True story, honest to God.

In the 1982-1983 school year, Robe and I were roomates in C dorm (not its real name, duh!), which was one of the smallest dorms on campus and among the most livable and comfortable (well, not counting the inevitable late-fall temperature plummet which always caught Physical Plant by surprise - once I slept in my room fully clothed with nothing but a vacuum-tube portable TV for heat). Because C dorm was as small as it was, it was fairly natural for people who didn't know each other at all to unwittingly keep an eye out for each other and develop a rough notion of what people were up to.

Mediterranean Man (we never knew where he was from, but that's how he looked, and it was catchy, so it stuck) lived on second floor, long hall (Robe and I were on first floor, short hall). I used to live on the far end of second floor, long hall and I had roomed there with a guy named Steven the quarter after the Peruvian Peckerhead (Vitamin Man's replacement) shipped out. Steven still lived in the room and one day he came down and told us what would have been merely a mildly amusing story if one weren't able to read between the lines.

Most of us in C dorm - again, just through casual observation - knew that Med Man had a girlfriend over a lot. At our school, that was not very common, so it was remarkable for that reason alone. You weren't supposed to have girls in your room past some hour of the night, but Resident Assistants tended to look the other way. Steven's story went like this: he liked to go running late at night, and when he'd return, he'd shower and go to bed. However, this time he came back from running at about 2AM and typically there's not a living soul in the bathrooms. Anyway, he was taking a shower when Med Man came in and fired up the next nozzle over. As usual, Med Man didn't say a word or acknowledge Steven's presence. However, Med Man wasn't taking an ordinary shower. He had turned away from Steven and appeared to be washing his dick with a fervor one would usually associate with containment breaches in a military biowarfare lab. He did this for several minutes.

Robe and I listened to Steven's story with sophomoric amusement (I was a sophomore, after all) until we realized that there had to be, if you'll excuse me, a BACK story.

Being on a weekend as it was, Med Man almost certainly had his girlfriend in his room. Why, we mused, would a guy who's probably shagging his gf in his room jump out at 2AM to wash his dick like it was on fire?

Robe and I actually had a class with Med Man, so, on Monday before class, I sat right behind him and Robe in the desk to my right. Robe and I started talking to each other and the conversation went something like this.

Me: "Was Doug going to make it to class today?"

Robe: "Oh, yeah - he made it - he's sitting by the back door."

Me: "He told me he was going to bend over backwards to make it."

We went back and forth like this for a while. Looking ahead of me, we saw that Med Man was trying very hard to surreptitiously glance behind him. Finally, we decided to, er, drive it home.

Robe: "Did you take Dr. ???'s midterm yet?"

Me: "Yeah, man. I got FUCKED! IN! THE! ASS!!!"

At this point, Mediterranean Man's head began to jerk to one side spasmodically.

We never knew what became of Med Man or his girfriend, but I get the feeling that if her bunghole could talk, it'd be thanking Robe and me.

This entry naturally refers to the story of Alison, so, go back and review if you must.

After writing the entry about Ladder Theory, I've given a bit of thought about what happened with Alison and I've come to pretty much replace my old take on the situation with a new one.

The old take basically said that I met this really hot girl that I really dug and I tried and tried and tried to keep her attention and get with her until eventually she dusted me. She went away happier and I went away crushed.

The new take is a little more complex: I met a girl and we dug each other and we both saw in each other something that we both really wanted personality-wise, but I wasn't able to rise to the occasion and do what I needed to do to make the relationship go anywhere, so she dusted me. She went away disappointed and I went away crushed.

The new take is kinder towards me, you'll no doubt note, and some of you may think that it's more ego-stroking of myself than anything else. That isn't so, and this is why: for the most part, guys can't control what ladder women put them on. "What's he got that I ain't got" (as goes the Producers song) is a sentiment that misses the point. If you understand Ladder Theory, you realize that if you're in a situation like that, YOU lose and HE wins simply because of the ladder choices she couldn't help but make. YOU have no more reason to feel bad about losing than HE does to feel good about winning. Another way of putting this is that there is, in reality, no winning or losing. You PERCEIVE it as loss because a woman who has landed very high on your ladder is not available to you. Anyway, my point is that the bare facts of the Alison story support my claim that Alison was strongly attracted to me initially. I did no more to gain that attraction than be at the right place at the right time, looking as I did. What makes Alison so memorable was that I was definitely attracted to her from the get-go as well.

Had I been further along on the road to adulthood at 17, my relationship with Alison...well, I would have had a lot more to write about and remember. As it is, I mostly have a vague impression of hair, hips, and lips that will stay with me forever.

Wherever you are, Alison, I'm sorry.

Have a good look at the site www.intellectualwhores.com. It was suggested to me by the same IRC-based life form who coaxed me into writing this journal in the first place. It's written by some guy who, along with his friends, have come up with something amazing called "Ladder Theory." It tries to provide a workable model for male-female relationships (although the model seems to really only apply to the relationships of single people - marriage seems to require an extension of the theory).

In a nutshell, men order the women they encounter on a kind of hierarchy - a ladder, if you will - according to the degree to which the men want to fuck the women. It's as simple as that. Women, however, have not one but two ladders. One, the "good ladder," is similar to the men's ladder, believe it or not, and men are placed on it basically according to how twitchy and moist their inner bits get from seeing or being near them. The women's other ladder is the "friends ladder" and other men - the ones who don't make the good ladder - wind up sorted on the friends ladder according to how well the women in question "like" them "as friends."

Any men reading this are probably jsut beginning to have their first glimmer of understanding at this point, because if you have balls in your sack at all, you know that you have been diamond-cutting hard over some woman in your life who has shot you down in flames in the worst way because, as she likely said, she thought of you as a "friend." You tried to "ladder jump,' you got a "kiss of death," and you fell into "the abyss" between the ladders.

