This story is about a crush I had on a girl named Amy in the 3rd grade.
I don’t talk about it very often, but I’m not really 100% gay. I didn’t fully embrace this part of my sexuality until my 40s. I register as a 5 on the Kinsey Scale. I like to say “95/5” or “Reverse Bi-Curious” which makes me laugh.
I don’t mention it because it hardly matters at this point. I’ve been happily married to a wonderful man for… wow, it will be 14 years in November, and even if I wanted to experiment, it’s a world I really don’t care to explore. Plus I never wanted to mention it to my parents and deal with the whole “Well why didn’t you marry a woman then?”
But I remember several distinct crushes on girls/women over the years: Amy in 3rd grade, Andrea at 13 years old, Felicia after high school, and far more recently a coworker who shall remain nameless (I definitely told her once though.)
And I’m a crush kind of guy. How does Big Pun say it? “I’m not a player I just crush a lot.” I’m a hopeless romantic, and when I fantasize about people I’m attracted to, it’s usually more about kissing and holding than actual sex. I’ve always been like this, and probably always will. Shit, I have one on someone right now. My husband tends to laugh at me when I go through these, unless I get depressed about it then he’s just annoyed and hoping it will be over soon. Anyway, this one in 3rd grade was my first.
Amy was a girl in the gifted program with me. I tested into that program every single year of school (in high school they called it the “Honors” program,) but I was definitely on the lower rung of the IQ scale in that program. Everyone was always smarter than me, and it was tough to keep up.
She was one of the smartest in my class. I always asked her for help because I knew she’d always have the right answer. I remember always looking at her wide-eyed with admiration. But not just because she was smart. She had light blue eyes, strawberry blond hair, a fully round face with few hard edges, and her skin was always tan-colored even though it was just her natural tone. I thought she was so pretty.
I was raised on radio, and whenever I could, whether at home on the stereo in the living room or making my parents turn it to my favorite station in the car, I would tune in. There was this station in St. Louis called KHTR 103.3, that played all of the top 80s hits. (Is that station still around??) I was addicted to that station.
“Something About You” would come on and I began to associate this song with Amy. Every time I hear this song, even today, I always recall her. It’s important to note here that as a kid I only barely had a grasp on the meaning of the lyrics of these songs, if I even knew the right lyrics at all. The line in this song that says “fragile but free” I always sang as “Frank Jabba free.” (I was a Star Wars kid too.) What the hell did I think that even meant??
But my experience with music has always about connecting to the feeling and emotion of the music more than the lyrics. Yes, I did understand the chorus of “There must be something about you, baby, so right…” However, it was the big swelling synths, one could say a signature of 80s pop, that felt like my own heart swelling when I thought of her. And the pre-chorus/bridge/whatever when he goes into singing falsetto, I couldn’t tell you why it invoked so much emotion for me, but it made me feel like I was floating. And even just the harmonic “Oooohs” at the beginning and end of the track had this tone of slight melancholy of not having her but the hopefulness that I could.
My favorite memory of this crush was the time I tried really hard to impress her, and failed miserably. As a class the teacher took us across the street to this big playground to play, and there was this big swing set. When I say big I mean BIG; it wasn’t the standard 7 or 8 feet tall, it had to be more like 12 feet. And of course from my small 3rd-grader body’s perspective, it seemed like 20 feet.
Some saw danger but I saw opportunity. Amy was nearby and I had been wanting to impress her so bad. I asked another boy in class to help me, to give me a proper push so I could swing as high as I could go. I finally swung hard enough to get the myself almost level to the top bar. I yelled “HEY AMY, WATCH THIS!”
I jumped from the apex of my swing, expecting that I would stick the landing like Mary Lou Retton or something. I absolutely did not. I landed flat on my face and stomach, knocking the wind out of me hard. Amy and a couple other classmates ran over to see if I was okay. Physically, once I caught my breath I was fine. But I wanted to leave my face buried in the ground forever out of embarrassment.
I wonder where she is now, what her life turned out to be like. I doubt she remembers me at all. But I’ll always remember her fondly, and laugh at my abject failure at the playground that day.
