Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2006 > September-October 2006

The woman chasing me down the stairs was slightly winded—breathless, I like to think. I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota and had just attended a gathering of honors students. “I liked what you said back there,” the woman shouted at me. “Are you going to the pizza party?”

Her name was Amy, and she seemed bright, kind, utterly unpretentious. She had long brown hair. Beneath her bulging backpack and demure flowered dress, she was slender as a No. 2 pencil. In short, she was exactly the sort of woman I wanted nothing to do with.

Amy was a nerd, by the crude dichotomy of my high school, in which you were uncool if you knew the answers, cool if you never let on. What’s more, she was from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a touristy little town where my uncle kept a cabin. In Rhinelander, the softball teams play on snowshoes—in the summer, mind you—just for kicks. (Some would say hicks.)

None of this would have mattered, of course, had I not been exactly the same. Shy and unathletic in high school in Milwaukee, I spent most of my free time writing idiosyncratic columns (sometimes on the First Amendment, sometimes on whether wrestling was a sport) for the school newspaper and watching old movies on television. I learned coolness from Humphrey Bogart, and during my senior year I grew a pencil-thin mustache à la Errol Flynn, which couldn’t have helped much. I was perfectly set to seduce an 80-year-old woman. What friends I had were arguably worse off than me, band geeks who were beat up with their own instruments. Sure, I could play “Stairway to Heaven” on the piano, but to girls I might as well have been playing air guitar. My mind was made up: When I escaped to college, there would be no more nerds for me.

In my first week at Minnesota, I was off to a good start. One night, after dinner in the dormitory, I played some blues on the house piano, a slow stride up the keys, like something from Casablanca, and soon an admiring female was draping herself across the piano top, just like in the movies. She was a blonde in a short blue dress, with a wink so mischievous it threw me off-key. “Of all the dorms in all the colleges in all the world, you walked into mine,” I wished I’d said. But instead I mumbled “hi,” and quickly ran out of tunes. My repertoire was limited, in more ways than one. Now that women were finally noticing me, I realized I had no idea what to do with them. Especially not with the kind of women I wanted. The kind who know their way around Victoria’s Secret better than the library. Women with beach tans, beach-blonde hair, and beach-babe clothing. In short, the type who believes that life is, in fact, a beach.

Somehow it never occurred to me, however, that in order to go out with the woman draped over the Lamborghini at the car show, you might actually have to own that vehicle, or any vehicle. A guy like me—with no car, no cash, and the musculature of a banana—wasn’t bringing much to the party. I did, however, look older than my 18 years, which is how I came to know Apple. “Buy me some cigarettes?” she asked me. “Buy me some beer?” Ever wondered where all the nice guys were? We were trying to be bad for the first time in our lives. God help us.

Apple was my language partner in Spanish class, where she was known by her Spanish name, Manzana. Manzana: It sounded like a Mexican beach town, and I imagined her there, a flower tucked behind her ear, sipping something unpronounceable in a cantina with no name at all. She always looked as if she’d just rolled out of a hammock, her short red hair leaping out like flames in all directions. She generally arrived late for class, smelling of incense, and after stashing her Guatemalan bag beneath her desk she would immediately put her head down for a sort of siesta. She gave the mysterious impression of leading a more exciting life than everyone else, and I suspected that more than a few men had a tattoo because of her.

Manzana lived in a tumbledown building that had once been the setting for a movie about a bohemian misfit played by bad-boy actor Christian Slater. The place felt like a carnival funhouse: doorways sagging under a hundred years of history, brick walls slouching toward oblivion. Here, amid a cloud of patchouli smoke, Manzana told me that for the past year she’d been too chronically stoned to do her math homework. “Yeah, I get that,” I lied. The only grass I’d ever known was the kind I cut for a summer on a groundskeeping crew.

Ultimately, hanging out with Manzana felt like running a convenience store. The last time I saw her was after she’d complained that her roommates had sucked up all of her beer. I surprised her by buying two cases and asking her over to my apartment, thinking we’d drink some and, well, ay caramba! Manzana brought her roommate and left with the beer, without staying to drink a drop.

By this time, as I was focusing my studies on literature, I was already meeting a different kind of woman, with a different kind of need: students who wanted me to read their fiction stories. One afternoon, on the last day of a writing class, a beautiful woman handed me her phone number. Emily was captivating in an English major sort of way—long brown hair, thick sweaters that smelled of clove cigarettes. I’d been writing terrible, poetic stories in which young women were always put just out of reach by some mental illness or terminal disease, which somehow ennobled them, and the male protagonist even more so for sticking things out at their side. Emily, as it happens, had an eating disorder. She was just the sort of tragic heroine I thought I could save.

Unfortunately, the real tragedy was just beginning. For a few weeks, I took Emily to lunch and read her short stories, and one day we found ourselves talking atop her bed. I was a virgin, despite all of my seduction strategies, and I let Emily make the first move. Only, she had something quite different in mind. She reached across me into the bedside table—and pulled out a photograph of her boyfriend. The end.

I should have seen it coming. Bogart never stepped out of character, never fell for a dame to whom he couldn’t relate. What did he do in Casablanca when the woman he loved proved too different? He put her on a plane and didn’t look back. It may be human nature to want everything we’ve never had. But instinctively we know better; we know what we need.

After all, I did accept the invitation of Amy the honors student to that pizza party all those years ago. Over cheese and pepperoni, we talked old movies and new books and I even confessed that I loved the snowshoe softballers up in Rhinelander.

But afterward, when I walked Amy out, I didn’t bother to get her number. I put her on a plane, in a sense, with no return ticket. And I never saw her again. Though for the next few years, chasing rebels and flirts and trying on new personalities—finding myself by losing myself—I wouldn’t exactly be looking in all the right places.

Tim Gihring (B.A.’95) is the senior writer at Minnesota Monthly magazine. His essay “Fake Dating” was published in Before the Mortgage: Brazen Loves, Broken Leases, and the Perplexing Pursuit of Adulthood this past spring.