. They looked unhappy, with their elbows holding down paper tablecloths and their jackets zipped to their chins. It had been six days. I hadn’t communicated with anyone here or at home since I landed. I had nowhere to go. I bought an orange soda and gulped it down. Here was another thing you’d never find in America: glass bottles distributed on fence-free, poorly manned thirty-story towers. What a trusting and carefree people the Portuguese were! Even if I couldn’t understand a single word they said. I tried to remember what it was that Holly Golightly had translated. Perhaps if I could pluck out “In you I believe” I could strike up a very earnest conversation with someone.