the prelude

My relationship with Hannah began almost in spite of myself, mostly because I’ve never been very good at relationships.  Maybe I should clarify: I’ve never been very good with women.  It’s not that I don’t like women.  From the earliest days of adolescence through my three-year marriage, I’ve always been quite attracted to the female personality and physique.  But for most of my life, I found that I was horribly awkward around them.

I have no doubt that much of that early awkwardness stemmed from the general travails of trying to grow into my self-identity, personality and feet all at the same time.  But even as I finally started to grow out of braces and bulky eyeglasses and past my 5’ frame with size 11 ½ shoes, into a confident and capable young adult, that overwhelming discomfort continued to remain.

Part of that, I’m sure, was owing to utter lack of practice.  During my high school years, I observed two general sets of relationships.  The first, and most preferable one I thought, was little more than a platonic friendship.  I found these most preferable because they were generally very low-maintenance, as were the girls who were amenable to them.  As a result, when we both had time, I could go out with these girls to dinner, a movie, miniature golf, whatever, and never have to give it a second thought.

The second type of relationship, and most retarded I thought, was the overindulgent, possessive ones in which both the guys and the girls were equally hormonal and likely to flip out if the other was talking to the wrong person or went to the wrong party.  High school, in my mind, was too short—and too stupid—to waste on that. 

The only problem was that, as great as the former option was, I also wasn’t inclined to lead any girls into thinking there was something more than there actually was.  I wasn’t interested in dating, and I didn’t want to do anything that might suggest otherwise.  So, I entered my college years having never had a girlfriend or been in a serious relationship.

The earliest of my college years were mostly an extension of my high school experiences.  Most of my close friends didn’t have girlfriends, and I saw no need to plod my own course.  Plus, I was having too much fun lighting fireworks (and other explosive and gaseous matter), taking impromptu road trips, making movie two-fers and going on late night runs for unnecessary food, purchases or activities.  Any time a girl would start to show a level of interest that I deemed uncomfortable (which translated to any level, really), I would take the highest road I knew/path of least resistance, and just stop talking to her.  I’m sure I didn’t make any friends going that route.  But, most importantly, I didn’t make any girlfriends, either.

It wasn’t until the waning years of my time in undergrad that I started even wondering if I should be looking for a female companion.  Buddies all around me were getting married or engaged or settling down into semi-serious relationships, and there were fewer and fewer guys to do stupid things with.  The only problem I had at that point was that I didn’t really know where I was headed in life and didn’t feel like I should drag someone along with me to wander in the desert.  All I knew was that I was about to graduate with an incredibly useless degree in political science unless I was heading to law school or to the cast of a reality TV show.  And I hadn’t decided yet which was the better option of the two.

On the one hand, I thought at the time that it was fortunate I had made this decision and not involved someone unnecessarily in my uncertain future.  On the other hand, looking back, I probably walked away from a lot of quality girls for no better reason than that I was a complete idiot.          
By the time I hit law school, my relationship front had really started to bottom out.  I had decided the best thing to do in the loneliness of a big city and new circumstances was to find a girlfriend to fill the void.  One of my classmates just so happened to go to a college down the road from mine and seemed to have a very similar background as I did.  The only problem was that as similar as our histories may have been, we were headed down two very different paths.

Once I got past my loneliness, this was painfully clear.  I did my best to hold on to the relationship through the end of the semester to avoid any messy break-up scene, but it came unglued following the first exam.  Despite my best efforts, Erin was insistent on having a very lengthy conversation about our relationship and where it was headed.  The information asymmetry in this discussion, though, was that I knew any talk about our future wasn’t going to be very long.  In the end, the conversation was had, the relationship ended and I was prepared to swear off dating for potentially the rest of my law school career.

Whether because of that experience or irrespective of it, my discussions with women had grown increasingly bizarre.  Very often, I seemed to just invite the most random of comments from which I could never fully recover.  Once I was at a Halloween party, dressed as a high school football coach, and a classmate dressed as a witch asked me why I wasn’t Catholic.  I had been playing flippy-cup and taking Saki-bombs with guys dressed up as the Ninja Turtles, Hans and Franz and a Tongue Twister for the two hours leading up to the party, so there may have been some relevant conversation leading up to that inquiry that has since escaped me—and most likely escaped me at that moment, too.  In the many instances I’ve recalled that moment over the last five years, though, what strikes me every time is that I’m not sure there even exists a context from which that question would reasonably arise, especially not at a Halloween party in a conversation between a witch and one-third of a football coaching staff.  That, combined with the fact that, like I said, I seem to have a tendency to attract questions of this nature anyway.  So I answered,

“I just found Martin Luther more compelling,”

and blew the whistle with which I had accessorized my get-up and yelled at the guy dressed up as a pregnant nun next to me to do up-downs for the umpteenth time that night.

