Love is pretty messed-up when you’re in middle school; for one thing, you can’t drive, so you have to be chaperoned if you’re lucky enough to get a date. If you have zits and glasses with lenses the thickness of bullet-proof glass, forget it; you won’t have to worry much about whether anyone can chaperone you.
When you get to high school, it’s supposed to be better, but it isn’t; after a couple of years of feeling like the world’s biggest pizza-face, your confidence is at an all-time low and you don’t feel much like even trying, even when you’re a senior, you’re on the school newspaper with a cute freshman cheerleader, and you’re pretty sure she likes you. Well, maybe.
Becky was that cheerleader, and she was cute. Her middle name was “Mildred,” which I still remember after all these years because it seemed like a ridiculously old name for someone so young to have, even if it was her middle name. Ours was not a great love story, by any stretch of the imagination (I doubt she’d remember me today, I looked her up on Facebook once because I was feeling nostalgic for high school romances that never were and what I saw seems to confirm my belief that she failed to carry a torch for me after I went to college and then came back to work at a grocery store to pay off some loans I may have reneged on regarding my supposed education), but I’d like to think maybe I contributed to her overall growth as a person. Is that too much to ask? Yes, yes it is.
The prom came around towards the end of senior year, and I did what any right-thinking male would do; I had a mutual friend ask Becky if she wanted to go with me. Girls like that when guys can’t approach them and have to use a friend, right? She was already going with someone (because male seniors like to scan the freshman talent pool before they officially leave high school, though they’ll be back for all the football games now that they can smoke without the principal or other authority figures giving them hell about it), so I went stag. I was also working through a lingering crush on Brooke, a girl I’d met who shared my obsession with the Beatles at a time when Nirvana-wannabes and the Smashing Pumpkins were ruling the roost. So I got to watch the two girls I sorta liked dancing with other guys all night, in my rented tux that cost more than I’ve probably ever made on any subsequent paychecks in my working life.
The Beatles were supposed to guide me in the ways of love, but as I discovered from reading about them, they were pretty bad at it. Apart from the random groupies over the years, John married Yoko (which I took at the time as a sign of mental instability on his part), Ringo married a Bond girl (not too shabby, even though it’s 007’s sloppy seconds), George lost his wife to Eric Clapton (I prefer his work with the Yardbirds to his AOR Eighties songs), and Paul managed to have happiness with Linda before she died and he found himself without a leg to stand on in divorce court with Heather Mills (low blow, I know, but I’m a gutter-dwelling comedian). “Do You Want to Know a Secret” is from the period when they were naïve, just as I was, and while it’s not the most amazing Beatles song or George vocal, it’s appropriate. High school is ridiculous, in retrospect, and my avoidance of Becky probably cost me at best a couple months of fun, before I went off to college. That’s *if* she liked me then…and I can’t say for sure about that.
I did have her phone number when I came back from college, and one night on a dare I called it from the pay phone outside the grocery store I worked at (this was a time when you still had pay phones; believe me, I know how this ages me but I have to deal with it). When a guy picked up (and started asking “hello?” repeatedly when I just stood there, unable to think of a viable reason to call), I knew it was over. I wasn’t sad, actually, or at least I don’t remember being so. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I didn’t know anything about love then, I think. I know more about it now, and I can say with certainty that I did not love Becky…at least, I don’t *think* I loved her.
Who the hell knows?
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