Years ago, Dave Portnoy gave me his phone number. I like to think he said something like “here, you’ll need this” and then took my phone and punched it in himself, like some assertive jock on a college quad, not knowing it’s for TikTok and his videographer is shooting from a window 200 yards away. Then he’d ask me my body count and I’d say a very humble number and he’d take my phone back and delete the number and 14 billion views later, I’m a slut.
But that’s not what happened. I don’t remember exactly how I acquired his number, but I saved it under “Dave Portnoy,” as though he was just another guy I’d met over wings and pinball. I didn’t get squirrelly and save it as “Boss Man” or “El Pres” the way that many here have done because they grew up fans and the very earning of his number served as some coronating life event that couldn’t be handled subtly. I wonder how many of these people around here have Dave saved in their phone as something reverential or fucking stupid. I bet it’s tons.
Not me though. Dave Portnoy, right down the middle, my friend, boss, mentor, but mostly friend. That’s how I knew him. That’s how I thought we would text over the ensuing years.
I was wrong.
Something changes in people when they make hundreds of millions of dollars. Their text response rate slows down, they don’t laugh at the very funny messages you send them, their word count dwindles, their emoji use disappears… in dating they call this “fizzling.” It’s a tactic used to infer a loss of interest without having to confront someone directly with the bad news: you don’t give a shit about their thoughts, time, or emotional investment anymore. Whatever you thought this was, it isn’t. Seek life elsewhere.
Still, there were periods of robust correspondence. For example, the time I went to Saratoga for the horses and purchased a suit and pocket square in town at the haberdashers, as well as some ill-fitting loafers that split my heel skin within five steps of leaving the store, knowing I had to look the part for we might end up in Dave’s box for a race or two.
View this post on Instagram
On this day, I texted Dave asking where he was, and whether he had any bets he liked. He responded so quickly and so invitingly that I was genuinely thrilled, telling me to come to his box where we could place exactos and sip champagne pulled from sweating buckets of ice and eat strawberry shortcake with clotted cream, seated atop cushioned benches beneath the shaded overhang of the track’s wooden eaves, craning our necks over the feathered hats of ladies born to high stations and boredom as a hundred hooves pound the track to pudding.
But when I found him, his face fell. He had somehow saved my number as “Willie Colon,” a 400-lb African-American Pittsburgh Steeler with Puerto Rican heritage with whom, to that point in my life, I’d never been confused. A classic mixup! I stayed for one race (which we actually won) and my enthusiastic shouts as the horses crossed the line were met with reproachful glances from the well-heeled crowd such that I quietly excused myself to a bathroom I never used.
Dave and I have had plenty of great exchanges like this over the years. I tried to sift through the hundreds, possibly thousands, of messages but unfortunately, he changed his number recently and when I updated his contact, I lost them all. It’s a shame as there were some truly historical gems in there. Once, Dave forgot he’d put caps lock on and wrote “WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM ARE YOU A FUCKING MORON?????” Lol. It reads so much differently in uppercase lettering, like he’s actually angry instead of kidding around as we so often did. I thought about writing back “Uh, Dave, did Owen Meany from A Prayer for Owen Meany take your phone? lol” but then he called me and told me I was fired, so I was glad I hadn’t sent that literary reference.
I won’t lie: once Dave fizzled me, things went a little dark. I’d type lengthy messages to him that rambled and roamed, searching frantically for some rediscovery of the common ground that had cultivated our hitherto vibrant discourse. These messages were devoid of structure and punctuation, the ravings of a man in full spiral. Luckily, in some deeply unconscious act of self-preservation, I never brought myself to hit send; just the drafting of these messages provided what little relief I needed from the pressurized steam that was building in my short-circuiting mainframe.
He has that effect, you know. You wouldn’t know; you don’t have his number. But my story is not unusual.
Through the support of family and mood-stabilizing drugs, I found my footing again. It came on May 24, when Dave texted me asking me to join the cast of Surviving Barstool:
I believe Erika once said in an interview that she would text employees on the weekend, evaluating their professional commitment by the number of minutes it took them to respond. You’ll notice that in the above exchange, I didn’t get back to Dave for two hours and twenty-five minutes. That’s an eternity. But when you’ve been in an on-again, off-again text relationship with your boss for the better part of a decade, you learn to hold your goddamn horses. For the first time in recent memory, I held the cards. You want me to be part of our premier game show? Let me weigh it, bud. Let me toss that shit around.
Privately, I was over the fucking moon. It took everything I had not to send him a video of me dancing like that girl with the large breasts that KFC used to feature. She spelled her name in a preposterous way but I forgave that given how playful she seemed.
In classic Dave fashion, I enjoyed my reverie for all of one week before a cold update ripped me back to earth:
The beauty of texting is that you can carefully choose a few words that do not bear a single shred of truth regarding your real feelings. “Ah damn. No problem. Thanks.” Do you know how many times I wrote and rewrote that message? I wanted him to know I was bummed but cool enough to handle it with grace. Tough luck, but I’ll live. I even threw in a “Thanks” which might be the most masochistic shit you’ll ever see in your fucking life. As in, I thank thee for trodding across my heart in dirtied stilettos, Madame Pain. Who’s that at the door, humiliation, ruin, and shame? Let ’em all in, the more the scarier.
Texting Dave is like living in Scott Hanson’s witching hour—where losses become wins and wins become losses. For this very Monday, I received the latest:
The boy is off the bubble, folks. And I think it will stick this time. There has to be some double-jeopardy policy that guards against employers removing employees from the same gigantic opportunity twice, right? He wouldn’t. Not the Dave I know.
Not the Dave I text.
