I was foolish to fall for a man named Jimmy.
A grown man who resorts to calling himself Jimmy clearly has issues with his adulthood or, as I like to think of it, the hidden grown-up within.
Granted, it seems that anyone who uses the full name James is probably gay. I know dozens of Davids and Michaels and Donalds, all fabulously camp, and yet my friends Dave, Mike and Don are relentlessly heterosexual. So, no James. But Jim, for example, is a perfectly acceptable shortening of the proper name. It’s masculine, muscular and evokes a construction worker (the brawny arms and rippling, tanned chest, not the butt-crack and the beer belly).
I admit that it was Jimmy’s childlike quality that drew me to him in the first place. Irreverent, whimsical, impulsive and just plain silly, the man never failed to make me laugh, and swept me off my feet with what I felt was romanticism, but what was probably just another escape from reality on his part. For the duration of our time together, I really felt as though I was in one of those torturous music-video moments from romantic comedy movies, where the couple frolics through a montage of happy, hand-holding goofy scenes, and we all sigh wistfully and wonder where the nearest Tower Records is so we can rush directly there and buy the soundtrack.
I believe the first one of these awful montages was in "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid," where our heroes and some woman perform unthinkable and dangerous acts on a bicycle accompanied by Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, a song I never thought was relevant, since the entire scene took place in bright and gorgeous sunlight.
We played hooky from work, ran off to theme parks on a whim, stayed overnight in motels just for the fun of it, and generally acted like besotted adolescents.
When he just stopped calling, I was rather confused. We had spent every night together for ten months, joined at the hip (or we would have been had he not been so much taller than me; I would have had to wear hooker pumps to raise my hips to meet his). One night he just didn’t come over. I called, we chatted; he wanted to catch dinner and a movie but was in the middle of something complicated involving system software, so could he call me back in half an hour? That’s thirty minutes, people.
Counting up until the morning in question, I had spent one and a half million minutes waiting for that return phone call. I did the math. Although it felt like I had counted every individual minute, each one draining more of my soul.
At first I assumed he had died some horrible and sudden death. Or maybe had concussed himself on a hard surface while crawling around hard-wiring some wealthy person’s home office and suffered total amnesia. Or even short-term memory loss, wiping the past ten months from his brain as easily as data on a SyQuest disk confronted with a magnet. But as the hours wore into days and the days into weeks, it seemed obvious that the same immaturity that drew me to him had led him to act for all the world like a petulant ninth grader disposing of his first crush.
