If you've been reading this series - the crown jewel of the Twisted Wrecks - now you know what the "Elvira, Mistress of the Frigid Bitch" sobriquet is about. Of course, the "Elvira, Mistress of the..." part arose from the piled-up dark hair and the heavy makeup, like that of the one-time horror movie hostess. As for the "bitch" part, you have to understand that when I would tell my friends the latest news about what happened with so-and-so, they wouldn't remember the name and therefore nor the context, so when I'd say a name, the person I was talking to would say, "Who's that?" and I'd answer with some descriptive word or phrase and, eventually, "[descriptive word or phrase] Bitch" would become a label. And so, we had "Backrub Bitch" and "Warmonger Bitch" and any manner of other Bitches. "Elvira, Mistress of the Frigid Bitch" became her label.

After my graduation in September 1985 and my stepfather's suicide in December, the new year didn't hold a lot of promise as I returned to my apartment after Christmas. There was, as I recall, a significant snow/ice storm, and I learned that a Camaro is not something you want to be driving in snow and ice. I was going over to Elvira's place and I nearly wrecked trying to get out of my apartment complex. The short chute between my row of buildings' parking lot and the exit was totally iced over, and as soon as the Camaro got onto it, the rear wheels let go just from the torque at idle and the whole car began to slide forward...right toward a car parked at the curb. Brakes on or off didn't make any difference and I was running out of time to think, so I reasoned lightning fast: brake pedal down, car thinks it is stopped...YYYYES! I threw it into reverse and punched it. WHEEEEEEEIIIIIZZZZ went the rear tires as they shot twin blasts of shredded ice to the front. The car came to a halt about five feet shy of its low-speed-impact target. The things I'd do.

Before I started college in the Summer of 1981, the orientation counselors would say to me, "Oh, you're going to be EE (electrical engineering). Awesome. People will be banging on your door to hire you by the time you graduate." T'was not to be. There had been a recession in 1982 and 1983 and fair-to-middlin' students like me didn't get sought out. I didn't have a whole lot to show for my time at school, save a particularly strong run in the area of Automated Test Equipment and other coursework related to signal processing and computers. I was too passive and introverted to get my "real world" life started.

Eventually, though, my mother began to chafe at continuing to send me money, and when the offer from the Air Force base came through, she basically shut the door.

This is where I made a critical life-decision blunder. I should have done anything I needed to do in order to stay in Atlanta, where I had friends, I knew my way around fairly well, and I at least had potential for getting a job in keeping with my four-year degree. Barring that, I could have taken the job at Robins and gotten an apartment near the base or in Macon, with a return to Atlanta my first priority. Instead, I caved in and planned to move into my mother's house, where I had a bedroom and a finished basement room that housed all of my music equipment.

That one failure - the failure to find my own way at a critical life juncture - wound up costing me dramatically and has had repercussions that hound me to this day. At least I can take some solace in the fact that the good things that have come in my life wouldn't be the way they are if I had done things differently. I met my future wife at the Air Force base; we had a wonderful daughter together.

I have since learned that you really can't play this "coulda/shoulda" game without considering that for every tweak you'd like to make to your past, there's an innumerable number of tweaks, deliberate or otherwise, that would have naturally arisen from the one you wanted to make. Like, say, sliding under a tanker truck the day after your big "fix." No, you did what you did, and hopefully you learn and you either resolve to do things differently or show people what happens when they don't. Remember, there is in fact no shame if you can serve as an example to others.

Where the fuck was I? Oh, yes. The kindest thing that Elvira ever did was to come visit the morning I moved away from the apartment a few weeks before starting my Air Force job. I had packed up all alone and was expecting my mother to show up in the "fuck truck" customized van she'd bought before I started college. The Salvation Army had hauled away the living room set and the bed, so I had slept on the floor in the living room. Elvira came over real early in the morning and woke me up. I remember answering the door and being so happy to see her, but I was so exhausted and dejected over leaving that I don't remember anything else. I expect there was no touching, because I am sure that if I had held her, I would have cried, and I would have remembered that.

So, away I went, and I set up shop at my mother's. I did stay in touch with Elvira and I actually made the 100-mile trip back specifically to catch her graduation. I managed to get a picture, but it wasn't a very good one, as her pale face with two dark upper eyelids is all overexposed what with the black gown.

She took a road trip to Los Angeles to spend some time with friends, and after that, something that should have been great turned into the last insult.

My mother was out of town for a few days when either I called Elvira or she called me. She was having trouble with her Nissan and none of the dealers in town could touch it for a few days. Seeing an opportunity, I suggested that she come down and hang with me, and we could stick her car at a local dealers' and everything would be fine. So, she came down and I'm pretty sure she spent the night (again, no touching). I had to go to work the next morning, so Elvira was going to hang out at the house until I got home.

I worked with a guy named Mike, who had actually lived on C dorm's first floor short hall across from Robe and me. He was the roommate of a guy we nicknamed "El Freako," a stoner in the Jeff Spicoli mold who played bad guitar and bad keyboards with a bad furor. Mike was a self-destructive headcase in his own right (lost his driver's license at least once while I worked with him) but he was great to be around, and he knew Elvira because they were both in the same major. When I told Mike that Elvira was staying with me, his reaction was, like, "duuuuuuuuuuude!"

"Oh, maaaaaan!," he said, shaking his head with a grin on his face. "You're going to go home and she's going to be there in the hot tub with a couple of champagne glasses, waiting for you." Mike was playing me like an old cello.

Never before or since did I make the trip home from work as quickly I did that afternoon. Of course, as you may have already surmised, there was no Elvira in the hot tub, no champagne glasses. However, we did go out to eat, and it was on the way back from dinner that Elvira dropped the bomb.

