The one who won't leave me alone

This entry is going to come at you in more than one installment. There’s a lot to say.

This redhead hasn’t left me alone since I met him in 1993. I was 13, he was 14.

I call him Firecrotch

Firectorch was my first kiss. Like, real kiss. With tongue. Like, my first make-out session. Both of ours actually. My memories of that kiss was the same as Harry Potter’s first kiss with Chou Chang: wet.

Firecrotch, the pain-in-the-ass, likes to remind me sometimes, that I have a soft spot for him. Just a couple words or phone calls here and there that makes me remember.

He tends to pop back up in my world every-so-often, especially when I’m not crushing hard on someone else. And if you’ve read any of the other entries in this blog, I crush a lot and I crush hard. I admit it is kind of obsessive. If I were one of these dudes and knew how hard this girl was crushing, I’d be scared. And that’s why I give these guys props when I think they know it.

Anyway, I went to an overnight camp in junior high and Firecrotch was my “boyfriend” for about two weeks. I remember the precise moment when I decided I liked him; it was on the volleyball court. I loved the combination of his strawberry-blonde jew-fro and the weird acid-washed bright blue t-shirt he was wearing. I told my friend that I like his hair.

She runs off and tells him I have a crush on him. How junior high is that?

Somehow it gets discussed that he likes me too and that he should “ask me out.” And at some point a couple days later, we were playing capture the flag and we end up alone.

“I have something to ask you” Firecrotch says.

“I know” I say.

“Will you, um, go out with me?”

“Yeah”

Granted this isn’t exactly how the conversation went, but it was something like this. We “dated” until camp was over. I kissed him good night on the cheek once probably almost a week after we started “dating” and he went “wooooo!”

We argued about the Batman and Robin cartoon that that was on tv, I had a crush on Robin (for some reason I found a cartoon character hot. See that looking at that picture up there at the top? he's totally my type, buff with glasses!)

There are a couple really cute pictures that I have of us cuddling during the after dinner song sessions. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I have any other pictures like that with any other guy, I wonder how much this says about my love life... I’ve hidden these behind other pictures. I won’t get rid of them, but I don’t want to look at them.

My brother was a CIT, a counselor-in-training for my group session. Basically he was a camper who got to go to camp for free in exchange for sitting around in the evening waiting for campers to sneak out of their cabins and more time to make out with members of the opposite sex. My brother was Firecrotch’s CIT. I think it freaked Firecrotch out a little bit. My brother liked to tease him, of course, that's an older brother's duty.

We never really “broke up.” I think it was just a camp-is-over type of thing. I called him when there were raging fires near his house. He was terrible on the phone.

We stayed friends. He came out of his shell once he got to high school. He was girl crazy. Girls loved him. We never made out again. But we would hang out whenever he was in town visiting family.

I developed a real crush on him. I never knew what to do about it. I still don't.

Part 2