Standing on the street corner, waiting for my luck to change
When we were twelve, a friend and I had to house-sit while my grandmother was in the hospital. Two hours on duty, we discovered the giant bottles of peppermint schnapps hidden in the back of the pantry. At that age, I was maybe 80 pounds soaking wet. Bombed and brazen, we had an absolutely ridiculous idea. We called the local top 40 station and requested Sophie B. Hawkins’ “Damn, I Wish I was Your Lover” (which is still one of my favorite dirty girl songs and what some magazine critic rightfully called “the filthiest song Prince never wrote.”)
Like taking someone out to the skating rink, calling the radio station was a big deal back then. You could give a “shout out” to your girls or dedicate a song to (omg!) Mark, the finest guy in algebra. The trick was to sound as old and blase as possible. “Like, I wanna give a shout out to my homegirls: Judy, Lil Reyna and Danielle.” “Any special guys out there?” “Um yeah…this one is for Mark…hee hee hee.”
Okay, now that I’m officially old, the prospect of dedicating a song to anyone on the radio wouldn’t even occur to me.
So we sat on the line with this DJ and he noticed, between our hiccups and stifled laughter, that we were preteens and clearly drunk so he quipped, “That’s an awfully sexy song for girls so young! What makes you want that?”
We were at a loss for anything resembling English, so we kept giggling.
“Okay,” he fired back and queued the song. “Stay on the line.”
At this point, we were laughing so hard, practically gluing our hands to the receivers. Did we win something? Were we caller 12?
The DJ returned, “Hello, ladies. Sounds like we’ve got some party girls at home tonight. Ever suck a dick?”
We screamed! And we kept screaming and laughing while this crazy radio shitstain tried to have phone sex with two girls who, a few years prior, were EIGHT.
Finally, we hung up and polished off the rest of the schnapps and spent the rest of the night talking about the guys in our class we’d “do” and how Mrs. Nelson was such “a tight ass.”
I knew that night that a party career was born.
Sadly, the last time I saw that friend (seven years ago?), she had evidently become a meth-addled hooker. I became…shit, man, I still don’t know.