I guess what stupefies me about this to this day is, why in the holy halls of fuck did she feel compelled to TELL me that she lost her virginity to a guy she had just met when she was out in California? If anyone has a possible explanation, who could give me some insight as to why a woman would say such a thing to a man who had been waiting at the fuzzy door for over four years, please leave a comment because for the life of me, I can't put it together.

I saw her off and once again, I threw up my hands. I felt betrayed but at the same time I knew that there really wasn't anything to betray. My offer to help get her car fixed accomplished nothing more than exactly that in her eyes. She was no more interested in me than anything. A place to crash and get her car fixed, maybe a dinner. Just a "friend." Just a chump.

She did stop by once more and coincidentally once again, my mother was out of town. This isn't pleasant to admit, but admitting it will at least serve to show the depths of my desperation, depravity, naivete, or all of the above: I set up a hidden camcorder in my bedroom, aimed at the bed. If I ask myself why I did that, I would have to say that I wanted proof for myself. It would have been too big an event to be able to retain it all in my mind if something had actually happened. If you climbed Everest, wouldn't you want to take a picture?? Of course, nothing happened, and the camcorder captured two hours of an empty bed.

She called one night to tell me that she was moving to California (oh, great - California, home of those who can bang Elvira with no effort and no waiting) and she asked if I could come up to see her before she left. I stupidly agreed instead of telling her how I really felt, which was that I had finally said "goodbye" in my own mind and really didn't want to ramp anything up again. I came up the next weekend, I think, and I picked her up at her mother's apartment. We had lunch, and after that, I was ready to end the day - take her back to her Mom's and let that be that. Inexplicably, once I indicated that I was taking her back, she became enraged at me. This put me in the typical "what the hell did I do wrong?" state and once I got to her Mom's apartment complex she hauled ass out of my car and stormed back to her Mom's building. I could almost see the lightning bolts shooting out of her thunderhead of hair.

My throat was in a knot and my heart was pounding. What the hell should I do? I can't just drive away! (Idiot, of COURSE you can just drive away!). I can't let it end like this (YES YOU CAN, SHIT-FOR-BRAINS!!). I sat in the car for a few minutes, knowing that she would probably look out the window to see if I was gone yet. Finally, I switched off the car, went in, and knocked on the apartment door. After a few seconds, during which I began seeing spots, Elvira's mother, a regal-looking middle-aged woman whose makeup tendencies apparently had been passed down, opened the door and I looked at her with sheepishly upcast eyes.

"Hi - I'm sorry - I'd like to talk with Elvira..." "I DON'T WANT TO TALK TO HIM," came the shriek from the back. Her mother excused herself and went to the back, and in a minute or so, the nostril-flaring Venezuelan Tornado came stomping out into the common hallway.

"Look - let's go talk," I said, and we wordlessly walked to the car. I remember that we drove to a nearby liberal-arts college campus and we sat on a concrete bench and talked. It was probably the least guarded I had even been with her since the start of our relationship but even at that, I swallowed my pent-up anger, she conveyed nothing of any significance, and then I took her back home. Now, I thought, it was through, and finally, in a very real sense, it was.

The four-year pattern alluded to earlier began here. We may have talked or written intermittently, I'm sure, but eventually that dried up, and I did get on with my life. After hopping jobs at the Air Force base a couple of times, in 1989 I would meet the woman I would eventually marry, but I also met a 35-year-old divorced violinist while playing bass at a community theater musical (another story) and I started seeing her. It was a rather satisfying relationship for a while, but it ended abruptly and, skipping over a great many details, I started seeing my wife-to-be. Skipping over yet many more details, she moved to another town to the northeast and yet another (bear with me as far as filling in the other LDR story) Long Distance Relationship (LDR) began.

I'll need to tell the story another time, but after seeing my wife-to-be V. for about a year and a half, things were coming to a head at home. I had tolerated living with my mother for five years, dealing with the cigarette smoke and the occasional beer-or-stronger-fueled rants every so often in trade for having enough room and time to indulge my interests in music, photography, and other things. In August 1991, V. was no longer welcome to stay at the house by my mother's decree. At V.'s urging, I had begun seeing a psychologist near the Air Force base and after a few sessions, I was starting to see my situation in a different light, even if subconsciously. So, I'd work during the week, and about every two or three weekends, I'd drive up to see V. One Monday morning on the way to work, I had a horrible one-car accident that I miraculously survived with no more than wrenched muscles in my back and a small cut on one hand. I'll elaborate some other time, but there was an incident at home that wasn't unusual in and of itself but the exact circumstances and my involvement with V. and the psychologist were such that the idea to move out popped into my head and I set the plan in motion within hours. I was gone in less that two weeks and my best friend David helped me move (David was a childhood friend of Robe's and we met before Robe started college; my relationship with David is a story in itself).

Getting that apartment on my own and moving out of my mother's house was my boldest and most decisive life decision yet. V. was very encouraging and helpful and, in fact, I was following her example: go where you need to go; do what you need to do.

It was here that I got a letter out of the blue from Elvira. She said she was working for NASA in Florida, and the letter contained tales of incredible things like building hydrophones to make recordings of dolphins and all kinds of other stuff like that. So, we talked on the phone, and one of the little nuggets of info I got was that she'd contracted herpes from some guy she'd dated. When she told me this, I remember that I just closed my eyes. I wasn't mad, but I was sorry for her and for myself, too. That I was in love with another woman was a good thing too, and made it easier to be a bit dispassionate or at least disentangled about her situation.