Had I known Ladder Theory when the events described in these stories took place...well, these stories simply wouldn't be here. The gimmick behind these stories, for the most part, is the unfairness of it all - the degree to which I was shit on. They are basically banana peels for the emotional mind of an intelligent and sensitive young man who was also very horny.

I would not have kept Elvira on my mind for much past 2 months after meeting her. I was her intellectual whore; she craved my attention and wanted and appreciated many things from me, but my thrusting John Thomas was not among them. I was her Father Confessor.

I would have realized that any woman who actually came up and talked to me probably had already stuck me on her good ladder and I could have had a slice IF I had realized it; instead, I farted around too much until the woman got frustrated and, instead of being more welcoming and/or forward with their own attentions toward me, hand-grenaded the whole thing (see Alison, Warmonger Bitch, Backrub Bitch, and even I Drove a Girl Crazy).

One of the things that would have been a very good antidote to my spirit-crushing misadventures is the notion that you really can't help which ladder any given woman puts you on; if you know this, you won't take it personally when a woman you're hot for brings some other guy with her when you ask her to go to a basketball game with you (that was some OTHER bitch who otherwise wasn't worth writing an entry about - in case you're wondering, I didn't have the balls to tell them both to fuck off when they showed up at my dorm, but after the game as the three of us walked back, I went straight when they turned left).

Understand Ladder Theory, gentlemen, and your lives will be much richer for it.

Some time after the Summer of Hell, Rich (Elvira's short-term boyfriend who I had written to after he left for his co-op quarter in the interest of striking a "gentleman's agreement" only to have him write back and tell me that Elvira was "too emotional" and "God speed, dude"), a good friend of ours whom I'll call MGK, and I formed a band for an on-campus event. As far as what all went on regarding Elvira, between Rich and me it was all water under the bridge. Elvira and I were still having fairly frequent contact but that contact wasn't at all exciting. Frustrating, yes.

Anyway, our band needed a name, and in a flash of brilliance, I came up with one: ELAB (it was really something else, but I'm obscuring it for a reason that will be apparent shortly). I did it as a self-satisfying joke - a little bit of revenge on Rich and Elvira both. The only thing was, MGK - who had a tendency to be real hyper at times, which was fairly entertaining because his creativity would kick in as a result - kept coming up to me and saying, hey, I've got a great name for the band, and I'd go, no, no, let's keep ELAB...this went on a few times.

Finally, it got to the point where it seemed pretty obvious that I was hanging on to the name for some specific reason, so I told MGK that ELAB was an acronym for Elvira [her last name] Alumni Band. He thought this was hysterical and once he was in on the joke, he was 100% for keeping the ELAB name. I did say to him, look, don't tell Rich, okay? I don't know how he'd take it.

Of course, MGK told Rich about the ELAB name probably the very next time he saw him. Thankfully, Rich took it well, and I have a picture of the three of us playing with a green and white ELAB sign MGK had made prominently displayed.

As I recall, Elvira was a bit ambivalent about being commemorated in that fashion. Well, she's REALLY commemorated in these blog entries NOW, ain't she?

Back in time we go, to the last part of my last year of high school (a private, religiously-oriented but non-denominational school). This would be early part of 1981.

I had been dating a girl from the previous spring until she dusted me in December, just in time for my birthday. I had been playing drums in the school band and had taken up bass at the end of my sophomore year. The band was going to do a concert at a private girls' school across town, and although I ordinarily played drums I was going to play bass because our regular bassist had a conflict that afternoon on account of a sports event. The plan was, I'd go ahead and prep to play bass but if the guy showed up at the last minute, I'd hand it over to him.

This girls' school (I'll call it GS for short) was the only one of its type in town. There were two all-boys private schools, of which mine was one, and there were two co-ed private schools. GS students were therefore on the mind of many students at my school and presumably vice versa. My girlfriend from earlier in the year came from GS, in fact, as did the girlfriends of many of the guys I knew at school.

But, having been kicked to the curb by my girlfriend as I had been in December, the rest of the winter was very, very bleak. Then, as later in college, any good experience I had with girls tended to arrive in a perceived vacuum, and never was the vacuum more cold than after being cut loose by your first ever "serious" girlfriend, especially when your access to girls or anybody else is rather limited. I'll explain how and why that was so when I tell her story.

For me, going to play in this concert at GS was like a trip to another planet and, let's face it, whether you were a studpuppy jock, a hopeless Star-Wars-quoting zit-encrusted geek, or, God help you, ME (somewhere in between), you walk into an environment like that and you bow up. Of COURSE you bow up, even if just a little bit. If you've got any testosterone at all, if you've got balls clattering between your legs, your primal self asserts itself and says, here I am, ladies. In my case, I don't really remember so much the bowing up but I remember being in a hyper kind of "target acquisition" mode.

The school uniform at GS was a hideous gunnysack dress. Only the colors varied, and I have to say that not even the hottest girls in the school looked good in them. The target acquisition system, that finely-tuned mechanism connecting left brain, right brain, lizard brain, and dick, hit a bogey and wouldn't let go. There was a tall girl with long thick brown hair walking around. She was in a dark blouse and tight brown slacks, and she wore gradient-tint glasses. The system registered: HAIR. HIPS. LIPS. ASS. She looked too old and too hip, worldly, and sensual to be a GS student but she looked too young and too hip, worldly, and sensual to be a teacher.

Our regular bassist materialized right before the first song started, so I was spared having to finger-sync a bunch of songs I didn't know, but it was after the gig that I remember. I looked up and there was the girl in the brown slacks, standing right there, smiling at me. She introduced herself. Her name was Alison, and it turned out that she was a student after all - a senior, like me.

I don't know why she was compelled to come up to me and talk to me. She did say, however, that she sang, which was great, because it made her seem even more perfect if she liked music. We exchanged phone numbers.