            Other times, though, I know I would bring this randomness on myself.  Like the time I was sitting in a bar, stone-sober since I was the designated driver for the night, and got to chatting with a couple gals my not-so-sober roommate had managed to find in tracking down another pitcher of the Heavy.  One of his new gal pals offered us some gum.  Obviously, my buddy had no interest in flavoring his Budweiser with wintermint, but I was pretty confident the flavor of the gum wouldn’t clash too much with my third cup of water for the night.  To my credit, Stride was a new gum that I had only ever seen advertised in corny commercials.  Not to my credit, I half-shrieked/completely yelled over the din of the bar when she unfurled the packaging,

            “Oooh, your gum’s two-tiered!”

            “Did you just say my gum’s ‘two-tiered?’” she responded with laughter and a smirk.  It was clear she had found more bemusement than amusement in my comment, so I scrambled to think of something to say.  The noise of the bar was loud enough that I probably could’ve gotten away with claiming I said something much more clever and endearing than what I had actually uttered.  The only problem was that I couldn’t think of anything clever and endearing in those brief moments that I could possibly pass off as having been  the words that emanated from my mouth, which I suppose is a common issue in making incredibly weird and off-the-wall comments.  So, I made the next best move, I thought, which was to play it off as though she was the one who should have been horribly ashamed at her response to my comment.

            “Uh, yeah.”

Fortunately, my roommate was in a half-serious relationship at the time and got such a big kick out of my misstep that he didn’t even mind when he tried calling the two of them the next night and found the number they had given him was a complete fake and landed him on the line with a local betting parlor, or something like that.

            One night in particular, though probably summed up the depths to which my aptitude for interacting with the opposite gender had fallen and will, I think, forever be the most popular tale for a cadre of my friends to recount to anyone who’s ready to listen.  It was really the perfect storm of relationship awkwardness, which played right into my inept hands.  The night began with a law school mixer—meaning free drinks with real attorneys—followed by an early evening cap at another bar as we all celebrated the final night of moot court—meaning lots of generous people in a celebratory mood buying a wide variety of shots of mostly hard liquor.

Honestly, I’m not sure I reached for my wallet all night since someone was feeding us free drink tickets at the mixer while someone else at the bar kept handing me a shot of something different before I even had the chance to finish the White Russian I was drinking.  (My wife would later tell me she always thought the Russian was a gay man’s drink until she met me.  Whatever, the Dude abides.  For me, it was always the coup de grace to a night out since it was a) relatively expensive, which meant I wasn’t going to have more than one, and b) was something I could nurse until we were ready to head home for the night.)  Add to that that two of my buddies had told me their wives were pregnant within the last week, reminding me how lonely I was, and the night had turned into the perfect storm for a binge.

            Once again, to my credit, I’m confident I would never have behaved the way I did had it not been for the urging of no fewer than three close friends who I trusted wouldn’t counsel me wrong.  However, to my discredit, I was way too drunk to reason my way through the fact that their advice was just plain bad.

            It started with one of my friends, Kate, indicating very strongly that her roommate, Leah, was interested in me.  I balked at first but started to buy into the idea after a shot of Belvidere each for my buddy’s pregnant wife and his unborn child and another shot of tequila thanks to the generosity that the last round of vodka had engendered in someone.

But, without being able to recall the particular details of how I arrived in that particular seat, I ended up sitting across from Leah at a two-seat bar table.  I would like to think that she approached me, which would have added a little confidence to my overflowing liquid courage at that point, but I wouldn’t even swear to that on the bar napkin that held one of the two Russians I happened to be double-fisting at that time of the evening.  Most of the conversation is a blur apart from the fact that at some point, I thought the opportunity had presented itself for a little smooch.

It hadn’t, and we did what I’m sure had to look like some John Travolta/Olivia Newton John-esque dance out of Grease as I leaned in, and she leaned away.  I wasn’t fazed.  But Leah, thoroughly embarrassed and mildly amused, I think, tried her best to let me down gently.

            “Don’t worry, it’s not you,” she consoled with mild laughter.  “I have a strict policy against kissing guys in a bar.”

