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I was in love with my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Wells. She had dark hair and her perfume smelled like lemons. I had always
had trouble holding my crayon the right way, but once I finally mastered it. I didn't make a big deal out of it, I was just
sitting there coloring and she came up to me and kissed me. Just like that, she just kissed me, on the cheek. It was kind
of like that episode of The Brady Bunch where special guest star Melissa Sue Anderson kisses Bobby and he sees fireworks.
I mean, he doesn't actually see them; he just stares blankly into space, and they cut away to a shot of some fireworks going
off in the sky, and then back to Bobby, with his hand just barely touching his cheek and staring off into space like a doofus.
Except I like to think I wasn't as much a doofus as Bobby Brady was.
Anyway, it didn't work out with Ms. Wells. I guess
she didn't think of me in "that way". I eventually got over her, I suppose, but even still today I can't listen to the song
"B-I-N-G-O" without getting a little misty. That was kind of "our song".
The next woman I fell in love with was named
Stacy. I had to play it cool with her, though, because I didn't want anyone to know that I was in love with her. Specifically,
I didn't want her to know. Looking back now, I can kind of see Stacy as my "transitional" person, even though I was only five
and wouldn't have even known what transitional means. It doesn't really matter, I suppose, because it didn't work out with
Stacy, either. I was still very inexperienced and had not yet mastered the game of love. Or little things like talking to
women....or looking directly at them....or telling them my name. I wonder how it might have actually worked out with Stacy,
although I'm quite certain that today, if she even thinks of me at all, it's just in the passing, wistful kind of way how
you sometimes might wish things had been different if maybe they'd invented Ritalin about 30 years earlier.
I had a
test to see if I was really in love with someone. I don't know where this all came from, but anyway here it is: I would always
picture her and me in a train station, where she would be getting ready to go away for a very long time, maybe to a jungle
or something. Or I would be going away. Or maybe both of us would be, and leaving behind all our loved ones and everything
we'd known up to this point. It doesn't really make any difference who's leaving, or where they're going, because the train
never leaves the station. Because it's then at that very moment that she realizes she's in love with me and can't live without
me, and she throws herself into my arms and kisses me. This might all seem psychotic and delusional to you, and maybe it even
is, but to me that train station holds special memories as it is the only place my relationships ever took place. I stood
there locked in a perpetual embrace with Stacy or Ms. Wells. It's a good thing the train never went anywhere, too, because
it would have probably taken me straight to a mental institute. It's also good that I was too young to read, because all the
signs in the station probably said things like "Next Stop: Insanity" and "Abandonment Issues, 2.3 Miles".
And, thanks
to Ms. Wells, I also now had a big crayon fixation, too. I still dream to this day about coloring a woman's naked body pine
green or burnt sienna, while she cries out how wonderful I am to be holding the crayon correctly. Actually I just made all
that up just now. But it would make a good psycho killer movie, where Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson have to track down the Crayola
Killer...
I was really unlucky at love and I even began to wonder if there were any nice girls out there at all. Someone
to talk to, spend time with, someone who appreciated me and wouldn't make a little origami puppet thing that had me pick a
color and then tell me I'm a jerk and run away, giggling.
Then I met Elena. Maybe "met" is too strong a word, as it
seems to infer that I spoke to her or that she even acknowledged my existence. And to my knowledge, that never happened.
Anyway,
so here I am in fourth grade and there's Elena sitting on the other side of the room. I don't know that she ever noticed me,
or at least she never gave me any indication of it. And I'm not sure how, but somehow I managed to get her phone number, and
in some deep recess of my brain where I seemed to store an enormous excess of self-confidence, I thought it would be a good
idea to call her. Maybe I just thought it was what you were supposed to do when you liked someone, it never having occured
to me at the time to wait and see whether she liked me too, or even wanted me to call. Or at least didn't completely hate
my guts.
Luckily for me, she didn't seem to completely hate my guts, or at least she was too timid to tell me so to
my face. At any rate, the conversation could hardly have dazzled her. It usually went something like this:
"Hello?
"Hi....Elena?"
"Yes...?"
"Hi."
"Hi"
"Hi."
"Ummm...."
"O,
sorry! This is John. Doolittle, you know, from class....?"
"Yes, John, I've known you since first grade."
"Yeah,
ok (nervous laugh)...that's, like, a long time, huh?"
"It does seem like a long time, yeah."
"I just wanted to say hi."
"And
you did, three times."
"You're pretty." *click*
I don't really remember what all we talked about; all I really
remember is how nervous I was to just be even talking to her. Maybe she felt sorry for me. Maybe she liked the attention.
Maybe she was even a little scared of me. Luckily for me, though, this was the mid-70's and there was no word for stalker
yet.
As bold as it seems for me to just call a girl out of the blue like that, esepcially one I'd never spoken more
than five words to before in my whole life, I got even bolder. Because I perfected my "telephone voice". It was something
like Billy Dee Williams or Barry White, I thought. At least half was, anyway; the other half was the "woh woh woh" sound that
all the adults made on Charlie Brown cartoons.
This went on a few weeks, I think. I would call her like on Saturdays
and talk for about 30 seconds, and then during the week I wouldn't even look her in the eye. Then one day I called her and
while she was talking to me I heard her friend giggling in the background and I was quite certain that she'd made a little
origami puppet with my name on it.
Anyway I'm older now, and wiser.
A little.
I think.
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