Girl #1: "Jessica & the Fruit Shaped Erasers"

The first time in my life I experienced what I'd later find out was "dread" was on my very first day of school. I might have had the same feeling upon initially leaving the womb, but my memory of that day was hazy. It was a curious feeling, and one that would occur on the first day of school for the rest of my life. I felt a sense of hysterical panic, coupled with the perpetual sensation of my stomach bottoming out, as if I were trapped in an elevator with a dangerously schizophrenic clown, as the elevator plummeted down a bottomless abyss. In fact, I think I even had that dream the night before school, along with my recurring nightmare of a skeleton jumping out of my closet, and tap dancing in front of me while singing, "Nick-nack-patty-wack, nick-nack-patty-wack!" The worse thing about that latter dream was that no matter how hard I tried, or how scared I was, I couldn't wake up from it. No, actually, I take that back - the worst part of the dream was inevitably waking up in a pool of fear urine.

Another recurring nightmare I would have at that age was one in which I accidentally throw a ball into the carriage of a stopped train, and when I wandered in to get it, the train would suddenly take off. I would look outside, and see my mom screaming my name as she rapidly receded into the distance. I remember the feeling of despair at the prospect of being lost and alone was profound, and I would always wake up from the dream crying my eyes out.

Ultimately, that's what I felt like on my first day of school: a profound sense of loss, abandonment, and loneliness as my dad drove me away to school, and I watched my mom rapidly recede into the distance, just like in the dream. What was this about? Why did my parents not want me anymore? This must be what dogs imagine whenever they take that "last ride" out into the country. Nah, more likely they're thinking: Oh, that looks like a good place to poop! Oh, that looks like a great place to poop! Meh, my poop could only help that shithole... The ironic thing about that last sentence is the dog was probably referring to Russellville, where I would later spend my teenage years.

***

My dad dropped me off in the school's gymnasium, where all the students had to wait before school was in session. He left me with my backpack, my lunch money (which was held in my trusty little, plastic, vagina shaped change wallet), an encouraging "Uh, have fun learning and stuff", and not a clue what to do next. I saw a small table, where the school was selling supplies. That looked like something to do, so I went over there. They had a small variety of stuff on sale, but what instantly caught my eye was a basket of small, fruit shaped erasers that almost seemed to glow in the morning light, giving off a soft, inviting halo. There were banana erasers, strawberry erasers, grape erasers... *gasp*... was... was that a watermelon?

You see, at that age, I had a bizarre fascination with fruit; not the way fruit tasted (I hated eating it), but the way fruit looked. I was a very tactile child - I was into the way things felt, looked, smelled, and even tasted. For example, when I was first exposed to shag carpeting, I would spend the better half of a day rubbing my face against it, running my fingers through it, inhaling the new carpet smell, or in most cases even the mildewy, old carpet smell. Then I would lick it. Yes, that's right, I licked carpet. Get it out of your system, perverts. I didn't need to lick something more than once to get the gist whether it tasted good or not. Any mundane, ordinary object was a potential wonderland for me, capable of keeping me busy for hours at time. Unfortunately, this eventually led to a very brief fascination with poop (The Final Frontier), but... the less said about that, the better.

Something about fruit, though, just really appealed to me. I love the variety of bright colors it came in. I loved the leathery, smooth surface of it. I even liked the "thud" sound it made when I threw it at a wall (my parents, however, did not). My love of fruit was not restricted to actual fruit, but extended to even pictures of it, fake toy fruit, and most certainly erasers that not only looked like fruit but... smelled like fruit? Are you kidding? I immediately surrendered every cent I had in my rubber, vagina-shaped change wallet and bought every variety of the erasers I could find.

The erasers made me feel much better about this whole school thing, and I wittered away the morning examining each one with intense scrutiny, which was convenient for the kids who would later be my bullies to spot me out of the crowd, because a kid who openly reveled in owning fruit erasers, as if he had found pirate treasure, was a kid who was destined to receive daily beatings. The fact that I was slinging around a vagina wallet didn't help my case.


Vagina or wallet... you decide!

***

The lunch lady and I stared at each other in mutual confusion. She was expecting money for the trey of food I was holding, while I was trying to cope with the concept of paying for food. I never had to pay for food at home. Well, this was certainly a dilemma.

***

I sat at the lunch table, alone, without a meal, and felt even more hopeless than I had that morning. I took out the fruity erasers, and wondered if they were also edible. As an experiment, licked the watermelon eraser... blegh! Not even close! It didn't even taste like watermelon chewing gum! I had thought nothing could taste worse than actual watermelon (besides my grandparents' shag carpet), but here was this eraser to prove me wrong. Great.

At that moment, a girl from my class sat next to me. Her name was Jessica. Even though I was far too young to understand my attraction to girls, I still felt an attraction to them, and to Jessica in particular. She was very pretty, as far as such things went in my mind back then, and as it turned out, she was also incredibly generous and sweet. She looked at the space on the table where my lunch would be, but was instead currently occupied by fruity erasers and my tears, then she made the connection: this poor dope really must like fruit. So she gave me her fruit cup. I graciously accepted the offering, and devoured it quickly.

Just as the fruit erasers were a temporary diversion from my general sense of despair earlier that morning, Jessica's fruit cup was another reprieve from what was increasingly becoming a much worse day. More importantly, though, this angel of mercy had become my first school friend. I began to feel like maybe school wasn't so awful after all!

Introduction: "Date a fat girl. Beggers can't be choosers."

