In an alternate universe where I have a nephew who is soon to go to High School and seeking sage council and advice from his wise and learned Uncle Josh on how to approach the coming four years, I would sit him down and tell him a shameful story of cowardice and indecision. Three of them, actually, in rapid succession, such that they form one grand tale of a decidedly unheroic protagonist, wimping out at nearly every turn.

It would be a true story and it would have a happy ending, but not for a while. A really, really long while. Mostly, it would be an embarrassing and precautionary tale on what not to do and how to not be like the younger, less learned and less wise incarnation of his Uncle Josh that existed in the dim reaches of the past. Way, way back, in the pre-internet dark ages of the  late 80s and very early 90s.

And here is how it would go.

Crush #1: Paula

Confidence, and the bravery it confers, is not always translatable across different spheres. You can be confident about your sports ability or confident (as I was) in striking a defiantly, wise-crackingly anti-authority pose, or “brave” when it comes to swinging fists and fighting (as I, unfortunately, was. Don’t you be like that, alternate-universe nephew. No good comes of it. But that’s a different raft of advice) or in a bunch of other directions.

But for all these things, you can still find that precisely none of it translates into the kind of bravery required to inform another human being that you have feelings for them and ask them if they, in turn, might consider having feelings for you.

I am here to tell you, Earth-2-alternate-universe nephew, that the threat of a black eye or a loss in a fistfight is nothing  compared to the threat of finding out, for certain, that the girl you’ve been thinking about isn’t interested in thinking about you.

And I think, with hindsight, that that’s probably the crux of it. It isn’t the fear of rejection (rejection is pretty awful, but it isn’t the whole thing)  so much as it is the closing out of the possibility. Before you ask whoever this girl is if she wants to be your girlfriend, the “what if” still exists in all its infinite forms.

There’s a whole host of possible outcomes, swirling in potential there, somewhere in the future, before the question is posed. When you wonder, “what if?”  then all of the answers are, as of that moment, unwritten and therefore possible.

But once the question is posed and an answer is given all of those possible outcomes-all of those alternate universes, if you will, disappear in an instant and crystallize into one definite answer and you’ve now influenced all of the history that will come after that point by asking it.  In quantum mechanics, this is known as the collapse of the wave function. And if the answer is “no,” it is also the collapse of your continued ability to daydream as you have been.

But I’m getting ahead of myself and being didactic and throwing around physics terms and waxing philosophical and not getting to the good embarrassing stuff, and you’re probably regretting asking anything of your fictional uncle at this point. Who can blame you?  Let me get back to what happened to me so maybe it won’t have to happen to you.

Sophomore year of High School. I had escaped a freshman year at a catholic  school that my parents sent jewy-me to because they did not like the public school in town.  I had gotten into a great private school by way of test scores, but we didn’t have the money, so my folks thought that a private catholic school would be better, at least, than the public one. (True story: on the tour of that catholic school, Holy Cross, my dad takes me to one side and points to one of the many crucifixes on the walls in the hallway. He says, “When you go here, Josh, keep a low profile. Don’t make waves. Look at what these sick sonsabitches  did to the last jew who mouthed off here.” )

At the end of that year, I told them that I didn’t care if there were weekly stabbings at the public school, I’m going there. No more catholic instruction for Naugatuck’s only jew-boy.

So my suit-jackets and ties were traded in for a large selection of Batman shirts and a few pairs of bugle-boy jeans and I was happy. I was a sophomore in Naugatuck High School.  There were no stabbings, weekly or otherwise. It was actually much better in almost every way.

And then I do what I always did, back in that time: Fell crazy, heart-palpitation-y mental for a girl I was convinced was five thousand miles out of my league. I suppose the statute of limitations has expired such that I can use actual names here.

Her name was Paula Fonseca, and oh, my alternate-universe-nephew, did I have it bad, in that aching, cross-eyed, tounge-tied way of the high school crush.

I tried to say clever and cool things somewhere vaguely next to her, but I don’t know as to whether or not I spoke three sentences in a row to her for most of the year.

You’ve got to understand, I was no shy wallflower. I was never afraid to speak in public, I was confident about knowing stuff and being funny or witty.  But when it came time actually say something, anything, to this girl, I found my usual bottomless well of language all dried up.

I did stuff that, if done outside of sophomore year of High School, might be considered creepy and restraining-ordery. She worked at Dunkin’ Donuts and I’d ride my 10 speed bike there, like, 3 or 4 miles away from my house. Each pedal-push would be accompanied by mental rehearsals of the awesome things I’d say and smooth conversation I’d initiate.

