For Every Letter, Let’s Nitpick My Past

Thought this might be fun. From A-Z, here’s a brief snippet of what it’s like to be me. Some of this stuff I’ve written about previously, but it’s staggering to put this all down in one fell swoop. By the way, I’m going to try to complete this list without referencing my marriage…

A – AO, the restaurant hostess. I know it wasn’t a mistake to dump her, but this is the one and only girl from my past that I can’t get out of my head, only because of what she brought to the table in bed. There’s not a single time we were together physically that I can’t vividly picture in my head. I’ve toyed with the idea of calling her, but I saw a recent picture online by Google stalking, and she’s more than a little bit bigger now. Not gonna do it.

B – Bob’s college housemate Beth was one of those legitimately unique people who was just adorable in her "alternative" sort of look. It was while watching "The Graduate" with her that I made what was easily the clumsiest pass at a girl that I had ever made before in my life. Joe Namath’s "I want to kiss you, I just want to kiss you" pass at Suzy Kolber was far smoother than I was. I’d get into details, but I think I’ve emotionally blocked out everything but the embarrassment from that moment.

C – CS, of whom I’ve spoken of before. This girl was smart, beautiful, funny, and did I mention beautiful? Problem was, I convinced myself that she was only using me and didn’t really like me. That’s because I’m an idiot. Biggest non ex-wife regret in my dating history. I totally blew her off after a couple of dates due to having no self-confidence.

D – Detassling corn is the most miserable job I’ve ever had. Out in the fields by 5AM, working in the heat of the day, and beating the ever living crap out of your hands is hardly a way to spend a summer. Not to mention the fact that I was living with my aunt and her asshole then-husband for the summer doing this. It was good money, but just beat you up physically and emotionally every day.

E – One big "What If" I have is what if I hadn’t passed along news of my Engagement to JP (mentioned below) when she called me completely out of the blue two plus years after I had seen her last? Basically, after exchanging pleasantries, she asked me what was up, I told her about the engagement, she cut the conversation short, and I haven’t heard from her since. I really do think she was calling to see if I was available. Now excuse me while I go bang my head against a door jamb for a couple of hours…

F – Football. I played one year of football in fifth or sixth grade, and was really out of my element. I’m too big a wuss to tackle appropriately, so I was useless on defense, and I was too small and slow to be of value on offense. Needless to say, I didn’t play much. Still took an undeserved beating.

G – There was this Goth chick from my AP English class senior year that fell hard for the new kid in school. She tailed me everywhere, following me to Taco Bell at lunch, and calling me at home. It got a little unnerving. Anyway, she eventually asked me to go with her to the midnight movies, and I said, "Sure, but it won’t be a date." She was pissed. "Why won’t it be a date?" My answer? "Because I’m not going to let it be." She left me alone after that. She wasn’t one of those cute Goth chicks either. Good move by me.

H – CH was this little punk bastard who lived across the street and three houses down from us in Utah. He’s the only person with whom I’ve ever been in a fight. Well, not a fight so much, as I just attacked him and kicked his ass, but still. He stole all my baseball cards, denied it, got caught by his older brother, and returned them to me. However, he bent them all up first. At the time, those were worth over $100, probably over $200. Still, that wasn’t the dumbest thing I ever caught him doing. I was making lunch in the kitchen and he was with my brothers in the living room. All of a sudden I’m hearing "No! Don’t!" and I run in to see he’s moved the couch away from the wall, and is pissing on the carpet behind. The bathroom was ten feet away.

I – I once contributed to driving a girl nearly Insane. Basically, freshman year I met this girl C, who had a roommate Jen. C and I hooked up shamelessly for a few nights, but I became friends with Jen on the side. C and Jen were friends from way back, and C was much prettier than Jen, and came from a wealthier family. Jen probably always resented C a little bit, but one night on a walk to the store, Jen stopped me and said, "Why are you going out with C and not me? I like you more." Oy. I did my best to diffuse that situation there, and C and I flamed out shortly thereafter. About a month later, Jen flipped out and nearly burned all her possessions to the ground in their shared dorm room, and left school abruptly. I can’t help but feel partially responsible.

J – JP was the best looking girl I’ve ever known. She worked with me at a restaurant, and lived in an extra room in my house for a few months while she was both waiting tables and stripping. One night while I was the closing manager for the steakhouse, she came in absolutely loaded and totally came on to me. As we were living in the same house, I just asked her on her way out the door to be there when I got home. She wasn’t, and I never got that close to having her again.

K – KS was a girl in high school that was – again – smart and cute enough that I just figured she was kidding when she constantly bugged me by asking "When are we going out? When are you going to ask me out?" Of course, I didn’t believe her and poo-poo’d the idea. Growing up in Utah does strange things to a kid, I’ll tell you.

