I'm a prankster and this is one of my favorite pranks. So, for the five people that will see this, I hope you enjoy.
Background: I live in CA, my buddy's gf was home from college in NY. She had brought her NY roomate who is also a prankster to visit. They talked her friend into pranking me. She basically just left me a voicemail saying that I'd been fired. It was fairly well done. It sounded pretty professional and believable, but it was over as soon as I went in to work the next day.
I had never met her.
I decided to prank her back. She was an Art student (photo major) at NYU and had a website up with her work. One of her pictures was a shot of a pack of cigarettes.
I did a little bit of research, found a law firm in Florida that didn't have an email address listed (this was 1998), and started committing a felony by impersonating a lawyer. I got a throw away email account and emailed her claiming that I was an attorney who had been hired by Philip Morris to police the internet for "illicit use of their trademarked property".
She wrote back with a pretty standard "I'm not making any money off of this, I'm an art student" line.
I kept it up, began researching the actual laws that were relevant and referencing them.
At the same time I had become single, and had started emailing her on my own. I took pains to not send the Lawyer emails at any times that weren't during business hours for Florida, and tried to keep my personal emails sent in the evening CA time. When I wrote long emails from the Lawyer account I would sometimes type with just my left hand, in order to disrupt my normal writing style.
So, as the lawyer I gave her a 2 month deadline to take down the offending materials. Why two months? I dunno, I just made it up in the first email. It happened to be a great deadline, because she and I became closer over emails and I was able to get into her head and see how she was responding to the lawyer emails.
Our personal emails grew more and more involved. This was the late 90s, no one had really heard of online dating. I don't think craigslist existed, if it did no one I knew was aware of it. So, starting to get to know someone over email was a unique experience for both of us.
Anyhow, the other accidentally brilliant part of the deadline is that it happened to be right before her finals that semester. She had been meeting with the N.Y.U. legal department who were happy to take the case to trial. In a post Andy Warhol world, the art student vrs. the cigarette company would be a great win. She saw the logic in this, but she was just too busy to deal with it. She also was afraid that if the legal department didn't win she would be the one left holding the bag.
The lawyer started mentioning that if she was fined hundreds of thousands of dollars she didn't have, they would possibly tithe her wages until the principle and reasonable interest was paid off.
I told her to appeal to the lawyer as a person. She did. The lawyer regretted to inform her that he was just doing his job, which was to find and inform offenders. If she choose not to comply, he would simply pass this case along to someone else. He didn't know what would happen if he did that, no one had failed to comply yet.
She broke. Two days later the website was down. Not just the offending picture, the whole damn thing.
So, I started to realize that I had done too good of a job. (It wouldn't be the first time in my life I realized I might have different... boundaries than other people.)
I emailed her from the Lawyer, saying that he was traveling but it was important that she contact him immediately. I left her my phone number.
We had never exchanged phone numbers before. I was a concerned because the emails we were exchanging had started become more and more personal. My buddy was going to go to NY to live with his gf (and her roommate I had been torturing over email daily for a few months) for the summer, he was suggesting that I join them.
Suddenly the effect of what I had been doing hit me. I had played a double agent, acting as though I was advising her on the best way to stay out of trouble while at the same time using the personal information about her that I gained for my own sadistic entertainment.
But I had given her my phone number. I would come clean. It wasn't the first time I had ever done wrong, and I'd gotten pretty good at apologizing over the years.
I was hanging out in my room (no cell phones!) waiting for the call. After a few hours it rings. I know it's her. I pick up the phone and say "this is lawyer so and so, how may I help you?" She had already figured it all out. She saw the area code, recognized that was the same area as her roommate was always calling (for you young kids, we old people used to have to share land lines, and we'd have to identify the expensive long distance calls we made). She put two and two together. She knew who she was calling.
Back to the phone call. "...how may I help you?" She replies, "You're the coolest person in the world."
I ended up moving to NY, and staying in her bedroom.
So, after this story we start emailing and talking even more. I think it was early winter, but I'm not really super sure of the time. By spring we've sent each other packages in the mail and are listening to mix tapes we made for one another every day. About a week before I'm supposed to arrive, her roommates let me in after a red eye flight to NYC. I surprise her at 7 am. We moved into an apartment in the East Village. I got a job waiting tables, then a job bar tending. This was probably the "coolest" my life will ever be.
Our relationship was fine, but not fantastic. Even though this story makes us sound like soulmates, we weren't. I'm pretty far from perfect, I'm sure I did a lot of things to annoy her. For my part, she worked two jobs during the summer. Two crappy minimum wage jobs. I had traveled across the continent to be with her, and she was working 60 hours a week. She was rich, her family was rich, she didn't really need the money. She just had it in her head that she should be working.
I realized that her life would always be that busy. That whatever relationship we had, she would always have all these "important" things that I might not think mattered, that would keep her away from me. This was in June. This is when I stopped really being in love with her. I didn't know it at the time.
At the end of August, I stayed around for a hot second. I actually lived in her dorm for a week or so. Spent some time in Ontario, came back and spent more time with her. Then I moved back to San Francisco. I started working for my family, which meant instead of waiting tables and have 20 hours a week to write long emails, I was working 50 hours a week and catching up with my friends. I had a lot less energy for her. I was now as busy as she was, and she didn't like it.
Early December we were talking on the phone, arguing as usual. She was complaining that we didn't spend enough time talking to each other. I said that the problem was that when we did talk, all we did was talk about not talking enough. She disagreed. I responded, "We've been talking for an hour, we've talked at least once every other day, you don't even know that I quit smoking two weeks ago." There was silence. Then there was more fighting. That's when I knew we had to end.
A week or two later we talked and both thought that we broke up with the other person. I mean that I thought I dumped her and she thought she dumped me. The most mutual breakup I've ever been a part of. We were laughing at the end of it. I've only seen her once since then. She's the only ex I have that I wouldn't mind being friends with. But we didn't stay in touch. And so it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment