02.18.2002
I remember the first time I set my eyes on a girl and decided that she was the one for me. Most of the other boys were still running around screaming at the mere touch of a girl for fear of catching some deadly disease that might cause them to somehow become one and thus become a carrier themselves. I was seven years old and at first thought that – in a mind that still believed reverse psychology was valid psychology –it was merely a form of shock resulting from the recently shot John Lennon, a man whose work I didn't yet know but whose death my parents mourned, but as the days passed I noticed that the feelings didn't retreat with time but rather increased. She was an odd girl but one that set the precedent for all the ones that followed.
Her name was Catharine but she insisted upon being called Cathy – though in later years I would have wondered why had she ever read the comic strip in the Sunday paper. She was about the same height as I but had wild orange hair on her head that was so wiry that it stuck out at the same angle at which she ran her hand through. Her face was covered with a patchwork of freckles of approximately the same color and ran from one cheekbone to the other across a nose that was as cute as a button.
Her parents had less money than mine – an amazing feat – and it was evidenced in her obvious second hand clothes that were either passed down from an older sister or picked up at the local Goodwill. In second grade it wasn't as important as it later becomes in high school and none of the other kids seemed to notice since they were all still dressed by their parents.
When I think about what I liked about that girl, the answer is not always immediate though I believe that it had something to do with her playing hard to get. Actually she wasn't playing hard to get, she was just plain uninterested. While I was intrigued by girls, she was still apparently totally apathetic about boys yet she seemed all the more interesting because of it. I didn't know what I would do if I had one alone with me – girls, though newly attractive, were still something like an entirely different species – but I wanted to find out.
The other pattern that Cathy set forth was the idea that she was also a girl in which the few other boys who looked at the other sex seemed to totally ignore. It wasn't that she was unattractive but that she was almost insane. During the thrice a day recess she would prowl around the overgrown soccer field on all fours meowing like a cat and chasing "skippers" – small brown butterflies that, while a sight to behold flying en mass, were entirely un-noteworthy as a single entity – and growling at kids who entered her territory which usually meant me. Unlike the later oddballs I would later date, I didn't pretend to understand her eccentricies, but watched from a distance like Jane Goodall did her apes: studying them and loving them all at the same time.
My love affair with her came to an end one afternoon when I caught up with her in the bicycle racks out in front of the school. I ran up to her with my backpack slung over both shoulders and swinging back and forth sending my center of gravity left and right as I jogged to tell her my feelings. I'd been up all night long and decided that I had to say it because as long as I said nothing it would stay inside and barbeque my insides with all the emotion my seven year-old heart had. Upon seeing me approach though, she ducked behind the rack's steel bars and began to growl like a ferocious jungle cat.
"Hey Cathy," I said with a finger in my mouth and a nail being chewed.
She uttered a guttural growl in return.
"Hey," I said again. "I wanted to tell you something."
She didn't reply and continued to make her animal noises while I knelt on the opposite side of the rack and tried to look her in the eye. I didn't know much about romance, but I knew how it was done even at that age. When I tried to hold her hand that was wrapped around one of the bars that bikes were normally locked to, she leaned down and bit three of my fingers. At first I thought it was a test, if I could deal with a certain amount of pain she would relent and listen to what I had to say, but it quickly became obvious that it was not and the pressure from her jaws was such that I could no longer pull them from her mouth. I resorted to screaming while trying to yank my hand from her mouth but she just bit harder. When I was near tears she finally relented and, after a few seconds that seemed to stretch into days of looking into her eyes for a reason why, I ran to the office for a band-aid to patch my new wound.
The second girl I ever fixated upon was a navy brat named Jessie whose dad had sailed into port for an indeterminate number of years and whose sandy blond hair I couldn't move past. She sat ahead of me in my fourth grade class and when I wasn't doodling various comic book characters in my notepad and missing out on the advanced basics of English I was gazing into the back of her head. I caught her eye on the monkey bars one day at lunch when I managed to wrestle my best friend Paul from his position and claim my place at the top. My physical prowess was clearly of some interest to the tomboy because the next day she turned around in the middle of our history lesson and dropped a note on my desk.
Daintily, I unfolded it and read her message to myself a couple of times before stuffing it into my pocket and ripping a page from my notebook to write a response to her. She had invited me over to her house for an afternoon of cartoons and sugary cereals. My reply said simply, "Okay."
After school, instead of riding my bicycle home with Paul, I followed behind Jessie with her book bag on my handlebars and her forming backside on my mind. She rattled off the greatest moments in sports history while I tried to come up with a few interesting facts myself as well as dropping the knowledge that I played catcher on my little league team. She wasn't interested in what I had to say and the reverse was true because I never did care about sports much less the history of.
Jessie didn't have many friends, girl or boy, because of her interest in sports. At an age where most girls still played with their Barbie dolls and began to experiment with their mother's makeup, she wanted to play catch and wrestle. Most girls thought that she was too much like a boy and most boys thought that she was just strange. I feigned an interest in sports because I was thrilled that she would speak to me, much less invite me over.
What began as a one day invite became a daily ritual as we walked home, her quoting the sports page and me pedaling slowly behind saying "yeah" or "no" where it seemed appropriate, then the two of us raiding her kitchen for the breakfast foods that contained the most sugar with which to watch the after school cartoons. One day during a Flintstones episode, she leaned over and asked me if I'd like to kiss her. I thought about it for a minute, weighing the benefits and consequences in my mind, before I said yes. Without warning she ripped off her Orioles t-shirt and, in a training bra, climbed on top of me, and began to suck on my lips. At first all I experienced was sheer terror as Jessie seemed intent upon tearing my face apart with her mouth but after a few minutes of awkwardness and attempting to kiss back, it became pleasurable and was soon just as much a part of our after school days as the Jetsons or Merry Melodies.
We continued until my stepmother transferred me to another elementary school after a conflict with another student's parent. I was only gone a few days when I dropped by her house to see if we couldn't continue when a fifth grade boy, who I knew because he was the schoolyard bully fond of using his basic kickboxing knowledge on those smaller than him, answered the door and asked what I wanted. I peered past him, into Jessie's living room and saw her on the couch not wearing anything but a pair of flowered briefs and her arms across her chest. I gazed up at the fifth grader who stood a good two or three inches higher than I with a darkening upper lip even at that age and thought briefly off throwing a punch and running but decided against it incase he happened to be faster.
"What do you want," the bully demanded again as I stood there silently considering my options.
After a moment, I looked up at him and mumbled, "Nothing." Then, with my hands in my pockets, and my shoulders hunched over, I plodded away from Jessie's porch and down the street to my home where I planned to crawl into bed and never leave.
I merely bring up these two girls because they seem to have set a pattern that continues to haunt me even into today. With the end of every relationship I tend to sit down and think about the girl who I was most recently with and compare it to those I had in the past and, though the details are different, they follow the same undercurrent that always leaves me empty handed and hurt. I guess that's why I can't help but to think that love stinks.