Love through the Eyes of an Idiot - You Never Forget Your First Crush by J. King

I began getting interested in girls at the age of 12 and a half.

Before then, around the time I turned 12, there was one girl who was clearly interested in me, threw herself at me, which gave my father pause. At that time, he pastored a tiny church in the small town of Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, and he wisely advised me to be wary of such a girl. But it was just a little early for me to be interested in girls, and ironically, her parents didn’t like me. So Dad really didn’t have much to fear.

Nonetheless, she and I spoke on the phone a few times. Or rather, we held the receivers to our ears, me sprawled across our golden, plush, living-room carpet. We listened to each other breathe as the minutes ticked away on my wristwatch.

We also exchanged a letter or two, one of which I still have. She greeted me and the rest of the family, told me about the multiple-sclerosis read-a-thon (for which she had already collected over $100!), noted that her parents had separated, and expressed shock that the price of stamps had gone up to 20 cents a piece!

But I really didn’t begin to become interested in girls until a pretty brunette with long, straight hair, pinned up on each side with a brown barrette, sat down at the piano in school chorus. I sat in the top row, all the way at the left, and I still remember her clearly. The director explained, Maryanne would accompany us as we sang certain numbers, but for now, she was just going to play a little something for us.

Maryanne proceeded to perform Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” flawlessly, without the sheet music. The pretty blonde who sat next to me commented that Maryanne was really good. I agreed, not thinking that the pretty blonde was the one who would be giving me shoulder massages for the rest of the year, as part of our choral warm-ups. I was mesmerized by Maryanne as she played through complicated runs and chords.

Then, some minutes into the piece, she suddenly stopped and, embarrassed, apologized for not going on, because she forgot the rest. The choral director said that was quite all right, and we applauded. I probably applauded more loudly than anyone else in the room.

The first erotic dream I remember involved a girl in tight jeans. I didn’t see her face, just her jeans. In my dream, I placed my hand in her back pocket, and it was fun, a lot of fun. But not just fun. It was emotional, passionate, romantic. The dream left a longing in my gut, a feeling that its memory still inspires today, not just sexual, but exciting, affectionate. I’m sure the dream was about Maryanne.

To this day, I have a penchant for long, dark hair and for names that begin with M and R.

As it turned out, Maryanne and I shared many of the same classes, and her last name was alphabetically just before mine, and many teachers assigned seating alphabetically. I spent the next two school years sitting behind her and falling in love with her beautiful hair. When she walked into class, I could smell her perfume, a light, winsome scent that stopped my breath and accelerated my heart. But I never told her how I felt.

Yes, I was an idiot, but you’re allowed to be an idiot with your first crush. This is one of the cruel laws of nature.

I obsessed over this girl—creepy, yes, though harmless, at least harmless to her. In study hall, I sat several seats to her left and a couple rows behind, and I spent endless hours learning to sketch her profile, looking down, writing at her desk. She had olive skin and a short, concave nose and soft features, dark eyebrows, and brown eyes. Her hair flowed through her barrette, around the back of her ear, and over her shoulders. I could probably still draw her picture today, from memory.

One of the songs we learned in school chorus was “Endless Love,” by Lionel Richie. I also learned to play it on the guitar, and I would sometimes sit outside on our porch swing, picking out music on my guitar, and thinking of her. To this day, every time I hear that song on the radio, I remember Maryanne.

I eventually wrote my own songs about her, some of the first songs I ever wrote and cheesy as any first-songs ever written. One of them, “Dream Girl,” tells of the deep passion I felt. Another, untitled song says, “I see your face, and I dream of you every night, but why didn’t you ever love me back?”

Looking back at that now, I want to scream at my young self, “Because you never gave her the chance, you idiot! You never told her how you feel. You never even said, ‘Hello.’ Never smiled at her. Never flirted with her. Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with staring and smiling at a pretty girl, you know, if you want her to notice you.”

But I had been afraid of rejection. I was a shy, socially inept kid. I didn’t know how to flirt, and I didn’t know how look for signals of romantic interest. I also didn’t know how to ask for help, even though I had around me those who could have taught me how to talk to girls. But I had deep, passionate feelings that I didn’t want to talk about, for fear of being embarrassed, for fear of getting hurt, and just because I usually kept my feelings to myself.

At a school track event once, I sat in the bleachers behind Maryanne and her friends. The sun shone through a clear sky, warming everything it touched. The boy sitting next to her touched the top of her head. “Whoa!” he said to their other friends. “Hey, feel how hot Maryanne’s hair is.”

This was the same boy, as I recall, who later I saw petting her hair and smiling at her, and she was smiling back, and when I witnessed the exchange, a wave of jealousy and regret swept through my body. I didn’t feel like going on with life anymore, and for a brief moment, I actually thought about death.

She was so out of my league: I was lonely and unpopular, while she was beautiful and surrounded herself with other beautiful people.

At the end of eighth grade, just after I had turned 14, my father got a new job. We were to move away from Burgettstown, to Sharpsville, about 100 miles north, and my last chance with Maryanne would be lost forever.

Sometime during the last few days of the school year, I let the cat out of the bag. I had told someone in the school that I liked her, and word had gotten around among her friends. The last day, in Science class, our classmates teased us about it. One of them found a strand of her hair and handed it to me. “And that’s not even from her head!” he said.

At lunch, one of them invited me to sit next to her. My head was spinning. They told me to put my arm around her. I tried, wrapped my arm around her back, but I did it wrong and ended up touching her breast with my hand, to choruses of “Oooh!” One of them fixed my hand, placed it on her shoulder, as she simultaneously grinned and sunk in embarrassment. I knew they were aiming their mocking tones at me, and catching Maryanne in the crossfire, but I didn’t care. I lived to regret that I had embarrassed her. But for a few moments, my consciousness completely filled with the simple feeling that I was sitting next to the prettiest girl in school.

Sometime after it was over, one of her friends had a little talk with me, a sober talk. She must have seen how depressed I was, because she said, “You really like her, don’t you?” I nodded, but so strong were my feelings, they could only be described by one word: love. Not the kind of love with which you build a life together, but the kind of love that tears you up from the inside and makes you lose your senses.

For about a month after my family moved, I cried myself to sleep, cuddling up with my pillow as though it were her, imagining impossible scenarios in which we might someday be reunited. It obviously never happened.

Some years later, on a whim, I Googled her name, found one mention of her in all the Internet. After college, she had run in the state beauty pageant. She had come to within two awards of being Miss America.

I guess you’re allowed to be an idiot for your first crush. But this unfortunate experience set up a pattern that would oft be repeated over the next decade.