My Life's Obsession, Part 6: Jenni

Unlike many of the people in my past, I know the exact circumstances under which I met Jenni. It's weird, how that has become a theme in my life - how my closest friends aren't really people I have *met* per se, so much as people that have simply been around. But Jenni - Jenni was in the band, a Clarinet player on the other side of the terraced band room who for most of the year remained faceless. She'd been living in Switzerland for the past four years - her father was a very high-up patent lawyer who had been transferred there for a time - but had returned home for her High School years. I knew that there was someone in the band for whom that description fit, but couldn't have given you a face or a name.

We met on the bus on the way back home from State Festival, a three hour ride that I specifically remember was punctuated by an intense desire for me to go to the bathroom. Usually on such long bus trips I, along with friends Schoop and Fitz (Senior, a very passive personality, basically into whatever the people around him were into, perpetual third chair trombone), and one other recruit would start up a game of Euchre. In this case our fourth was Lisa, who most of us knew only as the second half of the couple we called only by NateLisa; she and her boyfriend, Nate, were the school's quintessential geek coupling, joined at the hip (and the lip) more often than not, with the rare exception that occurred via the fact that she was in the band and he was not. Nate was a friend of Schoop's, and so she tolerated the likes of Schoop, Fitz, and myself, and on this particular bus ride, declared that her friend Jenni would be sitting with us, and that she wanted to learn how to play.

Euchre, once you get past the goofy Bauer rules, is not a difficult game in the least, and Jenni picked up on it right away. Now that I think on it, that might have been one of the first few things that attracted me to her - the intelligence that shone in the ease with which she picked up a card game. Before the end of the trip she was playing in Lisa's place, and advising her on strategy, and since I was Lisa's partner for the trip's majority, led to a number of high-fives and camraderie as we more than held our own against Schoop (who was an expert at the game) and Fitz (who wasn't generally bad, but who was far too passive at taking the lead). I was in rare form on the trip, and was helped in that, for it was not at all difficult to be in rare form around Schoop and Fitz. Not to disparage them, but neither one of the two is a gifted improvisational orator (they are fine with pre-prepared material), and as such, the trip offered ample opportunities for me to say the same thing that they had just said, and make it sound interesting.

It worked. By the end of the trip, Jenni was giving me looks - the kind that said, without room for error in translation, "I really wish I wasn't sitting next to Lisa, here." I think even Schoop and Fitz, the perpetual clods, picked up on it. Ladies and gentlemen, there was chemistry in the air.

Prom was upcoming, and I didn't have a date as yet. I mentioned this offhand, on the bus, and Jenni immediately prompted that she had taken a baby-sitting job over Prom weekend. That was, in a weird sort of way, encouraging and disheartening at the same time. Disheartening for the obvious reason - since it was an obvious signal for "don't ask, I won't be able to go" - but encouraging, in a way, since it meant that one way or another, she was thinking along those lines. The text of the statement was a warning, but the tone of it was disappointed; it said "Don't ask, because I'll be forced to say no and I don't want to be put in a position where I have to reject you".

The specifics of that exchange also benefitted me in another way; it spared me the anxiety of having to ask someone out straight-up while giving her a clear incentive to make the first move, were she interested. She later picked up on this directly; we were on the same page from the beginning. "I'd sent you a signal that would naturally keep you away", she later explained, to my agreement. "I had to be forward."

Forward she was. Not a week later she ambushed me after band rehearsal, saying that a group of friends were going out to a movie that weekend, "And I was wondering if you wanted to go with me."

The juxtaposition of the fact that it was a group of friends going out, but that the question had been phrased with the "with me" at the end of it, was certainly not lost on me. No room for misinterpretation. I accepted, knowing full well that this was a date.

Which in turn led to an awkward conversation the next day, where I had to explain to her that I couldn't go after all. I had a previous commitment - I was playing with the local semi-professional orchestra as a performance gimmick on their part where they took in the best of the high school band members and let them join into the 1812 Overture - that couldn't be cancelled.

The disappointment on her face was obvious, but she said I could make it up to her by giving her a ride home. To that I agreed (I had a car, she did not), and when I was prepared to drop her off (her home was gorgeous - unlike with Brac's house, I could see right away that her folks had Money), she invited me in.

