Shoulda Coulda Woulda, Part 1

So, like, what was that smoke monster again?

Loose ends. Unsolved mysteries. These are the things that can keep you up at night, or cause traffic accidents while dwelling on them as you navigate rush-hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

I don't mean broad enigmas like "Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?" or "What the hell was Lost really about?"; I'm blogging about dilemmas of a personal nature, like:

• How different would my life had been if I'd accepted that job in Chicago?
• Why did Grace really break up with me?
• Why does my physical appearance resemble that of "Uncle" Fred more than of my father?

Eventually, some of these mysteries will be solved (hopefully before either Fred or your father is on his deathbed) and some won't (Grace's restraining order against you won't expire until 2075). Here's an example of one of the unsolved mysteries from my own life.


COLLEGE-MEMORY ALERT
At college I was a humor columnist for the weekly school magazine, churning out 500-word pedestrian observations on a variety of subjects. For one particular column during my freshman year, I wrote about dating. (So much for writing about what you know.) I concluded the column with a humorous-but-half-serious personal ad for myself after noting how I was so desperate to get a date that I'd use my column to post a personal ad. In the "ad" I described myself as an average-to-above-average-looking (don't ask) English major who wore glasses and wielded sarcasm.

There was actually a time
when he made the girls swoon.

I didn't expect to receive any responses because the "ad" was written in the context of the column, but I did get two replies. The first one was clearly a joke because it was over-the-top and included text — I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days — that I recognized as a Kevin Costner quote from a Bull Durham movie poster tacked to the wall of some girl's room on another floor.

I figured out who sent that letter, and it caused a bit of a tiff when my brother (who lived on the same floor as the girl with the Bull Durham poster, two floors above me) yelled at the girl responsible (his girlfriend at the time; not the girl with the Bull Durham poster) for leading me on, even though I told him I thought it was actually kind of funny.

The second letter was a lot more, well, mysterious. It was one of those blank greeting cards I never buy because it's easier to hand over intentions summed up by a greeting-card writer than to compose a sincere message on your own.

The front of the card held a serene nature scene, like a couple of spare trees in a snow-covered forest or something. On the inside the text was handwritten in an all-caps print that was as neat as an architect's, every letter perfectly rendered in black ink.

The tone of the letter was "I'm also a shy English major with glasses who can be sarcastic, and I don't normally do things like replying to personal ads, but here goes..." and included a poem, also written in the same handwriting, called "The Truth Never Dies." I was no judge of poetry (nor am I now), but I could tell that it was a very well-crafted set of verses on the subject of capital-T Truth. I was very much interested in learning more about this woman, because during the first half of my freshman year my  weekend-evening pursuits consisted of shooting the shit about music, books, and writing with my brother's roommate, Dave, who also wrote for the magazine.

(I didn't start drinking until the following semester. Dave mostly abstained, despite — perhaps because of — a few notable incidents at dorm parties the previous year.)

Unfortunately, the letter had neither return address nor contact info. The magazine ran a free "personals" space that was just a graffiti wall of shout-outs and rants, and I was tempted to place a "missed connection" message for her, but I didn't want to deal with the grind of waiting for a response that might not arrive.

There two clues in the note: for which professor she wrote the poem, and an English class in which she was currently enrolled. This set up Plans A and B. I hoped I wouldn't have to execute Plan B.

PLAN A: TRACE THE POEM
I went to the English department and showed the poem to the professor in question a guy who resembled Eugene Levy in the straight-to-Netflix American Pie: Jim's Dad Is a College Professor for Reasons We Can't Explain. As he read the poem he knitted his eyebrows, thick as tarantula legs, and replied that he didn't recognize it, adding that his unfamiliarity with the poem didn't necessarily mean he didn't actually have the woman as a student.

At any rate, this was a dead end. Which mean I reluctantly moved on to Plan B. Which meant more work, and more possibility for embarrassment.

PLAN B: GO TO THE GIRL'S CLASS
The only information about the class was the name. I didn't know where or when it was held, so tracking down those important details wasn't easy, considering there was no website to look up. I forget how I even did it, but it probably involved heading back to the English department, which was quite a hike at a remote end of the campus.

I learned that the class was on a Tuesday night, which was inconvenient because

• It was at night
• It was in the English department building, which as I noted before was at a remote end of campus

The inconvenience of the two bullet points above were even more inconvenient that you'd expect because at the State University of New York at Buffalo, I lived on the South Campus, which was some four miles away from the North Campus, where most of the classes were held. A plodding bus-shuttle ride took anywhere from 15 minutes to a half-hour, not counting waiting at the bus stop, and at night the buses ran like every half-hour or hour. And you were dropped off as a point on the North Campus as far away as possible from the English Department, which might explain why all the English majors had toned legs.

This meant that my excursion to this student's class, which ended at 9:30, would have to begin sometime around 8, when I'd leave my room, wait forever for the elevator, give up and plod down the twelve half-flights of stairs, enjoy a lengthy stroll to the bus stop with enough time to catch a bus that might show up on time, sit on that bus, get off at the North Campus, and walk the quarter mile to English building.

Then, after whatever it was I planned to do, I'd have to reverse the process, meaning I'd be home by 11, probably. During the first semester of my freshman year I was mostly a hermit after dinnertime, so the whole exercise seemed like a lot of work.

However, I knew I had to take a chance. I hadn't experienced any romantic activity since my high school girlfriend broke up with me in August, and by October I was willing to crawl through glass to land a girl -- so a couple of evening Buffalo bus rides couldn't be so bad, right?

PLAN B: EXPANDED
But what was I going to do? I didn't know the girl's name and I didn't know what she looked like. And if she were as shy as she claimed, then I couldn't do anything that would put her on the spot, like interrupting her class to read the poem aloud, like a character in a John Hughes movie.

Refraining from a crazy public display was also accommodating my own fears, because I didn't know this person long enough (or at all) to even know whether she'd be worth taking that kind of risk. (If she even existed at all.)

After overthinking my options for several days I developed the strategy that I executed that night. Outside the classroom, which was actually a small screening room, I taped a small sign that read, cryptically (unless you were the person who sent the card), "The Truth Never Dies" with an arrow pointing to the elevators, where I sat in a chair, the card propped up on the arm of the chair.

I arrived at the room 15 minutes before it ended and set everything up and waited. When I heard the class let out, I buried myself in a magazine because I didn't want to make eye contact and (a) scare the girl away or (b) look like a slack-jawed creep scanning the females from the class as they approached the elevators. I also wanted to give her the right of refusal in case she didn't like what she saw.

SPOILER ALERT: ANTICLIMAX
I didn't look up from the magazine until the crowd noises subsided. Everyone was gone, and my mystery was still unsolved.

I didn't really do anything else afterward in my pursuit, though I did talk about and obsess over it for some time afterward. In one of those "I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and slap some sense into my younger self moments" (which I tend to have quite frequently), I would have presented to Anthony1989 the many reasons why this attempt might have failed, including:

• She didn't see the sign outside the room
• She didn't spot me and the card on the chair
• She did spot me, but was repulsed/creeped out by what she saw
• She did spot me, but was too embarrassed/shy to do anything
• She was absent that day
• She didn't exist

All in all, no reason to abandon the search. But my college self probably would have said something stupid like, "It probably wasn't meant to be, since you ended up marrying someone different and are satisfied with how that turned out" and I'd be all like, "Yeah, but I would've liked to have know the whole story, right?" Then Anthony1989 would tell me to go screw myself and I'd be like You know that's actually physically possible right now but I'm not going to do that and we'd start wrestling until Anthony from 2053 shows up and breaks up the tussle by smacking up with his walker.