Then I’d get there and be on line and all that would fall away as I became a desperately squirming mess almost incapable of eye-contact  and I’d croak my order for a diet pepsi and slink back to my bike. Then three or four miles of despair and self-loathing later, I was back home and cursing myself for a fool, vowing alternately that the next time, I’d have more nerve or that there would be no other next time; that this was more an exercise in self-punishment than anything else and I should just retreat to the shadows of cowardice where I belonged. These half-steps into the light were helping nobody.

Then Fate stepped in. Or should I say, backed out.

I was on yet another one of my Dunkin’-Donuts-runs-of-lameness, compelled by the fantastic nature of my crush to go but  already more than half hoping that today she would not be working that day. If she was not, it would give me a kind of out and an ability to lie to myself that if she had been, then I would have said something cool. Or just said something besides a barely audible, “Diet Pepsi, please.”

So that’s what I’m thinking about.  And then I get hit by a car.

It was a one-in-a-million shot; I was coming down a street at a reasonably fast clip and a car backed out of what was sort of an alley and caught me right at the wrong moment. My bike was designed as a city-driving one and had an EZ-release front tire as an anti-theft device. The idea being that if you were biking to the office or where ever, you’d pop off your tire and bring it with you and chain the rest of the bike somewhere, then pop it back on with the same quick-catch mechanism.

The force of the car hit popped the tire straight off.  I was amazingly lucky within the confines of my bad luck to be hit;  if you backed a car out a thousand times and hit into a thousand bike-riders, I gotta think that the particular confluence of angles and momentum would never break so happily as they did there.

I was totally unharmed. As best as I can piece it together, I went not so much sailing over the handlbars as hopping over them, then made contact with the car, which sort of pushed and cradled me up into itself, where I kind of rolled up and did a somersault which ended up with me being pushed off of the car, feet first, where I landed on the sidewalk. Then I fell backward onto my ass which was more embarrassing than painful. My bike was under the car.

It must have looked all manner of ninja (before the ass-tumble, anyway), but it was all completely luck and a series of improbable angles that saw me unscratched as opposed to thrown into traffic.

My bike was not so lucky. After calming the driver of the car down (he was freaking out more than I was) I got my tire back on, but the whole thing felt wobbly.  I took a look at the damage it had just received and suddenly was hit with a burst of adrenaline.  I could have been totally killed or at least in the hospital, yet here I was, unbroken. Unbreakable. Invincible!  I was like DC Comics Challengers of the Unknown; slated to die, but somehow alive and living on borrowed time! All the colors of the world seemed brighter and I was aware of every breath I drew in or exhaled.

I was like, “Dude. You just cheated Death! What can you possibly be afraid of now? Go! Seize the day! March into that Dunkin’ Donuts and say everything in your heart; be bold!” I said those words to myself. And I believed them. I had seen enough teen romantic comedy coming of age movies to understand what was expected of me in this moment.

I had to walk my wobbly bike the rest of the way there. In the intervening time, the kind of Popeye-eats-spinach-strength to my willpower began to wane. By the time I had arrived at the door, with its stickers admonishing me and anyone else who stood in front of it that shoes and shirts were, in fact, required, I had lost all that oomph and bravado. I had shoes. I had a shirt. I had no courage.

And yes, she was there, working.  A million, million thoughts on how and what I was going to do and say all fell to nothing as I murmured yet another mush-mouthed order of Diet Pepsi.

The walk home that day, pushing my bike all the way (as its bent wheel jiggled and mocked me)  was crushing. To this day, I cannot stomach the taste of Diet Pepsi from the fountain tap. It tastes like weakness and defeat.

To call it a walk of shame would be understating the issue. I hated myself and my weakness.  I had been given all manner of fateful signs, Death itself had smacked me in the ass and whispered, “Carpe this diem, you dick!” and I totally proved to be a coward.  I sucked and I knew it, with every step back home. And every sip of Diet Pepsi.

The year went by with this same internal drama, with no external analog. In yet another “this-would-be-creepy-if-you-were-anything-other-than-15″ move,  at the end of the year, I arranged my schedule for my junior year to include classes I knew she was likely to take.  Which worked out well as she was really smart and in a bunch of AP classes; I ended up getting a better education out of the deal, but still. What kind of a squirrelly asshole move is that?

So you know the end to this particular branch of the story? That’s it. Nothing. I did and said nothing. I wallowed in self-inflicted pitiful longing and my guts churned around a lot but there was absolutely nothing that happened of note.

Cue the “you lose!” waaagh-waaaugh-trumpet blare. (I promise you, if you stick it out to the bitter end, there’s a moral and a lesson to be learned, here.)

