If you find yourself in the otherwise enviable position of having two potential suitors vying for your affection, you’re probably going to pick the wrong one for all the wrong reasons. It’s almost human nature that in such a situation we will end up picking the most self-serving, narcissist, and least complicated route that is so wrong, on so many levels that the unfortunate person who makes it, might begin to wonder if they’re destined to make such poor decisions for the rest of their life.

Some live their whole lives for such an opportunity, and they might bask in the accompanying attention that follows. I know I did for one brief moment. The difference between most people and me is that I did not do everything I could to make the moment last as long as possible. I ended it as quickly as I possibly could. It embarrassed me, and I was so unaccustomed to such a spotlight that I thought it would expose me for who I was. I thought I would walk into class the next day to find that they discovered everything there was to know about me, and I would end up 0 for 2. I found the whole situation stressful. I wanted a girlfriend, and in my haste to put an end to my recent draught, I ended up going down the road that was easier and more of a guarantee. I also ended up allowing something stupid, like wounded, puppy dog eyes to put an exclamation point on my decision.

Debbie was the wrong choice, I know that now, but when she put her wounded, puppy dog eyes on me, I enjoyed the notion that I might be the one to rescue her. It didn’t hurt that she acted as if everything I said was passed down from Mount Olympus. It didn’t hurt that when I paid her some attention, she appeared frazzled. When it appeared that trying to entertain me stressed her out, I found her entertaining. When she would cut her stories off with a “You’re bored, I’ll stop,” I would snap to and follow the rest of her story with keen interest. Long story short, my attention meant the world to her, and I liked that.

Rhonda was the other girl in this story. Saying that she was vying for my attention may be a mischaracterization, but she welcomed my attention in a memorable way. Rhonda sat to my right in this college English class. She was the epitome of sophistication. I didn’t know her long, and our friendship never went beyond the superficial, but even in our superficial conversations, she used words no guy I knew had ever heard. I figured either a woman of impeccable etiquette raised this young woman, or she had attended some sort of charm school that asked girls to walk with books on their head to attain a statuesque posture. I don’t know what became of Rhonda, but when I knew her, she appeared to be a woman on the rise. I found the idea that someone like Rhonda would talk to someone like me both intoxicating and intimidating.

Rhonda dressed as if she was interviewing for an office job every day. She knew how to apply makeup, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. Rhonda also learned to avoid looking a guy in the eyes when he talked to her. It was as if she knew that most guys lose their place when she puts her eyes on them.

“You ain’t ready,” a friend of mine, named Otis, said when I told him about Rhonda. When I informed Otis that I had an “in” with this woman that I was working, and that I was excited about using it, “You ain’t ready,” is what he said. When I told him Rhonda and I had lengthy, highbrow conversations about literature, and the arts, he said it again. When I told him that she gave me a smile when I spoke, and that she was saying things that suggested I might have a chance, he said it again. He repeated “You ain’t ready” so often, after everything I said, that by the time he was done, he had the group of men around us guffawing.

The “in” that I had with Rhonda was that she was the older sister of a guy who was dating my ex-girlfriend, and I knew this because the two of them shared an unusual surname. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but I remember thinking it was so German that it sounded similar to Braunschweiger. I carefully tailored my intro to this information with a suggestion that I wasn’t sure if she was the guy’s sister, and I approached the matter with a, “With such an unusual last name, I thought it was possible that you might be related.” I was sure, however, as I knew all of the facts before I asked the question. I then followed that intro with strategically placed pauses and thoughts, and I wrapped it all up in a bow with a well-placed joke. It worked well as an intro, but as with all of my interactions with Rhonda, our conversation concluded with me thinking I failed to tie it up with a closer that would knock her off her seat with laughter.

