funny

Every now and again — for indiscernible reasons — your common sense blanks out, leaving you with absolutely no idea of how to cope with your surroundings and how to cope with the shenanigans going on around you. Ever notice that?

This morning, the errant brain happened to wander back thirty or forty years to my college days, back when I dated the First Great Love of My Life…a guy my father called (aptly enough, as it developed) Shithead. Me? I thought he was just the coolest, most wonderful thing that ever came along.

S.H. was the first guy who managed to get virginal little me into the sack. I was a sophomore at the University of Arizona at the time, so I would have been about 17. (Yeah: I started there a year early, before finishing high school.)

We had met at the school’s swimming pool, where we both were hanging out over the summer. He invited me over to his rented house, and before ya knew it, we were off and running. And everything else-ing!

I had invited him to my home, where he spent a weekend. During that time, my parents developed an instantaneous and passionate loathing for him. Apparently they recognized, right off the bat, that he’d already wrangled me into the sack. And in their minds: a virgin was what I was supposed to be and a virgin was what I was meant to be on my wedding night.

Heh! That didn’t work out so well, eh?

Well, they had no luck disconnecting me from the guy. Our relationship continued through my sophomore year and into the summer of my junior year. He was a year or two older than I. After that first year, I spent my remaining summers in Tucson, ostensibly attending summer school.

One afternoon, we were loafing together in the sack. He happened to say that his best friend, whose wife was about to deliver their first child, had taken up with a cocktail waitress that he’d met in a bar. And that he was merrily and happily fuc*ing her.

What grand fun, eh?

I was astonished! Here’s the guy’s wife, about to give birth to his child, and he’s screwing some barmaid! 

When I suggested this was perhaps not altogether kosher, he explained that it was all right because, said he, “his wife can’t give him any.”

No kidding!

She’s SO advanced in pregnancy with HIS child that she can’t accommodate his dong, so he goes out and finds a chippie who can.

The boggle minds!

That was it for Paul. I threw him out of my life right then and there. My parents were right, eh?

Ohhh my, what drama ensued!

He showed up at my apartment and carried on (and on…and on…) in front of my roommates and the neighbors, begging me to come back. I told him to get lost.

{sob!}

Eventually, he gave up and went away. And good riddance, thought I!

But…one is never rid of this, that, and the other, is one?

Years later, I was producing a research publication for Arizona State University. It was published out of the university president’s office. So…one day I go to a faculty meeting…and damned if he isn’t there! 

No kidding. He’s gone to work for ASU, spewing out PR for that august institution. And damned if he isn’t working for the university president’s office!

GAAAAHHH! 

Well. I seriously thought about quitting my job, right then and there.

But truth to tell, I couldn’t afford to do that. Plus by then I was married, so I had a husband to lurk between him and me.

Mercifully, this time around nothing much ensued from our re-encounter. He didn’t last long at the Great Desert University. I did: remained in the editor’s job for several more years. And was much relieved not to see him again.

Not finding him on the Web just now. Several others by the same name come up, but too clearly none of them are our Paul.

Strange territory, the Internet…

What WAS the matter with me that I didn’t know any better?

• Why did I fail to listen to my parents’ opinions and advice?
• How could I have failed to see what a cad the boyfriend was?
• What about the jerk was so attractive that it overrode the attractiveness of other, much more decent and desirable men?
• And what on EARTH was the matter with me that I didn’t get up out of his bed and walk out of his life, the time that he went on and on about how clever his buddy was for diddling some waitress, because the buddy’s wife was so advanced in pregnancy that she couldn’t accommodate his dong?

Yeah: love goes blind at the garden gate. But at some point the garden gate should swing open so you could see inside the yard, wouldn’t you think?

There’s only one explanation, really…and it’s stupidity. I was just too stump-dumb stupid to see what kinda guy he really was.

My parents just REVILED the man. And no, it’s not an exaggeration to say that if I’d married him or just gone off with him, I might never have seen my parents again. And…you understand…these were doting parents who devoted their entire life’s effort and {money} to bringing up their only child. 

If I had married P.J. (let us call him), I would very likely never have seen my parents again. Not unless he predeceased them: an unlikely chance.

That should have been obvious to me. And it was…sort of…but stumbling around there at the garden gate, I chose to ignore it. When I should have thrown him out of my life, I didn’t.

It was, mercifully, his own stupidity and carelessness that did him in, where I was concerned.

There we were one afternoon, loafing in the sack together, when the subject of his best buddy came up.

Dear Buddy was a married man…one who had recently taken up with a waitress he’d met in some café. So, there we are, P.J. and I, chatting on idly, when he tells me that Buddy was fully justified in f*cking his current floozy because he wasn’t “getting any” from his wife.

Uh huh. Wife was seven or eight months advanced into pregnancy. She was on the verge of giving birth…and she was accordingly bloated, uncomfortable, and miserable. Consequently, she wasn’t putting out for her husband just then.

P.J. saw this as a good reason for Buddy to jump into the sack with some chippy he’d met in passing.

Uh huh….

All the months of my parents’ telling me (incessantly!) what a jerk the guy was had made exactly zero impression on me. But that one moment of revelation did the job. This guy was a jerk. 

And…hey, stupid! If he thought it was OK for his buddy to do that to his wife, he will one day think it’s OK to do the same to you! 

Wow! Amazing, isn’t it, what one moment of lights-on will do for you?

It was out the door for me that night.

I told him to get lost. He threw a good 15 melodramatic sh!t-fits, followed me home, pestered me no end…but no, I never relented.

Welp…today he’s living what appears to be the good life in the Midwest. For awhile — unbeknownst to me — he apparently worked at the Great Desert University while I was there editing a research periodical. My last name, by then, was much different from the one he knew. But…he was a pretty smart guy and very likely knew I was there. Still…if he realized I was lurking around the President’s office, he never revealed himself to me: I never recognized him walking across the campus and, thank all the Gods Above and Below, never ended up in a faculty meeting with him.

What a bizarre experience, taken from beginning to end. And really: the upshot of my own stupidity.

😮