Every year our school put on a musical production in the spring that involved the entire music department and even included kids from other schools, especially GS. In addition to performances by the school's music groups, there were auditions held for "specials" - acts that anybody in any school could try out for. My role in that year's show was going to be fairly large as it was, but I was also trying to get in at least one act of my own into the show. At the time, as now, I was a big fan of R&B group The Spinners, and they had charted with a remake of Frankie Valli's "Working My Way Back To You" and I thought I'd go forward with that if I could find someone to sing it. And, here's this beautiful woman who says she can sing. Of course! And I'll get to spend more time with her, too!

So, Alison came over to the Music Department after school one day and I had arranged for a friend to come to play piano. I put a bass on and we proceeded to run through the song. A line or two into the chorus and it was pretty clear to all assembled that Alison had athlete's voice. She could place words in the right rhythm, but there was no tone and no pitch.

When I got home, I was pacing around, fretting over how I was going to call up Alison and tell her that she sounded like dogshit. I don't remember which of us actually called the other, but when we did finally talk, Alison spared me the trouble. She apologized and said that she really couldn't sing very well. I was very relieved and I told her that I was really in a crisis because I liked her a lot but I didn't think I could use her. Anyway, we had a good laugh over it and we stayed friends.

As an aside, my mother wound up torpedoing my doing that song in the show albeit in an oddly oblique manner. I continued pursuing finding a singer to do that Spinners tune and I was referred to a GS student who, as it happened, was black. I called her and she was excited about doing the song. When I told my mother, though, she was livid because the girl was black. However, what happened was that my mother had the act all worked out in her mind - a girl was going to sing and I was going to play bass and sing along (the occasional bass vocal part), playing it up like Sonny would to Cher. She was afraid of having her white son playing flirty with a black girl singer. Of course, I had no intention of doing any such "flirty" thing regardless of the race of the singer, but my mother was so set in her conviction that I had to do a "flirty" act that she made me cancel on the black girl, and to me, the only way I could do that and make the reason seem like it could be for reasons other than racial was to cancel the act completely, so that's what I did. If my mother's conception of a person or a situation is somehow challenged - including by, say, reality - then she'll shut down on you, and it doesn't matter who you are. She's rejected both her children and at least one friend, including a friend of over 30 years, over such.

Anyway, like I said, Alison and I remained friends, and we had wonderful phone conversations into the wee hours. Again, I suffered for not being able to drive "at will" even though I was 17. Alison lived about as far across town as a person could, but then again, few of my friends lived close by and I was always having to bum rides from the closest two, who were still probably 15 minutes away. My school's music department was going to be going on a Europe tour after graduation, and Alison would talk about wishing she could come with me. That would have been nice because I could have hung with her instead of the two girls I wound up hanging with.

Alison worked at a record store in a mall (very hip thing in those days because you kind of needed to know a thing or two about music - try asking some schlub at Best Buy for some recommendations on Jazz guitarists and see the blank stare) and that summer, she'd often call me when she got home. Understandably, given my mother's ability to get weird about anything, I worked up a way to conceal the calls. In those days, telephones had actual bells - you know, metal things that ring when hit - that rang when a call came in. I 'd remove the cover from the phone and I bent up a paper clip such that one end held down the hookswitch and the other end was precariously perched on the underside of the metal rod that rang the bells. So, I'd be sitting there in the basement room I spent most of my time in, and when my paper clip creation would fly up in the air, I'd pick up the receiver and Alison would be on the other end.

We arranged one date that would have had Alison picking me up at my house, which would have entailed a 30-minute drive for her, one-way. We were going to go see the animated "mature" film American Pop on a Saturday afternoon. The date never happened; she canceled out on me, claiming a blown water pump. Seeing that the release date of that movie was 2/13/81, this must have been well before I graduated. Hm. I might be getting the dates and order of events mixed up, but, it's not like it matters, right?

There are two things I remember most about Alison, one very good and one very bad. Well, one problem that I would have had was that Alison smoked, which is something I find a very serious turnoff. She was also one of a group of girls at GS who had a name for themselves that they acknowledged in their yearbook photo captions (I've forgotten it). That group of girls was generally assumed to be GS' stoners. This would have eventually rubbed me the wrong way.

Anyway, in an earlier entry, I mentioned Valentine's Day and what an unmitigated hatred for it I had developed, going all the way back to the grade-school popularity contests on whose stick I would wind up on the short end of. My senior year, my school and GS had come up with a truly sadistic Valentine's idea. GS students had sent over hundreds if not thousands of heart-shaped pieces of construction paper - valentines to students at my school. They had all been pinned up to these cork boards outside the school's administration building, and when assembly let out on Friday afternoon, there was this immense crowd around that part of the building, josting each other for access to what seemed to be a giant mass of cardiac-themed missives. Still stinging from getting ditched the previous December and believing that if there were a note up there from that girl, it would be for someone else, I silently shuffled off for the music department, which is where I typically spent my time after school before getting picked up by my mother. When I got there, other guys I knew, including my good friend Mike, came down with hands full of red hearts. I stayed away from them all as they talked about who all they had gotten cards from. I couldn't speak and I couldn't think of anything other than rejection and dejection. It didn't occur to me until after I had been observing this for a few minutes that my old girlfriend might have still sent me a card - you know, one that said, hey, no hard feelings, you were very special to me, thank you for being so nice. With this little glimmer of hope shining in my little teenage brain, I left the music department, bolted up the steps beside the building, and ran over to where the cards had been pinned up.

The cork boards that had been covered over in their entirety with overlapping layers of valentines were now mostly stripped bare. There were maybe five cards left on the boards; the names on them were not mine. Looking around, I saw maybe one or two dozen cards lying here and there around the quadrangle, moving or flapping around a bit in the cold wind. I caught and looked at a few until I realized, rather self-consciously, that I didn't want to be seen scrounging though lost or discarded valentine cards for one that might be for me. I left the quadrangle like a cockroach running from the middle of the kitchen floor when a light is turned on.