I liked who I was around Rhonda, but she did have a way about her that suggested I wasn’t ready for her league. She could make a guy feel like who was enjoyable to be around, but if I wanted to be truly entertaining, I would have to work the body a little more. I was all about delivering the funniest lines she ever heard, or to follow the boxing analogy, I was all about throwing knockout blows every time I saw her. She made me think that I had some charm, but if I wanted to be considered charming, I might want to read up on attribute, or watch someone that teach a fella how to charm a girl. I was the type who said the wrong things. I enjoyed saying things others considered offensive, and so did my people. I knew Rhonda wouldn’t. I figured I would probably embarrass her with many of my antics. Even though I knew I would have to work hard to date her, and presumably change many of my characteristics, she made me feel at ease when we were speaking.

She began smiling at me, after I told her about our link, and she would laugh at some of the things I said, but those smiles, and that laughter, were tempered and polite. She was not the type to betray her intentions, or desires, to date me. I would have to do a lot more work if that was going to happen. The link and the laughter would prove to be nothing more than an appetizer for this girl. If I wanted steak, I would have to put in a lot more elbow grease.

At some point in the semester, Debbie began sitting to the left of me. She stole someone else’s seat in class and began sitting next to me. I wasn’t sure if that act of aggression was attractive or unattractive, but I liked it. I told a joke one day in class, and the person sitting to the left of me doubled over in laughter. I told another joke, on another day, and when she recovered from her gales of laughter, she attempted to add to it. She successfully gained my attention, and her intentions were clear from that day forward.

Debbie was almost the exact opposite of Rhonda. Rhonda’s face appeared sculpted. She had a razor sharp chin line, her hair appeared manicured and beautifully curled, and her teeth had a whitened look before whitening solution became an almost mandatory ingredient in every toothpaste. Her legs were long, clean, tan, and shiny. They were both blondes, but Debbie’s blondeness was borne of a solution as opposed to God. Debbie wore sweatshirts inside out and blue light special jeans. She wasn’t fat, but she appeared content to live with what God granted her, as opposed to enduring anything physical that might enhance it.

Debbie was a nervous wreck when I would enter a room. Rhonda was the type that receives notice, and those who receive notice rarely notice anyone else in the room. Rhonda’s interest, if there was any, was more in the vein of a traditional 1950’s form of interest. She was coy. Her attention was subtle, and it served notice to the subject of her attention that it would be on them to pursue the matter. Debbie had cartoon-like hearts in her eyes for me, and she wasn’t afraid to show them. Had I instructed her to wear a sandwich board to tell the world how great I was Debbie might have purchased the permanent markers purchased before I could tell her I was joking.

Turning right involved a series of intricate challenges and mental games that movies on archeology employ to make the attainment of an artifact dramatic. Every conversation and lull with Rhonda brought such risk that a risk management type probably would’ve advised drawing up an algorithm before plodding further. Turning left was so much more pleasing and easy. On the rare occasion when I stared straight ahead, Debbie appeared damaged by it. To Rhonda, it was just another moment of another day. I would love to say that I turned left in an impulsive manner, but I didn’t. It was a well thought out emotional move I made for more immediate reward.

“I’ve always wanted to be a singer,” Debbie informed me one day. As just about everything Debbie would say about herself, this was a non sequitur. I could’ve pointed this out to her, I didn’t. “I think you’d like my singing,” she added.

I had no idea this was her point of entry. I lacked the foresight then, and to a lesser degree now, to recognize it when someone is coming onto me. When I was a young one, I believed that just about every woman I saw was attracted to me. As I aged, and pursued these opportunities, I began to believe no woman was attracted to me, but I still cannot tell anyone where the dividing lines between casual interest and lust are.

“Sure, I’d like to hear you sing,” I said to fulfill my lifelong credo of encouraging anyone who expresses interest in artistic expression.

Debbie invited me over to her home to listen to her sing. As we drove over to her place, she made a sign of the cross and gasped. “Bless him baby Jesus.”

“What was that?” I asked looking around.

She appeared hesitant. “I said bless him baby Jesus.”

“Why?” I asked.

“There was a dead squirrel on the road back there.”

“You said bless him baby Jesus to a dead squirrel?” I asked.

“I didn’t say it to the squirrel,” she said. “I said it to the baby Jesus, so that He’ll take the squirrel into His loving arms.”

