I was eighteen. It was my freshman year in college and I felt very far from home. The state is divided into east/west 'halves' by a range of mountains and my home was on the other side.
I lived in a dormitory, as was required of first and second year students who didn't live with parents or guardians at the time. The first semester I made the error of rooming with my buddy from high school. We soon came to despise each other, as we'd been warned we would.
The second semester, I was assigned a roommate who I was pretty sure was gay, but fortunately he never made any moves toward me. My scholastic performance was horrendous and socially I was self-crippled, due to a preternatural shyness. Even back in high school, I hadn't been comfortable with girls because I didn't feel I had anything to offer them. I was short for my age and athletically challenged. Everybody said I was smart, yet I neglected to apply myself to my classes. I'd like to think my instructors failed to challenge me, but the truth was that I was simply lazy.
The first semester I went out with one girl. She was a cute redhead from some class of mine – I forget which class. We went to a movie and I walked her home. I didn't even have the balls to kiss her. I spent most of my time hanging out down the hall from my room with a group of second year guys who – like me – were disillusioned with society and life in general.
I wasn't a virgin, as my social behavior might indicate. I'd gotten laid the summer after I graduated and it was fantastic. Susie and I hung out most of the summer, but she was a year younger than I was and I had to leave for college. She wasn't even from my home town, but lived in the town where I had gone to work for the summer. My success with her should have given me the courage to step up to the plate with other girls, but it didn't. I didn't feel like I could trust the inner voices that told me I was 'okay'.
Along about April of that first year my roommate (who was a music major) asked me to do him a favor and volunteer as a blind date with the roommate of a girl he planned to take to an off-campus party. The idea of a party sounded fine to me, but I was reluctant about the date. I'd never met the girl (thus, the term 'blind', I suppose) and told him I'd rather not go. He persevered and I finally gave in.
I knew he wasn't 'going with' his date, since, as I said, he was a little light in the loafers. He actually wore loafers most of the time. I knew the girl he was taking but I was mortified when I met my date for the evening. To put it kindly, she was unattractive. To me at eighteen, she was ugly as a mud fence. She was overweight and had a few zits (of course, so did I, so that wasn't too bothersome). But her face looked as if it had been put together in the dark by an idiot.
My mother had raised me to be a gentleman, however, so I didn't make a break for the stairs and the safety of my room. I was polite and breathed a sigh of relief when we escaped the lights of the dorm common room to the dark of night. Unlike me, my roomie had a car at school, so he drove us to the apartment where the party was being held.
At the party there were only a few people. Our dates were two of the three girls present with four or five other guys. As I recall, most of the people there were music students, though I didn't really care what they were. All I was interested in was the bottle of rum they had available. I wasted no time in drinking as much of it mixed with cola as I could swallow. In about an hour I was pretty wasted.
By that point, I convinced myself that the girl I was with found me attractive, no matter what I thought of her. As I said, I was nice to her and I guess she found it a rare thing. She laughed at my lame jokes and we pretty much maintained our own conversation while the others played whatever social games they were playing.