We did stay in touch just the same, and after I moved to V.'s town, V. and I planned out a Bahamas cruise leaving from Cape Canaveral and we stayed at Elvira's place. There were two things that were significant about being there, one of which was that Elvira had a boyfriend - a seemingly very nice guy named Michael. The other was that the house she was in (she had a roomie - a woman whose name and face I've forgotten) was one of these very hip places that was built in the heyday of the Space Age, the early 1960s (who knows what astronaut, controller, or whatever lived in it) but now it was falling apart. The applicances were all original and looked it, and in addition to being so overgrown in the front that finding and getting to the front door was an issue, the place was in the process of being chewed up from the inside by her hugeass pet bird, There were hunks of wall trim taken out of her bedroom, which otherwise looked just trashed (I seem to remember that the bird had learned to scream "GODDAMMIT!!" - gee, wherever would it have picked THAT up?).

Also, there was a point where all four of us walked down to the beach at Cocoa and as we were leaving, V. and I were walking and holding hands and I looked up and saw Elvira and Michael together, also holding hands and I thought, yes, I can let go of Elvira now.

There was another call or letter out of the blue a few years later; by that time, V. and I had gotten married and had a baby. She was in Arizona, and she e-mailed me a picture of her and her birds. I was surprised that the still-huge pile of hair now framed a significantly puffier face. I recalled at the time with no small amount of ironic humor that Elvira had actually called me "fat" once. Turned out - whether this was related or not, I don't know; maybe she was hitting the Ding Dongs - that she told me she had some sort of six-pound abdominal tumor or cyst or something and she was going to have to have it removed as soon as she moved to Houston, which supossedly was a done deal on account of a new job or some such. And, I never found out what happened. Didn't know if she made it to Houston, didn't know if she died on the table, nothing. Thanks loads, "friend."

And that was the last I heard until I got the e-mail I described in Part 1.

In my response I said

It took me a while to decide *to* write back, and then once I'd decided to, busy-ness and stress took off and I was just in no shape to actually gather my thoughts and, oh, well, I don't know if they'll ever actually *be* gathered, so, what the hell. :)

I caught her up on about four years of exhausting history and then:

You're probably wondering what I meant when I said that I might not have written back. It's not so much because of *you* as it is because of *me*. I was a bit confused and frustrated because the last I heard from you, you were in some deep doo-doo; you were about to move to Houston and you learned that you had some giant abdominal tumor or cyst or something and you needed to have surgery as soon as possible - and that was the last I heard. I think that that, plus all the other history there, was just more than I could take and I just sort of detached and decided that it was best to leave well enough alone.

This is not to say that I forgot all about you, but over time I started to look at everything that I've been through - I guess from my father's death on - differently. Maybe it's a natural result of getting older; I don't really know. It might be from having lots of time to think. Up until a point last Fall - October, actually - I had come to regard the time from high school through
college and on, probably up to the time I moved...to be with V., as this really awful stretch. It was like remembering being mugged, and that's how it felt. I think I understand young people a bit better now because I realize that people will do almost anything to avoid the kind of alienation, humiliation, isolation, and rejection that was kind of a routine thing for me. I couldn't seem to avoid it, although I realize now that there were many ways in which I tried to attract the opposite conditions with spotty success; music being the primary one. But for the most part, it was a pretty bleak landscape and the harshess of it all is what sticks with me.

Then, I finally got to the point.

For whatever reason - and, you know, it's been so long, it doesn't really matter what the reasons are anymore; it's merely an exercise to try to figure it all out - my relationship with you is a big huge rock on that bleak landscape. Please don't take umbrage; it was what it was. I have felt really victimized by it over the years and I avoided letting on that that was how I felt for a long time, even back in 1992 when V. and I came down and stayed at your place. I don't feel that way anymore, though - that began to change back in October and when you e-mailed me out of the blue a few weeks ago or whenver that was, I was kind of forced to finish the process.

This is kind of funny; you know what REALLY forced the issue? I realized that if I didn't e-mail back, you'd only call eventually, and *then* where would I be? :) So, for this, I thank you (honest!).

I was trying to be honest without being mean or vengeful. I wanted to take a high road, but I didn't want the actual history of what occurred to go unacknowledged. My response wasn't perfect, but I thought I did want I wanted to do, knowing that I had little control over how she'd take it. And, I still don't know, because she never responded, now four months later as I write this.

Here is how the rest of my e-mail to her went:

Like I said, I associate you with a lot of hurt. But, I decided after hearing from you that perhaps there is something else I can do than react to that hurt. The hurt, after all, is over, and as I've also said, I could have walked away from almost all of it and I really don't feel proud or noble for not having done so. I was stubborn and I was following a stubborn notion and a stubborn desire. *That* was not your fault.

The fact of the matter is that there were times when *you* sought *me* out when you could have done otherwise. I have not forgotten that you went to the trouble to leave me a note with your phone number on the dorm bulletin board before I came back from a quarter break. I have not forgotten that you offered to stay with me the night that my stepfather shot himself. I have not forgotten that you came by my apartment the morning before I moved away...I
have not forgotten that you practically moved out of your house...to give V. and me a place to stay back in 1992. Those were meaningful, caring things that you did, and it would be wrong for me to forget those things just because there were also things that were very hurtful. It would also be wrong of me to "keep score." I have to remember that by and large, the things you did that were hurtful were hurtful in large part because of what my expectations were of you at the time. If my expectations had been more experience/reality-based and therefore more reasonable, I wouldn't have set myself up for such falls and I probably would have lived a much less clouded life back in the day.

