I lived in a small town through most of high school, so the local constabulary knew me by name. I imagine that if we’d lived in a larger town we would have gotten in to far less trouble. The problem with living in the country is that there’s so little to do. And where there’s little to do, you come up with your own types of entertainment. It didn’t help that my grandfather was a sheriff’s deputy.
Now Rob, one of my best friends in high school, was a good kind hearted person. He took a dim view to violence, loved intellectual conversation, and had a ready quip for just about anything you could say. And he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind at a moments notice. We’d been friends for a few years, and generally kept each other from too much harm or too much trouble.
For most of those years, Rob and I were friends with a girl named Kelly. Rob was incredibly infatuated and completely in love with Kelly. As best as I could tell, she had no idea. The three of us spent a lot of time together, and he made it incredibly obvious… or at least, I thought so.
But alas, if she did know, she never let on.
One day, Rob and I were driving around Albany and, just as we were turning on to Queen Avenue, he glanced at me and said, “I’m going to tell Kelly.” He didn’t need to expound upon his statement at all. I knew exactly what he meant.
And to be honest, I was shocked. Rob was pretty good at getting dates back in those days, but he was horrible about telling a girl how he felt. In fact, the last time he’d tried to do so, she ended up slapping him, running away, and never speaking to him again. When it came to love, Rob was a lot like me: a walking disaster area.
“Are you sure?” I asked. He nodded. He’d made up his mind, and he wasn’t going to turn back.
“What are you going to say?”
“That’s just the thing. I have this idea: I’m going to play a song for her and tell her that that is how I feel.”
Gentlemen, let me explain something to you, okay? We don’t get in to trouble when we’re honest and straightforward. Do you know when we get in trouble? When we have a plan. Or an idea. Or anything even remotely approaching what we would call “brilliant”.
Anyway. It was probably at this point that I burst out laughing. His “brilliance” was always pretty stupid, or at least, it was when a woman was involved. I knew with Rob’s luck, it was sure to backfire. Something was going to go horribly wrong. Defensively, he yelled, “She’ll understand!”
I nodded, but I was still laughing and wiping tears from my face.
“Well, let me know how it goes.”
A few days later, Rob drove over to my house. Depressed. I jumped in the car and we started driving. I was afraid to ask, but I hadn’t spoken with Kelly yet that day, and I was dying to know how horribly it had gone.
“So… what happened?” I asked.
He pulled the car over, and slumped over. I was kind of surprised. I’d figured things would go badly, but I didn’t think that they would go quite that bad. He proceeded to tell me the details of his love seronade, and how it went from a good idea to a train wreck in the course of only a few seconds.
He had taken her out for dinner and stopped at one of the local stores to pick up something to drink on the drive back to her house (which was about twenty minutes outside of town). Sadly, before going in to the store he decided that the moment was right.
He placed a cassette tape (You know, those things that happened before CD’s but after records and 8 tracks?) in the deck of his car and hit pause. He explained to her that the song was about how he felt, and asked her to hit play when he got out of the car.
Yes, you read that right. He got out of the car. Sigh.
What song was he using? I’ll sigh again: Sigh. It was bad enough that the song was by Aerosmith, but the song name was “Angel”. Yeah. I know. I can hear you groaning out there. But it gets much much worse.
As Rob climbed back in to the car, Kelly was giving him the weirdest look he’d ever seen. She asked him why he wanted to tell her that, and why use a song? She was visibly upset, and Rob was heartbroken.
“I really like you Rob, I thought we might end up together someday.” She said to him.
Now it was Rob’s turn to be confused. What was she talking about? He was using the song to try and tell her that he wanted to be with her, and he loved her. What was going on?
Here’s a tip for all you guys out there: if you’re going to use a cassette tape to tell someone how you feel, be sure you put it in the right way. You know, tapes have two sides.
As I said, Rob’s luck was awful. So what song came blaring through the speakers when that poor girl had hit play? None other than the song, “Dude looks like a lady”.
She thought he was either trying to tell her she was ugly, he was a crossdresser, or he was gay. None of which worked out well for Rob.
The whole time Rob is telling me this, I’m laughing so hard that I’m crying.
“Well, how did she take the real news once you told her?” I asked.
He finally smiled, “We’ve got a date next weekend.”