Crush #2 Rose

Ok. So the school year ends, summer comes and goes and I’m back to school. Now, a junior. The summer was a good one.  I was a camp counselor at a computer/circus camp (true story!) which was very much to me as Hogwarts was to Harry Potter.  All manner of wonderful, amazing things happened there. But, also like Harry Potter, when I return home, it seems like I am no longer able to do magic. Camp-Josh exists as as kind of compartmentalized and separate entity from Home-Josh. Camp-Josh is popular and cool and has a series of adventures and triumphs. Home-Josh? Not so much. Weird.

As for my mad crush on Paula? Well, the thing is, I had spent so much time being consumed– and internally humiliated- by it and my lack of action or boldness that although I now was in 4 classes with her I find that I am just too put out by the whole non-existent affair to continue it with it. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still as pretty and cool as she was before, but at this point, it is like a hot stove I remember burning my hand on. I am just more embarrassed to myself than anything else. I kind of willingly let go of the crush, as it doesn’t even provide the pleasant daydreams that are crushes only benefit.

I find myself in Spanish II. This class was a mix of juniors and seniors.  There’s a girl in this class who is a senior and so incredibly pretty that it is almost ridiculous. Her name is Rose DaSilva. (Naugatuck is a town with a big Portuguese population, not only is there a Rose DaSilva in this class, but also a Rose Silva.  Without the “Da.” I imagine that if we lived in a TERMINATOR-universe where one of them will, at some point in time in the future, give birth to a John Conner who will defeat the robot menace, the other one would be in trouble when the time-travelling Terminator, armed with only a name, comes looking to change history.)

But here’s the thing: Since she’s older than me and so ludicrously out of my league, I find it pretty easy to talk to her. The pressure is off, you know? And over the year, I’m surprising myself with the witty and charming stuff coming out of my mouth. In two languages, no less.

So at a certain point, it dawns on me.  I’m looking forward each day to Spanish class, I’m not a tongue-tied moron this time around and I’m reasonably certain I am being flirted back it…and, hey, remember that awful feeling of not doing anything from the year before?

“Act,” I say to myself. “Do SOMETHING.”

But me being me, I over-think it. I decide I must do something extraordinary. I was in an art class that year where I had pretty much free run to do whatever I wanted. So I spend a week creating this parchment-paper scroll with a fragment of a poem on it, written in a kind of faux calligraphy that I spend a bunch of time on.

The poem is by George Gordon, otherwise known as Lord Byron and it is called “She Walks In Beauty.” The fragment I transcribe is this:

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes

 

I have stolen this idea from the movie Dead Poet’s Society, as I am both a teenager and a cheezeball, at this point in my life.

With a reasonably decent drawing of a rose at the top, I distress the edges of the parchment. My intention  was to have it appear to be some sort of ancient treasure-scroll, some story-book love letter fragment, right?

I find out the location of her locker. Twice I try to slip it in through those vent-holes that lockers inexplicably have but each time I am undone by someone walking down the hall or a sudden loss of nerve.

I almost toss the thing in the trash. But I’ve already put so much time into its construction and the sort of mental staging of it all that I find the fortitude to continue with The Plan. I have begun, at that point, referring to it in my head with capital letters like that. It is not “the plan.” It is “The Plan.”

And The Plan goes like this: I will get the poem into her locker. I will wait for a week and allow suspense to build and then at the precisely correct moment, I will dramatically reveal my secret identity by quoting the poem and completing the stanza.  It will be like the reveal of Max Caufield as  Grease II’s Cool Rider and life will be a big movie, and yay.

 

That’s The Plan. But there’s another poet, also dead, named Robbie Burns, who had a few choice words about plans and schemes. He wrote:

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Which is quite a ways to go to say “No matter how much you plan, it often doesn’t turn out like you think. A lot worse, probably.”

So I manage to get into school incredibly early, before anyone is there. I slip the vellum envelope into the locker-slot and in a very movie-like turn of events, I see that she’s somehow in school also early(!!), approaching her locker. I duck out of sight, like something from Saved By the Bell, and I’m unseen. But now, I’m secure in the knowledge that she’s going to see the letter and there won’t be any kind of weird Three’s Company mix-up of someone else opening the locker or whatever.

Viva The Plan! Right?

Wrong.

See, the fatal flaw of this plan was the week-long wait for the perfect moment. It allowed every last bit of fear and insecurity the nice, warm, dark place they need to fester and grow.  Suddenly I realized that the worst thing I could do was to build up suspense.

