I was a pathetic hideous virgin.
I'm sure you find that hard to believe, dear reader. You look at how articulate I am in these columns, how wittily I craft my wordplay, how sophisticated and varied my musical taste is, and you think to yourself: this guy has probably always been drowning in babes. Firstly, I'd like to thank you deeply and truly for having that high an opinion of my sexiness. And, secondly, if you really believe that, you're crazy. Bug-nuts insane.
No, the truth is, in my younger days, I was unwanted. Untouchable. Not even remotely considered boyfriend material. And the fact that I was a 135 pound skin bag filled with testosterone and and an innocent belief in romance didn't help things on my end. I had all this drive in me, all this rampant emotion... yet no understanding of how to deal with it all. But who would have guessed that a big part of my sexual maturity would come from the come-hither New Wave songcraft of...
THE WAITRESSES.
My lack of a love life didn't stem from being a nobody. I was actually pretty popular. I have this weird, wonderful ability to make friends with people no matter what strata of society they represent. I was friends with the jocks and the nerds. The rich kids and the poor kids. The honors class kids and the remedial kids. Black, Asian, Mexican... all good. Had there been any gay kids who were out back then, I would have been pals with them too. In the Venn diagram of every possible type of social group in my high school, there was one tiny little minuscule space where they all overlapped. And the only inhabitant of that space was me.
No, my problem was that I, as The Kids say, had no game. My family didn't have a lot of money, so I never had the cool clothes all the rich kids had. I wasn't very athletic. I was a bookworm. I was painfully unsure of myself when I got outside my tiny comfort zone. And to drive home the point... (ahem, let me slip into my Large Marge voice...) I. LOOKED. LIKE... THIS!!!
Pucker up, ladies. Dr. Love is in the house.
Sad, right? So, yeah, I had no hope. And that sense of being "less than" manifested as an inability to converse with any girl I found even remotely attractive. You know that scene in the first Captain America movie, where he's in the car with Peggy Carter, and he keeps tripping over his words as he tries to empathize with her not being taken seriously, and everything he says is awkward and painful? That was me. That was so me. (I rocked that same pre-Super Soldier build, too.)
But agonizingly enough, that wasn't the worst of it. I could handle being an ugly duckling. I had friends and comics and TV and music and video games and all that. I'm pretty self-sufficient and armored-up when it comes to that stuff. No, there were two other things that made my situation incredibly difficult: I had the sex drive of a 70s porn star, and I was a hopeless romantic. A double whammy!
Let me tell you, high school is pure torture for a horny teenage boy who's been infected with Hallmark's "romantic love" nonsense. All that internal conflict leads you to do some stupid stuff, let me tell you.
Here's a prime example. Somewhere in the middle of ninth grade, I fell head over heels in deep smit with a girl in my class, someone I considered the hottest girl in school. I was so nuts for her, I felt like I'd burst wide open if I didn't do something to let her know how I felt. To that end, I wrote her a loooong love letter (by hand!), and asked her good friend to deliver it to her. Now, despite my desire to win her heart, I was so terrified of what I was doing, I couldn't bear to let her know who cobbled together this tome. So... I signed the letter "Mr. X". (I'll give you a moment to let that patheticness sink in.)
The next morning, as I was walking through the hall to my locker, a senior that I barely knew finger-gunned me and barked, "How's it goin', MISTER X!" All the blood in my body evaporated. Time stood still. The world rack-focused around me like Roy Scheider hearing "Shark!" for the first time. And then more people did the same thing. Dozens of people. Kids I'd never even seen before. I found out later that my crush read the letter out loud on her bus, accompanied by the raucous laughter of her friends. When she finished it, she asked, "Who is 'Mr. X'?" And the friend I gave the letter to said, "It's Don Stroud!" She completely threw me under the bus. (Pardon the pun.)
But that soul-crushing embarrassment did nothing to temper my inner horndog. There was a constant tug-of-war going on in my body, an unending battle between my simpering, fawning heart, and my pulsating, newly-hirsute loins. With every girl I found even halfway cute, I was all sexual Jekyll and Hyde. I wanted to hold her hand, to walk side-by-side along the shoreline, to look longingly into her eyes, to confess my deepest emotions... and then, do nasty stuff to her boobs. I was a raging, boiling cauldron of conflicting thoughts and hormones. How could things in my little world possibly get harder?
Enter MTV.
Cable TV arrived in my rural corner of the country sometime in late 1980, and by the next year, most everyone I knew had it installed. But it didn't really become a must-have until MTV launched in August of 1981. It sounds like a cliche, but MTV changed everything. For you Millennials out there, MTV was the "killer app" of cable TV. It was world-changing for us teenagers. Suddenly an unknown universe of music was piped directly into our homes. As I mentioned before, we had a very limited selection of radio stations in my area. But with MTV, we were exposed to a dizzying number of new bands and songs, things we would have never heard on Casey Kasem's weekly top 40 countdown. For months, it seemed like every morning at school we were discussing a new, cool clip. It was heaven.
