My Second Boyfriend

It was February 1986. He was the new kid.

I walked around the corner on my way to the cafeteria, and there was a young man standing beside my friend’s brother. I’m not kidding. He was 15 but looked 18. He was already 6 ft tall, had shoulders as wide as a doorframe. His curly black shaggy hair spilled over the collar of his black leather motorcycle jacket. He had sparkling hazel eyes and of course, yes, there is a pattern here, black eyelashes. I didn’t breathe for a few seconds.

He smiled at me even before my friend introduced us. And the rest is history.

Danny’s life hadn’t been easy. He was traumatized by his father’s death seven years before, he had a hard time in school, and he’d already had a nasty little cocaine experience that put him in the hospital. He’d also been in some kind of juvenile detention situation. We had some badass characters at our school. Country kids come in two types: nice kids and total badass punk asses. But Danny had a tattoo. Back then, nobody under 25 had a tattoo. He had snarling Dobermann inked over a scar from where somebody had stuck a knife in his arm. I had no reason to not believe any of it. I mean, who the hell inks a tattoo onto a 14 year old kid?




I was not his first girlfriend, either.

It was two days before Valentine’s day and at the big dance dance the next night, we were completely in love. The next day we found each other and floated down the halls, holding hands, grinning sloppily.

Understand that a kid like him doesn’t show up at a rural high school and not make some news. It was a big central school, with at least 1000 kids in it. But the students were from a wide radius of neighbouring towns. Moving from one town to another could keep a student in the same school district. He was new, different, and dangerous. There were girls flirting all over him. Preppy girls, metal girls, pretty girls, older girls.

And he picked me.

Little, goofy, scrawny, me. The pastor’s granddaughter. Odd, misfit, flat chested, awkward me. I was not cool, or hip, or gorgeous. And he picked me!

He wrote me long barely legible letters instead of paying attention in class. He was funny, and passionate, and deeply troubled.

He would let me wear his denim Levi’s jacket with the Pink Floyd The Wall carefully drawn on the back. The jacket smelled like smoke and whatever that cologne was. Are you kidding me? Cologne. He was from a different planet.

He made funny faces all the time and sang out of key in his deep young man voice. His voice was lower than most other guys, but in goofy moments he’d break into a bubbling giggle. He was emotional. He could be extremely dark and he couldn’t hold still until he fell asleep.

He introduced me to Led Zeppelin. I will forever love him and be grateful to him for that.

We spent long hours listening to music. He wasn’t a musician and had no aspirations to be, but he was a huge fan. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of rock music between 1968 and 1978. He loved U2 and XTC and INXS - all the letters bands. He knew about British punk and American punk and mod and new wave, and was a connoisseur of heavy metal. He liked to misquote lyrics in those rambling disjointed letters he wrote me.

I was so crazy about him. I mean, I was frighteningly, violently, stupidly crazy about him. My emotions actually scared me sometimes.

Love is not always sweet and caring and pretty, and my love for Danny taught me that. Love really can make you feel like your heart is being ripped out. Being in love like that, in the middle of your teens, grows you up pretty damn fast.

We were boyfriend- girlfriend for a year. In that time we had a lot of laughs and fights and taught each other some hard lessons about life. Two mercurial people like us could not stay together and survive. When we were done with each other, we had thoroughly broken each other’s hearts.

There’s no way I can tell you everything about that volatile year and I wouldn’t anyways. Some things have to stay in my memories and I would never want to violate his privacy by spilling all the details.

I will tell you this though. You don’t spend such an influential time in your life with somebody and then forget about him, not in my family. Eventually, after the hurt cooled, he started bringing his new girlfriend out to meet my parents. He started chatting about cars and music with that new guy that had started hanging around with me.

In 1991, he came to my wedding and I went to his.

I wish I could say that we were still good friends but I haven’t talked to him since a phone call over two years. He was not doing well. My mom hasn’t seen his wife around town much lately. They haven’t seen Danny at all. I won’t pursue it and try to find out because even though we were all on good terms, there’s still something awkward about the fiery teenage long lost love coming back looking for him. So I’m staying out of it while we all hope, all of us, that someday he’ll call up my folks and let them know if he’s okay.

It was nice talking to him last time, even if he was having a difficult time. We laughed about some good times. I found myself apologizing for some of the nasty things I did and said way back then. He laughed softly. It was the same laugh from all those years before, only now it was even deeper than it was then, and roughed up with more years of smoking and drinking. “It’s okay Heidi. We were kids.”

He’s right.

Wherever he is... I hope he’s okay and like I said, I’ll always thank him for the Zeppelin.