One thing that occurred to me when pondering what to do in response to your sudden reappearance is that if I didn't respond or just "puked" on you (to use one of my therapists' terms), what kind of person would that make me? Someone who would hold and act on a 15-20-year grudge, all over a situation I helped create? That's how my mother is, and her being that way cost me dearly; it punched an irreparable 13-year hole in my brother's and my relationship. It's a matter of making the past more important than the present or the future. Now, that's a principle that must be applied sparingly...Anyway, the kind of person I am *matters*. My wife relies on me and so does my daughter - and my daughter learns how to live from me. I am far from perfect and I do not always live up to my own ideals, but I do not want my daughter to pick up the same kinds of self-defeating behavior that has helped my mother ensure that she will live alone for the rest of her life (I realized that men who live with her do not fare well).

And, it didn't occur to me at first, but what if we wound up living in the same town again? Like I said, I'm up for a job that I believe is at Patrick AFB. If that were to happen, V. and I would need friends. [Our daughter] needs adults around to look up to, and you could do much to reinforce her mother's good example. How we fared down there - our overall quality of life - would be greatly impacted by how I choose to respond to you now.

It's not lost on me that for whatever reason, every so often, you seem to look me up and tell me what all you've been doing. You wouldn't do that if you didn't associate me with some kind of need of yours, and that's not at all a bad thing. I realize that *I* am sometimes compelled to seek validation, appreciation, or reassurance from my old friends and that it feels good to get it, and I have every expectation that that is in large part behind your periodic reappearances even if you don't realize it.

And so, for the first time, I laid my feelings out on the table. It doesn't matter if she responds or not, really. She did copy me on some hyperachievement-type thing she apparently cc'ed to a bunch of people and I sent a brief reply back, but other than that there has been no acknowledgement of what I said.

"We were kids." It isn't always clear what the lessons we learn as kids are until we grow up, but at least I'm closer to figuring these lessons out, and while it may be too late for me to live any differently as a result, it may not be too late for you, your kids, or your friends.

With various bits of furniture and odds and ends from both our households, Robe and I set up shop in our new apartment. Robe and I had both gotten cars from our parents. I had a "sleeper" base model Camaro, 4-barrel 305, metallic silver, with T-tops. I recall that it cost about $10,600. Robe, extending his fledgling "top-drawer" reputation, got his parents to pop for an Audi 5000S for about $19,000.

In 1984, an Audi 5000S was a fairly unusual car to see on the road; not just anyone would buy one even if they had the money. However, it wasn't as though he wasted his parents' money. He would go on to drive that thing well over 200,000 miles, whereas my Camaro was a rattletrap with faded, pitted, blotchy, and etched paint when it got rear-ended into essential totality after only about 50,000 miles about three years on. But, I digress. Life off campus for Robe and me really wasn't all that different from dorm life except for the obvious things like not having to share a bathroom with a bunch of other guys. Robe took heavier loads than I did and I think he had to put less time into studying than I did in order to get grades that were much better than mine. Keep in mind that we started a year apart but graduated the same day. He did in twelve quarters what I did in fifteen.

Robe did not date. It wasn't that he wasn't interested; he was, and he was especially interested in one girl and then VERY interested in another back in our home town about 100 miles to the north. But, aside from an attempt Robe and I made at dressing up in shirts and ties and going to a couple of lunches at a sorority house, Robe never pursued anyone at college that I can recall. I, on the other hand, tried and tried, and my pathetic social life led a friend of mine to coin the phrase "Twisted Wreck of the [my last name] Love Machine."

I of course was still banging my head (the cranial one) against the brick wall that was Elvira. Then she met some guy at museum where she was working part-time or volunteering or something, and started going out with him. I had had enough. Holding in my head as I did the notion that it wasn't fair to put in so much time, effort, and attention into a relationship only to have someone else get the payoff, I considered myself finished. And, I had managed to fall into another set of friends and acquaintances because of the college's band.

For the Fall football season of 1984, the band director wanted to have a drumkit in the stands at the games in order to achieve a more contemporary sound. He had bought a kit, and I recall that I came down a few days early in order to try out. Some other guys in the band tried out, but they weren't really drumkit drummers, whereas that was my main thing, so the director told me I had the gig within just a minute or two of starting the audition. So, that's how I was spending my Saturdays that fall. This brought me into contact with a whole bunch of people cutting across majors and across years, whereas I had become accustomed to seeing the same faces in class after class for the previous two years. So, there were opportunities, and these opportunities made signing off on the pursuit of Elvira hurt a little less than it would if I were only able to brood about it.

I wasn't a good fit into the school's social structure. I didn't drink and I really didn't like fraternities, in no small part because fraternity life was centered around drinking in those days. If I had to do it all again, I would have simply operated outside those avenues, even if that meant off campus. There were foreign students and numerous organizations I could have at least glanced off of. Once I had a car, I could have ramped this up and become quite the young man about town. Even before that, I had access to cabs and buses. Nope, too introverted, too wounded, too self-conscious. I stayed in my little well-worn ruts.

Fall quarter became Winter quarter and in addition to Jazz Ensemble I was also playing with the Pep Band at home basketball games, and it was during that time that I met someone from the band and started having my first "adult" relationship in February of 1985. This relationship only lasted until the night before I graduated in September, but part of the way through, I was by myself in the apartment one afternoon when Elvira called. She sounded like her heart sank when I told her I had been seeing somebody and she said something to the effect of, well, I guess I'd better leave you alone. I told her that she was still special to me and that she's always free to call. As it happened, though, I don't think I heard much from her until graduation, when my life would enter a bleak phase.

I had done some interviewing before I graduated, but really, I didn't have much to offer. My overall GPA was 2.6, enough to put me in the top of the middle third of my class in my major, and nearly all of my extracurricular activities had been music-related. I did apply for a job at an Air Force base near the town to which my mother and stepfather had moved while I was in college, but I really wasn't interested in going there. I kept myself plenty busy by working on the third generation of the synthesizer project I'd started and doing any number of other things, like playing in a musical. Elvira had moved into a nearby apartment complex. Robe had moved out a couple quarters previous, I think in no small part because I was all but taking over the apartment with my electronic and musical stuff. I didn't get another (paying) roommate, meaning that my parents were footing the whole $500/month rent for this 2BR/1B. In any case, by the end of 1985, Elvira was coming over rather regularly just to hang out.