The idea that she didn’t want me to hear that was obvious in her posture, but her need to say it was just as obvious. I sensed that she took some abuse for this in the past, but she was willing to endure that if it meant that she could play a role in preventing the eternal damnation of a squirrel.

My first instinct was that she was so serious that she couldn’t be, but the special shade of red on her face told me that she was. Her body language suggested she was so serious it was funny, and that this moment was so funny that it wasn’t.

The moment wasn’t funny to me, I thought as I instinctually looked back for the recently departed squirrel, because it was exhibit ‘A’ of what a huge mistake I made by choosing this woman over Rhonda. This realization was so strong that by the time I was completely turned around, to see what she was talking about, I was no longer looking for it. I thought about how rare such stark realizations are. When one makes such a poor decision in life, it can take weeks, sometimes months for the full realization of the true effect to hit. This one was so strong that I went silent in it.

I was so quiet for so long that one would think my silence would prompt a “Why are you so quiet?” question. It was one of those moments when a person looks back for the dead squirrel she was talking about, thinking about everything that led them to the decision they’ve made. I thought long and hard about that decision, and all that I would miss out on. I thought about how engaging the conversations I had with Rhonda were, and I thought about all the ones I could’ve had. I thought about the discussions we had about literature and philosophy, and how those discussions might have foreshadowed what was to come. I thought about the intriguing fact that she read some of the same obscure authors I had, and I thought about how I couldn’t believe that a woman of such sophistication and beauty had to have worked her way through the pile of literature to the obscure authors I read. I didn’t know anything about her diet, but I imagined that it had to be classy, as we drove to Debbie’s home. I thought about those dining experiences I could’ve had with Rhonda. I thought about how she wanted to be a designer, and how detailed she could be when she talked about the craft. I thought about how Rhonda engaged in after class conversations with our professor about our assigned readings. I thought about how intoxicating those conversations could be if she directed them at me. I thought about all that as Debbie and I drove to her home, and our conversation evolved into a discussion of whether or not a squirrel heaven existed.

Most people become so locked in on what makes them what they are, that they fail to notice when they venture off the trail. Most of those people can find their way back to normalcy with well-established breadcrumbs back to reality. Other people end up fixating on their own thing to a point that they neglect to consider how their idiosyncrasies might appear to others. Some may be weirded out by such people, but they fascinate me. If I’m at a table of four people, and one of those people are a little off in some manner, I’ll focus most of my attention on them. I’ll ask them questions, I’ll give them scenarios to test their level of sanity, and I’ll do whatever I have to satisfy my questions about how they came to be. Who are these people, I wonder, and are they a natural creation due to slight chemical imbalances, or are they manmade? Do certain people influence them in such a manner that they become who they are, in other words, and are they so confined in their thought process that they don’t see it as being off the trail anymore? It’s always been a fascination of mine to indulge such oddities, but I’ve always done so as a brief flirtation with the desire to know more about the weird people of our society. Prior to driving to Debbie’s home, however, I never allowed this fascination to divert me into making such a poor decision before.

This recognition made the rest of the fifteen-minute ride to her house an emotional whirlwind for me, as I dealt with the fact that I chose the wrong girl, and how it could pertain to my overall decision-making process. By the time we were sitting in her home, at her dining room table, I decided to put all that behind me and try to enjoy myself. ‘What’s done is done,’ I thought.

“It’s not my house,” she said after I issued the perfunctory compliment. “It’s my dad’s.” When I noticed some of the detailed decisions she made regarding her home furnishings, and how clean and good looking her home was, she said, “It’s not my home. It’s my dad’s.” I didn’t know why making this distinction was so important to her, but she continued to do make it I asked her about the trinkets, the furniture, and the overall layout. She appeared embarrassed, rattled, and she didn’t care for my observations.

“How many people live here?” I asked searching for conversation topics. “What does your Dad do for a living? What were you hoping to accomplish with these home furnishings?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “My dad picked all this stuff out.”

