The void in my stomach didn’t make its presence known until about halfway through eight 400 meter sprints. A six-pack of chocolate Donettes chugged with an eight ounce carton of milk — yin and yang —three hours earlier barely allowed me to fire on all my cylinders.
I squeezed a jagged rock into my palm as I sprinted, replacing my hunger pangs with focused suffering. What is the sound of one hand being stabbed? became the Zen-inspired koan thundering through my mind.
I called on yet another sophisticated psychological technique to finish the last straightaway, which I always thought of as my theory of pain displacement. The maneuver involved letting my eyes roll back into my head as if eyeing the heavens through my own glass skull, then coasting in on pure teenage desperation to not Look Like a Complete Loser. When the lap was done and I lay dying on the track for the next minute, I contemplated my life choices.
And concluded again that my suffering and sacrifice had merit. He’s worth it, I chanted inwardly. Secretly.
My loving mother had often chided me for having a martyr complex, so I guess I lived up to my proclivities well via this little Juliet-esque interlude in my first serious romantic misadventure.
The Romeotic object of my ill-fated affection stood about six feet tall, very slender, with brown hair and eyes, and some kind of Calvin cologne that drove me mad. He owned a sporty red car, invited me and my Weltschmerz into his wide Wagnerian world of classical music, which indirectly led to my learning Tengwar elvish orthography just to enter the Shire of Tolkien’s Middle Earth with him. Anyplace he was, I was determined to find a way to be there. Figuratively and literally.
The maneuver involved letting my eyes roll back into my head, then coasting in on pure teenage desperation to not Look Like a Complete Loser.
The biggest problem for me was not that he didn’t like me, per se, but that he liked everyone, a male “My Last Duchess.” It was his job to like us all, in fact. For Mr. Herz toiled as a public school teacher. Fortunately for me, however, he oft traveled in the realms of nerd; not only did he masterfully dabble in both oboe and bassoon, he was ever at the ready to talk music, literature, religion, mythology, philosophy, and any number of topics I thrust his way amid hopes of impressing him with my mature thinking.
The pièce de résistance of my plan to win over Mr. H was this: music would make his heart grow fonder of me in my absence. By forgoing lunch or drastically cutting back, I’d been able to cobble together $50 (a huge sum to me, then) to purchase a gift card to CD Planet, with which I imagined he’d be able to buy such music as befits celestial beings. When his birthday came in March, I gave it to him, though not without a near panic attack.
To say that I put him on a pedestal doesn’t go far enough. Because I was nine-tenths hyperbole, I naturally set him atop the mountains of Mars while I peered through the Marianas trajectory of my life, in the gutter but looking upward.
As an educator myself today, I can’t fathom what it would feel like to shoulder the millstone of ardent, doe-eyed love of the type I projected at him for those couple of years.
Of course the time came for me to graduate. In red ink, he scrawled in my yearbook, in Tengwar, in his characteristically tiny cursive font: “Will you still be able to read this 20 years from now?” (Yes, mostly, but I got a little help from my friend Google.)
I called Mr. Herz up the summer immediately after graduation. And then I, who had always been fearful of driving because of bad experiences with my mom, scavenged the courage to find his house on a paper map and white-knuckled it to his house.
The limber arms and birdcage chest enveloped me in a short hug until the probably somewhere deeply realized intuition rose up from him like a fiery koi seeking sun.
That day, we went out for fast food and talked. And talked. And then we jabbered some more. Even though the conversation flowed easily, I sweated copiously into the soles of my imitation Birkenstocks. I intuited that the moment was coming to be vulnerable, to stick my neck out — if only to see it broken.
When it came time to leave, I was rooted to his driveway. Time for the declaration of my dependence. As I shifted uneasily in the deepening dusk, the words struggled from me, their flight wings dripping with plangent awareness of the futility of their existence.
“I have to tell you something . . . I . . . I . . . love you.” I’m sure my dark eyes must’ve been fused to the asphalt the entire time.
To his credit, he didn’t dismiss or berate me, laugh or howl with amusement or scorn. Instead, the limber arms and birdcage chest enveloped me in a short hug until the probably somewhere deeply realized intuition rose up from him like a fiery koi seeking sun: “Lucy, this is difficult, but I think I’m gay.”
Nothing after that quite registered with me for hours, and it was exceedingly difficult to drive home through the veil of tears.
Although Mr. Herz and I corresponded via letters and talked on the phone throughout the early part of my college years, I chickened out on meeting up with him each and every time I traveled East.
My first mister — and one key person involved in keeping myself alive, to paraphrase the Queen song, through the wreckage of my teen years — unfortunately died far before his time several years ago. I learned through social media, where we’d also “talked,” that he’d had an organ transplant, and his death was likely related to that. The day of his death, I had felt a rising need to contact him on Facebook, and when I didn’t hear back, I eventually got to a germ of the truth.
Mr. H left behind a doting partner of many years named Scott, a scruffy little tornadic terrier called Baxter, and a forever–17-year-old who will always think of him and chocolate donuts every time she hears a minor-keyed classical composition.
