My first girlfriend was Debbie Roshotko, a kindergarten classmate. Every day after school I would go to her house, which was right across the street from Fairfax Elementary, and we would play with building blocks and Lincoln Logs and sometimes a family of hand puppets made of some sort of rubber, probably latex. After a few minutes of playing with these—I played the daddy of course and Debbie played the mommy—and your hand would be wet with sweat. I liked those puppets even though they made the skin on my fingers look like prunes.
Playing like that is hardly the sort of activity one associates with girlfriends and boyfriends. If we ever so much as kissed one another on the cheek I sure can’t remember. But I guess that has more to do with the way grown ups think about words like that than it does with the way kids think. Debbie and I happily called each other boyfriend and girlfriend without giving it another thought.
Having a girlfriend is very different from having a crush though and even a kindergartener knows the difference. Having a girlfriend was having a girl to play with, having a crush was having something inside you that made your whole insides ache from your shoulders down to your thighs. Maybe that’s where the word comes from or maybe it was the word that influenced the way I felt but when I had a crush on someone it was like I was carrying a bowling ball around inside. I swear it even made me walk all wobbly like. I had a lot of crushes, I wonder if it made people think I a limp or something.
My first crush showed up in the third grade, in Mrs. Lodish’s class. Her name was Dawn Mandel and she had long dark hair and deep-set blue eyes. Add a long straight nose and Dawn was pretty exotic-looking (I learned later she looked “Jewish” but I had no idea what that meant back then). Dawn had a boyfriend, Danny Matovina, and they were the beautiful people of their day. Or at least of Mrs. Lodish’s class. Oh, did I mention that a crush is almost always a one way proposition? Yeah, Dawn wouldn’t give me the time of day.
I put a valentine on Dawn’s desk—“Be Mine”—but she never acknowledged it. I understood, she was too busy being a beautiful person with Danny to go acknowledging every valentine she got. And I’m sure she got a lot of them. I assumed her indifference was directed specifically at me though, that is if indifference can be directed. But this had more to do with me than anything Dawn ever did or said. Self-loathing starts early.
That bowling ball I was carrying around caused me such pain that I thought for a while it might be gas. Is gas a by-product of love? Doubtful, mine didn’t go away when I took Tums. The only thing that gave me any relief at all was to talk about it (little did I know that I was already learning a technique that I would one day pay a shrink a hundred dollars and hour for). My primary confidant was my mother. She’s the one who told me I was suffering from a crush, a temporary condition that would go away with time (I protested that this was no transitional state, my love for Dawn Mandel was deep and timeless). She suggested I put my feelings down on paper. Write Dawn a letter, she said. Just doing it would make me feel better, and who knows, it might even win Dawn’s heart.
That evening I sat down with my No. 2 pencil and a sheet of lined paper and wrote Dawn a love letter. It began with a paragraph of passionate prose (“my heart is heavy with love”), moved on to a clear-eyed assessment of the situation (“I realize this might create an awkward situation with Danny”), and ended with a sales pitch (“if you weigh the facts, Dawn, I think you will have to see the undeniable advantages of being my girlfriend”). To be honest, I had a little help with some of this from Mom and Dad (mostly Mom, Dad was busy watching “Twelve O’Clock High”). By the time I was done I had filled both sides the sheet. I went to bed with it under my pillow, folded into a small square. I fell asleep safe in the knowledge that Dawn would see the wisdom of my words, drop Danny, and shower me with her love.
I began to have doubts the moment I woke up.
What looks like a good idea in the warm, reddish light of evening often evaporates in the cold blue light of morning. As I walked to school the chill in the air was more than metaphorical, winter had reasserted itself that March day. By the time I reached the Church of the Savior, at the bottom of the block, the doubts were no longer doubts but a certainty, a certainty of failure. And embarrassment. I tore the letter into small pieces and tossed them behind a hedge at the edge of the church parking lot.
There were many other crushes throughout grade school—Laurie Nehas, Robin Gutterman, Melanie Deodhar—but none quite so crushing as Denise Despres. Even her name—Denise Dee-PRAY—was beautiful, a sort of French supplication. An anglicized pronunciation would have been more appropriate though for loving Denise was nothing if not depressing. Unlike Dawn, my love for Denise was met not with indifference, but contempt.
I was led down this path of heartbreak at Outdoor School, in October of 1968. Outdoor School was a sort of week long field trip in which the entire fifth grade class of Canterbury Elementary was packed into buses and shipped off to Red Raider Camp, an hour west of Cleveland. We spent five days trudging through the woods, wading through swamps, identifying trees, learning about snakes and frogs and squirrels, and making maple syrup.