I was making simple conversation in another person’s home, but Debbie had no idea how to play a decent host. If she had her way, we would’ve entered her home quietly and remained that way throughout. She appeared to have no idea why I needed to make small talk. She should’ve sensed that I was uncomfortable in her home, but she had no way of knowing that one of the main reasons I tried to engage in inane conversation was to avoid talking about the central topic in my head, the one I considered the only topic worth discussing, that she was the wrong girl.

She reached into her purse to get a piece of gum when we sat down in her kitchen. “Can I get a piece?” I asked. She searched her purse. It took a while. She began looking into it, and then she wasn’t searching anymore. “I asked for a piece of gum,” I said thinking that she had lost her place.

“I know,” she said with exasperation. “I’m looking.” She put her head into the purse and came out with a condom in her teeth. She shook the condom like a terrier with a play toy.

“I said gum.” I thought her joke was funny, and I thought my response was a well-timed, sitcom response to an uncomfortable moment. I thought my deadpan response to her well-placed visual joke was nothing more than an addition to the joke. She reddened with embarrassment, reached back into her purse, grabbed a piece of gum, and handed it to me.

She pulled out a carbonated beverage for the two of us and poured us a couple glasses. After doing so, she went to the freezer to get some ice.

“In my land, you put the ice in first and poured the soda over that ice to enhance the ice’s effect on the soda’s temperature,” I said.

“That causes the soda to go flat,” she informed me. “My dad used to be a bartender. He taught me that.”

She also had cartons of cigarettes in her freezer, next to the ice.

“You put your smokes in the freezer?” I asked leaving my seat to get a better look at this anomaly.

“My dad says it keeps them fresh,” she said with the fatigue that she gave all my questions. Smokes in a freezer were her way of life, and she believed in it. Who was I, her exasperation said, to question everything she did. Her exasperation and fatigue also suggested she was either losing interest in me, or she feared I was losing interest in her. I didn’t know which one was the case, but I really wasn’t that interested in her. I wasn’t interested in her long term anyway. I didn’t think long term, and if I had, I would be using this time to find a way to pursue Rhonda further.

This humble abode housed some serious smokers I thought when she told me about the freshness technique that her family engaged in. It’s always struck me as a little odd when people develop unnecessary routines in life. I’m not an expert on cigarettes, but I have to imagine that they have a shelf life of over a month. Either these people don’t smoke that often, which I doubted after seeing this girl smoke or her dad had so few lessons to pass onto his daughter that he came up with this little nugget, and the nugget about soda going flat when poured over ice, as some of the few pieces of knowledge he could pass onto her.

We sat and talked about stupid stuff for a little while, until our glasses were empty. At that point, I kept talking, and she began chewing on ice with emphasis. She was cracking them in her mouth. It drove me nuts after about the fourth cube.

“Do you have to crack it like that?” I asked.

She ignored the question. She kept cracking with an impishness that didn’t suit her. “You know what they say about girls that chew on ice dontcha-?”

“It drives me nuts when people chew on ice,” I said, “but I don’t say anything, until it begins to be obnoxious.”

“-They enjoy oral sex,” she continued.

“They … They what?”

“People who chew on ice enjoy giving oral sex,” she said. “That’s what they say.”

I’ve always had a tough time dealing with non sequitur people. I often ask them to go back and examine the conversation we just had, and I ask them how it applies. When I do so, it’s intended to be funny, but I couldn’t make this funny. Her end of the conversation did apply to the conversation, and it was not a true non sequitur in that sense, but I was as unprepared for it as any non sequitur I’d ever heard. If there was some sort of build up to that line, I may have been more prepared. That line would haunt me in the dating drought that would follow. In the replays, I would be the smooth guy. I would stand, take her by the hand and say, “Let’s test that little theory out, little mama.” I was not ready for her provocative however, as it appeared to have come from out of nowhere.

Moments later –I’ve managed to block out some of the interim where I stumbled through the after effects of what she said– I informed her that I had to go to the bathroom. She told me where it was. Then she said, “Wait!” and she scurried into the bathroom and locked the door. In the process of scurrying to the bathroom, she cut me off with such urgency that she attempted to push me aside. She hit me in such a way that she fell back, however, and she gave me a wounded look.