            Somehow, I pulled my wit together and responded, “Hey, me too!”

            “Against kissing guys in a bar?” she repeated, now laughing in complete amusement.

            “Yep.  It keeps me out of a lot of trouble,” I said.

Evidently there actually is a well of charm and wit deep down inside my liver that can only be tapped with copious amounts of hard liquor.  And it’s probably best for my physical well-being that I didn’t discover this until the months preceding the start of the courtship with Hannah.  Otherwise, the charm and wit may have been mildly tinged with the early stages of cirrhosis.

I wish I could say the train wreck that was that evening ended there, but as my buddies are ever pleased to inform, it did not.  Either having observed this debacle or having been advised by Leah that it was one of my roommates and not me in whom she was interested, Kate apologized profusely to me for leading me astray.

            It didn’t register.  So when Keith, who may have been the only person in the bar that night more intoxicated than I was since we had both been drinking to his wife and first child, suggested I should go after Leah as she and Kate left the bar and my other buddy Drake was actually holding the door open yelling, “Go get her, T.S.!” I thought they had the right idea.  Bastards.

I’m sure I envisioned that the romantic moment would go down like something out of one of the classic movies that I had never watched because I hadn’t been in enough relationships for a serious girlfriend to make me sit down and endure one.  Something like Leah turning around and running toward me for some long, picturesque kiss in the middle of the midnight avenue or, at the very least, jumping into my arms in an enraptured embrace.  What hadn’t occurred to me in the slightest was that she had had enough of my drunken ass for the evening and thought she might leave me with the shred of dignity I was prepared to sacrifice to the goddess of love before the night was over.

The moment didn’t unfold as I had anticipated in my mind’s bloodshot eye and instead unraveled much more like the scene out of Old School after Will Ferrell shoots himself in the neck with a tranquilizer dart.  I turned sharply around the corner of the open door, tripped (obviously) and yelled at Leah.

            She didn’t stop, even though she wasn’t more than about five cars away from where I was standing.  I assumed it was because she couldn’t hear me, not that she was annoyed I had yet to concede that this wasn’t my night.  So I started to run at a less than blistering clip, stumbling over all the imperfections in the sidewalk along the way and yelling her name a couple more times.  I finally caught up with the two of them as they were getting into Leah’s car, not processing yet that not only had she never started coming toward me for that embrace, she actually hadn’t even stopped to acknowledge me until she was at her car with nowhere to go.  She turned around and smiled.

Drawing on my knowledge of prepositional phrases from my days in junior high English class and the aforementioned reserve of wit and charm that had been fueled by more Kalua, vodka and cream, I said,

“Were not in the bar anymore . . . .”

But the charm had faded, and I was now just a creepy guy who had followed Leah out of a bar.  She had the decency of not even rejecting me again but instead offering to give me a ride home.  Although it would’ve been smart to take her up on that offer since there wasn’t a single one of my buddies who was in decent enough shape to drive the quarter mile back to our house, there were still drinks on the table I had just left, so I declined.  I walked back to the bar grinning like an idiot and found Drake still holding the door, but I’m not sure for what reason.  Maybe he just wanted to catch all of the action.  Or maybe he was just too drunk to realize he was standing in front of a door at all.

            It wasn’t until the next morning that I was able to fully process with Kate the fool I had made of myself the night before.  Fortunately, Leah accepted my apology and just let me chalk the loss up to excessive drunkenness. 

            The unfortunate part is that, as horribly embarrassing as the evening was, it was little more than the next logical step in what had become my own personal romantic comedy of errors.  Prior to that point, my exploits had been pretty innocuous.  It was walking into a gas station deli in college with some friends and seeing a girl I knew and acting like I didn’t see her because I didn’t know what to do—and completely failing to fess-up when she called me out on it.  It was driving back from a group trip to go ice skating and not knowing what to do when a girl snuggled up to my arm and fell asleep on my shoulder other than to not talk to her for another couple months until whatever she felt in that moment had been sufficiently replaced with malice and ill will toward me.  It was showing up at girls’ apartments to watch movies they invited me over for only to discover I was the only person who had been invited.  At least on those occasions, I didn’t stop talking to the girls, but I’m sure my demeanor toward them cooled as I grappled internally with what the next move was.

            The bottom line is, when it came to interacting with women who I might have some interest in—or who might have had some interest in me—I sucked.

            I wish I could say things started off differently with Hannah . . . .