I got quite a blow in December when my mother called to tell me that my stepfather had killed himself. I called Elvira soon after because at that point, I was spending more time with her than with anyone else. She offered to come over (I got the impression that she meant come over to spend the night, although I can't remember what her exact words were), and it one of the stupiest moves I ever made, I turned her down. Here was my stepfather giving me a gift from the Great Beyond, and I turned it down. However, in the hurt and confusion over my stepfather's suicide probably, any "sympathy lay" I might have possibly gotten probably wouldn't have been the life-changing snogging I had intended for her.

Just because I saw Elvira all the time didn't mean she was at all easy to deal with. Even though she had gone on the Pill at her doctor's suggestion as a hormone-regulating mechanism (NASA would have trouble regulating THAT mechanism), she was still capable of being very moody. Thing was, I was still very conscious of this no-touch aspect of the relationship and I was immensely frustrated by it. She was oblivious, as though it was normal to spend nearly every day with a guy you won't touch.

I remember two incidents that illustrate the basic conflict. She came over one day and was channel-surfing and being real moody and bitchy, but in a cold, almost unemotional way. I don't remember exactly what she was going on about but whatever it was, she was being real oblique. Finally, I turned the TV off and said, "Look - show's over." I tried to get her to get to the point - like, let's either solve your problem or let's drop it. She went away mad. Another time, I was busy working on my synthesizer on a card table in my bedroom when she came over. I sat and talked with her for a few minutes and the TV was on and she was kind of idly watching it. The feeling that I had at the time was, look, I'm not here to entertain you; you're over here nearly every day and you come over whenever you want; you don't even call first anymore. That's like a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship; when I had had a girlfriend, I had given her a key and she was for all intents and purposes living with me. So, I went back to what I was doing. After a few minutes, I heard the apartment door open and close. I hopped outside and Elvira is getting in her car, acting all put out that I was ignoring her.

Now, a more emotionally healthy guy wouldn't have been in that situation in the first place, but I could have avoided it by being more open about how I felt. In fact, I now believe that the best way for me to have dealt with her would have been as though she *were* my girlfriend, and, if she didn't want the attention, she could stay the hell away from me and I'd stay the hell away from her.

Then again, I have also thought, maybe I sent unclear signals. I backed down and accepted the "just friends" situation just so I might have a shot later if I could only persist. If I was in love with her, I should have acted like I was in love with her, and if she didn't like my acting like that, I could have full well gone off and fallen in love with someone else. But, you see, this is what happens when you are lonely and desperate. You hang on to any shred of attention you get as though it is the only one you will ever get, because you go for months or years with nothing. You don't make decisions based on weighing alternatives because there aren't any alternatives in your mind. You settle for what you get, and one thing on which I blame my relationship with Elvira on is this dynamic of settling for what you can get. As I said, after having thrown my hands up regarding Elvira, I did start seeing someone, but I was not very discriminating and I'm not very proud of the relationship. I wasn't really very proud of it at the time either, but then again, it was the only shred I could find.

To this day, I am affected by that dynamic that I got myself into and the only thing I can say is, don't let it happen to you.

In Part 5, the final insult, and the long goodbye.

Ah, yes. Summer quarter in college. To the extent that I could, I would take light loads on Summer quarters so I could, well, slack off. You might not have class until 11AM, so you float out of bed at 10 or so. You wear shorts most every day, because you're in an urban area and the temperature nails its little love note between 95 and 100 for days at a stretch. I, of course, being a hopeless idiot, spent an alarming amount of my free time with an unbelievably gorgeous and intelligent woman who was as emotionally distant and unreachable to me as if she lived on Mars.

Again, persistence. In the name of persistence, I pressed on. I would be at her house in Home Park - I'd actually walk the half-mile or so - which she shared with a couple of roommates, and she would just fly into rages. I'd stand around just waiting for it to end and kept thinking there must be something I could do to make her feel better. Many times, it would have something to do with her professors or just anything. She'd be angry with ALL MEN, or STUPID PEOPLE. She'd get upset about being stared at by men, or hit on by men (especially black men, which really pissed her off) despite going out every day with streetwalker levels of makeup and long ratted-out hair. After a while, it occurred to me that Elvira seemed to have anti-PMS - every month, she'd have a good week.

I remember one night riding with her to pick up a friend of hers at the airport. And, for whatever reason, she was having a total shitfit on the drive down, and in so doing, she was swerving around a lot and I began to fear for my safety. At some point, I just flat-out asked her to let me out of the car. I said, pull over; I want out. That calmed her down a bit, because she could tell I was serious. Walking on the shoulder of the interstate through downtown was safer than riding in her car. Of course, she was fine by the time she picked up her friend, a striking tall black woman that Elvira had some ME classes with. I was unnerved by the whole thing, but this did nothing to dissuade me.

During one of my afternoons off during the week (remember, light Summer load), Elvira had asked me to come up with her to a lake outside of town with her rented windsurf board. She wanted me to take pictures of her. We did just that. Only problem was, there was no wind, so I got little more than Elvira in a black one-piece, standing atop a rather static windsurfboard. Oh, I did get a posed shot of her sitting demurely on the beached board, at her request. At some point after, she told me that she wanted the pictures to send to Rich. Guess who threw a shitfit THAT time!!