I was just about to apologize but add that she ran into me, when she entered the bathroom and slammed the door in my face.

I heard rustling in her bathroom. My first thought was, she was cleaning. I thought she had such a messy bathroom that she thought it might affect the way I thought of her. After a space of time, let’s say a minute and a half, I began to think something else was going on in there. “What are you doing in there?” I called through the door.

“Just hold on!” she said. She exited the bathroom about two minutes later with a box that covered her entire torso. She was beat red.

“What in the hell were you doing in there?” I asked. I thought it was funny.

“Just go to the bathroom,” she instructed.

To this day, I don’t know what was in that box. The impatient order to go to the bathroom coupled with the implicit demand that I forget what I saw only made me more curious. As I went to the bathroom, I thought about the embarrassment on her face as she exited, the time she spent in the bathroom collecting things, and the harried pace with which she exited past me with a large box in her arms. The only conclusion I could come up was that the box was filled with dildos. I write this after I dismissed all of the other possibilities. If I had made a commotion about tampons or maxi-pads, she could’ve call me out for being a naïve bachelor. Other than that, I can’t think of any other product for which she wouldn’t have a suitable response to my inquiry.

When I exited the bathroom, I decided to let the box controversy die. She was sitting on the couch, and when I sat down she handed me the remote, which I considered odd. She sensed the confusion, and she offered some cliché line like, “I know how you men are about your remotes.” Whatever, I thought, and I began flipping. I wasn’t two to three flips in, when the screen went blue. “What did you do?” she asked.

I was embarrassed and confused when the screen went from blue to black, and a pornographic movie started. I began clicking channels, hitting every button on the remote I could find, until I finally hit the power button and looked at her with some apology. It clicked immediately back on, and I clicked it off again.

“It’s me,” she said with that impish smile that didn’t appear natural on her. She pulled a VCR remote out from her left side. She laughed. I didn’t. I was relieved. “Do you want me to leave it on?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m good.”

We watched regular TV for a second longer when she invited me to see some of the ceramics she had in her bedroom. As naïve as I was, even I knew that was a gateway to the portal. She had to know that no man has any interest in ceramics. She said some things to further my interest, as we walked down the hall, but we both knew I had no interest in ceramics. Had we been starring in one of her pornographic movies, this is where the music would’ve started.

We walked to the bedroom, and she showed me some of her prized ceramics. Then she said two words that place me back in this situation anytime I think of them. “My songs!” she said in a frantic way that suggested one of us was on fire.

“What?”

“You came over to my home to hear me sing. I almost forgot to sing for you.” She raced around her room searching for a particular cassette tape. She was cursing herself and running around. “I can’t find it!” she said tossing boxes and blank cassettes aside.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Just sing anything.”

“No,” she said. “I want to do this right. It’s here, it’s just got to be … Here it is!” she said holding the tape up high with a smile. She plugged the cassette home, and a Christian hymn began spilling out of the speakers. This was what I considered the perfect culmination of this afternoon I spent with Debbie. I knew the woman who went terrier with the condom, laid an oral sex joke on me before my backside was warm in her dining room chair, the dildos in the box, and the porn trick on the tube would wrap it all up her best rendition of Jesus Loves Me.

I recognized the opening beats of the song, and I started laughing. Prior to the opening beats of the song, she hit a couple of songs that weren’t the one she wanted. This forced her to fast forward through the tape. When I heard the opening beats of Jesus Loves Me, I considered it another errant song, and the idea that this bizarre afternoon would close with this song was momentarily hilarious to me. I fully expected her to laugh with me, cuss a little at her error, and race back to the stereo to fast forward to her favorite song to sing.

Her face did go red when I started laughing, but she followed that look with a look of anger that asked me to understand how important this was to her. I didn’t understand, and my sitcom conditioning compelled me to laugh. My sitcom conditioning also suggested that those who don’t laugh in all the right places become the naïve butt of the joke. With my laughter, I thought I was telling her that I appreciated her bizarre sense of humor more than most might, but her expression informed me that this was no joke to her.

