"Hey, Jay, you know that girl Ally?"
"From work?"
"Yeah."
"I guess, what about her?"
"I think I'm going to ask her out."
"What?"
"I'm going to ask her out, like to the movies or something."
"You're just going to walk up to her and ask her out? Just like that?"
"Yeah...why?"
A few minutes of stunned silence pass.
"Dude," is all I can manage for a reply.
Perhaps I should set the stage here a bit. My best friend Mark and I were about a month shy of our eighteenth birthdays when that conversation took place, driving around in his burgundy '87 Oldsmobile (pre-Nirvana stickers) to nowhere in particular. We both worked at the local supermarket (I had gotten him the job there a few months before) that year as we started our first semester at Merrimack College. Between passing each other in the quad and bagging groceries together thirty hours a week--to say nothing of our frequent propensity to ditch class together--we had sort of become inseparable.
The girl he was talking about, Ally, was one of the new cashiers at the supermarket. Every fall a new batch of high school juniors would come in to replace the group that had left over the summer to go away to college. A few of us, Mark and I included, stayed at home, though, to become veteran front end workers. I, myself, was an assistant head cashier--and was still young and foolish enough to believe that was cool. Eh, that's another story entirely, though.
Anyway, Ally was pretty cute. She was tall with chestnut brown hair and a slightly squeaky, Boston accent heavy voice that was incredibly endearing in 1993...but by 1995, as it would turn out, significantly less so. She was also one of those people with an overly outgoing personality, and she dressed like she was on her way to interview for a legal secretary position...in a sexy Leah Remini kind of way. And she'd talk to everyone she saw (which tended to hurt her items-per-minute numbers--and again 1993 me was actually enough of a tool to think that mattered to someone) and was something of a toucher.
"Jay!" she'd say, clasping my forearm with both of her tiny, ring covered hands, "I screwed this up! I ran this guy's milk in twice. I am so embarrassed!"
"It's okay, Ally," I'd say, reaching into my pocket with my free hand for the register key, "I can just void it out."
"I'm so sorry, sir," she'd tell the customer, patting him apologetically on the arm. "I'm new!"
Mark wasn't really a loser or anything, but at the time Ally seemed ridiculously out of his league. To be honest, though, any girl seemed out of our league back then. We were probably just being overly self conscious (or perhaps I should say he was, my self consciousness was in many ways justified--did I mention that I considered holding those register keys a point of pride?), but that night when he told me his plans to just walk up and ask this cute girl out I thought he had lost his mind.
Jump forward about three days.
"Hi Jay!" Ally's chipper voice calls to me from across the checkout area.
I look up to see Mark coming through the automatic doors with Ally happily hugging his arm the entire way. As they walk over to where I am bagging some faceless customer's order, Mark wears the triumphant expression of a man who has just taken his first steps into a larger world (they had just come from an innocent night at the movies--don't get too far ahead of me here, kids.)
"So we're dating now, is that okay?" Ally asks me, giggling.
"Um...I guess so."
"I mean Mark's your best friend and all, right? So I just want to make sure you like me. You like me, right? We have fun when we work together, right? I just don't want--"
"I like you, I like you!" I tell her, probably over packing a cheep plastic bag with cans. "It's totally fine."
"We're just picking up Katie," Mark tells me, his voice strangely two octaves cooler. "What time do you think she'll be getting out?"
This was code. I was technically in charge of the front end (I was the assistant head cashier, after all. It's a wonder Ally wasn't hanging off my arm, huh?) My pal was basically asking me to send Katie, Ally's best friend, home early. This was a bad idea. Katie was on until close, which meant she was there to help with cleanup before the rest of us went home. Sending her home now would put us one girl short for breakdown--keeping the rest of us there late and adding to the "hour overages" my boss was always complaining about.
"Let me check the window sheet," I said, tossing a final bag onto the faceless customer's carriage and likely squishing his loaf of bread in the process.
I sent her home. I knew I was sending her home before I even started to count how many girls I had on for the night. That's just guy code. Your pal needs to look cool in front of his new girl, you do what it takes. It's not like it's on my resume or anything that I had all of us there until 10:30 that night trying to catch up.
