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…