My mother picked me up soon after. Her mood is in part determined by those of the people around her, so I tried not to let on in order to avoid any shit I would catch - in this case, the shit in question would support the concept of "you have no reason to ever feel worse emotionally than I do." So, all the way home, I mostly kept my mouth shut. A few minutes after we got home, the phone rang, and because I was closest at the time, I picked it up. The voice on the other end said "Hello, this is Alison xxxxxxx from the xxxxxxx Record bar, calling to wish you a happy Valentine's Day."

I could have fainted. If I had been alone when I answered the phone, I'm sure I would have cried and told Alison the story of what I had just been through at school. I also would have told her how grateful I was and that I would never forget this.

Unfortunately, though, getting all effusive and emotional like that might have done more harm than good; for all I know, I might have only needed to have been as grateful as would have been appropriate for having been included on a list of 50 other guys that Alison may have called that day. If that were the case, then my dumping my guts out like that might not have gone over very well ("Geez, what a desperate psycho," she might have said").

In any case, Alison eventually got rid of me. One time when I called, rather out of the blue, she said I must call because I like to hear myself talk. That really hurt. Ow.

I kept in touch with Alison very intermittently after that. We did meet for lunch one day after I had started college. I don't remember much about it other than where it was.

What did I learn? I think that, early on, Alison was very interested in me and that it may well not have been coincidence that the one girl I couldn't take my eyes off of at that special assembly at GS came up to me. But, attractive young women in their last year of high school don't have to sit around at home, especially if their parents let them drive. Even if they dig you, they'll get bored if you don't make an effort. If you're a mama's-boy, 17-years-old-and-still-can't-drive-when-and-where-he-wants-to loser, the initial attraction won't cut it; some other guy she digs less but can be with her more will get the action and not you.

As you recall, the "X Bitch" nicknames came about primarily so that my best friends, Robe and D., could keep track of which Twisted Wreck I was talking about. The use of the word "Bitch" in the nickname was fair or unfair to different degrees. This woman qualified in a big hurry.

Remember the IRC-like thing that was at the college I went to? That's how I came across two girls in addition to Mary - Ashley and Lorraine. However, I didn't actually get to know them until after I had graduated and moved away for that Air Force job. Then and for a few years thereafter, I had dialup access to a local college's network that was able to connect back to the machine at my old college that ran the IRC-like thing, which was known as Talk.

And, sadly, Talk was a large part of my social life after I moved away. I'd be dialed up via my Amiga most nights. Just like IRC, Talk had a private message mode, and there were several people that I'd chat with privately fairly regularly.

I had started playing in community theater musicals and Ashley, Ashley's boyfriend, and Lorraine came down for one show. We hung out in the parking lot for a while afterwards and while I don't remember what prompted this, at one point Lorraine stuck her tongue in my ear. That's one way to get my attention. Lorraine carried some weight but she was actually a very pretty brunette - in face, she had done some print modeling when she was younger.

So, we conversed a lot and it was pretty clear that we dug each other and would like to spend some time with each other despite living about 100 miles apart. And, I did have occasion to pay her a visit during one of my trips to the big city; backrubs were exchanged. However, the "real fun" lay ahead.

We even talked about doing things like running off to a little beachside hotel in Fernandina Beach, Florida for a weekend. I'd never done anything like that before and it seemed like such a natural, fun, and life-affirming thing to do that I was very excited at the prospect.

We arranged for me to come up and spend the night at her apartment. As I recall, I left my mother under the impression that I was going to be at D.'s all weekend when in reality I planned to spend Friday night at D.'s and Saturday night at Lorraine's. [EXAMPLE TO OTHERS: Move away from home and you won't feel as compelled to cover your tracks.]

I remember we sat and watched a movie - The Color Purple - and we hung on the couch afterwards, companiably talking. I don't know how things turned so bad so quickly, but the next thing I knew, Lorraine was calling me a "warmonger" for working for the Air Force. I couldn't believe she was serious, but she was.

I'm not a "hawk" but I always thought and still think that to the extent that the "American way of life" is important, it needs to be protected. But, seeing as all I was doing for the Air Force at the time was to develop software for boxes that tested other boxes that went on a military aircraft, to call me a warmonger would have been a stretch among stretches. It's not as though I was personally calling in air strikes in Libya or something.

I was floored. She had turned on me in the course of a minute or less.

There really wasn't anything I could do or say to save the evening. If you had decided that I'm a warmonger because I worked for the Air Force, then I couldn't very much say, "no, I don't work for the Air Force." Not even "I'll quit on Monday" was going to save the situation. That I worked for the Air Force was common knowledge, even back when we were talking about running off to Florida for a weekend.

Yeah, I slept with her, but sleep was all that transpired on her little futon. We didn't discuss the matter at all the next day, but Lorraine and I met up with her mother to do some shopping; I remember just pretty much going along for the ride and not saying much. Then, I went home.

I don't know what became of the Warmonger Bitch. Eventually, my local dialup went down and never came back, and a year or two later I decided to start getting a life.

Please leave comments if you have a possible explanation as to what happened. I have a theory, and that is that I was moving too slowly, i.e., I hadn't taken the tongue-in-the-ear, the beach trip talk, and the invitation to come spend the night with her as enough of a clue that Lorraine wanted me to make a move (reading this back to myself, I guess I was pretty stupid, huh?) and, once the move didn't come (I guess because I was waiting for her to make a move or some sign that a move would be welcome), she decided to hand-grenade the whole relationship.

This is a relationship where I didn't really know what went wrong and I still don't.

The college that I went to, in the early- to mid-1980s, had a number of big honking mainframe computers and one of them ran something that was very much like IRC, except it was only one channel. It did not have a high level of use but, like any modern IRC channel, it had its regulars and I became one while I was a freshman. I had a Timex Sinclair 1000 with a modem and I was able to connect from my dorm room. To give you an idea of how esoteric this was, there were only three other guys in C dorm who had some manner of terminal or computer in their rooms with a modem attached. Anyway, I had gotten to know Mary (NOT her real name) over this thing and I actually met up with her once, across campus - I hopped on the campus bus, I think, and I talked with her briefly at a terminal cluster on the western side of campus.

