I usually wore shorts and tank tops, which might have showed off my musculature to advantage to any that were into bulk. But, I was also cursed with enough body hair that my team nickname in high school was “Link” for Missing Link. And thick body hair hadn’t been a thing since the mid-70s so most guys peeled the glued toupees off their chests.
I don’t wonder why Playgirl never called.
So, perhaps it wasn’t really all that odd that Wendy and I, neither of us the prime specimens of our respective genders, managed to find each other. But, I doubt we would have even so, if she hadn’t grasped the bull by the horns and asked me out.
It was either late August or early September by then. I don’t remember which. I only know it was because the sun was touching the horizon when we both got off at closing time rather than a finger high in sky.
I was hot, sweaty, and tired. I was covered in parking lot grime and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have smelled too good even if I hadn’t stepped in the dirty diaper someone had thrown out after changing their baby. I really just wanted to drive home, which I still lived with my Mom thirty miles away in one of the smaller surrounding towns, shower and maybe veg in front of the television before getting some sleep. I had a dollar in my car glove box. And I wasn’t really interested in Wendy per se.
But, I’d also been without a girlfriend since early July and had lost touch with my high school buddies already as we’d scattered after graduation like dandelion fuzz on the West Texas winds. Maybe I was lonely. I don’t know. I’d never been all that popular, but I had kept busy.
And I was intrigued both by Wendy’s strangeness and her sheer chutzpah to walk up to me and ask me if I would go grab a bite to eat with her and offer to pay for it when I said I didn’t have any money. At least as long as I didn’t order the whole left side of the menu or anything crazy.
I don’t think I would have classified that first outing to McDonalds as a raving success by any scale as we limped around in conversational circles without really finding any common ground.
I was a Baptist who still went to church when I didn’t have to work. She thought her family might have been catholic, but she’d never been in a church in her life.
I’d played football and worked out incessantly in the off season hoping to overcome my lack of height to make a college team, which I hadn’t. Wendy had worked at a local music store when school was over for the day and had skated out of any extra-curricular through work/study.
Wendy liked to go to dance clubs, which I still think qualify as bars since they serve alcohol, and dance. Did I mention I was Baptist and actually pretty serious about it? Dancing was a no go. As was drinking. And such places were obviously dens of iniquity.
Yeah, all in all I think Adolph Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi would have had better luck finding something to talk about. Just don’t ask me which of us was which in that comparison.
Thinking about it now, I really could not say what in the hell she might have been thinking to ask me out again a few days later. Or what was running through my mind that I actually went.