From that day on, things changed drastically. My best friend had a girlfriend. Up until that point, my entire experience with the dating world started and ended with reruns of Saved By the Bell. But now here was a guy I knew, with a girl, all because he had just walked up and asked her. I wasn't exactly cruising the strip on Saturday nights, but I was looking at the world a little differently. Maybe pretty girls weren't so unapproachable after all...
It wasn't all good news, though. For the next several weeks, I pretty much never saw Mark. I understood, and was honestly just happy for him. As I said, Ally was pretty cute, and, as it turns out, was not averse to letting my pal slide into second on a regular basis. Besides, I had plenty going on myself. My classes were going well, I had joined the theater group at school, and there seemed no end in sight to my supermarket career. There was even a stage crew girl from school who--thanks to Mark's inspirational feats--I was just about ready to start thinking about asking out. She wasn't terribly cute, but she liked to make small talk with me between scenes on a regular basis, so I figured that was my in. Mark, it seemed, had other plans.
"Okay, you have a date Friday," he announced one day while we were at work.
"I'm sorry, what now?"
"Yeah, Ally set it up," he said. "Her name is Nicole. You're going right?"
I stared back at him awestruck. Later, I would come to understand that he took my silence as me trying to think of a way out of this. Really I was just racking my brain trying to find a way to say, "Oh my god yes! Woo Hoo! Boobies here I come!" in a cool, restrained manner.
"Come on, dude," he said as my brain started to invent a little booby song that I still sometimes sing to this day. "It sucks that we never get to hang out anymore. This way at least we can double and stuff."
"Huh? Oh yeah, I guess that would be cool."
Smooth.
Later that night, as my excitement fell back a little, a wrinkle in this whole plan occurred to me. I had never heard Ally (or anyone else for that matter) mention this Nicole girl. More to the point, Katie--Ally's bestest friend in the world--just happened to be single at the time. Why weren't they setting me up with easily-a-nine Katie who was adorable, sweet, and liked to chat with me when I bagged for her (we had that whole "my best friend is dating your best friend" thing going)? I quickly decided that was a question that was best left unanswered and went to sleep thinking up cool things to say to the mysterious Nicole when I met her. ("That's right, baby, I'm the guy who approves the checks under $50. Growl!")
Friday couldn't have come soon enough. Nicole and Ally were babysitting, and so Mark and I came over after work (I did rush home to change first) at about 11. Nicole was a nice girl, but it wasn't exactly love at first sight. We made awkward small talk as Mark and Ally madeout in the kitchen, and at one point she found an excuse to rest her hand on my leg, eradicating any lingering thoughts of Lisa the stage crew girl from my mind forever.
So Mark and I left that night just two guys with girlfriends. The next few weeks were a magical time, all handholding and talking pointlessly on the phone for hours on end. While we didn't have much--well, anything--in common, we got along pretty well. Looking back, Nicole and I didn't so much "like" each other as we did "like" the idea of having a boyfriend/girlfriend. In hindsight, I can see we were really just friends who madeout on occasion. Not that it was a bad thing. In fact, I think it was pretty much all either of us was ready for at the time.
A couple months later, a new wrinkle popped up. The whole plan had been for Nicole and I to get together so that the four of us could hang out. But as the weeks rolled on, it seemed we never did.
"Why don't you ask Ally tomorrow if they want to go out with us Saturday?" I asked Nicole one night on the phone, with my sister impatiently staring me down from the kitchen (up until that point she'd never had to share the phone).
"Uh, I probably won't see her, why don't you ask Mark."
"What do you mean you won't see her? Don't you guys have lunch together every day?"
"Oh, I don't sit at her table."
"What? Aren't you guys like best friends?"
"No, I hardly know her. She just came up to me at lunch one day and asked if I wanted to meet this cute guy."
I'm pretty sure she added the word "cute" to the story, and I paused to enjoy that. Still, what the hell?
"Then why did they set us up? I thought the whole point was so we could all hang out?"
"I guess Ally just figured we'd be good together," she said with a mindless shrug I could almost see over the phone.
Oh, that's right. We're in a relationship. I'm not supposed to think of you as an interchangeable fourth wheel four our group who occasionally lets me see her boobies. Good thing the logic behind that comment went over your head. (Cut me some slack, I was eighteen).