What made matters worse was that she had decided to join the college's Jazz Ensemble, which I played bass in and was probably my greatest source of joy and contentment that I had during my four years there. She played saxophone and had absolutely no Jazz exposure but was intrigued by it and decided to join in. I recall that at some point not long after I screwed through the ceiling at the audacity of this woman, using a wanna-be boyfriend to take pictures of her to try to impress an ex-boyfriend-by-his-choice, the Jazz Ensemble had a gig in town and before the gig, Elvira tried to kind of sidle up to me and talk to me about the running order or some such but I just kind of acknowledged her and subtly kept my distance.

Why did I put up with this? You'd think that any normal kid would have moved on. First, I was not a normal kid, and second...well, you would have had to have seen her for yourself. Like I said in Part 1, I was very desperate and really quite alienated and lonely when I was there, and the notion that this woman would even want to spend any time with me at all was positively intoxicating. She'd wear these skirt outfits that left about four or five inches of tummy exposed and I could see this little line of dark hair inching up from her navel, which drove me crazy. And, one day - and don't ask how this came up, because I can't remember to save my life - but she told me that she was a virgin and that she was, to use her word "frigid." That, to me, was like throwing a gauntlet down. This wasn't a matter of just wanting to have sex with somebody; this was a matter of making this girl's first lay the best she'd ever have in her life. I was determined that someday, somewhere, somehow, I was going to rock her world. This wasn't merely an issue of acting out of my own considerable horniness. It was a mission.

In fact, I remember one thing that showed me where I stood. She had parked her car on the street somewhere in front of the East Campus dorms and we had been having an argument, the basic thrust of which had to do with our rather asymmetrical relationship. She had opened the trunk of her car and her saxophone case was sitting at the curb, between where we were standing. Anyway, I had gotten to the point where I just wanted her to go, and I stepped forward and began to extend my right arm towards her. She quickly stepped away from me. When I saw this reaction, I froze my position and fixed her with what must have been the most penetrating stare my blue eyes could generate. I unfroze and slowly continued my forward and downward motion, which had only begun in order to pick up her saxophone case for her. I slowly lifted the case up and set it in her trunk, blood in my eye all the while, and I turned and walked away. Her sudden recoiling - which looked to me as though it was out of fear that I might actually touch her - was probably the most succinct and deeply felt rejection I have ever received, out of many that I would receive before I got together with the woman I would later marry in 1990.

Interestingly, during the parts of the Summer of Hell in which Elvira and I were speaking to each other, this real dippy character who was playing guitar in Jazz Ensemble started hitting on her and didn't get anywhere at all. Of course, for her to make fun of him to *my* face only makes me wonder to whose face *she* made fun of *me*. He was making such a big deal of how much of a "Christian" he was, but it was clear that he really only wanted to bless her with his little pink scepter.

There was another girl I became interested in later on (another story for another time) but our relationship went bad. We did, however, remain friends and even though she has been in California for years now, we keep in touch every once in a great while. One time when I brought up our little twisted wreck, her response was "We were kids." What she meant by that was that we were limited in our ways of dealing with each other. And, she was right. However, I have never been able to use that conclusion - that we were in our late teens or early twenties - as a way to forget, or to not acknowledge that we were still people with hearts and minds and glands that yearn and dream and want and need. What happened to me then will always be important to me, even if my present relationship to that time changes, as it did last October (another story; bookmark me).

The Summer of Hell ended with a transition. Robe and I both lost the campus housing lottery, meaning that we would spend our next and final year off-campus, ending what for me would have been one quarter shy of three years in the dorms, all in the same building, in three different rooms.

Robe and I got an apartment about five miles from school. Elvira's and my relationship would stop and restart while I was there, and I would also, finally, at the age of 21, get laid...but not by Elvira. Elvira and I would also get closer than we ever got, but to no good end. And, I would leave that apartment defeated, having failed at that critical juncture of young adulthood where one decides to live one's own life.

I'm drawing a blank on what happened after that one date at that cockroach-infested restaurant.

My second year at college, I was joined by one of my best friends from high school, Robe. Smart guy, great sense of humor, loved music. He had played trombone in high school - even taking it seriously enough to get his parents to pop for an F attachment (basically some extra plumbing and a valve so as to extend the low end of the bone's range). However, he closed the trombone case after playing at Class Day right before he graduated (a year after I did) and never opened it again. It seemed a shame, but later he told me that he figured he'd never be any good at it, so he gave it up. In retrospect, that's probably a more sane way to proceed through life than mine, in which I press on with as many talents as I can cultivate regardless of how good I am at them. Our friends predicted that we'd wind up killing each other as roomies, but actually, I couldn't have asked for better, even with his quirks, which were legion and as entertaining as they were irritating.

I've got to tell some Robe stories in a separate entry, because I don't want to interrupt the bleak wreckage-strewn landscape that was Elvira.

After that first summer off, in which I mostly stayed at home trying to build a strap-on synthesizer, I went straight through at college until I graduated in '85, almost exactly four years after I started. Robe and I were in a room on the short hall of the first floor of C dorm for that fall/winter/spring run in '82/'83 and Elvira and I did continue to have contact with each other during that time. I remember she came over to the room to study (some subject I either was taking or had taken) once, but aside from that, I just don't remember what all happened other than that I wasn't able to really get any traction with her.

I was very deeply attracted to her. It was clear that she was very smart (Mechanical Engineering) but she was also capable of being incredibly neurotic, which would come to the fore later on. For school, she would dress impecccably, with full makeup and a pile of jewelry. She had a set of rings across one hand - gold, with gold coins set into them - that she said were worth a few thousand. Yet, she was not loaded as far as money was concerned; like I said. she was driving a bit of a beater of a Corolla and in those days, a Corolla was pretty much a beater six months after you bought it.

