"Yes," he said. "We're drinking and hanging out and GAC wants to see you. You should come over." I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle this joker -- why was he, third party and a mutual friend of mine and, apparently, GAC, doing his dirty work? Moreover, why in the hell was GAC, a long-lost acquaintance at best, attempting to make what certainly sounded like a booty call to me, someone he did not have a booty-call relationship with?
Instead of flipping out, I laughed it off and made some superficial remark about how I don't drink and how much fun that doesn't make me and how I had to get up early and how I'm old and boring and how I had to go right now and get back to staring at my coffee, STAT.
Then GAC himself began texting me. Nonstop, until I responded. I brushed off his textual advances with a few "ha ha" and "in an alternate universe" kind of responses, but in the back of my throat, vomit of both the word and bile variety began collecting, waiting to spew. He had never, in the history of our mild friendship, said such things to me before.
If there was ever any romanticism in the initiation of casual sex, it has been lost to technology. When Bill Bellamy explains the booty call (in what I have come to understand to be the first reference to the term in modern history), his example involves a man actually picking up the telephone and requesting a lady's company. With text-messaging now being the preferred mode of flirtation, there is no deftness with words, no sugar-coating of potential activities. The true booty call has become a lost art form.
I was surprised by the strength of my internal reaction to a booty call. Yes, I had found this person attractive once upon a time, but our relationship was platonic. We had engaged in a heavy workplace flirtation a few years prior, but he was married and I was (and am) not interested in attached people.
With the textual delivery of GAC's dirty words, I felt like the nerdy girl in every teen movie ever -- the one who, after crushing on the hot football player since eighth grade, finally gets acknowledged while she's sitting alone outside prom. But the star quarterback's acknowledgement of her adoration comes in some warped, fucked-up way. It was if when GAC accidentally sank to my level, I got the text equivalent of a request for a hand job in the backseat of a car, not a hand leading me to a last dance.
And another thing: I'm not one to just accept any random booty call. I'm a monogamous individual by nature; I call it being "Catholic" about my relationships. All that really means is, I'm only hot for commitment. I am a one-man-who-is-my-man kind of woman. I don't have casual sex.
Well, there is an exception to my zero-tolerance casual-sex rule, but he is singular. For all intents and purposes, it is a faithful relationship. He is the only booty call in my life, and it is more like an understanding -- we meet up for yoga, dinner, a walk and a boff once or twice a year, and we ask no questions. We've had the same arrangement for over half a decade and it works out rather well. But he's my one and only. There are no others.
Was I overreacting to my former co-worker's lame, Thursday night "come over and I'll take my shirt off" advances? Probably. I felt more disgusting inside about the the idea that this man thought I would actually drop what I was doing and come over and get down with him than I did about having sex with a married man. That's not fucked up; It is the truth.
But all this still leaves one puzzling question: Should a booty call be initiated in any other way than with an actual booty call?