The college I went to had a fairly well-defined geek culture. It wasn't as hardcore as, oh, MIT's, but it was definitely there. Mary was a computer science major and that is where one tended to find the geeks. Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Tolkein, and the like were the icons of the day. I actually overhead part of a very serious-sounding debate on how warp drives worked.

Mary stood out from this crowd because she was female, pretty, and stacked. She was also smart and playful. During the summer of 1985 when my relationship with Sara was on its downhill slide - and while Sara was out of town - I caught Mary on this IRC-like thing and she talked about needing a backrub. So, I offered, and she took me up on it, and we made a date at her place.

Later that evening, I went by one of the frat houses where Mary was renting a room. She let me inside and she spread a comforter from her bed onto the floor. What I wasn't expecting was that she pulled off her jersey, setting free two really humongous breasts, before lying down. I was really quite amazed by this, and as I set to work on her back, I was really thrilled about having this woman lying there and making her feel good with my hands. Her hair was full and somewhat curly, and I remember stroking the back of her head with my thumb and forefinger.

There's no telling how far this would have gone, but I had to excuse myself in order to pick up Sarah at the airport, and I was already going to be quite late.

The problem was, in the days or weeks after that, I wanted to get together with her some more but she was hard to pin down - very hard to get her undivided attention. I'm not sure what the hell happened but Mary got very angry with me and nothing ever more occured.

Mary and I still keep in touch once in a great while; she now lives in California. A few years ago, she mailed me some "Glamour Shots" pictures of herself and she was still very pretty - whoever can manage to keep her attention could do a lot worse!

I've already shown that I am capable of less-than-noble things, like trying to pick up one girlfriend (I still need to tell that story) before dusting another. Turns out that my first two roommates in my dorm in college also brought out the worst in me.

Barry the Vitamin Man was in the same major as me, electrical engineering, but every millimeter of him had "jock" written on it. I don't think he was a "dumb jock" but everything else about him was 100% consistent with that appellation.

First year of college. First time living away from home. First time having to deal with [non-family] people that I couldn't just escape. I got paired up with Barry and the fact that he was older and bigger than me made me nervous. There was none of this "hey, I'm new here too" comraderie. Barry was okay, I guess, even though he had dozens of bottles of vitamins and Lord only knows what all other jock bullshit lying around the dorm room, but he did two things that pissed me off. One, he had some dippy girlfriend out of town somewhere - he'd send her notes with little cartoons of hearts with feet drawn on them - and whenever they would talk on the phone, Barry would ask me to leave the room. His "negotiation" was that he'd do the same for me.

If you've read this far, you'd know that my having Barry clear out so I could sex-talk a girl over the phone or bring a girl over for some knockin' boots would be a little like my asking to borrow Christopher Reeve's tennis racket with the provision that he could borrow mine anytime he liked. A few weeks into my Twisted Wreck career, the phone rang, Barry picked up, and it was his girlfriend. Barry looked at me with his face screwed up and waved one hand around inscrutably - his indication to me to get out. I ignored him and stayed in my chair. I could tell he was pissed off, but he was still trying to make kissy-face with his LDR bimbette. He cut the conversation short and jumped my case for not leaving. I told him that it wasn't fair to expect me to leave the room on his command because his "agreement" was one-sided. Granted, I should have told him to fuck himself when he suggested the arrangement in the first place, but I guess I had to be in a bad enough mood to stand up to some dude who could kick my ass. But, this wasn't what I did that besmirched my image of myself.

The other thing Barry did that bugged me was to bring in this goddamned house plant that had to be over three feet tall. It looked like something that would grow next to your mailbox unless you hit the spot with Roundup regularly.

This dorm room was not very big and something over three feet tall and over two feet wide is just unwelcome. So, I decided to kill his plant. Every so often, I'd squirt some saline solution for my contacts into the plant's dirt. Eventually, there was this yellowish-white crust forming and the plant started to turn brown. However, it was not my saline that did the job; Vitamin Man was putting some of his Jock Dumbshit Asshole yeast powder into the dirt, thinking he was "feeding" it, whereas it was probably making the dirt toxic.

Next quarter, Barry went off to co-op and his replacement, John the Peruvian Peckerhead, was even worse. He had a rather miscalibrated sense of humor, probably through not being a native English speaker - Tom and Jerry cartoons were hilarious to him, whereas a Johnny Carson monologue would leave him just sitting there, staring blankly.

We had rotary-dial phones in our rooms in those days. In the middle of the night, during the week, John would drag the phone out into the hall, prop the door open by about an inch, and sit out there and dial these 25-digit phone numbers to call his folks in Peru. Calls to Peru wouldn't always make it, so he'd dial and dial and dial. I'm sure this was frustrating to him, but it's also frustrating when you're trying to get to sleep with this going on ten feet away from your head. So, after a while, I figured, what the hell, I'm not getting any sleep anyway...and I'd wait until he was at about digit 20 and then I'd sit up, reach past the foot of my bed, and yank the phone cord out of the socket and stick it back in right away. I had great fun with this, because he'd keep on dialing the number and it would take him a minute to figure out that the phone had gone dead on him.

He had friends that would come by. That was actually amusing, because he had friends that I would never have had in a million years, like Fernando. He was this disconcertingly happy Peruvian guy, greasy-looking black hair, with glasses. He didn't have the English language down too well, so when he'd make an entrance, I'd say "FERNANDO!!! You shitkickingcocksuckerdipwad, how the hell are ya??" Went right by him; I think he thought that was how Americans greeted each other, and that was fine with me. I wish I could have been there when he had his first job interview.

One day, John bought this little Pioneer stereo. He set it up on his desk and while he was studying, he'd fire up the radio and "La cucaraaa-chaaaa, la cucaraaa-chaaaa" or whatever would come out. This bugged the living piss out of me, but Mr. Conflict Avoidance (it was easier slicing shit with Vitaman Man somehow) would say nothing. One day, I'd had enough.

