Here is the promised first date story. I hope you find it worth the wait...
Our story begins one evening in the Howard County Public Library, late winter or early spring, 1988. I've come to the library to do some background research for my psychology project/paper, which is on autism. As I enter the library, I notice this guy noticing me. I get the specific impression that he's looking at my earrings (large silver-colored peace symbols) and then at me. He's average looking, not particularly my type (light-colored hair, boring sweater, no glasses). I don't think much else about it.
Sometime later I'm up in the periodical section reading an article on microfiche, and he comes and sits next to me, strikes up a conversation. Somehow or other, we wind up talking about religion. It seems I always winding up talking religion with total strangers. Anyway, I tell him that my mom is elsewhere in the library and will soon be meeting me upstairs, because we're going to our Bible study tonight. So, a few minutes later my mom shows up, and the three of us wind up talking religion, and my mom, in a fit of evangelical fervor, invites this guy to come to Bible study with us. He follows us there in his car, and afterwards she asks him what he thought, and he says that we're definitely a bunch of thoughtful people and it was interesting for him. So my mom says that if he would like to come again some time maybe we can carpool; he replies in the affirmative. So, my mom gives him our phone number. Duh! And of course I'm a) annoyed with her and b) feeling really, really guilty now, because I'm feeling like a really bad Christian for not being the least bit happy about this.
So, of course, this guy starts calling me up, and I, being this reclusive little introvert in the winter of my sixteenth year, am too polite to tell him to quit it, so I keep politely accepting his phone calls, and he keeps calling me and asking me out, and I keep politely refusing. Until finally, one ill-advised and fateful day, I say, "Fine. We can go out somewhere... But just as friends."
"Okay," he says and decides (though, to be fair, he did consult me on the topic and get my opinion) that we should go to Georgetown.
Night of the date: He picks me up in his stick shift car. It must be somewhere in the vicinty of late March, because it's kind of cold but not freezing. He drives like a maniac, and we're zipping down 295 while he keeps changing gears. He wants to talk about cars. I think I tell him about this passage in Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust that's all about guys and cars. I tell him that if I had a car I would want it to be a VW bug, and I'd paint it silver and get a vanity license plate that says "FACTORY," and everywhere I went I would listen to the Velvet Underground, and only the Velvet Underground. He says that a friend of his, who owes him some money, is trying sell a VW bug, and maybe, if I want, he can get it for me.
So, we're zooming down 295, and he says, "Didn't you tell me you liked musicals?"
"Yes," I said -- or something else equally witty to that effect.
So, he tells me that he's been listening to the soundtrack of this musical that he checked out from the library. And it's right here... somewhere on the floor behind the passage seat, and while he's saying this he's rummaging around on the floor behind my seat with his right hand, while he's madly driving his stick shift with his left hand, and he leans his head sideways to the right, so that it's practically in my lap. Finally, and all the while he's speeding down the road somewhere between Baltimore and DC, he pulls out this walkman. There's this one song, he says, that he really wants me to listen to, so while he's driving, he puts the headphones on and starts forwarding or rewinding or rewinding and forwarding (you really can't expect me to remember all the details, can you?) until he finds the spot. And, so it turns out, the musical in question is "Hair." And the song is all about oral sex.
Later, we're in Georgetown, and everytime I turn around, he keeps buying me things. I'm really skittish, to this day, about letting guys buy me things unless I know them really well. But there are people selling roses on the street, and as soon as I have my back turned and am not paying attention, he buys me a dozen pink roses. Then, we're in a poster shop, and he notices the sound I make when I see this one poster that I really want (it's of Morrissey -- this being near the height of my Morrissey/Smiths obsession), he goes and buys the poster for me and won't take no for an answer. Towards the end of the night, on the way home, he says he doesn't want to take me home yet, so I say, "Well, if you want, we could stop at that Dunkin' Donuts and get a cup of coffee." And he winds up buying a dozen doughnuts for my entire family for breakfast.
I also left out, because I forgot where it occurred during the evening, that at some point during all this, he asked me how I, as a Christian, felt about premarital sex.
Also... he was a Republican.