What if she had imagined some actual cool rider to be the writer and deliverer of this mystery letter? And then there’s dorky me, like when someone picks the wrong door on “Let’s Make A Deal.”

What if she had a secret crush on someone else? I mean, she’s a senior and moves in circles I don’t know about.  It is probably filled with dudes much cooler and more desirable than me. What was I thinking?  And then, she’s had a full week to convince herself that it is him, this shadowy-awesome-guy I imagine as being in all ways superior to me.

In my head now, as I imagine it, at the moment where I came clean, the reaction would not be a dramatic swell 80s of music (since this was the 80s at the time, we referred to it simply as “music,” but you get the point)  and a cinematic kiss, but rather a horrified or, even worse, painfully disappointed, “Oh. You. Um…”

What seemed so romantic and amazing in the planning session now appeared creepy to me, viewing it from the perspective of an imagined Rose DaSilva who is not happy to find that I am the gag-gift at the end of this particular rainbow.  The note and its placing in her locker could be interpreted as a violation, I remember thinking. She could be totally creeped out by the whole thing, this anonymous bunch of bull.

So I talked myself out of saying anything at all. Out of fear, out of worry and out of a lack of courage to take a step into the unknown and place myself, my heart and my pride at risk.  The path of least resistance is to do nothing at all and cut my losses before they even occur. LAME.

To this day, unless she somehow comes across this blog-post, I remain anonymous in the not-so-great-locker-poem-caper of 1990.

Now, here’s where the story as I’m choosing to tell it here to you, my imagined-nephew, actually gets good. I hope I haven’t bored you to tears or forced you to click away to, like, LOLcats or FAILBlog from my long-windedness and inability to come to a point within 2000 words.

Crush #3: Jolene

Fast-forwarding out of high school and into college. I’m a little more experienced and have had some bona fide relationships. But in large part, a lot of me is still that same kid who is prone to those same bouts of doubt and indecision.

I had bopped around for a bit, took a semester off, switched schools and filled notebooks with self-important musings (imagine that).  I found myself at Southern Connecticut State University, where my two best friends in all the world were attending.  Out for a walk on the campus, I came across a posted flier advertising open auditions for a production of Shakepeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

My very first thought was, “Oh, that is something I’ve always wanted to do.” But my very first thought was followed very rapidly by my very second thought, which went something like, “Come on, dude.  You’ve never been in a play, there’s a whole drama department, no doubt full of people twelve times more talented than you are, you’re going to embarrass yourself. Don’t be a fool.”

I came to the conclusion that my second thought was kind of an asshole and he had not done me too many favors thus far in my life, so I bucked convention and went to the auditions.

And I kind of kicked ass. The director liked my look, which was long hair and pirate-meets-skater attire. It was exactly what he had envisaged for his particular take on the character of Lysander, one of the comedy-of-errors lovers in the play. He read me for the part all night, against a series of different people.

When I was there, History began repeating, as History is prone to do.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the drill by now: Blah, blah, met the prettiest girl in the world, blah blah.

But this time: Holy shit, dude.  Forget all those other times. They were just dress rehearsals.  Forget prettiest, forget girl, this was the most beautiful woman I was sitting next to.  And she was cool. Oh, man. So, so very cool. You know how sometimes you just see someone talk, and you know? I’m not talking about love-at-first-sight-knowing or fireworks, but just knowing that this is one of those people that you should know?  That gets stuff? That gets the specific kind of stuff that you get?  That.

This stands out in stark contrast in memory: These were open auditions. And much like the first few episodes of American Idol each season, there are some oddballs in the mix and they all have to have the courtesy of auditioning.

So one guy got up and he looked like a demented Andy Warhol. (Andy Warhol himself looked like a demented Andy Warhol, so you can imagine, this dude was effed up) A shock of pure white hair, moving around like a spider-monkey, intoning and stressing odd words as he yelled his way through the audition.

This astonishingly beautiful woman in the next seat leans over to me and says, “Did Andy Warhol fake his death?”

I said, “You know, in the future, everyone will audition for A Midsummer Night’s Dream for fifteen minutes.”

And she laughed. Oh, boy. I can still hear it, right now. But at that particular point in time, I was not making any plans. This was, as I said, a beautiful woman, who I was sure had a some kind of exotic, amazing life going on that I would be silly to try to imagine myself barging into.

So it turned out, she was pretty good and talented, too.  The director had her reading for the part of the Fairy Queen, Titania, over and over again.

I would tell you, “long story short” to get you to the next vital point of this tale, but that would be disingenuous and absurd, given the length I’ve gone to up to this point. Let me just say, “very long story somewhat shorter,” and tell you that a few days later, I found myself at the Drama Lab, where the casting notices were posted.