I used to build electronic shit on my desk, so I had a little power supply that I'd rigged up to give me a clean five volts for my little circuits. I ran some wires from it over to his desk, turned on John's stereo, and started probing the wires around inside the stereo, through the ventilation slots on the top. So, I'd touch a wire here...nothing. Touch a wire there...nothing. Touch a wire over there..."THUNK"...then, silence. Ahhhh.

I rolled up my wires and waited for John's return. A while later, he came in, dropped his book bag on his chair. My heart was pounding and my breathing quickened. He reached to the stereo and hit the power button.

"La cucaraaa-chaaaa, la cucaraaa-chaaaa..."

Love and/or sex can make you look past someone's flaws, but no amount of love or sex - especially the lame sex that we had - could make Sara's flaws invisible:

Pushy - told everyone, in every circumstance, what they should do about everything. One day, we were driving around in my car (she had a banger Chevelle but we'd go around in the Camaro with the T-tops off) and she told me what shortcut I should have taken one time too many, and I got after her about it. I said, look, does it really matter that much? This was a big town with roads going every which way; you could spend your whole life finding shortcuts beteen any given point A and point B. She backed down after that, but geez, it was annoying.

Tactless - Sara's father was a professor. Now, most people, when especially good fortune comes their way, have the class to soft-pedal it. Not Sara. She'd lord the faculty parking sticker on her Chevelle over people whenever the subject of parking came up, with was often, because parking on campus was notoriously shitty (an aside: they tore up some tennis courts on campus to build a multi-level parking deck to the relief of all, only to reserve it for athletic functions - turned out the bottom level of the parking deck flooded every time there was a good rain, and I think it still does to this day). It's not good to see the look in people's eyes when they'd like to slap your girlfriend.

Selfish - this really showed up in bed. All of the moves that I would have unleashed on Elvira got unleashed on Sara that first night, but we had a problem. I wasn't expecting to get laid, so I didn't have any condoms and, in fact, had never bought any in my life, which should come as no surprise to the regular reader. At this point in time, you generally didn't need to worry about STDs (especially incurable ones that would eventually kill you) if you were young, straight, and didn't have sex with a LOT of partners, so there was a bit of hide-the-sausage. Eventually, she was on top and we were going to do the pull-out trick, but when the time came, I pulled out...and she did nothing. And I couldn't reach it because she was in the way. First ever fuck and I lost the orgasm. This and other circumstances to follow (that I won't go into) got things to the point where when we fooled around, I couldn't get off. This didn't seem to bother her in the least. This didn't keep me from trying to get her off as many times and/or for as long as I could, any way I could. Look, I enjoyed that. You go for years frustrated and invisible and you learn one day that you can just about make a girl pass out?? DON'T EVER GET THAT DESPERATE, GUYS!! That one-way street is hard to get away from.

Childish - Look, even my wife and I have a certain kind of "baby talk" we've always done with each other. It's not so "baby" that you'd vomit if you heard it; it's like what a nine-year-old might do. Couples do that as a way to share vulnerability and even to express thoughts or sentiments that would seem out of character if you did it in their usual comportment. And, for our part, back when we were first married, we had a small Coca-Cola polar bear that was "our bear" and I'd "animate" Bianca (that was my wife's name for the bear) for our amusement (we still have Bianca, but we don't mess with Bianca much especially because we have a daughter now). So, you might imagine that I'd be pretty tolerant of a college-aged girl having a teddy bear, and you'd be right. Except, if the teddy bear got rolled on accidentally, she'd get all put out. That was a little much. She also made me this needlepoint thing and framed it - it said "With this rainbow I give you my heart" - which was kind of sweet although the rainbow wasn't an arc, it was straight parallel lines with a 45-degree kink in it.

Gluttonous - Toward the end, there, I was basically in a state of toleration toward Sara. She was for all intents and purposes living with me; she had a key, she had a drawer in my dresser. She also had a dorm room, but she was rarely ever there. She was paying me no rent, was riding shotgun in my T-top Camaro, and every so often had to endure orgasm after orgasm in my bed. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? Anyway, one night, Robe came over to do a lab report or something with me, and Sara was there. Incredibly, she downed a whole bag of Double Stuf Oreos while Robe was there and - this is bad, okay? - while we were in the kitchen working, Robe and I were also drawing this picture of a pig and pushing it back and forth, adding to it each time. It probably wasn't a good idea to let Sara see it.

Toward the end, I was a bit of a dog and I did have a lightweight encounter with the Backrub Bitch (she who would years later say "We were kids). That's why I was late to pick up Sara at the airport the night of said encounter, and when I finally got there, the whiny "where WERE you??" that I got the instant she saw me after not seeing me for nearly a week just set me off. I wasn't THAT late - maybe 20-30 minutes - but she immediately saw from the look in my eyes that I was hurt. It really hit me that to her, I was The Ride (in more ways that one) more than anything else. Yes, I was a dog, and I am not proud of my duplicity for trying to start a relationship with someone else without having the stones to end the one I was in, but I must again point to the desperate state of mind, which DOES NOT LEAVE YOU when you finally start seeing someone. You fight for months or years to get into a relationship - any relationship if the ones you want don't pan out - and even if it sucks, you won't leave it because it's better than the sorry state of being alone. You want to get off the road, but you hold out for that nice, seamless cloverleaf.

By the last couple of weeks of my last quarter in college, the Summer of 1985, I was pretty busy, as was Sara. I was trying to avoid failing my Engineering Economics class - which I was only going to be able to do by acing the final. Anyway, once finals week rolled around, the day came when I was Done. No more school business. Ever. That was really when graduating from college hit me. I remember lying in bed one night, by myself, unable to sleep. Finally at about 1AM, I called Robe in his dorm room. He couldn't sleep either.

