1. After getting off the phone, Adam texted AJ, who dated Nate when they were in acting class together 5 years ago, to tell him he should have enough time to get to the date after his AA meeting.
2. Tony, whose last date was with a Puerto Rican, emailed Adam to tell him he was leaving work late and still needed to douche, so he’d be about fifteen minutes late.
3. Adam’s neighbor, Marcos, who broke up with Nate three months ago because he was always late, borrowed a watch from Adam before leaving his apartment at 8:15 and arriving ten minutes earlier than his date.
4. Nate, who was ten minutes earlier than his date, nearly ran into his exes as they were leaving ninety minutes after they started eating.
5. At one time, Adam slept with all of them.
From these clues, you should be able to make a grid that connects the four guys (AJ, Nate, Marcos, Tony) with Adam (Email, Texting, Phone, In person) and each other each other in a certain order (Years ago, Months ago, Tonight) and when they arrived (8:20, 8:30, 10:00, 10:10). And you but little x’s and dots to figure out the puzzle.
Then there were cryptograms, the ones with the mixed up letters that spell out a message. I didn’t like the idea of being excluded, and that’s what those felt like to me. Here’s a message out in the open, but it’s not meant for me to understand; like spelling certain words in front of kids and dogs, or pig latin, or when strippers use double-talk to each other at your friends bachelor party in Vegas and some guy knows it and it’s kind of cool because he gets it, and kind of creepy because they’re talking in code about whether or not to eat each other out, and this guy knows that because he has an eight year-old daughter who speaks in double-talk.
I know pig latin and double-talk, so I picked up some key words from the strippers and knew what they were getting at, but codes in general are something I’m not great with.
Either I lose patience with them and think if someone wants me to know, they’ll tell me, or I forget the code halfway through.
There were hanky codes a while back, maybe before the internet, and I remember looking at this list of colors and their meanings and which pocket you put it in determined if you were active or passive (i.e. poo on my face, vs. I’ll poo on your face).
Not being particularly strong on my rights and lefts, I thought there should be a diagram. As a passenger, I’ve trained nearly every driver that when I say “this way” I mean towards me, and “that way” means away from me. So when the placement of a bandana in my right or left back pocket determines my role in something, I think it’s important if I know if my right or stage right.
I was discussing this with Eddy a couple years ago around the old fire pit at the Faultline, when I saw a guy with a yellow bandana sticking out of back pocket. Yellow means pee, so I was asking Eddy if he expects someone to pee on him, or if he wants to pee on someone else. Though I kept pointing to the guy and Eddy was getting more and more impatient and mocking me for not knowing my rights and lefts, I inched us closer until we were a couple feet from him.
“Right there, Eddy. Look!”
“Girl… where?
“Stand facing me, OK, over my shoulder.”
“That guy has no pants on.”
“Then it’s obviously not him!”
I turned around and stood next to Eddy, angling us so the guy was directly next to me.
“Eddy, he’s at 9:00.”
“AM or PM?”
“What?! AM or PM?”
We started laughing and couldn’t stop. Eddy doubled over and said he was laughing so hard he had to pee and asked me where the bathroom was.
“It’s that way.”
“What way?”
“Over there.”
“Over where?”
“Two o’clock… PM.”
And he grabbed his crotch and disappeared into the crowd.
B