The idea that this was serious to her, regardless what preceded it, arrived when she began rolling her shoulders to find the most appropriate stance for the song while the musical intro played into the vocal portion. Her seriousness became obvious when she began to count the beats to her vocals, and the idea that she took this a little too seriously was obvious in the earnest falsetto she used to sing her part.

“You’re really good,” I lied. It wasn’t an out and out lie. She wasn’t awful, but she had just filled my head with so many sexual innuendos, in one school day afternoon that she could’ve sounded like PJ Harvey and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between good and bad.

If I had any thoughts that this was an elaborate joke Debbie was playing straight, and I still considered that a remote possibility, she answered that question when she clicked the tape off with embarrassment and apologized for doing it.

“I said it was good,” I said, and I plead that for a moment. I did this, because I was an aspiring artist, and I knew how damaging it could be for someone to laugh at my effort. I made a pledge, long before that, that I was never going to crush another person’s dreams in the manner so many crushed mine.

She ignored my pleas, and changed the subject by laying down next to me on the bed. When I apologized for my reaction and told her that she caught me off guard with the song, she kissed me to shut me up. Here’s another thing I thought a lot about during the dating draught that followed, her lips. Before Debbie and I began kissing on her bed, I never associated dating with real emotion. I pretended to be emotionally attached to some of the women I dated, but I never put much thought into it. As such, I considered most of the kisses I received to that point foreplay. To that point in my life, kissing was something a person did so that they didn’t have to look at the other person while reaching for their reproductive organs. The soft, sensual nature of this woman’s lips stopped me. I didn’t grab for anything. I didn’t look at anything, I just kissed her.

Up to that moment where I tasted those lips, I thought that Debbie was but another lost soul who confused the desire to have sex with love. I thought she was one of us. I was fully prepared to consider her a huge mistake in my life, compared to whatever meaningful relationship I could’ve had with Rhonda. Debbie had a cute quality about her, but she wasn’t so attractive that one would think about her after she was gone. She didn’t have a sparkling personality, and she wasn’t uniquely intelligent or refined. In other words, Debbie couldn’t have competed with a Rhonda in any way, unless she made it well known that she was willing to lay it all out on the line, and indulge in the male fantasy of a one-night stand. It may have been more complex than that, or it may have been that simple. It may have had something to do with the fact that Debbie was just a horny woman. I didn’t care much either way, at that point in my life. Rhonda did impress me. Rhonda would’ve been a huge step up for me at that point in my life. Debbie hadn’t made much of an impression at all, until my lips touched hers.

My first thought was that her lips were not natural. I hadn’t kissed too many lips to that point, and I haven’t kissed too many since, but I couldn’t believe that natural lips could be this soft and yielding. I knew how foolish that thinking was, even as I thought it, but I had never kissed lips this soft and yielding. Most lips have a tense quality to them. Prior to this kiss, I’d heard poets and lyricists refer to the sensuous quality of lips, but I always associated that with their physical appearance. No one ever told me, or showed me, how sensuous some lips could be to the touch. I kissed Debbie harder to have her match the strength of my kiss. The rationale behind doing this was that I thought her lips were too soft and too yielding, and I thought that meant she wasn’t participating in the kiss. I was wrong. I felt her lips tense up to match mine, but they maintained that soft and yielding quality. My fascination with these lips superseded the confusion I experienced of a woman like this having such a luxury. It seemed unfair that a woman so lacking in every other characteristic I preferred should have such an abundance in this regard. The shock I experienced in the moment was equivalent to tasting the best hamburger I’ve ever had, in a blind taste test, only to find out I just selected the Big Mac. I couldn’t believe that they were natural one minute, and then I couldn’t believe that they would be anything but natural the next minute.