Things were actually worse than that. As Ally and Nicole got to know each other they discovered that they hated each other. Double dating was pretty much out from then on. It wasn't all bad. I saw Nicole probably once a week or so, and over the next year I got to do all the fun dating things most people experience in high school. It got a little awkward as I started my sophomore year of college (I felt a little creepy picking up my high school girlfriend from that point on) but she seemed to really like me, and hey I probably wasn't going to do any better.
If Nicole and I took our cues from Saved by the Bell, Ally and Mark were reading from rejected scripts of Melrose Place. They were on again off again, fighting one minute then steaming up the car windows the next. There were impassioned notes written in purple pen and stuffed into pockets. There were screaming fights in parking lots and hastily purchased pregnancy kits. It was in a word: awesome.
See, looking back today--with my 32 years of worldly experience--I can understand that being in a tense, emotional relationship like that sucks. But then, at eighteen and in the tamest of polite relationships, it looked so god damned cool.
Ally would show up at my house late at night, tears running down her face, begging to talk to Mark--who would be hiding in my basement. She would act incredibly jealous all the time, asking him if he thought this girl or that girl was pretty--don’t even ask about the time we dropped by her house over the summer and Mark dared to glimpse easily-a-nine Katie in her bikini. At the end of one particularly vicious fight, she tried to win him back by crawling on top of him in the driver's seat of his car and whispering (in what I can only assume was a sad, penitent voice) that she wasn't wearing any underwear.
I wanted all of that! The drama, the borderline insane neediness, the begging him to be with her, promising she would do whatever it took. It looked so wonderfully awesome.
Now don't get me wrong, I was (am still am, I like to think) the furthest thing from misogynistic. I wasn't looking to toy with the emotions of some slightly unstable girl just to boost my ego. What was attractive to me was the idea of someone wanting to be with me as badly as she wanted to be with Mark. Here she was practically having a mental breakdown over the thought of him leaving her, and on the other side I was with a girl who couldn't be bothered to see me more than once a week--if she wasn't babysitting that is. I didn't see Ally's stalking, mood swings, and slightly inappropriate sexual advances as a cry for help as much as I saw them, in a weird way as romantic acts of love (the "boom box" scene from Say Anything comes to mind). And I couldn’t help but think that if I was with her instead of Mark all that drama would be put to a more positive end.
This ignorance on my part would ultimately lead to Mark seeking a new best friend a few years later, for reasons best illustrated by the time Mark and I attended our good friend's graduation party. Early into the party, we noticed Ally and Katie driving by the house over and over and over. Mark was mortified and considered leaving so that she didn’t ruin the party, but I thought it was the funniest thing ever--and perhaps a touch romantic. After about an hour, I went outside, stood in front of the house and waved cheerfully as they passed by for the dozenth time. I am pretty sure Mark wanted to punch me--and I kind of wish he had.
Two minutes later, their car pulls in. Jamie (our friend having the party) came out to smooth things over. He was nearly pulled into the car (he's kind of a little guy) as Ally caught him in a death grip with both hands on his forearm and begged him to get Mark. I remember standing in that driveway wondering why Mark didn't come out and see her. Didn't he want to get back together with her? How could you not love a girl who would make a fool of herself like this to show you how much she cared? I just wanted to scoop her up, take her somewhere romantic, and have endless conversations about our emotional needs and promise to never, ever leave her.
Yeah, I was a little emotionally warped back then.
Now through all this, sweet, adorable, easily-a-nine Katie remained strangely single. Stupid, gullible, not-really-getting-the-whole-picture-here me took a while to catch on as to why.
Over the course of this whole saga, Mark would often talk about Katie; how nice she was or this funny thing she said. Sometimes we'd be out driving (we did that a lot, just two guys driving around in a car aimlessly) and mysteriously find ourselves passing by Katie's house.
"I just wanted to see if she was home," he'd say.
"Huh...well, why?"
"I don't know, just to see."
"Yeah, how do you know where her house is? We're kind of in the boonies here."
"I just do, okay? Drop it."
