Dumbass of Love

In order to really frame the story, I sort of have to explain who I was at the time. You have to understand that I’d been at an all boys private school for about the duration of my high school, middle school and grade school life. What I knew about women at that time wouldn’t have filled a thimble. I had been a pretty heavy teenager, but I’d lost about 80 pounds, gotten contact lenses and highlights. It was the style at the time. When you combine this transformation with the fact that I had only had one girlfriend in high school and she had been completely opposed to sex both in theory and in practice, you’ll admit that I was in way over my head. And that was just in residence. Being around girls at all was a completely foreign concept to me on a day to day basis, as I hadn’t really had enough of a social life before university to get me ready.

It’s getting on for February my first year of university, and there’s a cast party for the musical I’m in the pit band for. I’d gone on some dates, and made out with some girls. What I thought I wanted was a relationship. Little did I know that sex with no strings attached would have been a far superior outcome. This was when I met Roxy. She’d been playing some old lady in the musical so I hadn’t really noticed her before, but I’m sitting there hammered on the porch at the cast party and she comes over and starts talking. I’m immediately smitten, but nothing happens the first night. Roxy had long black hair and green eyes and a dancer’s body. She was really intelligent and quite a conversationalist. Apparently, I must have sounded good when we were talking because I got her phone number, and we agreed to meet for dinner the next night.

So, I’m walking my drunk friend Rob back from the cast party with Bishop, and I mention what happened, thinking that everything is good, and I’m finally going to get some action. For reference, this would be the first in an extremely long list of people looking at me funny. Bishop looks at me and asks if I know anything about her. I say no, and she proceeds to tell me that she’s heard some pretty wild things and that I should probably retreat immediately from the situation and bury my head in the sand. I laugh it off, but the thought has been planted in my head that there might be something wrong in some obscure way.

My suspicions were all but confirmed the night I had dinner with Roxy for the first time. We went our separate ways after I picked up the check, mostly because I didn’t think it would be appropriate for anything else to happen at the time. What happened next is something you don’t want to happen anywhere near a first date. I get back to the residence and my roommate’s talking on the phone. He says, “It’s for you,” and I pick it up. Roxy, for some reason is completely and totally panicked on the other end of the line and needs me to go over to her place immediately. I’m worried something terrible has happened and I run as fast as I can over the unsalted roads. I twist an ankle on the way into her building and hobble up the stairs.

I knock on the door, and there’s mellow music playing. No one is in the apartment, by which I mean that the door hasn’t been kicked in or anything. I knock, and am greeted by Roxy who I should mention, for the record, had never heard of the phrase “trying too hard.” She’s wearing black lingerie and hooker boots and she asks if she can get me anything to drink. I say no, but I do ask for an icepack for the ankle. She hands me a beer and pours two shots of rye, downs one and tells me there’s something she’s got to talk to me about.

“saints gambit,” she says, “I was just worried that you might have heard a rumour floating around about me.”

“Uh, nope. Haven’t heard anything. What’s the rumour?”

“Oh, there were these guys on the hockey team that were lying about having a threesome with me.”

“Well, I haven’t heard anything. Besides, those guys are lying, right?” I said, remembering that there was no hockey team. They had folded two seasons previously to make room in the budget for football.

“They definitely are.”

It was at this point that I began to notice something was kind of wrong. Granted, at the time I was not worldly, but I had never heard of anything like this happening on the first date, and it stood to reason that a sensible person would wait for me to ask about the rumour before discussing it at all. I might never have heard. Anyway, I dispelled any notions I might have that something was wrong from my mind. After all, how many women meet you at the door in lingerie with cold beer.

From here, things would only get weirder.