That Time I went on my first date #2

We sat next to each other at school that year, her hands folded in her lap, blue eyes vaguely turning towards mine, her broad ruddy face smiling at our conversation.

“How was class?”

“Class was good. It was interesting. “

“Really?”

“No. Actually, now that I think of it, it wasn’t all that interesting.”

She wasn’t the prettiest girl, but she fascinated me. She fascinated me because she was the first girl who wasn’t currently dating one of my friend’s with whom I could have a conversation that lasted more than a sentence or two. I had, since puberty, been horrified of speaking to the opposite sex. Though like everyone else who had passed through puberty I found them endlessly riveting, eyes, hair, thighs, chest, all.

Around Bidwell Park the Sycamaores start to arrive, their white bark, peeling like a sun burn, mixed with maples, Scrub Oak, Canyon Live Oak, and California Black Oak. When I was a child, I used to skip small stones across the water at odd bits of detritus, mostly soda cans, their aluminum rims reflecting back the sunlight that skimmed through the leaves of mostly oak, their cantankerous roots, exposed by the park’s river. The water in Big Chico Creek, mostly shallow, breaking at slight collections of rocks, pooling outward in ripples that are caught by the light, washing towards shore like waves from a boat, and some of the sycamores and oaks leaning down by the water, with large vines that stretch across the water, such that at many points the Creek has an awning of green. The green underside of leaves, the flickers of pale blue water, and the perfectly shaped stones made for skipping across the water that looked like sunlight. One, two, three, four, five, six skips, and up out of the water, if I’d gotten the right arm angle, pinging into a plastic cup with a satisfying sound, or, if everything had gone perfectly, dislodging the cup and sending it down the creek, bobbing and weaving through the rocks like a boxer on ESPN Friday night fights, like Mike Tyson, who haunted my childhood with is malevolent wink.

We finished driving down Mangrove and turned into the park, my mind whirring, here in this familiar place where I’d been to camp, skipped stones while my brother played baseball, swam countless times as a child, my feet slipping on the mossy underside of One Mile, a small portion of the creek cordoned off for public swimming, who’s banks were full of young families or college students passing beers and throwing Frisbees. A hippie town. A college town.

I drove through the park, kicking up bits of dust, through the small paved roads through corridors of oaks, ringed by dried grass, golden, and brittle bits of star thistle, who’s burrs got stuck in your socks and had to be removed from inside the shoe, their spiny shapes affixed to the top of my ankle.

Some years we’d hear a story about a mountain lion that had killed a jogger in Upper Bidwell Park. A large swath of land, rimmed by the rising foothills on either side, a thin line of water dotted by swimming holes, Alligator Hole, Bear Hole, where occasionally someone would wander out and get sucked down a chute of water, or get their leg trapped and drown, and it’s all we’d read about for a week in the Chico Enterprise Record, such that Bear Hole, without my ever having been there, took on the specter of some kind of person gobbling bit of water, when really it was just a swimming hole.

As a child, when I used to be driving across town to my best friend Brandon’s house, we’d sometimes see charred ashes along the side of the road where someone had tossed a cigarette into the dried grass, which must have lit like tinder, scorching the underside of the Live Oaks, sometimes raging for a few acres before the fires were put out. I was scared of fire too. Of course, I was scared of nearly everything but mostly girls.

My car chugged won the lane and eventually we reached a small stand of trees, a brown bench or two, chained in place around a solid cement block, and, off to the right, a standard issue park grill, black with long metal grates . We got out of the car, I almost made a brief run to open her door, but I couldn’t quite make it, so I got out the sandwiches, two Cold-Cut Trios that I paid for hesitantly, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t sure that she wanted me to, reaching back in my wallet, an awkward catching of her eye.

“I got this,” I said, pulling two fives from my black leather wallet.

“Are you sure?” she said. “I have money.” And I almost took it, hesitating, waiting, for her. “It’s fine, Andy.”

I got it, I said, flushing scarlet, as I’d done since kindergarten when presented with any situation that involved me talking in class or worse yet, talking to a girl. In those cases, I could feel the pin pricks rising up my neck and the flush reaching my cheeks, so I always kept my answers short, often cutting my thoughts off, staring at the ground and waiting for someone else to pick up the conversation.

“I got it,” I said, sliding the five dollars across the table to the college aged girl working behind the counter, dark hair in a pony tail, and a name tag that said Amy, her shirt, slightly stained by some of the oils, but standard issue black with a white apron. I got change for the ten and slipped the coins into my pocket. My father carried a change purse, but he was from another generation. I considered change useless and let it slip from my pocket all the time, collecting dust on the floor or showing up in the bottom of my underwear drawer next to old G.I. Joe’s with whom I’d staged vast and involved wars with as a child, outfitting my whole room in blankets and pitting them against an array of cars, a few Transformers because they were too expensive for our single parent home and a few stray dinosaurs who were led by a large black T-Rex with a green belly.

I took the change and the bag of sandwiches and we headed back towards the car. I walked around to her side and opened the door, and she smiled at me. 

That Time I went on my first date

That summer I asked a girl out on a date for the first time. I was 17 and hadn’t gotten past laying down a sacrifice bunt, which is to say, once a girl had put her hand on my arm to explain something to me in a Health Science class. The state of affairs was embarrassing yes, but I’d spent the last few months talking to her on a large square bench after school. She called me Andy, as everyone called me Andy back then, though I hated the name and won’t let anyone call me it to this day.

We bought sandwiches from Subway. The conversation on the way over was stilted.

“What have you been doing this summer?”