Not much happened in that first adventure into her house (I was nervous as all hell - never in my life had a girl invited me in to their house without there being a clear picture of where we stood); we had a snack and a nice conversation, and I met her younger sister Alison (a precocious seventh grader who I would grow quite fond of over the coming years), who snickered immediately, before heading out the door just in time to meet her mother (who worked at a menial job to keep herself busy) - she shot me a strange look.

She asked me for a ride the next day as well, and again invited me in. Things got a bit more serious this time, with a tickle-fight that ended in a kiss - her first, as it turned out, though I didn't learn that until quite a bit later. There was no Serious Discussion as to where things stood in that regard - I suppose that neither one of us had any illusions that we were not an item at that point - but on the next day, a Friday as it turned out, when my foray into her house turned into one long makeout session, Alison crashed in on us and pretended like it was an accident. "You know," Alison said to Jenni, "Mom hasn't even figured out that he's your new BOYfriend" (the stressing of the first syllable of that word is inevitable in pre-teens, I think, and my memory of it is alarmingly distinct). Jenni and I shot each other a look, each thinking the same thing. How had we managed to get things so out of order? But it worked, and before either one of us really knew what was happening, we were arm-in-arm at school, putting on public displays of affection, going to movies, renting movies to watch in the basement of her house, more often than not using it as an excuse to cuddle up and make out.

It's weird how I remember that time. There's a powerful element to the wonderful movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which deals with a long relationship since gone sour. For those unfamiliar with the movie, it invents a procedure whereby someone can have an entire person erased from their memory, more often than not in the form of, erasing an old girlfriend or boyfriend from your memory. The main character, Joel, as played by Jim Carrey, is erasing his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) after their relationship has gone sour (with the added complication that she has already erased him). Much of the movie consists of Joel's reminiscence of their relationship as he goes backwards in time, the memories deleting themselves after he relives them. The first memories, of the end of the relationship, are all bad; their fights, her flaws, their colossal argument that led to her leaving. The next are of the discontent and quiet unease that led to that point. It takes a while to get back to the good memories, but once he gets there, he realizes that he doesn't want the procedure done any more. "Just let me keep this memory", he pleads in a voice-over. "Just this one." The juxtaposition with the fighting throughout the rest of the movie is shocking.

I say this because I'm experiencing something similar as I write this. Given what I now know of my relationship with Jenni, and how it ended, and all the pain it caused, I have a weird temptation to cast everything that happened in the worst possible light. But that wouldn't be honest. The fact of the matter is, the remainder of that school year, and the summer that followed, was one of the best periods of my life.

Jenni wasn't the only factor in that, though she was a large part. As we started the first flush of our relationship, meeting her friends provided a startling coincidence: one of her best friends from elementary school, who she had hooked back up with (following her four-year stint in Switzerland), was a girl named Kelly, who was dating a guy that Jenni had also become friends with - a guy named Nick, who I had actually been friends with way back in elementary school myself. He had gone to a different Junior High, and then to the High School across town, and we had lost touch, but for a while we had actually been pretty close. The four of us got along very well, and spent much of the summer in each other's company, going to dinner, going to movies, just hanging out.

Things seemed to be coming together. My parents had been High School sweethearts, and my older brother was at college with his High School sweetheart, who he was obviously on track to marry. All of my grandparents had married their High School sweethearts. And here I was, about to graduate High School, and I met a girl with whom I shared the most serious relationship of my life to date. It might seem silly, but that was a hell of a psychological weight off my shoulders: I had found The One; I could relax now.

Things went quickly with Jenni. The progression to physical intimacy in particular was alarmingly fast; she went from having never kissed a boy to having her first sexual partner within a matter of months. She was my first as well, and far be it from me to be crude and spill out all the gory details, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it because - well - that was a very big part of what I remember. The first kisses in her basement - the first tentative gropings in the front seat of my 1968 Mercury comet - her mom walking in on us, hearing the footsteps on the stairs as we frantically put our shirts back on, kicked her bra underneath the sofa, grabbed the blanket, and pulled it over the two of us to make believe we had just been snuggling as we watched whatever movie we had rented.