Through it all, Mark insisted nothing was going on with Katie. Even so, it soon became pretty obvious that they at the very least "liked" each other (and that was clearly the reason I was with not-even-close-to-a-nine Nicole instead of her), and that perhaps they were secretly in love--a love that could never be. In Mark's own warped view of romantic love, I think that's what he wanted: a tortured, illicit relationship that was sadly thwarted at every turn. I think a large part of him loved being miserable, and pining away for sweet, adorable, easily-a-nine Katie while stuck with her "psycho" best friend just fit the bill perfectly. It was all very Emo, but about a decade too early (I think we called it Goth back then, kids).
Mark pretty much told me everything that happened with Ally, but he would only confess things to me about Katie in bits and pieces. I am sure he made a play for her more than once, only to be lovingly rejected in a way that left the door open. Reading between the lines, I think one night he made one final bid. Talking in his car after work, he told me her response:
"Mark," she had asked him, "why does life have to suck so bad?"
He just sat there in silence as if that just summed it all up, and while I was pretty sure it didn’t, I had no idea what else to say.
After that conversation I saw Ally differently. Before she'd always been "psycho-chick" without a cause, but now I had to wonder. Was she really a controlling, slightly insane girl or was she really just a normal girl--with the same insecurities we all have--whose first real boyfriend was messing around behind her back with her slightly prettier best friend? I felt a little guilty in that moment because, even if I hadn't taken it all very seriously, I had always taken Mark's side in the major fights. And while I don't know exactly what happened with Katie, my gut tells me I was on the wrong side.
That conversation seemed to end things, and Mark and Ally broke up for the last time. Mark left school and went out into the real world soon after, which I imagine put all of the drama with Ally and Katie into perspective. Mark and I grew apart rapidly after that and eventually lost touch completely when I moved away a few years later.
I saw Ally one last time before I hit the big reset button and moved down to Newport--probably about two years after their last breakup. Out of nowhere, she and Mark had strangely decided to be friends, and they asked me to go out to dinner with them to celebrate--just three pals hanging out, talking about the old days. It was beyond awkward. Mark got drunk passed the point of coherent conversation (he was a quiet drunk) and disappeared outside for a while. Ally and I just superficially joked about the old days, and how much more mature we were now that it was all behind us.
I got the sense how far things had come later in the night, after we moved to the bar to share a few drinks, when Ally returned to the table.
"Oh what was I thinking? I shouldn't have left that!" she said, sitting back down.
"What?" I asked.
"My drink, I shouldn't have... Jay, tell me the truth, did Mark put anything in there?"
"What?" I was a little unnerved by how she was staring into my face, trying to tell if I was lying or not. "Of course not! Why would you think he would?"
"You can tell me, Jay, I won't be mad."
"Ally, trust me, we would never do anything like that."
She considered it for a moment and then picked up her glass and took a sip. I guess I can take some solace in that she trusted me at least, but Mark was never the same after that conversation. Driving home, he crawled into the backseat of my car and grumbled for me to turn up the Tom Petty CD he had brought, and tuned us both out. As I said before, I moved away soon after that last night out with Ally and Mark and her strange accusation of attempted date-rape. I never saw either of them again.
It's been almost a decade since all of that happened. Part of me--perhaps the part watching a little too much Journeyman--has always felt that if I had been a little more mature or emotionally aware back then, I could have prevented most of what happened instead of really just making it worse. Maybe I could have helped Ally just move on or talked some sense into Mark. Really, though, we were all just dumb kids caught up in some giant drama that would hardly matter in a few years. We just didn't know it. But I guess that's how we grow, and how we figure out that the things we think we so terribly want aren't quite what will make us happy at all.
Despite everything, though, I'd like to think that Mark and Katie did end up together eventually. I sometimes imagine that they bump into each other at the supermarket years later and in minutes are laughing about what a couple of emotional teenagers they had been. And that chance meeting leads to dinner, just to catch up, you understand. But soon one dinner moves to two and then three, and before you know it, those two crazy kids have started up again right where they left off.
And maybe--just maybe--still adorable, sweet, easily-a-nine Katie sent Mark off to work this morning with a kiss and smile, then turned back to the counter to finish making lunches for little Zack and Emily and thought to herself, "you know, I guess life doesn’t really suck so bad after all."
And for the record, I married an off-the-scale-ten Kim. Now leave a comment you lovable jealous fool.