The night before the graduation ceremony, Sara came over and something she said or did (I don't remember) made things come to a head and I very nervously broke up with her. I seem to remember that some time earlier, I asked her to move out, and she cried and as she cried, I told her I was sorry and I stroked her hair and held her. But, by this point, I was too used up and too disoriented (what with graduating and all that that meant) to be that loving. She wasn't as emotional either. I do remember that she said something to the effect of her parents thought that we'd get married someday. My clever but rather heartless response was that I hope they didn't go ahead and get silverware engraved.

My response may have been heartless but it was an understandable result of feeling pushed along in the whole relationship. I've got one picture of the two of us together; I think it was taken by my mother the night before graduation, hours before I dusted Sara, in the hotel room my family was staying in. They took me to dinner later but Sara couldn't stay for some reason, but she came by the room first; I think that was the only time she met my family. My mother took the picture. In it, I am sitting on the couch in the hotel room and Sara is sitting on it too, back toward me and leaning on me, smiling at the camera. I'm facing straight ahead and the look on my face conveys embarassment and fear.

My see-you-most-every-day-but-don't-touch-me relationship with Elvira is what had my attention from that point on for the almost six months I would remain in that apartment. Sara did come over one time, but it was a very platonic visit. I showed her my concert video of the group Asia and I showed off the used synthesizer I had bought (I seem to have reverted back to that "care about what I do if you won't care about me" thing). She said that she now thought Bruce Springsteen was "hunky." I had brought her away from Air Supply to Asia, Rush, and King Crimson but now, with some time away from me and time with her buddies at the fraternity she was a little sister at, she had conformed as necessary (to her minor credit, she all but abandoned the little sister gig while we were involved with each other).

I saw her again maybe two years later, at a Homecoming Weekend function. She had married this guy she knew from the fraternity and they moved to Minnesota. Her ass was as wide as two basketballs, and I said to myself, there but for the grace of God would I have gone.

We had no further contact. Information I have come across indicates that she and her husband still live in Missouri and that they have kids. Google showed that Sara and her husband are active in homebrewing clubs. Thanks to Google, I came across a picture of her with a group of people at some homebrewing function and even though her back was to the camera and there was no caption explaining who was who, her thin ponytailed hair was, to me, unmistakable. It appears that she now weighs no less than three hundred pounds.

In October 2002, it seemed as though we might meet again at a band alunmi function that Homecoming Weekend - the first one I hade attended in a great many years. I was not looking forward to seeing her and I was angry about her selfishness and how it cost me even in subsequent relationships. I felt like ignoring her or being rather nasty to her. But - and I will try to tell this story in full some other time - I had an epiphany that weekend that changed my thinking.

She may weigh over 300 now, but there are a few people alive who experienced her when she was shapely, smooth, and horny, and was capable of real sweetness. She was the first person to really go out of their way for me on Valentine's day (although there was a meaningful incident in high school that I will try to describe later). I don't know what all the hell made her so selfish and immature, and it doesn't matter. In her limited way, she loved me as much as she had ever loved anyone, and she seemed perfectly willing to be my wife.

As (I hope) my last e-mail to Elvira showed, you can't just go on hating people; it chews you up inside and it makes you crazy. For longer-term relationships like the ones I had with Sara and Elvira, you adapt, and the adaptations are so ingrained that you cannot consciously change them or reason with yourself about them. That's a serious problem and it goes a long way to explain why women that are getting beaten and cheated on keep coming back and/or hooking up with guys that treat them the exact same way. When time passes and you're able to do something to stop holding these Twisted Wrecks in your mind in the same light, you've got a prayer of having the adaptations fade away.

"Don't get all wrapped around the axle over any one girl" is the lesson I was finally able to take away from the Elvira experience. Of course, I wasn't actually able to put words to this lesson until well after I was married and I went through most of college and some time thereafter with my axle quite wrapped around by Elvira. Yet, as I have already explained, my pursuit of Elvira was not continuous and single-minded; it was something I kept returning to after being put off time and time again. Each time, it seemed that there was hope; each time, that hope was smashed flat. Dolt though I was, I was not able to simply pine for her every day and I did look elsewhere, at least to the extent that my socially inept self could.

As 1984 began, I was into my senior year at college and I was on an Elvira hiatus. I was playing bass with the Pep Band at basketball games a few times a week, and it was great fun. I like to think I looked like a badass but I probably only looked like a geek trying to look like a badass. We had these longsleeve white T-shirts and we were supposed to wear black pants, so I picked up a pair of these nylon parachute pants (please remember, this was 1984) and some black high-top shoes.

There was a girl in the band named Sara (NOT her real name) who played flute. I had been teasing her since the Fall because in the course of packing up the drumkit into several cases for the cross-campus trip before a football game, Sara came up and asked if she could put her flute case in one of my drum cases. My reaction was, of course, to tease her - to accuse her of being too lazy to get a little tiny case to the stadium whereas I had several fiberboard containers to keep track of. This running gag went on for a while.

Remember what I wrote about "any little shred?" Here's why it's bad to be a lonely and desperate young man: you'd welcome attention from women even if they are trying to take advantage of you. By contrast, if you're healthy, this would be a non-event and even if you accepted the mooch, she who was doing the mooching wouldn't really register on your radar. But, as should already be clear, I wasn't healthy. Many days at school would pass without my actually interacting with anyone and I was conscious of traveling in what felt like Harry Potter's "invisibility cloak." Starting from when I first got there, and without deliberately setting out to do this, I developed an encyclopedic memory for girls - their names, their faces, what dorm they lived in, what sorority they were in, what their major was, who they hung out with, what organizations they belonged to, what they wore. I retain a suprising amount of that information even 20 years later, displacing abilities like being able to remember to do the laundry. The thing was, even with this extraordinarily thorough mental database, I generally wasn't able to meaningfully engage these girls in day-to-day acquaintanceship, much less friendship, casual dating, or anything else and take advantage of the "social computer" I was packing.

