Id Man to the Rescue

When I was seventeen, I had a crush on this girl in my high school whose name was Amanda. She was very shy--she always kept to herself, and only had a couple of friends, who I thought were mostly stuck-up. For whatever reason, I was really intrigued by this girl, and I really wanted to know more about her: What did she think about? What does she like to do for fun? What was she like growing up? What are her parents like?

I started trying to talk to her at school: Making jokes, being obnoxious, and generally making it known that I was interested in her in the way that seventeen-year-old boys do. Finally, after a few weeks, she gave me her phone number, and I began calling her during the evening. I remember being pretty frustrated with the conversations; she remained shy and untalkative. I can't recall everything we talked about, but I do remember the sense I had of wanting to prove myself to her. At one point I launched into a monologue about how, you know, people have two sides, and you know, oftentimes people only see one side and think that's all a person is, but in reality they have more depth and sensitivity than you would think. I'm certain I made a poorly-understood comparison to Freud's discussion of the id and the ego.

Amanda and me went out on one date--I took her to see Will Smith star in Enemy of the State, and we went to Houston's in the Galleria area. (Usually when I tell this story, I mention how Amanda, with her small stature and cheerleader physique to maintain (I guess), didn't eat anything when we went out. Instead I suggested she order a salad, which she did, but didn't take a single bite. But that's not the punchline in this version.)

I spent all this time trying to prove to her that I wasn't the loudmouth schmuck that she saw making noise at school all the time, and that I was really a more sensitive cat, you know, like the kind of guy who could understand her, and would listen to her, and would really care for her if she let him.

Time went by, and I kept calling her and trying to show her how this other side of me is really great. But Christmas break came up, and I started getting frustrated because she was still really distant, and I didn't feel like I was making any progress. We didn't talk much over the duration of the break.

When we got back to school, I thought it was a lost cause, and I stopped pursuing her. Around the same time I felt like it was winding down, I got a call out of the blue by one of the more popular girls in my school--an older girl, a senior named Robyn, who is well-known for being a partier (read: into coke and doing random guys) and a rumored bisexual, which is a big deal when you're seventeen and you're picturing two chicks making out.¹ So she calls me up, and we start chatting, and I'm feeling like I struck the jackpot because I'm thinking that I could get involved in some three-way action or something. We start "talking" as they say in high school jargon, and we did some light fooling around at her house, my house, and at this really nice house in River Oaks that she was taking care of while the owners were away. I didn't really know much about her, and she always made me feel slightly uncomfortable because she was so clearly the one calling the shots in the relationship. But I was pretty content with the situation because this pretty, popular girl is hanging around with me, and I'm feeling kind of flattered in my own misguided way.

After a month or so of this, I'm at my locker in between classes, and Amanda comes up to me with this note, all folded up in that cool way that girls do that indicates that the information inside is a secret. By the time I got to class, I was really anxious to read it, because I had no clue what it could say. The basic gist of the note was that she had given it a lot of thought, and she thought that she was really willing to give me a serious chance.

I was taken aback, first because I figured that she'd heard about my dealings with the bisexual coke-user and wanted to tell me that she was now sure that everything I said about having two sides was all bullshit. I was also surprised because of my gut reaction to the letter, which was that I wasn't sure what to even do about it. I had tried for so long (relatively speaking) to get her to trust me, and now she was saying that she would, but I wasn't sure if I was even interested anymore. Most overwhelmingly though, I recognized that I didn't deserve her trust, now that I'd taken up with this hussy who was Amanda's complete opposite in terms of how she commanded respect.

In the end, things fell apart with Robyn pretty quickly, who dumped me as suddenly and unceremoniously as she had recruited me. I didn't feel up to trying to justify myself to Amanda, in whose eyes I imagined I was a complete and total asshole. I ended up giving her a really lame excuse and never really spoke to her again. She went on to date some wealthy underclassman who was tall, skinny, and awkward. I think she went to SMU or somewhere like that.

¹It's kind of a big deal now.