Day 306 - Charlie Was

 Charlie Was

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 

Charlie was an asshole, but I miss him dearly. Perhaps he was right or perhaps he was a liar, but it doesn’t really matter. I would suffer through whatever torment he wanted to initiate, if only he would call.

I don’t know what the trick was. I don’t know how Charlie could do it, but he got it done. I got phone calls. All the time. All of the time. All of it. Girls I knew suddenly had the biggest crush on me. Companies I had submitted work to suddenly called wanting to hire me.

It’s hard to explain to someone younger, someone who grew up in the age of technology and a million and one programs or apps or AI tricks. There was a time before any of that, that in order to do it you had to have tremendous skill, some incredibly fancy sound machine, or enough money to bribe the unbribable.

Charlie had none of those things.

I got a million calls. And I was fooled by a great many of them. Voice mail messages. I’d return the call and get some stranger on the other side of the country with no clue what I was talking about.

Perhaps Charlie was a vocal chameleon. Or maybe he had an ounce or two of magic deep down somewhere. He never told me. He never explained. He never acknowledged it was him. To this day I don’t know how he was doing it. But he was the only asshole I knew who liked to play pranks on his friends. So, if it wasn’t him, it was the strangest set of coincidences and impossible situations all wrapped up in one.

One day while in college my father called me. Impossible as I would later find out, because my father had a heart attack six hours earlier while digging weeds in the back yard. But it was my father and we talked and he was kind and loving in a way my father normally wasn’t. And I accepted it in a way that I normally would not have done.

Charlie came to the funeral and I wanted to punch him in the face. He cried when I yelled at him and then I cried because I didn’t know what else to do. Maybe I talked to my father. Maybe I talked to the dead. Maybe Charlie knew that was one prank too many, because the impossible phone calls stopped.

For years and years Charlie was my best friend. I loved him and I hated him and I loved him again. But he was my best friend. Charlie was an asshole, and now I miss him dearly. Maybe none of it was him. Maybe I had been the victim of someone else. Some spirit. Some ghost. Some otherworldly delight. But none of that seems very real. Not in this world. Not in these times. Nothing good or strange or special seems to happen like that.

 Maybe Charlie was just a guy. A guy who could make me laugh. Maybe none of his pranks were real. But I hope some of them were. I hope he calls me someday. Because what good is being able to talk to the dead if they refuse to pick up the phone and call you.