That endless parade of music videos had a downside, however: the plethora of hot rock 'n roll babes! And they made me feel even more like a loser. It wasn't enough that I had to deal with the girls ignoring me in school, now I had to gaze at all these sexy divas dancing and writhing non-stop on my TV. Kim Wilde. Nena. Debbie Harry. Annabella Lwin. Terri Nunn. Dale Bozzio.
But none of them juiced my lemons the way Patty Donahue did.
You probably don't know her by her real name. But if I described her as "that girl in the 'I Know What Boys Like' video", I bet you can see her in your mind's eye. The curly brunette hair. The black and white checkered sleeveless shirt. The wide pink belt. The simple black skirt. The sheer hose. The shoes with the low heels. Yeah, her. To be honest, I didn't know her name until much, much later. But names didn't matter to a scrawny sixteen year old boy who was rarin' to go. All I knew is, "I Know What Boys Like" was mesmerizing.
I'd never seen a woman like Patty Donahue before. From the first shot of the video, a close-up of her lips as she nonchalantly puffs on a half-smoked cigarette, she had me wrapped around her catty little finger. Patty acted like she'd rather be anywhere else, as if singing to her unseen suitor was boring the living hell out of her. Her voice threatened to go off key at a moment's notice, and didn't care if it did. She swayed side to side with hardly any energy whatsoever. The band behind her was doing their best to entertain the viewer, but Patty couldn't be bothered. She wasn't there for us. She was there for... whatever.
Yet, at the same time Patty was trying to be as distant and unaffected as a human being could be, there was this playfulness in her outright dismissal. A tiny hint of a smile lurked at the corner of her mouth. In one smooth move she'd play with her skirt, then suddenly throw her shoulders forward. She would rock on one heel and strike a cute pose. And, was that a twinkle I saw in her eye? If she was so bored with this nameless guy... why did she seem to be having so much fun?
The clincher, though, the bit that really knocked me out, was when she says, "Sucker!"... followed by a snotty giggle. She lured me in, got me interested... Then POW! She took me out with a body blow. That playful teasing was electric.
Pure unadulterated sexiness.
At this point you're probably screaming at the screen, "Hello, McFly! She was just playing hard to get!" But, c'mon, cut me some slack. I was a sad virgin. I had no clue what "playing hard to get" meant. I had zero experience with "the dance" that occurs between two people who are attracted to each other. At this point in my life, I'd never had a girlfriend. The only kiss I'd ever had was awkward and weird. I didn't know how this whole "boys and girls" thing worked. All I knew was I couldn't get enough of that woman. Those feelings burned into my nascent sexual DNA and stayed with me for years.
Believe it or not, I didn't hear a single note of any other Waitresses song until late in the 90s, when I learned of Patty's death from lung cancer. (She was only forty years old.) That led me to hunt down Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?, the Waitresses' first album. As far as New Wave platters go, it's fun, and eclectic, but not really a classic. "No Guilt" has a quirky, semi-ska vibe. "Quit" could have been a Blondie B-side. The muscular, driving "Heat Night" wouldn't sound of out place on The Cars' Panorama. "Pussy Strut" might be my second favorite song on the album, a chaotic song that uses the rules of thermodynamics and geometry as a thinly veiled euphemism for... well, you know.
"I Know What Boys Like", however, is a stone cold New Wave must-have track. I've heard it umpteen thousand times since high school, and it's never gotten old. Patty's performance still gives me all sorts of tingles in my fun parts.
Now... here's where things get embarrassing. I hope I can explain this well enough that no one out there gets muscle strain from their eyes rolling back into their brains. But Patty's "love you/hate you" dynamic taught me something. No, really, it did! As I (sort of) matured into my twenties, and got lucky enough to carve a few notches on my bedpost, I had a realization. A realization about what I wanted and needed from my partner. My teenage reaction to Patty's salty siren song had made it very clear to me that I needed to be with a woman who had an edge. No prudish uptight spinster type for me. I wanted to hang with someone who had a biting sense of humor. A gal who would sit in a Burger King and make fun of everyone who walked in. A girlfriend who would laugh her ass off at phony phone calls on The Howard Stern Show. I wanted a manic pixie dream girl, one with a couple of shots of top-shelf bourbon in her.
And thanks to Al Gore inventing the Internet, I found her!
Suzie and me, celebrating our nuptials with class.
My wife Suzie and I are an actual, true blue online dating success story. We've been together since our second date. This April we celebrated our thirteenth year as husband and wife, and July marks our nineteenth year as a couple. She's a blonde knockout who loves animals, good food, and making the world a better place. She's brassy, sassy, and classy. Edge? Hell yeah, she's got an edge. At times it's honed razor sharp, at other times it's jagged and rusty. But it gives her character, and I love her for it. And for some unknown reason, she loves me back.
Not bad for a pathetic hideous virgin, huh?
BIO
Don Stroud is not the famous actor and world-class surfer of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning film editor and struggling amateur screenwriter. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his wife. You can follow him on Twitter, where he pops up sporadically, at @DonStroud2.