All the Rage #41

Ah, youth.
*sigh*

Ah, young love.
*bleah*

Jill Brylka. Jenny Longawa. Jenny Szabo. Linda LeJeune. What do all these women have in common? That's right, they were all the unwitting subjects of my misplaced affections throughout my grade school career! If you got that one right, you've earned a hearty pat on the back, pal. And a restraining order. Quit going through my garbage, ya pervert.

Really, if you think about it, the most entertaining romantic stories to tell might be the ones from your youth. There's so little ugliness involved--it's all touching gestures of naïve innocence, with an occasional affirmation that keeps you chugging forward like a moron toward the inevitable junkyard of romantic failure.

But that's all in the future. There's no such thing as a "painful break-up" when you're seven. There are no tear-drenched early morning phone calls from ex-girlfriends, and no knots of nerves piled in your stomach when you unwittingly run into those ex-girlfriends on the street. No shadows, no darkness. Only light.

Maybe that's what's inspiring this trip into my own ancient romantic past. My head's cluttered and confused and clouded by smoky pessimism, and I need to clear the joint out. Air out the ol' noggin, if you will. And I will. Right now.

I think the first woman I had a crush on was Morticia Addams. I wasn't any huge obsessive over The Addams Family, but I do recall watching re-runs on occasion, and I definitely had some kind of strange fascination with Morticia. Maybe it was the all-black wardrobe. Maybe it was the endlessly long hair. Maybe it was the way she responded so erotically to Gomez's irresistible French, as he spoke his "Cara Mia" into an orgasmic frenzy with just a few words. Whatever the reason, I vividly recall a strong reaction to Morticia's appearance. I doubt that my loins were involved at that early stage, but there was something there. (This hasn't helped me to admire Angelina Jolie's choice of Oscar outfits this year, though. She looked like a hag.)

The first crush I developed on a girl who existed in the "real world" was for red-haired Jill Brylka, one of my fellow students in grade school. I vaguely remember this infatuation surfacing chiefly during second and third grade. I knew where she lived and I'd ride my bike past her house on a regular basis, both hoping and dreading that she'd appear out of her doorway and enter the same tiny geographical area that my bike was passing through. Yet if I did the same thing today--riding my bike past a young lady's house several times a week--I'd be viewed as obsessive, compulsive, perhaps both. Funny, that.

I was pretty far gone for Jill. Who wouldn't be? Red hair and freckles. That's all you need to know. A true stunner, at least for her age bracket. This didn't stop me from moving forward in fourth grade, to Jenny Longawa. She was a year older than me and seemed so exotic and fascinating. Now she really is exotic and fascinating; she's a radio DJ for the Chicagoland area's big alternateen pop station, and I'm a hack writer. I musta known better in fourth grade.

I remember the exact year of this infatuation because somewhere in my basement, there is photographic evidence of my affections. On the last day of school as I ended fourth grade, I chased young Jenny around Mrs. Melko's classroom with my camera in a playful chase to take her photo. Fortunately, she took this as a fun gesture and not as a sign of my decaying mind. Oh, and note the growing signs of young stalkermania: the bike riding past the house, the amateur voyeur photography.

Jenny Szabo arrived in sixth grade. That's not entirely true; if I recall correctly, she'd attended our school previously and had returned. Or she was there all along. I dunno. What I do know is that she did "arrive" that year in the sense that she was one of the first overtly pubescent females in our class. I was smitten, a state that was exascerbated by my sharing a stage with her in our afterschool production of Little Mary Sunshine. She was Mary; I was her romantic lead. Ah, those warm spring afternoons spent in the A-V room painting backdrops on huge sheets of thin white paper.

My infatuation with Jenny even drove me to attempt spying on her through lurking around her small cluster of girls on the playground and enlisting my pal Mike Kosinski (my co-conspirator in the Nintendo Players Club) to steal notes that were passing from her desk around the classroom. I was hardly a subtle spy, as Sister Morrison quickly noted my meager espionage and issued a stern warning in front of the whole class. Boy, was my face red.

After giving up on Jenny, I finished out my grade-school career with perhaps my most advanced and sensible infatuation to date: Linda LeJeune. By this point, I was learning a few of the rules of love, specifically that one can't really date outside your own class. And by "class," I mean the whole ball of wax--attractiveness, personality, intelligence, popularity. Jenny Szabo, Jenny Longawa and Jill Brylka had all been "popular" girls by typical grade-school standards. They moved in the "popular" circles, they "dated" "popular" boys, they spread gossip and looked down their noses toward all those less "popular" than themselves.

I was definitely not popular. As a teachers' pet, a smart kid, a budding theatrical talent and the only eighth grader who bothered to stick it out in Mr. Cook's afterschool childrens' choir, I was your prototypical geek. (Still am, as a matter of fact.) Linda wasn't popular either, which was part of the reason I saw her as a realistic objective. She was also damn cute and funny, and based on her brief relationship with Paul Lovegren, she had experience, something which I was sorely lacking.

For much of my eighth grade year, I pined for Linda. (I also later pined for her during portions of both my high school and college careers, but those are tales for the therapist, not my sizable Rage readership.) The one-sided affair culminated in my first slow dance ever with a girl, at the eighth grade graduation dance, to the strains of that mid-eighties power ballad "Always." Every time I hear that song, my mind can't help but drift back to that sweaty-palmed slow dance and my fumbling attempts to make conversation, which literally led to our discussing the weather, of all things.

After eighth grade, it was off to high school at Marist High in Alsip, IL. Marist is an all-boys school, and it was there that my love life hit the crapper. Let's not even go there. Better to remain in the nostalgia-drenched glow of grade school infatuations, the days when we all made stupid mistakes, but could at least justifiably claim that we didn't know any better.