She was little, less than 5 feet tall. I’ve always preferred my girlfriends little because they put up less resistance and they’re more aerodynamic when I strap them to the top of the van for long trips.
It was the week of Valentine’s Day, 1989. I was tall but sick.
We tumbled into bed. She was my first. I was 22 years old. She was 19.
I clung to her in my claustrophobic dorm room. I tried to lose my misery inside of her.
“You have to succeed for me too,” I said to her.
We lay side by side Saturday and Sunday nights and listened to Dennis Prager on KABC radio.
“When I first saw you,” she said, “you were in the laundry room wearing that green and gold soccer shirt. I thought you were European.”
“It makes me insecure to think about all the girls you’ve been with.”
“Guess what?” I said. “I lied. You were my first.”
“Oh my,” she said. “I wish I had waited for you.”
“What if you got well?” she asked. “Would we still be together?”
“Of course not,” I thought. “I’d be with a white girl. But you’re the best I can get right now.”
“It would just be different,” I said. “Our relationship would be totally different.”
My mother would recollect that I “squeezed her like a lemon and threw her away.”
Mom has an adorable pet name for me — “User!”
At least it’s not “Rapey”, says my friend Ashley.
Five years later, I returned to LA and my first came over with a bag of potatoes.
Afterward, she asked, “How many girls have you been with since me?”
“About ten,” I said. “How many guys have you been with?”
“Just one,” she said. “They taught you well. You used to be really awkward.”
The last time I saw her was in 1997. She worked at Bank of America. She was in a relationship with a latin guy who’d marry her and give her a baby. Learning what I was writing about, she spoke to me with contempt.
Ten years later, I tracked her down with Google and she emailed back, calling me an old man. She said I should settle down before it was too late.
I kept having relationships with girls like her.
“It’s my family’s minhag to date non-Jewish women,” I explained to my friend in shul.