Elvira often seemed to feel persecuted - by classmates, teachers, people on the street, whoever. Things were always going wrong and becoming a crisis. She wore hard contacts and every so often she'd get a "contact attack" and be in intense pain until it could be addressed (the thick mascara probably didn't help her here). I've worn hard lenses, so I know what it feels like when that happens - like you've been stabbed in the eye with a pin - but back when I wore them, there weren't any alternatives, so, that's what you did and dealt with if you wanted out of glasses. But this was well into the soft lens era and there was simply no point in going on with that torture. Self-torture, albeit in different ways, seemed to be something Elvira and I were both into.

I remember one thing that happened that I *think* was in that time bracket. Something was messed up with her car and she and I were looking under the hood out in front of C dorm where the car was parked by the street. She really didn't know what was what under the hood, and she leaned over and touched her finger to what turned out to be the exhaust manifold and burned the piss out of her finger. I ran her into C dorm and held her finger in the water fountain. Poor thing...always a crisis.

By the end of this time bracket, I had let on that I was really interested in Elvira as a girlfriend but she was ambivalent. At some point we had a "heart to heart" talk outside on a bench in front of the dorm, where it was made pretty crystal clear that I was "just a friend" and that I was otherwise a great guy, etc. etc. [NOTE TO WOMEN: If you feel that way about a guy who is interested in you, shut them down cold! Don't give them even the slightest glimmer of hope, and then leave them alone and ignore them. Be a bitch; don't be CRUEL, but make it clear he isn't your type and that there is NO CHANCE, EVER.] She told me things she liked about me, like the stickers I use to stick onto cars...they were round white stickers with a drawing of a screw on them, and I'd carry these things around in my backpack and stick them onto people's bumper stickers with a heart on them; for a time, there were cars driving around campus and the larger metro area proclaiming I [screw drawing] THE CLASS OF '81, I [screw drawing] MY BOSTON TERRIER, I [screw drawing] MY PASTOR, I [screw drawing] MY ELECTROLUX. This probably fed my neurosis about feeling like only the things I did, through their uniqueness or cleverness or creativity, and not me, could be attractive to women.

During the summer of 1984, without my knowing it, Elvira had started dating a friend of mine. I had gotten to know Rich through a drummer I'd met in the dorm, Mike. Mike and I were EE students, and Rich, who played guitar, was in ME, like Elvira. Rich, Mike, and I plus one other guitarist, had gotten together to make a band to try out for something (I can't remember what, but I remember we played Jeff Beck's "Starcycle"). In fact, the three of them went to Florida in Elvira's car over a weekend (I wasn't hipped to this until later, of course).

Summer break came. Elvira had been a co-op, meaning that she was at school one quarter and working the next, but I think she pulled out of the program part way through - this may explain why we had intermittent contact all the previous school year. For Summer break, I think we were off for about two weeks, and Robe and I had to move completely out of our room on short hall, first floor only to dump ourselves back into the corner room - the room on the front at the far end of short hall, first floor.

That room had metal bunk beds as opposed to the wooden racks that were bolted to the walls in the other rooms. I insisted on the top bunk, for a reason that I will go into in a later entry of Robe stories. We had two desks, a color TV (which we rarely watched), Robe's stereo, my music stuff, and my computer - a Timex Sinclair, with a 16KB memory add-on and a 300-baud modem, attached to its own little black-and-white TV. And so began the Summer of Hell.

For years, I've referred to that time as the Summer of Hell because it was, quite simply, hell to have fallen in love with someone who wasn't interested in you but wanted to be around you anyway.

I may be misremembering the timing, but I think that when Robe and I came back to move into the dorm for Summer quarter 1984, Elvira had pinned a note to the bulletin board on the first floor landing. It said (more or less) "[my first name] - Hi! Call me at [her phone number -[her initials]. I was elated and I called as soon as I could. She had moved into a house in Home Park, a grid of small old houses that sat across from the north side of campus. She had been working out, so she was buff on top of being hot, with what looked like tennis balls in her upper arms. She had also gotten a new car - a Nissan 200SX Turbo. Ventilated disc brakes, she kept saying to anyone within earshot.

Details began to come out about her relationship with Rich, who had gone on to his co-op job that quarter in the Miami area. I felt like Rich had stomped on me and that Elvira had too, practically rubbing my nose in my inadequacy (in her eyes, in any case) by seeing one of my friends. But, Rich was going to be gone for three months, and a lot can happen in three months, I optimistically told myself. The problem was, I did not know how "free and clear" Elvira was. I got Rich's address and I wrote him a letter. I told him that I'd been interested in Elvira for two years and I just wanted to know - what were your plans when you came back in the Fall as regards Elvira.

Rich, for his part, wrote me a very nice letter back. He said that yes, he had been dating her, but that she was "too emotional." He indicated that he was not planning to pursue a relationship with her when he got back. One thing that I did find personally encouraging was that Rich was surprised to learn of the depth of my affection for Elvira and that he thought she was very lucky to have someone like me care that much about her.

Call me a candyass if you will, but I am not the type to "compete" for a woman's affection. If a woman doesn't particularly see anything about me that attracts her, nothing I do is going to change that unless the woman in question really gets off on how aggressive a guy can be. This generally isn't what I'd want in a woman anyway, so it all works out. Had Rich said, "hey, buddy, mitts off," then that's what I would have done. I liked Rich; he was a good guy as far as I could tell, and I wouldn't have wanted to piss him off even if I "was there first." The fact of that matter was, he had been "in" and I, it seemed, was "out, wasn't ever in, and won't ever be in." But, having gotten what amounted to permission to proceed, I held to that goal of persistence which, as all young men seem to get drummed into them, is supposed to overcome everything.