The difference between Outdoor School and the usual field trip though was that we spent four nights there. Four nights of ghost stories, singing around campfires, and disputes over who got to sleep on the top bunk. All of which led to a new level of intimacy with your classmates.
And that led to crushes. Lots and lots of crushes. By the time the week was over it seemed like everyone was in love with everyone else. (There were even rumors of “sexual contact”—these always involved Harriet Gunya, the only girl who was developing actual breasts, and Kelsey Smith, one of the few black kids in our class—though to be honest we weren’t exactly sure what that meant.) That was the week I fell hard for Denise. Trouble was, she fell hard for Mack Cutting. That was the rumor anyway.
Mack was big and blond, the champion wrestler of our gym class. He enjoyed throwing kids to the mat, then body slamming them. This resulted in all the air being squeezed out of his victims, who lay crumpled on the mat for a good five minutes after Mack was declared the winner. This was illegal of course but Mr. Schroeder gave Mack only the mildest of rebukes (“Mack,” he’d say with a grin, “Remember what I told you?”). Clearly Mack was a boy after his own heart.
Like so many of Mack’s victims I had learned the best way to get through a match with him was to go down immediately. You’d still get crushed but at least it was over quickly. I liked to think Mack would one day end up in prison, or perhaps in a trailer park, a drunken wife beater. But it was more likely he’d become the president of his fraternity, bully his way to the top of a major corporation, marry the homecoming queen and raise little Macks in a big house in Pepper Pike. He might even marry Denise. After Outdoor School the two of them were inseparable. And after he gave her a POW bracelet it was official: Mack and Denise were “going.” I used to see them on the playground or walking down the cinder path together and think, Mack doesn’t treat her right, she needs a more sensitive boyfriend, someone who appreciates her for who she is, someone like me.
Denise didn’t think so though apparently. When I ran against Mack for classroom president (the job consisted of taking attendance and making sure everyone hung up there coat in the cloakroom) I got the whole class laughing with my goofy meet-the-candidate speech, the one I’d worked on for five days. Not Denise though. All I got from Denise was that contemptuous glare. I ended up coming in second, vice president, which meant I got the “honor” of cleaning the chalkboard erasers after class every day. I guess that even though my speech was intelligent and funny—I think I worked LBJ into it somehow—and Mack’s was barely above retarded—“I’m Mack Cutting, vote for me or else”—my classmates felt he was better commander-in-chief material. Idiots.
I never even considered writing Denise a love letter. It would only end with me lying in a heap on the cinder path, gasping for air, with Mack towering over me and Denise, having ripped my letter into little pieces and flung them like confetti upon my crumpled body, smiling admiringly at her big strong man.
Why did I fall for these girls, the ones I could never get? In junior high it was Sharon Miller, with red hair, freckles, and torpedo tits. She went out with Buzzy Calhoun for Christ’s sake, the tallest, handsomest (and, according to the buzz around the locker room, the best hung) kid in ninth grade. Then there was that cheerleader in high school, the one I might actually have had a chance with (she seemed interested in my long hair and Che Guevara button, apparently mistaking me for someone dangerous). But the incident with leaky pen put the kibosh on that. We were at the library studying for a history exam, I was talking to her, playing it cool, casually twirling my pen around, holding it between my teeth like a cigar. She seemed to be enjoying herself because she smiled a lot.
Then she said, “Your pen is leaking.” I nodded like I already knew that, that sticking leaking pens in my mouth was just part of being carefree rebel (Che Guevara smoked a cigar, I opted for a pen). “No, it’s really leaking,” she said. “A lot.” In the bathroom mirror my mouth was black and there were black streaks running down my chin. I looked like I’d been eating a licorice popsicle. If was cool about it I might have been able to turn the mishap to my advantage, I’d take it in stride, we’d have a good laugh, and she’d think here’s a guy who can laugh at himself. Instead, I was so mortified, so filled with shame, I completely avoided her after that. Why relive the embarrassment?
Years later, I found myself walking down Princeton, one of the streets intersected by the cider path on the way to Canterbury Elementary. I felt a strange tingle, a sense of both fear and excitement. Where did that come from? Then I realized I was standing in front of Denise Despres’s house. I’m a grown up now, I thought. I’m in college, I wear a motorcycle jacket, I have several girlfriends (I was attending Bard after all). In short, I’m cool. A lot cooler than that kid Mac Cutting punched just a half a block from here in other words. And who knows? Maybe Mac wasn’t some Master of the Universe somewhere but the pathetic loser I’d been willing him to be all these years. A failed gym teacher, that would be a good one. Maybe me and Denise…
There was a guy out front mowing the lawn with one of those old push mowers. I asked him if the Depreses still lived there. “Nah,” he said, “they moved to Columbus, long time ago.”