Column:

Adventures in drunk dialing

By Dan Friesen

Published Feb. 12, 2008

A lot has changed in my life this semester, children. Most importantly, as I see it, I got some sleeping pills. Most tragically, the guy downstairs from whom I was stealing wireless turned off his modem. Most graciously, my buddy Swear-n-Gin came through to give me a few discs of porn in this, my internet dry season. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I lost my once-best-friend Jon Martin.

He claimed that I was a “toxic influence” in his life. He couldn’t stand how I always thought I knew what was best for him, and how it was always the opposite of what he was doing. My side of the story is that I couldn’t bear to silently watch him make so many mistakes over and over. In my world, that’s what a friend does. A good friend does it cruelly.

I have a suspicion that our falling out was actually not a product of my “toxicity” at all. I’ve been consistently toxic for years now, and I’ve always been condescending about his problems. So why now?

My theory is it happened now because I came up with a better zombie movie pitch than he did. He loves zombie movies, so this would be a tender spot for him. Truth be told, his idea wasn’t bad, it’s just that it looks like day-old bread next to my idea: 9/11 triggers a zombie apocalypse. I would go into more details, but I don’t want some enterprising young film executive to read this paper, and next thing I know New Line Cinema is putting out the $500 million blockbuster “9/11: The Day Sarcasm Died And Came Back With A Taste For Flesh.”

But it’s not productive to speculate about why our falling out happened. All I can say for sure is that it did happen. Unfortunately, something else happened too: I inadvertently started a rumor that Jon Martin had been shot.

A few weeks back, I went on a two-day bender that involved five hours of bowling, abandoned plans to spend a night in the woods at Saunder’s Cabin, beers in bowling-pin shaped bottles, and approximately six hours for which I have only flashes of memory.

One such flash involves me calling my and Jon’s mutual friend, Tan, who lives in California, and leaving a long, slurred, elaborate story on his voicemail about Jon being shot. I remember the story being far-fetched to the point that Tan would never believe it, but I’m not the best witness.

Things did not go quite according to plan, as Tan heard the message and began calling all our friends for information. As luck would have it, he didn’t see fit to call me and Jon didn’t answer his phone. Thus, the rumor snowballed until friends of ours were calling around to hospitals and making inquiries with the police. But, none of them called me and I didn’t find out about this entire hullabaloo until much later.

My first thought when I was told about all this was that I should start a lot more rumors. Perhaps I should stay away from ones that involve life and death, but if it’s this easy to get people to believe ridiculous things, I could get a lot of amusement out of paying my friends back for moving away with lies.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am sorry. A lesser man might say all those who didn’t think it might be a good idea to check in with the source of the rumor should share in the blame, but not I. I’ve got the message loud and clear: it’s not funny to make people think their friend is in critical condition or dead. I hereby solemnly vow to limit my drunken voicemails to involve friends courting tranny prostitutes or doing a line of coke off the lead singer of Saliva’s penis.

Again, mea culpa. It won’t happen again.