CHAPTER 1 – SUMMER
DETOX
It used to be that when a guy liked
a girl, he couldn’t send a quick “Hey” to her phone or inbox and hope for the
best. He couldn’t hide behind text or a
computer screen to maintain the façade of aloof coolness. No. He
had to walk to the front door of her house, knock on the door, and tell her
father to his face that he was there to call on his daughter. Imagine how
exposed he would have felt when she finally appeared in the doorway. All pretenses are gone. He is there for one purpose: to win her
heart.
Thankfully for you kids, I didn’t
grow up during that time or you would never have existed.
But we did have to use the phone and actually
speak to someone. We had to first get
the number. I used the phone book,
because that’s one fewer terrifying interaction. Then we would sit and stare at the numbers on
the phone. Back then, there was a button
on the phone that was the “hook,” and if you pressed it, the phone was hung up,
and when it was released, there was a dial tone. Guys like me would hold that button down and
rehearse dialing the number again and again.
Staring at the phone as our hands shook, we would one day gain the
courage to release the button and dial for real.
Then the rings would come. You know the sound. It was the point of no return. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… my heart rate has just
doubled… Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… I think I’m going to throw up… Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
that’s three rings—maybe I can hang up now without it being weird…
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… answering machine! Click!
Hanging up represented both relief
and frustration. Relief because no
matter who or what picked up the phone, it was bad—if the girl herself picked
up, a guy would have to get enough moisture back into his mouth to identify
himself (and after that, to actually make conversation), and if she didn’t pick
up, he had to squeak out “Is so-and-so there?”, and if she wasn’t, there was
the exercise in stuttering awkwardness of leaving a message. And a machine was
even worse, because it recorded all of that for posterity. But hanging up was also frustrating, because
all that mustered courage came to nothing.
Most people didn’t even have caller ID yet.
But I am thankful for one thing: no
pictures. There was no Facebook or
Instagram where someone could go a browse dozens of selfies of all the girls
from school. If a guy liked a girl, he
saw her when he saw her. For me, that meant summer was a break. Sure, I could obsess about girls anytime, but
since I could go all summer without actually laying eyes on most of these
girls, it allowed me to clear my mind a bit.
Every summer from middle school on,
I needed that break more than the year before.
At the end of my sophomore year, it was Nicole Ellis. Really, it was almost always Nicole Ellis
ever since we moved to town at the beginning of sixth grade, but this was the
year I finally had real interactions with her.
She was in most of my classes, and every day, I would thrill at every
chance to make her laugh, and I found I was good at it. I didn’t feel invisible any more, but I never
felt like I had a legitimate shot with her, either. I didn’t even go through the whole
stare-at-the-phone routine when it came to her.
But by the time school was out, I could hardly think of anything else.
June was a good “detox” month for
me, though I wouldn’t have thought of it that way at the time. By the beginning of July, I was back in my
summer routines and pursuits, and basketball—shots I made, missed, or should
have taken—increasingly became the thoughts that filled my mind as I lay in bed
to sleep.
As I
drifted off to sleep on the night of July 2nd, 1993—the day before
your grandpa’s birthday—I was thinking about how I was brutally stuffed when I
went up for a shot in the lane that afternoon.
“I would have had him if I pump-faked,” I thought, as I pictured myself
scooping under him and laying it in as he flew into the air to block my shot. I didn’t know then that these carefree
nighttime thoughts were about to again be replaced. My summer detox was about to end.
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