Journal SharpNose's Journal: Alison 1
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.
One other lesson for parents (Score:1)