It's a myth, guys. Movies like The Graduate and any manner of romantic comedies and dramas before and since teach the lesson that Persistence Pays Off. Stalkers don't realize this, but that principle is a lie when it comes to getting a woman you want to also want you. Guys, if you are interested in someone and you perceive the least little bit that she is not interested, MOVE ON. It benefits them and it benefits you.

Of course, I put a big wrench into all this when I told Elvira that I had written Rich. That's the most anyone has ever yelled at me over the phone, and that's even after ten years of marriage. I was getting screamed at. I can still remember "I DON'T WANT TO TALK TO YOU ANYMORE!!!"

Come back for Part 3 and see how the Summer of Hell panned out.

Elvira (NOT her real name) was the prettiest woman I had ever met. Read on and you will see just how little that matters.

I was a freshman at college taking my first quarter of Physics. The Physics building has three cavernous lecture halls, side by side, that can probably hold 200 students each and typically did for this particular offering.

This is one of those people who you remember exactly where you were when you met them. Well, except I don't remember which of the three halls. Anyway, I think I was in the second row from the back and second seat from the left end of the row. Elvira came in some time after I did and sat right next to me, to my left.

Perhaps I should set the stage a little bit before I continue the story. I went to an all-boys' private high school and in part because my parents chose to move to a rural low-education area south of the town I was born in, right before my father died (he was, in fact, terminally ill when the house was being built and never set foot in it after it was completed), I had spent my high school years with very little contact or interaction with girls. [NOTE: ATTENTION ALL PARENTS. Make sure this never happens to your kids.] Near the end of my junior year of high school, I started an intense relationship with a girl that probably 95% of which was conducted over the phone. This relationship would have definitely turned sexual if we had had more access to each other and time alone, but as it was, "third base" was as far as that got. In any case, she broke up with me in December of my senior year of high school. I got started up with someone else at the beginning of a two-week Music Department tour right after I graduated from high school, but that ended in days only to restart and restop several times over the course of the next six or seven years (i.e., even past college) even though we never lived in the same town again. So, when I started at college, with routine contact with and access to girls, I was half mad. I wanted more! However, my early attempts at getting with various girls in my first year at college were fruitless and frustrating and by Spring quarter of my freshman year, I was still desperate for affection but had not yet sunk to the depths of loneliness and hopelessness that I would sink to later. In other words, I thought I was in an ascendant phase as a young man of 18, and I thought that I would enter into bigger and better relationships in short order. Not only was I very wrong about this, but Elvira would help show me how wrong I was, time and time again, like a tour guide.

Sitting in that lecture hall in the Spring of 1982, it was one of those situations where two strangers happen to look at each other at the same time and, in so doing, inadventently disclose to the other that they are looking at them. We smiled at leach other and said hello. Had my relationship with Elvira gone differently, I would probably remember this event of 21 years ago as though it were yesterday. Alas, I remember it like it was 21 years ago and the beginning of a string of events that were mostly frustrating and hurtful and, eventually, ended in ambivalence. Today, the whole thing is just a painful lesson. And, like the Beatles tune says, "I'm telling you so that you won't lose all."

As it was, I don't recall which of us spoke to the other first or how things progressed right after that point. However, I do remember that we got together to work on Physics in her dorm toom, but the only thing I remember about that is following her ass up the stairs. She was wearing light blue jeans with some kind of metal oval on the right hand pocket.

This would probably be a good time to describe what Elvira was like. She looked Latina, and she was in fact born in Venezuela. She was probably about 5'3" and thin. She had large eyes that I think were dark green, set off by somewhat heavy dark eye shadow and mascara. High cheekbones, full lips on a narrow mouth, light skin. When I first met her, her hair was about waist length and dark brown, parted on the side, and straight, although later on, she'd rat it out, which made her an even more striking package. Long waist, short legs. Catlike voice.

Her father had worked in the oil industry and her parents had been divorced for a long time. I didn't really learn much about her childhood or the circumstances of her parents' divorce, although one time she said something about being supposed to be "seen but not heard" when she was a little girl. I got the distinct impression that there was something about her childhood that was not at all good and that she was not interested in discussing. Had I gone through my experiences with Elvira knowing what I know now, I would have tried to draw her out a bit more regarding this topic or, if that wasn't in the offing, I would have moved on. For many reasons, I should have moved on, and not moving on cost me in ways I really wouldn't understand until just in the past few years.

I'm going to jump to the end of the story in part so you know how it ends when you read the middle. So, where is she now? Every four years or so over the past twelve, she looks me up and either writes, calls, or e-mails. in each case, I am presented with a recent history of hyperachievement the likes of which maybe one person in a million can top (Googleability keeps me from elaborating). However, in the follow-up, more detail would come out that would be less positive - chronic medical problems, a house that was slowly disintegrating from the outside in and from the inside out (things of which were not all just bad luck - let me leave it at that). A couple months ago, an e-mail arrived from her. Same pattern. She sent it from her work (Federal Government) address and the first thing I did was ask if she had a personal e-mail account I could reply to. When I finally got an answer, she said no, go ahead, I send/get personal e-mail here all the time.

Okay, so I responded, and I pulled no punches. I updated her on what all had gone on with me, and I also told her honestly how I felt about my relationship with her. Aside from forwarding me some of her spam (i.e., she sent a message to some number of her friends and acquaintances), I never heard back, and that's fine. My candor probably took her by no small surprise. I'll get to my response later.

I believe we had exactly one actual date, very early on. She drove us in her green Corolla to this huge trendy restaurant on the north side of town. We sat in one of those tables that only sat two side by side, which was awkward as crap. I remember that I flicked a cockroach off the table and we did kiss goodnight after she dropped me off.

You have just read about the high point of the relationship.

More later.