The Crush

Today’s entry is not about a guy I’ve fucked, I’m sorry to say. It’s about a guy I go goony for, every time I see him.

I remained awake in bed last night trying to remember who were the objects of my first childhood crushes. I remembered a girl named Beth, sometime in the third grade, for whom I nurtured an unspoken passion. There was my intense crush on my absent brother that was more akin to hero worship, starting around the time I was ten. In high school I had a deep unrequited love for the valedictorian of the class ahead of mine, a girl who lived in my neighborhood who proved the age-old complaint of She doesn’t even know who I am! when I got up the nerve to ask her to sign my yearbook at the end of her senior year, and she scrawled someone else’s name before the words, “Have a nice summer!”

In college I had a multi-year crush on a boy I saw from afar during freshman orientation, and hungered for him without a word every time our paths would cross on campus. He too seemed to have a crush on me, but neither of us did anything about it until the night before we graduated, eight semesters later. At the same time I juggled a wild passion for a girl in my sophomore dorm, who in turn burned with passion for a bearded buffoon who treated her like crap while I showered her, unnoticed, with attention and occasional flowers. All I got in return was the dubious privilege of being her confidante, which involved having to listen to her mope about her buffoon while I ached inside.

Early crushes are painful things. One doesn’t have the life experience to know what they are, or to take them philosophically. All one really knows is that there’s desire there, sometimes a desire more frightening and overwhelming than anything one’s ever experienced before. The force is so strong it seems almost like a tidal wave, yet the only thing one can think to do is suppress it and let it go unspoken. Which in itself, is tragic.

I’ve had a rich crush life since my college days, but I learned something about them during that time. A fledgling sprout of a crush is sweet. Its seed is affection—undiluted and pure. It’s delight in the presence of another. It’s joy in its truest form, and it’s supposed to be enjoyed.

The problem I had in my teen and college years is that I’d want so much more from my crushes than what that little sprout could support. When I learned finally to relish the feelings of a crush without hanging excessive expectations on it, or building from it an imaginary future that I expected to come true through sheer force of will, I finally could accept crushes for what they were, and enjoy the people upon whom I had them, without resenting them in the end.

My current crush tends bar once a week, Sunday nights, at a dive I occasionally go to with friends. And he’s so pretty. When I started crushing out on him four or five years ago, the kid was a tiny twink dancer whose only asset was a perky and round little butt on a skinny little body. Now he’s twenty-five, no longer a dancer, and has filled out nicely. He has a man’s shoulders and arms, a slightly furry chest, and a lean, narrow waist. When he’s tending bar, he’ll usually remove his shirt to show off that body (and increase his tips). It’s hard to keep me from turning my chair across the room to face him, when that happens, so I can stare at his jeans hanging low from those slender hips.

Here’s what I love about my bartender: his floppy, jet-black hair, which has gone from short to Jesus-length to shaved to long and shaggy again, over the last five years. I love the dark, haphazard swoops that are his eyebrows. I love the roundness of his face, sometimes covered in scruff or outright beard, sometimes clean-shaven. I love his dark brown eyes. I love the way he stands, stares blankly, and hums to himself when he thinks he has nothing to do, though someone at the bar’s other end is trying to get his attention. And on those occasions when he gets up to sing karaoke, I love how awful he is at it. He’s not so terrible that it’s amazing, but he’s endearing because he’s off-tune and wooden and stiff and doesn’t really seem to give a damn. And because afterward, when the noise ceases and he steps down off the stage, his little smile of relief at being done is so, so cute.

I like all those little things, and appreciate them for what they are. I don’t try to think about nailing the kid, much, or about the little mountain cottage the two of us will share when we’re old and gray. I just like how alive the little things make me feel.

My friends tease me about my bartender boy, because I can’t talk to him. I’m too shy. I know! It’s totally unlike me. When I have to buy a drink from him, I mumble my order and avert my eyes in a way that makes me roll my eyes and shake my head at myself when I think about it at home, after. I’ll gaze from afar, and sigh, and let them tease me, because I know something they don’t. I did attempt to talk to the bartender one time.

It was a Sunday night on which I was there by myself, for a change. Without my friends to hang with, I sat at the bar and let my crush tend to me there. Silently I decided that it would be the night I got to know my bartender boy. We’d strike up a conversation. I’d find out that he was really a serious young veterinary student, or a talented musician waiting for the moment to make his break. He’d want to talk about literature, or he’d intently lean over and give me his opinions on Stanislavsky. We’d have one of those friendships in which I’d add him on Facebook and we’d wave and call out each other’s names when I walked into the bar. That’d show my friends, all right, when the bartender boy and I were best buds.

Then the bartender boy came over and, from beneath the bar, and right at the spot where I was sitting, produced an enormous Tupperware container. I mean, seriously large. It had to be a four-gallon tub, and it was filled with an opaque red-colored liquid studded with chopped carrots, potatoes and noodles. With a plastic Taco Bell spork in one had, he popped open the lid. I could smell the vapor of a slightly-warm tomato-vegetable mixture.

Clutching the tub to his belly with one arm, my crush wrapped his fingers around the plastic utensil, dug it into the tub, and stuffed a dripping sporkful into his mouth. Then he chewed it with bulging cheeks. “I like soup!” he announced to me. Then he stuffed another sporkful into his mouth before he’d finished chewing and swallowing the first. “Soup is good!” he asserted, giving me a good view of the see-food buffet.

All the little fantasies I’d had about the intellectual conversations I’d be having with the bartender boy went flying out the window. “Yay, soup,” I said wanly, and turned around in my seat so that I didn’t have to watch the gruesome scene any more. Since that night, I’ve stayed across the room from the kid, so that I couldn’t let him give me any more reason to stop going moony-eyed over him.

Because that’s the thing about crushes. They’re fragile things. Sometimes you really don’t want to confront the reality behind them too closely. Not if you want to keep them alive for a time.