I was a little embarrassed when Debbie provided a subtle, physical gesture that suggested she wanted to progress. It was embarrassing, because I didn’t want to progress. I just wanted to kiss her, and I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to learn the essence of her lips through taste, and all the other sensations I was experiencing in the moment. When she provided the physical insistence that we progress, it woke me out of that spell. We were on her bed, we were horizontal, and I was on top of her. Something had to happen. I reached down and touched another favorable attribute of hers. I had been in the nether region a couple of times on girls, and I usually found it to be generally unappealing. When push came to shove, I enjoyed the product, but on the surface I’ve generally found the nether region of women to be unkempt. Debbie’s was another luxury, I didn’t think she deserved.

I decided that I wanted to do this again, while I was doing it, and I recalled a conversation I had just had with a bunch of fellas in a college dorm room where the topic of the day was deliberation. “The ladies like it slow and sensual,” one of them said. The participants in this conversation were mostly idiots, but they were far more experienced than I was, so I giggled a little and took a number of mental notes. “The ladies consider you a smooth operator when you tease them up right and finish in a flurry.” After tasting those lips, and wanting to capture their essence, I decided to test this theory out. I no longer wanted Debbie to be just another one. I wanted to be a smooth operator who swept off her feet, so that I would have another chance at kissing those lips.

Before I kissed her, I’m sure that my expression revealed boredom. I just wanted to do what boys and girls, and the birds and the bees do, and go home and tell all my friends that the damned streak was over, but kissing those lips brought me out of all that. I was concentrating, I was fascinated, and fixated, and I wanted to fully explore and experience everything about her.

“We have to hurry!” she said.

“What?” I asked pulled out of my trance. I almost forgot she was there. I almost forgot what we were doing. I almost enjoyed it more than I ever have. “I’d like to go slow.”

“We can’t,” she said. “My dad will be home soon, and if he finds you here, he’ll kill you.”

When I’ve retold this story, this is the part that most people find the most humorous.  “What would you do?” I ask them. “When the woman says she wants to pick up the pace, a fella follows suit, right? When the woman tells you her dad is coming home, and he’s going to kill you, you tend to forget all previous methodologies and strategies.”

I can take those ‘you’re so naïve’ laughs, and the ‘you’re not ready’ comments for a while, but those laughers must acknowledge the reality of the situation I was in. At some point, even the most experienced player will admit that reality will kick in and they would do what is necessary and commanded.

When I tasted those lips, and felt her other lips, I thought this would be a pleasurable endeavor. When she instructed me to do otherwise, I reacted. Those who listen to this story often have the same reaction, and I confess that it was awful from that point on, but I reiterate the question, “What you do?”

Debbie didn’t show up for our classes again. I didn’t even notice it until a day or two passed. I was ballsy enough to try hitting on Rhonda again. She would have none of it.

A friend of mine wanted to “meet” Debbie. I called her. She sounded a little off, but she invited me over. The girl was stoned out of her mind. This, on the face of it, didn’t bother me too much, until I discovered that she was trying to fry what remained of her brain on something called Scotch Guard. I knew Scotch Guard, the fabric protector, but I never knew it could be used to attain a high. Debbie showed me a procedure I considered novel of spraying the chemical substance into a towel. Those desiring a high from it then put the towel to their face in the manner Dennis Hopper did in the movie Blue Velvet, and they huff it. I never heard of the movie Blue Velvet at that point, and I never heard of the huffing procedure she was doing either. I was fascinated by it, and I asked her questions about it. She answered them. Then she invited me to hit it, I said no.

My friend wanted to hit it, not the Scotch Guard, Debbie. There was another girl in the room, but she established the idea that she was going to play the role of the morose, little pig that didn’t want to oink with anyone. My friend asked me to allow him to put it to Debbie. I said no. I told him that I thought it was weird. I had no allegiance to Debbie, but the idea that he would have her screaming in the other room while I sat with the sad, little piggy just wasn’t appealing to me. I played a blocker, I know, but I had to do it. Even though I had a solid excuse locked in for my meager performance, I don’t think the sounds coming from that room would’ve settled with me too well.

About three to four years later, I stood at a Kwik Shop counter. I ordered cigarettes and gas. The woman behind the counter stared at me. I repeated my order. She continued to stare at me. After she finally rang me up, I left. I drove halfway to work before I realized that the Kwik Shop checker looking up at me was Debbie.