As I wrap up my last semester in an MFA program, eager to rain some writing upon the Earth, I’m reminded of a time when words had to do more work. In 1999, when an individual wanted a partner (or a hookup), physical newspapers, and the photo-free personal ads therein, were the widest net one could cast. In the classifieds department of a college town’s alternative newsweekly, from a small room with hardwood floors, I sold ad space one small rectangle at a time.
If you are of a swiping age, when it to comes to trawling for love, you might need to understand that a Personals ad was not unusual. Every paper had them in the back: a 50-100 word pitch of one’s self to the wide world in search of a mate. Distilling identity and desire into acronyms and coded language turned the boxes into something like poetry: SWFs and GBMs and DWMs sought same, or different, for companionship, or more. It seems quaint, akin to the elevated language in a Civil War letter, but without photographs in the ad, lonely people had to write well. Like songbirds, our customers used the utmost communication ability at their disposal — and there was some variety here — to pitch themselves in this arena. I was in charge of approving that pitch.
I kicked off every day checking the new personals voicemail messages left from the night before. The ads themselves were printed for almost nothing in our paper; the voicemail system was where we made the money. The customer who posted the printed ad logged into a phone system and recorded an audio greeting. A person who wanted to respond to the print had to call a phone number, listen to the greeting, and leave a message. To retrieve this message the person who posted the ad had to pay a few more dollars, and before screen addiction and notifications were even a thing, we were leveraging that irresistible urge to know what a message says, once you know there’s one waiting for you. So, every business day began with approving new people’s messages and then screening the previous day’s responses for threatening or illicit content.
Although I listened like an eavesdropper to every single message, nothing compared to the message from Suzie Q. I listened to it once and then shuffled back through the forms to see what she had written down. Yep, “Suzie Q” on the form, too. The greeting was so unrepeatably inappropriate I was contractually obliged to contact her and tell her to re-record the message, or else delete it. I listened to it one more time. The editor-in-chief walked by the door and did a double-take. I rewound it and played the breathless voice over again.
Hi. I’m Suzie. I’ve got two. Big. Round. Eyes. And one of them likes to wink at you. I work at the sausage factory, where all. Day. Long. I slide the casings. Carefully. Onto the sausages. Like this…
To demonstrate my belief in professionalism I pressed delete before the finale, and sighed that I would have to ask Suzie to change her message or else lose the ad. The editor shook his head and went upstairs.
It was early, so I was surprised when she picked up.
“Hi, this is Dave from the Weekly, do you have a minute to talk about your ad?” There was a long pause. Then a laugh. Then a confession. “My friends dared me to do that. I’m so sorry…”
“No, no, no,” I didn’t want her to be sorry. “I thought it was pretty funny.” “You did?”
I leaned back in my chair and smiled at the ceiling while we chatted, and a few minutes later I hung up, raced upstairs, and told the editor about the date I’d just made with her for that evening.
I was early for the first time in my life, but she was a little bit earlier. We had exchanged vague physical descriptions and I was overjoyed that the elements she described on the phone came together in a pleasing form, one that rose up from the outdoor table to hug me before we gabbed and ate fancy burritos and tasted each others’ margaritas and —whaddaya know? — the editor just happened to be walking by on the sidewalk and see us and come over and say hi.
He left, and I confessed that I had played her message for him. She looked so cute when she pretended to be ashamed. We drew closer and then went home together. We did something intimate with each other that felt like invention, something I had never done before, and which wouldn’t even have a name until it debuted in Urban Dictionary five years later. It was summer, so we bid goodbye at dusk between my car and her apartment. I had deleted her only message, and my calls would proceed to go unreturned. In a time before Caller ID, I called her sporadically for a week. I wondered if I’d been used. I was OK with that. Then I wondered if I was not good. In bed? As a person?
Checking the voicemails lost its luster. I had been to the proverbial mountaintop, and now what? Her brush-off left me wondering who was that confident guy on the phone, swiveling in his office chair and staring at the ceiling.
It felt like a plot twist one day in the classifieds department when I received an ad placed by my former high school headmaster. His name was on the top of the form, and I wanted to look away immediately. I thought of his eyes, which I had stared at for years before ever meeting him. In middle school I’d had a poster in my room, promotional propaganda from the high school I would end up attending. His high school. The poster showed him staring at the camera while at his feet lounged an actual Bengal tiger, the school’s mascot. The overall impression was of quiet strength, and despite a few interactions with the man in person, the poster remained my persistent image of him. When his personals ad, in my hands, got to the private part, every word felt queasy. As he revealed more about himself, I watched him struggle on the page in real time, a man snagging his proverbial toe inside the leg of his underwear.
“Retired high school principal, 75…” oh, it felt so wrong to read the first line. I could not align the next ones, either, with the stern eyes of the man in the tiger picture, “seeks female, 50-60 for golf partner, friendship, or something more.” Then I had to go into the system and check his recorded message.
I winced at his voice. A Southern baritone I had heard boom out commencement speeches came through my speakerphone and laid bare, in the frank manner of a small yard sale, all he had to offer. Part of me wanted to catch him saying something inappropriate, or delete the whole malformed thing out of mercy, for both of our sakes. But he went on as he began, and got approved and published, and did get a few replies to that sad little ad. Maybe they led to something more.
I’m forty-six now, halfway between the ages of the old man looking for love on the golf course and the young man searching for love in an imaginary sausage factory. At the time, one of those Personals ads seemed more infinitely depressing than the other. Now I see it differently. In fact, now that I’m in my second marriage and a father thrice over, it seems like a miracle, or the first blossom of summer, that the old man’s simple plea ever resulted in the blinking red light of a reply message. But it did.
Dave Gentry 