The girls whose lives I knew in such detail would have been surprised and probably a little bit creeped out to learn that that was the case, although they might be a little less creeped out to know that they had not actually been singled out. I might be wrong, but most wouldn't have recognized me as familiar and the vast majority would not have been able to place a name with my face. I had so little interaction with girls that there wasn't going to be much shift in that situation.

Okay, so, I did a cute, sweet, nothing thing that got the whole ball rolling with Sara, although at the time, I didn't know it. I can still remember doing this quite plainly. It was during a basketball game and as per usual I was standing up with my bass on, and at that moment the rest of the band was also standing. Perhaps we had just gotten through playing something; I don't recall. I was in the very back of our section in the stands and Sara was maybe one or two rows from the front with the rest of the flutes. A clear path had opened up between us and when I looked down that path I saw Sara standing there, turned backward and looking up at me.

I'll admit it, okay? I blew the girl a kiss.

All she did was smile and spin back around. But, I would learn later, that was a big moment to her.

After games, it was typical for band types to hang out afterwards. I wasn't a standard "band type," as I was a Jazz Ensemble transplant, but I did have one good friend and numerous other acquaintances in the band. It always took me a few minutes to pack up my gear and a few people were standing near my location, including Sara. I'm not sure how the lead-in went, but I asked Sara if she'd like to go out for pizza. Just when I was getting ready to say "Well - uh - how about tomorrow night," she said yes. And so went our first date.

Somewhere in the early going here, Valentine's Day came. Holy mother of shit, how I had come to hate Valentine's Day. VD had been a sore spot for me even as far back as junior high, when the collective affection your class' opposite sex felt for you was ruthlessly quantified by the number of little 3"-long Valentine cards that would get stuffed into a line of envelopes tacked upon a wall. I had become quite accustomed to getting 3 or four cards from the girls whose parents made them do one for every last person in class, whereas there would be other guys whose envelopes had rips in them from the sheer volume of cards that had been stuffed inside. Senior year of high school was the worst, but that story is best told elsewhere. Suffice it to say that I was not to be fucked with on Valentine's Day in college. I'd walk into the post office in the Student Center and my retinas would register blobs of pink and bright red in every direction as I walked to and from my usually empty (save for the music and science magazines) box. I'd see girls and guys both, smiles on their faces, with several cards in each's hands as they learn who all thought so highly of them to send them a card on this day of symbolic gestures of love. Many was the time I stuffed down the urge to whack people in the back of the head with a three-ring binder.

Anyway, that February 14, Sara called me early one morning and wanted me to come over to her dorm, which was in the same part of campus as my old one. Damned if she didn't have some balloons and a card for me! I was floored. Now, I don't remember if I had already gotten her a card or not and I don't even remember to what extent I sent anyone cards, but I think that even if I hadn't sent anyone else a card in the whole four years, I'd have at least send Sara one.

It occurs to me that, VD being only one day, you can't really hedge your bets, i.e., see what all you get before you send. The way my mindset was at the time, if you sent someone a card, you ran a significant risk of humiliation given that the recipient of the card might just go, "Huh? Who's he?" So, you're pretty much limited to safe bets, and I didn't have many.

I don't remember the second date, but I certainly remember that that night, Sara spent the night with me. That aspect of it was fantastic, but when I think about it, my desperation got the better of me and I didn't really pick up on what I came to realize was a whole lot of selfishness.

Like I said, I'm not terribly proud of this relationship. It was like it chose me instead of the other way around. I can't tell you that I didn't love this woman, but, looking back on it now, it is clear that I was operating from a position of believing that no one else was available.

Robe couldn't believe it when he came back to the apartment early from Chattanooga the next morning, came into my bedroom, and realized that the back of the head that he saw in my bed wasn't attached to the front of *my* head. I think he went, "Oh. Shit!" and excused himself to go clean out his car. Sara and I threw our clothes on and went out for breakfast in my car; I couldn't even look Robe in the eye!

Frustrated as I was by Elvira, I did on occasion set my sights elsewhere while I was in college. Sometimes, sights were actually set on me, but as you'll see, that wasn't necessarily good.

Desperate as I was, I was often looking for ways to draw attention to myself based on all these special abilities that I had. When I lived in the dorms, I would often drag my bass and a boom box that I could run the bass through to the little circle of wooden benches at the corner of the block my dorm was on and play along with songs. This probably mostly had the effect of making me an object of scorn, however, one girl did actually come up and talk to me. She was a smallish, mousy-looking girl named Cathy, and she typically wore fairly dumpy shirts with jeans and a denim jacket. Her oval wireframe glasses were tinted, making it difficult to see her eyes. She looked stoner-y, but in fact, she was the type of person we generally referred to as Jesus Freaks.

Every campus has them. Kids who are away from home for the first time will often glom onto anything that makes them feel good. If the indulgence of choice is food, well, that's where the phrase "the Freshman Ten" comes from - the ten pounds you put on by Christmas. If it's alcohol, you tend to not remember your weekends and your laundry throughput is more than most people's. However, campus Christian groups *really* put hooks into people, and Cathy was one just so hooked, it turned out.

I did get her number and we'd talk every once in a while, but one time there was going to be an ice cream social in the basement of C dorm, so I invited her. She was in G dorm, the mega-dorm immediately to the north, and I met her at the stairwell door that faced C dorm and walked her down.

Her behavior at the ice cream social was a bit odd. She seemed distracted and out of it. At one point, she appeared to be holding her ears, even though aside from people having lively conversation there wasn't anything louder than a boombox with Billy Joel playing.

After the social, Cathy just sort of vanished, and I couldn't figure out what happened to her.

Some weeks later, I got a letter in my campus mailbox from Cathy. She was at her folks' in upstate New York, and in the letter she described what happened.

Apparently she had gone to see a professor about a test score and whatever occured in that meeting was troubling enough for the professor to call the Dean of Women Students' office. Cathy was called into the office, and again, whatever happened *there*, she was taken away in an ambulance, to a psychiatric hospital. From which she escaped. And was caught again. And was sent home.

More ice cream?

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.