L – Lisa, a roommate and best friend to my freshman year hook-up friend MP, hated my sense of humor, acerbic as I can be. I think she might have resented my hooking up with her friend, as ultimately Lisa came out of the closet a few years later, and her friend was (in my estimation) very much "her type." Anyway, she hated me until I came through in the clutch as an excellent Secret Santa for her, and although we never became real tight, the tension was broken.

M – MP, as mentioned above, was my college hook-up for much of my time there. I got it through my head early on that we weren’t ever going to be much more than friends with the occasional make-out session, but it still always bugged me when she introduced me to other guys. One in particular I hated was a short term guy, but was around long enough for me to loathe. He looked just like Brian Krakow from "My So Called Life," which was on TV at that time. Could have been twins. I wanted to crack his skull open with a baseball bat, pretty much just because he looked like Brian Krakow and took my girl away temporarily.

N – "N" is for Newspaper, either the Salt Lake Tribune or Deseret News, I can’t remember. I won a Nickelodeon contest when I was in eighth grade, and was Mayor of Salt Lake City for a day. I ended up giving interviews to both local newspapers, but I guess one of the writers found me so dry and boring at age 13 that they felt the need to make up a whole bunch of crap that never came out of my mouth. Complete fiction. They turned me into a gum-smacking, slingshot in the back pocket caricature of Dennis the Menace. All I could think about for months was, "Am I so boring that they had to do this in order to write an article?"

O – OK, the "big O." I can remember the when, where, and what of the first one for me. It was probably fifth grade, and I had this little room built into the back of my closet where I went to read. Yeah, "read", that’s it. Anyway, I was in that room, it was probably fifth grade, and I had the SI Swimsuit Issue. Not only do I remember that it was the SI Swimsuit Issue, but I remember precisely what picture I was looking at. Whoever the Duke QB was at the time (Dave Brown is my guess) had an article written about him, and they threw in a picture of his girlfriend in a bikini. That’s what I was looking at, and those are the circumstances of my very first payoff.

P – The Pool house snack bar and ticket gate was one of my first jobs, and was the first job from which I got fired. I was working the gate, and the lifeguards had stolen the stamp with which we stamped hands for re-entry. I did, however, have a black magic marker. I marked a few dozen kids’ hands for re-entry with "BFD." No, not "Brooklyn Fire Department." Anyway, a kid went up to his mom and asked what "BFD" meant, and I was summarily canned. There’s actually a bar now locally that calls itself "BFE," and advertises on TV. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Q – Well, Q is for "Queue," which is what I was in, waiting to buy HORDE Festival tickets after an all night bender that had left me completely unable to put words together coherently that morning. Unfortunately for me, that’s when the best looking girl who had ever tried to make a pass at me, tried just that, just then. For over two hours she was trying to get me to talk to her, and was flirting hard. I just couldn’t respond. I wanted to, but was on the downside of the bender, and flat-out incapable. Talk about timing, that was about the worst timing of my life.

R – I can only pick out one instance where I successfully picked up a Random girl. In college, I asked out the girl from behind the counter of the mini-mart a few houses up the street from my house. Now, I'm about to admit an embarrassing moment here, so bear with me. We went out to a lunch and a dinner, and hung out a bit before anything really happened. But the first time anything happened, was basically the last time anything happened. She came over fresh from work, and within a few minutes of TV watching, we were all over each other. We went upstairs, and slowly started to strip each other down. I've almost got her naked, and she says that she doesn't want to have sex just yet, which I'm OK with. Regardless, she still let me get her naked, and put me in the same boat. We're pawing at each other and making out like animals on a National Geographic special, but again, I'm fighting every urge possible to get inside her. I'm that kind of respectful. Half hour, forty five minutes, an hour passes, and I'm just getting hornier by the minute. And I'm just now noticing that she's steering well clear of my dick. I mean, she'll brush it lightly and briefly, teasing me, even goes down on me for just ever so quick moments, but never for more than fifteen or twenty seconds at a time before moving on elsewhere. I'm leaning in, bending toward her, doing the hip thrusts, whatever to try to draw attention to where attention is needed. On the other hand, she's letting me do whatever it is I want to do to her, and I'm reasonably certain (as reasonably certain as a man can ever be I suppose) I've gotten her off at least a couple of times so far. And I'm still throbbing purple. She just won't help me out. Another hour passes, same story. We're both sweaty and rolling around on the floor, I've just brought her close to hyperventilation for about the fifth time, and she rolls away from me with a smile thanking me while sighing relief. You're done? And it's just now that I just have to lay it out for her. "You know, I could really use some help here." I'm so in need down there I look like I must taste like blue raspberries. "No, that's OK. I don't really want to." WHAT?!? You'll let me violate you with everything but my dick and my left middle toe, and you're not willing to close the deal for me? I couldn't have been hornier, and I've never needed release more in my life before or since. So (and this is the embarrassing part) I tell her, "Fine then, but I've got to help myself here," and proceed to, uh, help myself there. Right there in front of her. Bad, bad move. I'm pretty sure I successfully weirded her out, but if she wasn't willing to give me a piece of ass but was willing to let everything else happen, nothing else here is my fault. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

