Squirrels

1987:  My high school love Ginny, who was in '87 (unbeknownst to me) dying of a heart problem and who had abandoned me completely in '83 when I went off to college, called me in Austin in 1987 to see if I could come live with her in Georgia, where she'd had to move with her parents --- with no choice, because she was sick. She mistakenly thought that because I'd started college in the fall of '83, that I'd be automatically finished 4 years later, by the fall of '87. The girl she'd dumped me for in the fall of '83 (a mere couple of months after I'd left for college) was currently stuck in Azle attending to her own dying mother and so couldn't move to Georgia.

I wasn't finished with college, and told her so. The other girl's mother eventually died and the girl went to Georgia. Ginny died in early 1988. (I recently contacted the woman on Facebook, who, like me, said that Ginny was "the love of her life." Didn't tell her about this phone call.)

1995:  I ran into my first sexual partner Mollie, whom I was with from 1989 to 1991, and with whom I would ultimately be obsessed until 2000, in a club. She acted strangely nice to me, asked me to call her. When I called, turned out she wanted me to pay back $100 from way back in 1990 when she'd given me her credit card and told me to go buy a dress for some club event we were supposed to go to. (I couldn't find a dress that I liked and instead used the money for a car repair.) My grief was too heavy for the indoors. I went outside and sat on the back bumper of my car and wept for hours when I found out that she had only wanted me to call her because of a credit card bill of 5 years earlier.

1997:  I'd been infatuated with a local roots-rock musician for years, seeing him weekly in concert since the early '90s. At one point we agreed to meet up at a local club that often featured his band. I arrived and paid my own cover. He arrived a few minutes later... I'd thought that, for sure, he could get in for free, but no, I had to pay his cover! We roamed around the club and ultimately sat a table together, where he told another girl that they would "make beautiful babies together." He then said he was bored and asked to borrow $10. When I said no, he disappeared. (The same year, I remember he asked me to tape one of his performances on a local cable station: While I was doing so on August 31, Princess Diana was simultaneously dying in a French tunnel. I erased him.)

Today:  No, Sandra (whom I first fell in love with in a poetry class in '86 or so). Listening to you, and offering a place to live and help with a resume, yes. Paying your cover? No.