As luck and Fate would have it, this woman who I had sat next to and who had the most wonderful laugh I’d ever heard was there at the same time, checking to see if she had been cast.

“Did you get in?” I asked as I walked up to the board.

“I did!” She pointed to her name.

TITANIA: JOLENE HAY.

“Are you here? What’s your name?” she asked me.

“Josh. Josh Dobbin.”

“Congratulations, Josh Dobbin. You are Lysander,” she told me.

And we got to talking and walking, this woman and I. This Jolene. It was easy and fun and natural, like I had known her for years. Then we came to an actual, physical crossroads. According to my schedule and classes, I was headed to the right. She was walking to the left.

“Oh. I’m going this way,” she said.

I looked down at the cross-roads.  It doesn’t get more symbolic than that. Once again, that second-thought came up. “Dude. Don’t even think it. This girl is light-years beyond you and to entertain even a daydream to the contrary would be both stupid and cruel.”

I don’t tell you this, my imagined-nephew, for dramatic effect. I tell you this because it is the truth and I tell you this because it happened this way. I began to form the words, “Oh, I’m going here,” to indicate the other direction.

Then I thought about that long-ago bike-walk home and the metallic ring of Diet Pepsi in my mouth. I thought about that poem-note I never owned up to. I thought about Paula Fonseca and Rose DaSilva and I thought, Is “Jolene Hay” going to get added to that list?

And I heard myself saying, “Cool. I’m going that way too. I’ll walk with you.”

Seventeen years of being in love and two beautiful children later, it remains the best decision I’ve ever made in my entire life. Check it:

Epilogue (At long, long, long last)

So. What’s the moral of the story here? What advice am I giving you, my beloved-but-unknown nephew?

Do I look back with regret or longing about what may have been with some girls in High School? No. That isn’t it.  All those things were important to 15, 16, 17 year old me on the Universe’s timeline.

That’s not the regret; I’m pretty cool with where I landed and I’m infinitely glad that I managed to somehow, through a series of mistakes and missteps,  fall  my way into where I needed to be to meet her there in that spot. Eff Charlie Sheen. I am #winning.

But I tell you what I do regret about those instances, when I think back about that time, and what I hope you don’t have to end up regretting as you make your way through High School. And then, you know, life.

I regret that I had the intention to do something, to take action and that fear and self-doubt kept me from following through. I regret internalizing the idea of giving up and becoming familiar with self-inflicted defeat.  The official particulars of what might or mightn’t have happened are kind of unimportant in the grand scheme.

What counts, I think, are your intentions and how your actions either met or failed them. That’s what you have in the end total.  That’s what you end up measuring yourself with.

The world is about to open up to you in ways it has never been open before: cars, opportunities, freedoms, choices… All stuff that age and mobility have kept you shielded from.

I tend to think that people who tell you that High School was the best four years of their life are either to be pitied or despised. Probably both. They’re usually sad cases. I don’t think they should come close to the best years of your life. I think you probably have done a catastrophic series of wrong things if you can manage to say those words in your 30s or 40s and mean them.

But at the same time, they don’t have to be the worst. My advice is this. Don’t repeat my story. I’m glad it is my story, no doubt. But the reality is, it didn’t become “a story” until it had an ending.  And really, the “ending” was actually the beginning of where my life stopped being about constructing imagined narratives and stated being about actually living them.

My advice is this: Don’t start too late. Start early in fact, hooking up your intentions with your actions. Not just about girls, but with everything. The world is yours, you’re young and nothing is set in stone. It is all open up. Be assured that it is OK to attempt something extraordinary, out of all the possibilities.

Ok, mainly it is about girls.

So that’s it. Speaking of alternate universes and collapsed wave functions and regret at what might have been, I end with this:

I regret that I have to address this to the nephew I imagine rather than one I have; one whose life I wonder what it would be to be a part of. I regret that I could not tell you these stories in person over pizza or after movies I bring you to see. Where said stories  probably wouldn’t be so damn long.

But being as that’s all I got, I hope you find something in here worthwhile. I hope you might entertain, for a minute, what having an actual Uncle Josh might have been like. Or might be like, if you ever decide to find out on your own, later on. I’ll be around.

Go out into the rest of your life and knock ‘em dead, my nephew-I-don’t-quite-have.

Ethan, nothing and no one is beyond you. If you believe anything at all, believe that. Impossible though it should be to say and mean it, given our relative-stranger status,  I love you, kiddo.

Sincerely,

Your Not-Quite-Uncle Josh