That was the stock response my dad would usually have loaded in his rather limited revolver of wisdom to dispense whenever one the fruits of his loins made the fatal error of coming to him for advice about anything. Dad was like Charles Bronson in the Death Wish movies, except instead of systematically killing violent thugs and rapists, he would, to his defense, unintentionally, and recklessly, kill your hopes and dreams.

Don't get me wrong, he was trying to help - he really was! He was just not properly equipped to help. You see, my surname, Williams, comes from the Germanic word "Wilhelm", which roughly means "protective helmet", which is a fancy, pseudo-intellectual way of saying that I'm descended from a long, proud line of hard-headed assholes. I often imagine how my family was first christened with that name long ago, in some shit caked Medieval village, where my great, great, great, great, great, great, great (and so on), grandfather would scream belligerently at the sun, fully believing that it only set in fear of his wrath, while other villagers look on and chuckle things like, "Yep, there goes Edward, screaming at the sun again, even though everybody has told him that it'll go down with or without him. That's why we call him, and his ol' bleedin' family, the Wilhelms - because their skull is thick, nothin' gets in!" This is an unfortunate truth about us Williams men, nothing gets through our thicks skulls, most certainly not basic human empathy for our own kin.

So, as you see, my dad isn't a bad guy - just a product of his lineage, as I am, and my hypothetical child after me. His own father's knowledge didn't extend to anything beyond fish and Kenny Rogers. His father's father liked to paint portraits of horses, even preferring it over the opportunity to work with Walt Disney, the Walt Disney, on the ground floor of Disney's ramshackle animation studio. No, really, this really happened - my great grandfather was asked by Disney himself to join his studio, and he turned it down. By all rights, a family with instincts this poor shouldn't have been able to successfully breed to the point of me writing this blog right now. Richard Dawkins would be perplexed at how the Williams family has somehow overcome the laws of natural selection and continues propagating, evolution be damned!

If it seems like I've gone on a tangent, you need to just be patient! I am getting to a point!

So, going to my dad for advice on any subject was tantamount using a Magic 8 Ball of Discouragement.



The talk my dad had with me about masturbation? Shake the Magic 8 Ball and... "You need to stop fiddlin'." Hey dad, I'm having trouble finishing my homework because it's too hard. Shake the Magic 8 Ball... "If there were a sandwich involved, you'd finish it." Hey dad, that girl at school doesn't like me, I'm starting to think I'll never get a girlfriend. Shake the Magic 8 Ball and... "Date a fat girl. Beggers can't be choosers." As I grew older, that phrase evolved (if that's the appropriate verb) into: "Beauty is only a light switch away."

So, I grew up throughout my formative years, in the firm belief that I was "a beggar", not "a chooser", when it came to romance, and I grew to resent it. With such a cloud hanging over my head, it was easy to feel the victim of the cruel vixens known as "teenage girls", whenever every romantic pursuit ended with miserable failure. As high school ran into college, I began to grow bitter that I hadn't yet proved my dad wrong, that I wasn't a beggar at all, dammit, that I could get any girl I wanted, it was all a matter of WILL - and my last name was WILLiams.

The paradox was, though, that the more angry I got, the more inept I was with girls. It took a few years, but I began to realize that "will" doesn't mean much when it's grounded in insecurity and low self-esteem. In fact, that isn't "will" at all - it's pure desperation. I began to see love, girls, sex, and life, from a fresh perspective, a more mature one, and as a result, had a lot more luck with all of those things - not much, but I was on the right. Instead of living up to my cursed namesake, and stubbornly hanging onto the worldview my dad has inadvertently instilled in me, I opened my mind, and began to learn from my mistakes with women. I became a student, not only of women, but of human relationships in general: how they happened, how they are sustained, and how, or why, they sometimes come to a sober end. Whereas there was a time I would have recoiled at seeing a happy couple walk by, much like a vampire recoils from a crucifix, nowadays I contently observe this interaction, maybe only feeling a slight bite in my stomach of regret that I didn't have someone of my own with whom I could have moment with (yet).

Instead of acting out some kind of bullshit, macho outrage at the prospect of being "just friends" with girls, I embraced the role, seeing it as an opportunity to not only have more friends, but to learn more about how girls think so that they aren't so completely alien to me that I'm paralyzed with fear whenever an attractive one talks to me. Also, it doesn't hurt to know that, even if I can't get a particular girl to fall in love with me, I'm not completely repugnant to every girl on the planet, as would be my immediate assumption after every rejection in high school or college.

Once again, I swear I'm not going on a pointless tangent. I'll go ahead and bring it home now, alright?

So here we are - me writing this, and you reading it (I hope). I've always meant to start a blog like this, or even write a book of some sort about the jagged puzzle pieces of my relationship experiences that have somehow been jammed together forcefully to create the current persona that inhabits this 29-year-old body. I'll be as honest as I can be, without getting myself, or others, into trouble, starting right now - honestly, most of these stories will be embellished, some more than others. I embellish for many reasons, but the ones that come to mind are: A.) most of them I can't completely recall to memory, so I'll need to fill in the gaps, B.) life is inherently dull, so every now and then, people feel the need to make shit up in order to make life seem more interesting (which, Billy, is where The Bible comes from!), C.) it's my story, and I can tell it the way I want to.

By the way, I mentioned above that I thought about making this a book, because if I can stick with this and write out all of my experiences, it'll be enough to fill a book, and let's face it - anything can get published these days. If someone was able to wrangle up the gumption to write a book called The History of Farting, and it actually got published, then surely I can write what will, essentially, amount to my life's story: the story of a boy who refused to be a beggar, and a man who is learning, ever-so-patiently, how to be a chooser. I invite you to learn with me.


If only I'd learn to not to write my love letters on pizza box lids, they might be more effective.