Male Bag

by Christina O'Brien

This column is devoted to love letters, hate mail, and other correspondence from guys that I've saved over the years. Names have not been changed to protect the innocent

Bill S. was my First Serious Boyfriend. Well, at least he was the first boyfriend I was serious enough about to bother fighting with. And we fought a lot—about how much time he spent with me vs. his friends, about how often he called me or wrote me, about his lingering "feelings" for his ex-girlfriend—the same stuff I’d fight about with future Serious Boyfriends.

After one of our fights, presumably around Christmas, he sent me this card with a dozen red roses. (I don’t remember what the fight was about, but I do remember his insistence on being called "William" when he was clearly just a "Bill".) I’m embarrassed to say, I was impressed.

I should have dumped him. Not because of this particular fight—or any other, for that matter. The fact was, Bill was a loser. And I knew this at the time, but I was willing to overlook it because I was a freshman and he was a SENIOR. With a CAR. And EXPERIENCE. Never mind that he was a

senior with a new-wave mullet and duck lips who wore peg-leg pants and bolo ties. With not just any old car, but a Le Car. And experience limited to groping sessions in forest-preserve parking lots with naïve freshman girls like me.

Maybe because I was a naïve freshman girl, it didn’t bother me that Bill paid very little attention to me in school—only after school in the cramped front seat of his Le Car when he had his hand down my pants. The only times I ever really saw him in school were between classes when I would circle the halls hoping for a casual, "chance" encounter with him (I had his class schedule memorized, of course). But eventually I became determined to break through his aura of cool detachment and make him mine—so determined, in fact, that I wrote him the following note, which by the grace of God I did not send him.

Despite Bill’s refusal to publicly acknowledge that he was my boyfriend, I somehow bullied him into going to the Turnabout dance with me in February. I wore this awful strapless dress, white lace with matching fingerless gloves, and an equally horrible black rabbit fur jacket, which I borrowed from a friend. Bill seemed intent on ditching the dance ASAP and returning to the Le Car to molest me. However, we ended up leaving early for another reason. It turned out that I was deathly allergic to the rabbit fur and I broke out in huge red hives (tre sexy).

True to character, Bill got pissed off and started a BIG fight, and I finally realized what a BIG loser he was. And after that, I decided not to fight with him anymore, by not fighting for him anymore.

Yes, in my immortal hackneyed prose, I got tired and finished the race. (Good lord!)