First Date

When I was younger, I was shy and could barely speak to people. When I did speak, it all went wrong. I was always digging too deep, thinking too much. It took me a long time to understand that people did not want that, did not wish to get into conversations about meaning and consequences. And so I remained shy and quiet and a little nervous. As a result of learning not to bother people, I never asked girls out and still haven't. I tell that to people and they smile. But it is true. I have never thought I could stand the rejection.

I was in college the first time I told this to anyone. We were sitting at a lunch table.

"Bullshit!" he exploded. "How will you ever get a date?"

"If someone wants to go out with me, I guess she'll ask."

The truth of it was that I had never been on a date. Technically, I had once, but it was a mistake. I had called my friend's house and his sister answered the phone. She was a year younger than I, but she was tall and beautiful in a mature, experienced way. She looked like New York in a town full of hillbillies. In the course of our conversation, I asked her if she wanted to see some movie that was out that everyone was talking about, and she said yes, she wanted to see it. It never occurred to me that she thought I had asked her out. When our conversation ended, I said, "OK, I'll see you tonight," because I was coming over to see her brother.

It was Friday night and I was going to drive around with my pals and look for excitement and adventure. I had already picked up Tommy when I stopped at my friends house, the one with the sister, and it was she who answered the door, made up, ready for a date. The first realization that she thought we were going to see the movie led to panic, then shock and finally horror. I was less psychologically ready for this than a trip to the emergency room. I felt like a seventh grade boy who gets called to the board to solve a math problem in the middle of an involuntary erection.

Needless to say, the night was a bust. I don't know. Maybe it scarred me.

Now, in college, I had not determined to make my dating life any more fruitful. But I had become friends with my health professor, a youngish man who you could tell had once been terribly handsome but who had been depleted a bit by a divorce from a wealthy woman he'd married out of college, and by the terrible drinking that had ensued. But he was still attractive and owned a sort of broken power and worn charm that many of his female students coveted, and he had been busy taking advantage of it. At that moment, he was going out with a pretty brunette I knew from class. I'd had drinks with the two of them at his apartment once, and I knew he had been seeing her and I knew that now they were scrapping.

And now, here comes the part of the story you will think I am making up. It is just one of those moments in life that is wrapped up in paper and ribbon and given you without reason.

At the very moment I'd finished reciting my dating dissertation to my friend, the brunette walked up and said, "Fuck Terry. He borrowed my car and it got a flat on the other side of town, and that shit won't even fix it. He just called me to let me know where the fucking car is. He expects me to go out there and deal with it."

Jesus, I thought, Terry's got balls. And then she turned to me and said,

"You want to go out tonight?"

No, no, I'm not making this up. And that is how I got my first official date. The best part of the whole thing was the look on my friend's face. Really. That was the best part because the date sucked. She was a woman and I was still a child. I had no idea of what to do that night with a woman who was dating a professor. This life was still far beyond me. But for now, one curse had been broken and a spell put into place.