CALL OF THE DAY: that old “call-within-a-call” trick
Dammit. I don’t have any hands free for my dick.
His card in my file box is sparsely annotated: CD (cross-dressing) slut, toilet. Then at the bottom-left corner of the card: crackhead. I never put down drugs, or derogatory names, for that matter, unless the caller tells me, so at some point he must have called himself a crackhead. I still don’t really know what people on harder drugs sound like, but he’s fairly brief in his responses and oddly loud.
My dispatcher had given me the heads-up about the elaborate scenario that he wanted to unfold, but I ask the caller himself to tell me again, because sometimes communications aren’t clear on that particular leg of the information journey, and this sounded wacky and potentially non-consensual enough that I want to be 100-percent clear about what the fuck is going on. The 30-minute call is meant to go like this:
He is going to get me on the phone, and then call up his ex, Michelle. Michelle didn’t believe that he was at home doing what he said he was doing–gee, I wonder why she doesn’t believe that? So, I need to pretend to be someone named Lisa, and tell Michelle that I had spent the night with the caller, but right now I was taking a breather to let the caller suck my husband Don’s dick and get fucked in the ass. “If you can get her to do some girl-on-girl action with you, that’d be even better.”
Wait, is she expecting this call?
“Yes.”
Have you guys done threesomes in the past?
“Once.”
Huh. Okay. <deep breath> Put her on.
Of course it takes him 6 minutes and two call-backs to figure out how to work the three-way calling on his end, and yes, you better fucking believe that I run the timer for that. When his ex finally picks up her phone, I definitely am no’t expecting the first line she shot out: “Why does <caller> think this blackmail thing is going to work?”
My mind whirred. Blackmail? What blackmail? DEFLECT, DEFLECT, no one tells me anything around here that I really need to know! I don’t understand what’s happening, so I shift it something that I do understand, i.e. the fact that my caller is a cocksucker and likes to be humiliated for it. It’s starting to come back to me, how he likes to play. I laugh and say, yeah, you know I’d probably take it more seriously if I didn’t see how much he enjoyed it.
What follows is an eight-minute conversation, where I’m telling Michelle what the caller is doing with my husband over there, and asking her questions about her time with the caller. “Three times he got phone sex girls to call me and talk with me, try to have phone sex with me, isn’t that stupid?” Oh, yeah, I say and feel weirdly meta in the middle of all this. What else did he do, I ask. He liked to zip-tie her and do things to her involving piss and shit. He won’t be doing that to me, I say; it’s possibly the truest sentence I have ever uttered. But surely, I add, you must have had some idea that he liked to suck dick.
“Well, he used to text me sometimes from truck stops, tell me he was going off into some dude’s cab, but I wanted to see a picture, and he never sent me one.”
She wants to see proof, and I’m not sure that this call with me and the caller is going to suffice. In fact, as the conversation grinds on, I have little flashes of tinfoil-hat-style suspicions: what if the caller called another phone service for a “Michelle”, and this other PSO and I are stuck in a loop of trying to sort out what kind of two-girl call would actually be most effective, but neither of us are getting PAID for a two-girl call, and we don’t know IF the other character is real or fake. WHAT’S HAPPENING.
I don’t stay in that headache-inducing state for too long, thankfully. After about 8 minutes, Michelle says, “All right, I’ve got a job interview in about a half an hour, I have to go to get ready for it.” Thanks for talking, I say, and hang up.
Between the tech glitches at the beginning of the call, and then this incredibly awkward and partly non-consensual conversation with a so-called “Michelle”, that still only added up to 15 minutes, even though it felt like it was running forever. I call back and let the dispatcher know we ran short. Tough shit for my caller. If his ex—not even his current girlfriend, but his ex—isn’t actually interested in discussing his sex life with a stranger, ESPECIALLY if she has a suspicion that it’s just another one of “those” calls, well… that actually makes a lot of sense.
Oh, and then he calls back to get the rest of the time. By himself. He is so in trouble, really he is. Because now I’ve got a whole conversation with someone else about him, as grist for the mill. I’ve established that I’m dominating this thing. And we’ve established that, after talking with this woman who did not step up the way he thought (hoped?) she would, I have no patience with his bullshit.
I tell him this. I think you’re a lying sack of shit, I say. I ask if Michelle was telling the truth about the things that he did to her.
Yes.
You’re kind of a cunty bastard, I say. Aren’t you?
Yes.
Once he says yes to that, I feel free to rip into him. And I do. I’m not sure why. I mean, I know he wants this treatment, to some degree, but I’m pushing way over what’s necessary. I think it’s also that I’m irritated by his baroque contortions and narrative twists and possibly involving nonconsensual parties to give him space to talk about getting dick in his mouth. That really bothers me. Well, whatever the cause, he is getting a real bargain in humiliation and abuse today.