Upon coming home to our ground-floor apartment on a Halloween night quite a few years ago, my lovely wife and I found something on our doorstep. No, not a flaming bag of dog excrement, or a smashed pumpkin, but I like the way you think, reader. It was, in fact, a person. More specifically, it was a very, very, very, very drunk teenage girl, passed out on our doormat, curled up like a kitten.
“Holy Jesus, what the hell is that!?” my wife yelled as I nearly stepped on the huddled mass. I looked down and jumped back a few feet.
“It’s a girl!” I said in surprise as I got a better look in the dim light of our stoop.
“Oh my god… is she dead?” My wife asked tentatively.
“What am I, a psychic?” I replied, and then upon seeing the sharp look she was giving me, I continued, “I don’t think so. Probably just passed out.”
“I can’t tell if she’s breathing. Maybe you should… you know… give her a little kick?”
“Pardon?” I raised an eyebrow.
“You know… nudge her with your foot… just a little kick.” She said, as if this were the most natural thing to do. My wife is just an old hand at this, I guess.
“And what if she is dead, eh? And they examine her body later and find a post-mortem boot mark?” I ask.
“If you don’t want to kick her, then I’ll do it.” she said huffily, taking a step toward the unknown girl.
“Oh, no. I’ll do it. I just want you to realize the lunacy inherent in the situation,” I said.
“Duly noted. Now, I’m freezing out here, so get to kicking.”
I took a step toward her and put my toe out gingerly, to give her a nudge. She groaned before I made contact.
“Alright then, not dead.” My wife said decisively. She then bent down over the girl and started shaking her shoulder gently. “Excuse me! Excuse me, strange drunken girl? Or stoned girl? Intoxicated female person? Wake up!”
I noticed then that this girl was using the electrical outlet on our stoop to charge her cellphone.
“Look, she’s stealing our electricity, the little thief!” I said. Oh, yes, I’m a petty, petty man sometimes.
“Yeah, I see that.” My wife rolled her eyes at me. “I’ll make sure I get back the eleven-cents-worth she’s stealing.”
“It’s the principal of the thing. I’m calling the police.” I said.
“About what? A dime’s worth of electricity?” My wife said, flabbergasted.
“No, about the underage drinker who’s passed out on our doorstep!” I said.
“Oh. Yeah.”
I dialed 911 and gave the operator my address and name and the circumstances. She asked if the girl was breathing.
“Oh yeah. She seems fine, just asleep. No bruises about her face or anything, just asleep.” Just to make sure, I held the phone away from me and bent down to the girl, and said “IS THERE ANYTHING WRONG WITH YOU? ARE YOU DRUNK? YOU’RE JUST DRUNK, RIGHT?” I could smell the alcohol. Then, I said back to the operator, “I think she’s just drunk.”
They said they would send an officer over right away, and I said thank you and hung up. My wife and I stood there for a minute, looking at each other and shrugging.
“Should we step over her?” I asked my wife.
Just then, the girl leaped up to her feet, smoothed back her hair, unplugged her cellphone, stuffed the phone in her purse, picked up her purse, appeared woozy for a moment and then noticed us. This all happened within the space of about twenty seconds, while we were just standing there watching. She looked about 16, maybe 17, and was garbed in what passes these days as a standard teenage girl Halloween costume. In other words, to put it indelicately, she was dressed like a whore, and a cheap one at that.
“Oh!” she said when she noticed us, “I didn’t see you there.”
My wife and I looked at each other in disbelief, our mouths agape.
“Uh… are you feeling alright? I only ask this because you were just passed out a moment ago and you look a bit, well, ill.” I said.
“I… I…” She began. She was quiet for a moment and I could see she was trying to compose herself. She straightened up, looked me squarely in the eye and said what has now become one of my all-time favorite sentence for when someone has caught me doing something I shouldn’t be doing, when someone has caught me in a small gaff or a little white lie or a benign faux-pas, like taking an hors-d’oeuvre before they’ve been formally served.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, with an air of dignity she apparently plucked from thin air.
It’s not so much the words she said, but the way she said them, as if I were implying something completely silly about her, something that could just be dismissed with no more effort than brushing a bit of lint from one’s sleeve.
She paused a moment to let her words sink in, nodded ever-so-slightly at her own matter-of-fact-ness, and then, without further ado, she sidestepped right around my wife and I and started walking briskly away from us.
Allow me to just say that I was fucking shocked. But I quickly regained my own composure enough to yell at the back of her head as she left.
“Hey!” I called after her. “You can’t just deny that! You WERE passed out a minute ago! Are you alright? Why’d you choose MY stoop? Where are you going? Get back here MISSY!” I felt like shaking my fist in the air, to make a point, but resisted. She pretended not to hear me. “I called the cops on you, you’ve got to come back and talk to them when they get here!” At this news she broke into a run, probably hard to do on high heels and newly regained consciousness.
I turned to my wife, who told me to let it go. I shrugged and we then shared a cigarette as we waited for the cops to arrive. When they asked if anything was missing, I heavily considered telling them that’s she’d stolen electricity from me. I didn’t, though, instead telling myself that everyone makes mistakes and that the drunk girl probably had enough to worry about. Wasn’t I a teenager once, too? Also, there’s probably no use in pressing charges when the object taken is not actually an object and is more like a brief flow of current.
What was weird was that she’d flatly denied that she had been passed out in front of us. As if I was going to say, “Oh, that wasn’t you? My mistake then. I must have had something in my eye. Or perhaps I’M drunk or on drugs, not YOU.”
She offered no apology, no “sorry I was passed out”, not even a curt “my bad”. Just the now infamous line “I don’t know what you’re talking about” that has now been said, by yours truly, on various occasions, no less than five hundred times since that night. I only wish I’d thought of it first.
Good on you, you little drunkard.