S – There was another CS in my past, besides the one I used for "C" above. This one was a co-worker of mine I had just started to see frequently when my ex-wife hopped back into my life (we dated briefly in college, didn’t for awhile, then she hunted me down). Pauly is going to kill me, but she kinda resembled Julie Delpy. Not as delicate, but the resemblance in the face was definitely there. I remember dumping her while driving back from the MSU-Notre Dame game where Plaxico Burress torched the Domers for something like three TDs. I dumped her with at least an hour left to go in the ride home. Wasn’t exactly the most fun I’ve ever had in the car right there.

T – Tina was this gorgeous and quiet Italian girl who worked in the corporate offices of my first employer when I was there for nine months of training. After a couple months of absolutely killing myself trying to work up the courage to talk to her (let alone ask her out), I went to one of her co-workers, someone I was friendly with through the training. This co-worker went to Tina and presented my case. However, I’m fairly certain that she told Tina "there’s a guy in that training group…" and didn’t identify me further, because when I found out Tina had interest, I called her, she asked which one of the group I was, I told her the guy with the shaved head and glasses, and she blew me off unceremoniously with some flimsy "family won’t let me date" excuse (or something of the sort). She also never made eye contact with me again. Partially my fault, I’m sure, for not sacking up and just talking to the girl, but I still was irritated by the whole thing.

U – All you can eat spaghetti night in the Moab, Utah Pizza Hut was the site of one of my biggest victories, followed by literal pains of regret. My dad challenged me to see who could eat more spaghetti. I took him seriously and killed nearly five full plates with garlic bread, meatballs, and pop. He, apparently, was kidding and only finished one plate. Yes, I won, but I was so bloated that I had to sleep on the floor as the tiniest cushion from the bed in the hotel was making me motion sick enough to forego sleeping on it. I haven’t eaten that much since.

V – The circumstance surrounding the loss of my Virginity were pretty standard. Boy meets girl. Boy chases girl. Girl blows off boy. Months later, girl gets drunk and jumps boy out of the blue. Boy needs a place to bang girl, and makes sure Little Brother gets so drunk that he passes out in the bathroom so his room is freed for usage.

W – JW was part of this group of girls that my friends and I hung out with my senior year of high school. One afternoon, completely out of left field, we’re on the couch watching the local news (her brother was on camera for a blip, we were heading out with the group a little later) alone, there’s no one in the house besides us, and she basically tackles me to the floor and starts kissing me. We’re rounding second and trying to make it to third base in mere minutes, and the stupid freaking garage door goes up, signaling her parents’ early arrival back home. It’s funny. That whole thing lasted less than twenty minutes, and we never were put in a position of being alone again, so it never happened again. We never even really talked about it. Oh well, whatareyagonnado?

X – I’ll dedicate X to my first girlfriend, who became my first eX-girlfriend. Let me present a logic problem to you, OK? You’re dating a girl who takes a trip to represent the school at the National Model UN in New York City. While there, she meets a boy with whom she obviously had struck up a friendship, as he’s all she can talk about for weeks later. Less than a week after her return, she’s sequestered with Mono. Hmm… The women in my life who have cheated on me always deny it. I never understood that. I’ve already dumped you, why hide it further?

Y – My 10th grade Yearbook, which I have lost and will never see again, was no big loss to me at all. Reason was, I made a friend that year named Steve, and the two of us were about the biggest dickhead assholes you could imagine. All of my "friends" who signed my yearbook who had to endure Steve and I in drama class wrote something to the effect of, "Now that Steve is graduating, you have a good opportunity to be a more pleasant person – and you should take it." Not that I didn’t deserve two dozen entries right up that alley, but it still sucks to take back what you’ve been giving out all year long.

Z - Zero, refers painfully to the number of times I was able to even so much as get a girl's shirt off while living in Utah. It's like fucking "Leave it to Beaver" out there (editor's note: No one is fornicating with Jerry Mathers here, I'm saying it's like the world of the 50's, and it's fucking annoying.). Totally warped my abilities to function appropriately with women for years, as most of letters A-Y will indicate.