The Three Word Challenge

It was a Friday evening over a year ago in Virginia City, the only place I know where a person can drink history by the glass and still owe for it later. I was occupying my customary post at the Tahoe House, engaged in the serious civic duty of reducing an Old Fashioned to its natural elements.

The room was performing its usual symphony, boots against floorboards, low conspiracies at the far tables, and the clink of glassware that sounds suspiciously like ambition in measures. I had just reached that agreeable condition where a man forgives the day for happening when the door opened and admitted a vision.

She did not merely enter; she arrived.

Now, Virginia City has seen its share of striking figures from miners with pockets full of optimism, to legislators with pockets full of something else.

The lady commanded the room the way a general commands his field artillery. She was so astonishingly pretty that I found my gaze behaving like an untrained dog returning to look upon her countenance, no matter how often I called it back.

She took a seat at the far end of the bar. I attempted to devote myself to my drink with renewed moral discipline. The drink, I regret to report, offered no assistance.

After a few minutes, she caught me looking. There is a particular embarrassment reserved for a grown man discovered staring as if he has misplaced his spectacles.

I mentally prepared a lengthy and sincere apology. But before I could deliver it, the woman rose and approached me with a composure that suggested that she had never hurried for anything, not even an Uber or Lyft.

She looked me straight in the eye. It was not a casual glance, but the sort of look that makes a man review his will.

In a voice smooth enough to butter toast at 20 paces, she said, “I’ll do anything you’d like me to do. Whatever you can imagine in your wildest dreams, no matter how unusual or extreme, I’m game. I only want one hundred dollars, and there’s one other condition.”

Now, I have lived long enough in Nevada to know that when fortune knocks, it generally has a cousin waiting to borrow money. Still, I confess I was struck dumb as a courthouse on Sunday.

I managed, after a swallow that did not entirely belong to the Old Fashioned, to ask what the condition might be. She smiled, a slow, deliberate arrangement of features calculated to rearrange a man’s common sense.

“You must tell me exactly what you want me to do,” she said, “and you can only use three words.”

Three words.

It is astonishing how brief the English language becomes when rationed. My mind, usually so nimble in unnecessary matters, turned to porridge.

Around us, the bar continued its business, unaware that I was engaged in the most significant literary exercise of my life.

I considered the proposition carefully, reflected on my circumstances, my bank account, and most soberly, my state of drunkness. At length, I withdrew my wallet and produced a crisp hundred-dollar bill, laying it upon the bar with the solemnity of a treaty.

I met her steady gaze and spoke slowly, so there could be no misunderstanding.

“Paint my house.”