“Oh, not much, a few odd jobs, here and there for people from church.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

The sun was hot that day, beating down on the asphalt as we drove across town on Mangrove, past Mountain Mike’s where I’d had countless soccer parties as a child and past Blockbuster and La Comida, the cheap Mexican restaurant where my family had occasionally gone out to dinner when we wanted to be at a sit down place that wasn’t McDonald’s.

She was working odd jobs as well, and I could tell, in the car that something between us was off, but I imagined that it was just that this was it felt like to be on a date. I assumed that you felt nervous, didn’t make eye contact, suffered through rather long swaths of silence, in large part because a date was making the implicit explicit. I’d wanted to be with a girl since around the end of seventh grade, which meant four years had passed without that desire ever being made explicit. And now we were driving through long arcs of sunlight that pounded the black pavement and reflected the heat back. On that day, you could smell the tar starting to melt, a strong scent. We drove past the Baskin Robbins and Safeway parking lot, a long line of non-descript bushes, lined the road side with some small bits of red gravel on the ground around them. Down and down we drove.

I had a horrible sense of direction and was trying to focus on the conversation, which wasn’t going well. I was very aware of the positioning of her knee, which was, though not close at all to mine, sort of close to my hand, which was resting occasionally on the automatic clutch, which was a nervous gesture I had, and I’d sort of tap the top of my fingers on the clutch before removing it, adjusting my body, leaning back into the seat, taking my left hand off the wheel and sliding the right hand underneath, driving with my bottom two fingers, though I wasn’t doing the latter on this particular drive. On this drive, I tapped the automatic clutch, nervously moved my hand back to the wheel and then down again to the clutch. 

Ninth Grade

In ninth grade I transitioned over to the high school, twelve hundred students and solid brick buildings, connected by covered walkways and small piazzas, a minor miracle of intelligent building design in CA, which tends to specialize in low squat buildings, space on space on space, without any sort of design towards public spaces.

 In ninth grade my friends started playing football, waking up for practice at 5 AM to beat the sweltering August heat that pounded into the northern CA valley. I’d been playing football since I was a kid, throwing the football to friends and my brother, flooding our back yard with a hose and playing punt return tackle football for years. And yet, when it came time to actually play football I decided it wasn’t for me. Back then, I’d have said that it was because I didn’t want to and was an independent sort who didn’t want to wake up in the morning, but preferred waking late in the last weaning weeks of summer, playing video games all afternoon, searching for the Trident or Dragon Spear on long gridded maps of Dark Wizard as opposed to learning how to run a proper slant route.

The truth of the matter, if such things can be gotten at decades later, is that I was scared because I am scared of nearly everything, plane flights, roller coasters, speaking in class, any sort of wild animal, a task that I don’t immediately feel like I excel at. And it was precisely this fear, which dogs me today, that lead me to stay indoors, wrapped in a blanket, wearing a pair of shorts and trying to decide if my HP was enough to engage the War Lord perched atop the castle. And this fear of not being excellent and therefore avoiding things runs through me like a subterranean river carving out a hole in a bit of rock, such that I appear as though I am confident and sure of myself, when precisely the opposite is true—I doubt myself and wonder if I’m really good at anything beyond pleasing people, which isn’t a skill so much as it is an adaptation. And, to be honest, I also wasn’t too keen on getting hit. I had to work myself into a rage in order to run the football or tackle someone aggressively, and I didn’t want, or couldn’t imagine, walking around in a blind rage all the time just to be good at football.

On one of the first day of classes I was walking in to school with a friend, long hair, parted down the middle, tall and skinny with a pair of front teeth that were not entirely straight. I was wearing a red flannel and jeans, walking down one of the long shaded corridors, behind the gym and just beyond the cafeteria, which wasn’t really used, when I was stopped by a pair of girls, bounding along arm in arm as girls were wont to walk through the halls. “What’s your name?” the girl on the right asked. She had long dark brown hair, her body was rail thin, almost bird like, and she had a quick and easy smile. “Me,” I asked, incredulously. She had her arm looped through another girl’s who’s face and name I don’t remember at all, Jessica maybe? “Andrew,” I said, and then she smiled at me, turned, still arm in arm, and walked down the hallway.

“What was that?” my friend asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

My heart was racing, as I watched them walk quickly down the hallway. Those moments in life, they pass. You are only young enough for a short time to be surprised by a girl walking down the hall and asking for your name. All that day, I wondered what her name was, and whether I’d given her my correct name, whether I should have. Whether she was pretty. Whether I was handsome. What it meant that she had asked me what my name was.

“She likes you, dude,” my friend said, which didn’t seem like a totally unreasonable conclusion. Except that I didn’t remember ever seeing or meeting this girl before, which put our budding relationship on fairly unsteady grounds. What if I’d had a ridiculous named like Philip? I was only a couple of weeks away from getting braces and what would she think of me then?

                I don’t remember most of my classes that year, but I do remember having Mrs. Smith. I think I remember her because she had unusually short hair and perhaps because she occasionally wore a beret. We read plays, so many plays. Why are English classes endlessly reading plays? Is it because there is an assumption that they are meant to be read in large groups? That the only way to read Romeo and Juliet, (and oh, god, there it is, another memory. The actress who played Juliet in the old version we watched, set in Italy, leaning over the window sill, her breasts, so full. My friends telling me before the class that I should watch closely that there was a moment when she is completely topless—the stuff of dreams—the tense moment, a fleeting glimpse of her breast, someone somehow knowing that the actress who played her was only 15 at the time of the filming and all the strangeness and wonder of being an adolescent boy, watching intently to see if Juliet was going to fall out of her dress).

                But you see I have been side tracked by the memory of a woman, born in 1951, playing Juliet in a movie when she was fifteen. What strange times we live in, yes?