I would like to wish someone a Happy Birthday today. She won't read this, I imagine, but it gives me the op to put down some of this tale to have somewhere besides my own ever diminishing mind.
She bedeviled me for years. Starting at 16. It wasn't like I hadn't dated some but I only had a few minor wrestling matches in the back of a car or two to my credit. I had known her for a while and always loved the big saucer like blue eyes and long blonde hair and etc...oh my the etc...
But suddenly she was noticing me back. I was an "A" student trying to be the smart-ass cracking jokes in the back of the room. She laughed at my jokes, humor always gets them I promise you. One day she asked if I wanted to come over to her house after classes, as she lived mere blocks from good old Patrick Henry High School. And of course I did. When we got there this preacher's daughter and I smoked ummm. funny cigarettes, though this was definitely not the first time I had done that. Down in what would become a most famous basement we sat and laughed and enjoyed our buzz then she suddenly asked bluntly if I wanted to (bleep). Only because I was stoned did I blurt out the honest answer, "sure, but I have no idea what to do since I've never done it before". Good answer dude, good answer, I'll never regret that. She smiled and said, "How about I show you how I would like you to do it". I must thank her a thousand times for the training I thus received over the next couple of years. The only thanks she ever requested was that in the future that all compliments in that area be answered as "I was trained by an expert", and the story of she and I was to follow. I have stuck to the bargain as now I do so even here. But her influence on me reached far beyond just that.
She went out of town for college and I stayed local (UCLA as we called it)so I could continue my profitable stint in my band at the same time. We would hook up for the summer and holidays and then continue with whoever in the meantime. But she would never let me get too far along with anyone before she appeared as if out of the mist. Because you see she demanded my soul as well as everything else she already owned. Of course I dropped whoever and whatever at her command. Because there was no one like her. As a result however, I broke the heart of some very sweet girls who deserved better from me than to be dumped at her bidding like that.
We did give it a serious go, while she finished school nearby (she is a praticing psychologist now, surprise, surprise) but heavy shiote went down that year as well as the off and on and on again and I, unbelievably, was the one to say enough was enough, and that maybe it wasn't meant to be. I couldn't take the roller coaster ride anymore. I think I thought it a good ploy to get her attention. Instead she left and took a job in Maine. A few months later she reappeared, like always, and I was invited to join her at a hotel she was staying at for the weekend. Nothing new here really. I began thinking that yes, now it was going to happen, finally. However, on Sunday she dropped the bomb on me. She was in town to tell her parents she was getting married in three months. She might as well have shot me.
Two months and 21 days later, she calls me. She is crying and nearly hysterical. One word from me, she says, just one word and she will leave and come back to Roanoke and call it off. She got more than one word, she got a stream of them and most of them were four letters long. I was done.
As one might predict her marriage to a guy 20 years her senior lasted less than two years. She is single again and we run into one another back in town for Thanksgiving. We meet for a drink and go park under the gaudy neon star that's on top of a mountain that is in the middle of the city (and I grew up at the bottom of that very mountain)like the old days and I think she really was sincere in wanting to try again. But what she wanted no longer existed to me, in fact, I had outgrown her and my need for her. Sadly, we just talked for a while, had one of those moments I'll never forget, in complete silence staring at each other, our moments together passing before our eyes. And it was done forever.
We still email every blue moon and I am not quite sure what she's up to now, I just hope this birthday finds her well and happy. I hold no grudges it's all under the bridge, and I will openly credit her with helping create who I am in a very large part. One of the top three or so influences on my life. There were bad things she did to me and oh, they were bad. But in the end, I took more from her than I could likely have ever given back, because when it was good, ladies and gentlemen, it was the best.
So thanks Amber, thanks for everything, cheers babe.