The emotional intimacy came even more quickly than the physical. I had said "I love you" to previous girlfriends and thought that I had meant it, but now I realize that with Jenni, I meant it for the first time in truth. We talked about the future, almost from the beginning. We talked about her plans, how I would fit into them, my plans, how she fit into those. We talked about my going off to college in just a few months, and promised each other that we would find a way to work it out. My brother was two years ahead of his girlfriend, and they had managed through the years where he was off at school - why couldn't we as well?

The scariest part of these conversations is that they didn't scare me.

I remember the Fourth of July, Kelly and Nick and Jenni and I finding a secluded spot, away from the crowds, where we could bask in the perfect summer breeze and have a view of the fireworks; trips to the movie theater several times a week, finding excuses to call and be in each other's presence at odd hours of the morning, teaching her little sister Alison how to do algebra. I remember that her basement flooded, and that I impressed the hell out of her father by giving him advice on how to save the computer, which had been on the basement floor but wasn't turned on (wash everything out with clean water, wait a few days for everything to air dry, fire it up!) I remember curling up with her on the couch while Nick and Kelly shared the loveseat as we watched through Braveheart, and roundabout the battle of Falkirk her hand seeking mine out and guiding it down into her already-unzipped pants, as I whispered her name into her ear in shock, and she whispered back, "They're completely oblivious; they'll never notice." I remember Nick stopping by with a movie that "You absolutely have to watch, it's fucking hilarious", and it turning out to be Kevin Smith's "Clerks" - if you want an idea of how momentous a moment that was in my life, consider that my three computers are named Dante, Brodie, and Azrael.

Forgive my indulgence throughout this, as these aren't the sort of memories I come up with that often, when thinking about Jenni.

Of course, video games were far from completely absent during that time. Jenni was an enormous part of my life, but she still wasn't 100% of it, and when I wasn't with her, chances were very good that I was in the middle of a Warcraft 2 game on Kali, teaming up with MadDawg to rip the crap out of some unsuspecting newbies or gearing up for an epic match with another top-tier team. My webpage fell a bit by the wayside during this time - it was lucky to get more than a brief update every couple of weeks - but there were only so many hours in a day.

Eventually, of course, it came to an end. My freshman year at Michigan Tech will be covered in a later chapter, suffice to say that Jenni and I were still going out, calling and emailing on a regular basis, and spending time with one another in my infrequent trips home. I took her to her Prom that year, but as the summer came, we could tell that the time apart was fading. we were fighting more often than not, and spent about four consecutive weeks apart, as I went with my parents on a family vacation, and she spent the following two weeks at a journalism camp. That was the summer of the Ultima Online beta, and, sad to say, I probably spent more time with my character in the game than I did with her. We were still ostensibly going out by the time I went back to school for my Sophomore year, but it was clear by then that she had no intention of following me to Michigan Tech, that she wanted to go to the University of Michigan and pursue a journalism career, either majoring in Journalism or History, neither of which Tech offered. When I came home for my first trimester break, her first act was to call me up and say that she didn't think we should see each other any more. She began dating another guy, in her class, with a haste that was extremely undue, and I haven't had any direct contact with her since.

So, this section leaves me, and perhaps you, with some questions. For one, why the hell do I go into so much detail about one particular relationship in a series of discussions about my lifetime obsession with video games? I'm not sure I can say, except that the story doesn't feel right without this part of it told. I think that, for the time that we went out, and in particular, the last part of that Senior year and the summer to follow, Jenni represented to me what video games would become for the next few years; something that I enjoyed beyond any reasonable breaking point, a personification of the philosophy that I was passively assuming: that anything worth doing was worth overdoing. People talk about addiction to video games as a bad thing, but when they talk about an addiction to a relationship, it's usually said with a smile, as though it were perfectly healthy. Of course the analogy isn't perfect, and I would never try to claim that a relationship with a girl and a relationship with a video game are the same thing, or that they should be approached in the same way; instead, I think, I merely feel the need to accent that Jenni made me feel much the same way that video games made me feel; anxious for me to wake up and reaquaint myself with them, eager to see what happened next. In the year to come, Warcraft II would become my replacement for Jenni, and in a weird sort of way, almost seemed an acceptable substitute. And I think I can safely say that if it hadn't been for that one relationship, and the way it ended up, my perception of video games would be very different. I had allowed Jenni to consume me, and so video games took on that role for years to come. I cannot explain the latter without explaining the effect that this girl had over me.