Now it’s getting convoluted – 331.5

I was trying to decide whether to write about Aaron or Gerard first, and it gets tricky because they are so intertwined. I think I may have to alternate. I did decide that I hate calling him Gerard. At the time, I was trying to decide whether Gerard Butler was good-looking or not. Now I have decided his looks are not bad, but it is really more that he is charismatic than anything else. Regardless, when I needed a code name for someone tall, dark, and handsome, that’s what I went for. From now on I will call him Mitch. It’s still not his birth name, but it works better for me.

So, we know that I did not ask Mike to the prom, and that I was a little bit worried about getting a date. While this was going on, after his graduation Aaron had gone to play basketball at U of O. I went down to a game with his family, but I saw that my ticket was not actually from him—it was from Kevin. Aaron had a large family that was fairly local, and a lot of the players, including Kevin, were from California. I think each player only gets two tickets per game, so trading around was common, and I would presume that Aaron would give Kevin his tickets when they went down to UCLA or something.

Well, the next time I went down, I made cookies for both of them and Aaron’s roommate, Darin. I used to make pretty good cookies (though I am out of practice now). This happened as my prom concerns were growing. Talking to Aaron later, he passed along their thanks, and said that Kevin said the cookies were really good and he would like to meet me. I said that if he was free on this specific date, we could go out. Amazingly, he went for it. I would be attending prom with a college man! A really tall man, as it was. In the side by side picture we took, all you have is my head or we would have lost his.

Anyway, this changed things a lot for when I ended up at school. I looked Kevin up, and gradually started meeting all of the basketball team members, and then I started doing things for them because it felt like a natural continuation of what I had been doing in high school. I wasn’t the official manager, so I was not on the court bringing them water and towels, but I would bake them things and take posters to the games and was just kind of supportive.

I suppose it was weird. For one thing, there is a big difference between being on the team at a not particularly respected high school, and being a scholarship player at an NCAA university, so they might not need as much support. However, no one specifically acted like I was weird. Some were warmer, and more grateful than others, but everyone kind of took it stride. Eventually, after the football coaching class, I took an interest in the football team too, but I went to at least one game or meet of every official team—track, wrestling, volleyball, women’s basketball—all of them. (I specify official because there were club teams like hockey where we did not get the free tickets and have the games on campus. Sorry Cold Ducks.) For more details on all of that, refer back to “Spork and Basketball” and “Spork and Football”, from summer 2006.

This is all just background, and then I can start talking about the actual relationships, but I am going to throw in two more stories to make understanding Aaron easier.

One of the many Scotts I knew was interesting in that, going back to junior high, he would always start off a year or a class being kind of a jerk to me, and then he would thaw and we would get along okay, but it would all be done away over the summer.

A few months after quitting McDonald’s, I started working at K-Mart, and worked there through the rest of high school. Scott got a job there too, and we worked together for a while, and bonded again, and then he said he was quitting. I pointed out our pattern, and he realized he was right, and said something along the lines of how we were going to have to go through it again. I was like, no, just quit doing that! His pattern was foolish, but I had an issue there too in that when he was being cold and withholding of approval, I always felt compelled to earn it. I guess that makes him the first guy who really reminded me of my father.

You may remember my discussions of junior high, where I mentioned one of the guys I hung out with as being a sociopath. He was remarkably manipulative, and was always trying to trick you into saying something where he could prove you wrong and win. I remember him once asking me if I would be the lives of everyone in the universe on the existence of God. I said “yes”, but that was wrong because I don’t have the right to bet on other people’s lives. However, if I said “no”, that would have meant that I didn’t really believe, which was what he was going for and what I was resisting. That was relatively good behavior for him.

Anyway, I remember one time when he was accusing me of thinking that he liked me. I just said I didn’t want him to, which he said wasn’t his point, and that was true, but the problem was I could not express what I really felt about him. I did not understand it well enough yet.

Years later, I can articulate it. What I felt was that he wanted to be able to have control over me, so it would have been good if I liked him, or admired him, or even was scared of him. That is far from him liking me, and certainly doesn’t make me special because he wanted the same thing from lots of people. I could never have put it into words at fourteen.

Anyway, Aaron was like Scott in that I felt compelled to when him over when I should not have cared, like this guy in that I could not even explain to myself what was happening on all of the different levels, and going back to other blog entries, like Chris from Junior High whom I mentally worked myself into liking. Also, Aaron was like Bobby in that he had a grossly inflated idea of my affections.

Now that all of that is out of the way, I am confident that I can write about him tomorrow and it will all make sense. Whether I can finish the story before explaining about Mitch is a bit more debatable.