Jennifer came from a very religious family and was our high school valedictorian. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, when all of the other girls were wearing knee-length or just barely shorter, usually fairly tight skirts -- girls weren't allowed to wear pants to school then, unless it was below 20º F -- and miniskirts were becoming popular (but still against the school dress code), Jennifer's every day outfit was an almost mid-calf, certainly not very tight skirt, either bobby socks or knee socks, and a conservative, certainly not sexy blouse. She had very long, almost to her waist honey-blonde hair, but it was never styled, and had the slightly kinky look of hair which had just been unbraided. Makeup? Not a hint of it. At a time when all of us guys were a mass of pussy-seeking hormones, Jennifer had no boyfriend, didn't seem to want a boyfriend, and would probably have been locked away in a closet by her father if she ever had a boyfriend. She had about zero sex appeal, pretty much on purpose, and her clothes hid her body about as much as it could be hidden outside of a Middle Eastern
chador.
When school was out, she went straight home, and socialized with no one; her family lived outside of town, on a farm, and she had farm chores and homework and studying to do.
Jennifer wanted to be a doctor, and this was back in a time when women just didn't become physicians. She had top, top grades, getting exactly one B in high school, and that B almost devastated her. But, to become a doctor, she had to go to college, and in Kentucky, that meant the University of Kentucky, in too-far-away-to-commute Lexington. A few other colleges were closer, but they were lesser-ranked schools which would have made getting into medical school harder to do. This meant that very conservative Jennifer had to live in a dorm.
Me? I was graduated at the same time, from the same small-town high school, and I was going to UK as well. There was a requirement then that freshmen had to live in the dorms, but there were not enough dorm rooms for everybody, and some of us couldn't get a dorm room. I, for one, didn't want one, and deliberately put off my residence hall application until late, figuring that I'd be one of the freshmen excluded from the dorms, and I was. A lot of my high school friends who went to UK did get into the dorms, most of them into Haggin Hall, across from the Student Center, and a bunch of us congregated in Timmy's room to watch the draft lottery. No, not the NBA draft lottery, but the Selective Service lottery. We'd occasionally hear an "Oh, fuck!" yelled out when a low lottery number was called, and a friend of mine with a 4.0 in electrical engineering drew lottery number five; this was after President Nixon had ended student deferments, so my buddy was going to go into the Army.
My lottery number was 264, so I was safe.
But, I digress. I was on my way to class one morning, walking up the sidewalk from Euclid Avenue, going past the Student Center, with these long, poorly-planned steps -- a riser, then six feet to the next riser -- up toward the Patterson Office Tower and the Whitehall Classroom Building, when I ran into Jennifer. I am a very fast walker, and she was burdened down with books and papers. Her one dress concession to college was a backpack for some of her books, but it was a cheap, small one, and she had other stuff in her arms, and it was sliding out. Recognizing her even from behind -- no one else dressed like that at UK -- I caught up to her and offered to help.
"Oh, Mark, thanks! I guess that I shouldn't carry so much, but I like to study in the library between classes." Left unspoken was the fact that it was difficult to study in her dorm room.
"Not a problem. Where's your class?"
"I've got a calculus class next, in the Classroom Building, and then two hours before French."
"I'm headed to the same place, I'll walk you."
"You don't have to do that."
"It's OK, Jenny, it's no problem at all."
I caught just the slightest look of surprise from Jennifer:
nobody
called her Jenny, or at least I had never heard anyone call her anything other than Jennifer. Actually, it kind of surprised me, too; was I flirting with her?
We didn't say anything the last couple of minutes before I dropped her off at her classroom, but I made a conscious mental note of where her class was. Mine was just a floor above hers, and I started to think: what could Jennifer actually be like, now that she's away from home?
Her face was cute, even though she took no effort at all to look good. Her body, well, she wasn't fat by any means, but her clothes did nothing to show off her figure. She seemed to be just average. I could tell that she didn't have big boobs.
I would say that I was "between girlfriends," but that would imply that I had girlfriends. The truth is that I'd had a few dates, dates that went nowhere. I had been pathetic when it came to girls in high school, and never even got to go to prom, but had gotten a lot more confident once I got to UK. My clumsiness reputation didn't follow me, which gave me an actual chance with girls, but while I could get dates now, they weren't really going anywhere. I was a couple weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday, and I was still a virgin.
Was I desperate? Well, maybe, because all of a sudden I was thinking about Jennifer in a way I hadn't before. She was decent-looking, even though she didn't try to be, and she was smart; that's not a bad package at all. And I assumed that she was still a virgin, with no boyfriend. At any rate, whether I was officially desperate or not, I started thinking of ways to go out with Jennifer.
Fortunately, UK made that easy, because back in the early 1970s, they actually published a student directory, including the telephone numbers of every student in the dorms. I wouldn't have to go through any special effort to find her number or in which dorm she lived. The only question was: where could I take her, and how would I go about asking her out?
Well, the where was simple: I could ask her out for dinner at Joe Bologna's, an at-the-time hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant right off campus. (It has since expanded, but that hasn't made it any better.) Joe B's was hugely popular with UK students, it was cheap, and there were many times students would go over at 10 PM just for an order of the garlic-butter drenched bread sticks. I could ask Jen -- darn,
another
diminutive name for her! -- if she wanted to go there, and it would still be casual enough that it wouldn't be a too-much first date for her.
There was also the question of when. I didn't know, but it wouldn't have been any surprise to me at all if her parents didn't pick her up every weekend, and that meant asking her out for Friday, Saturday or Sunday ran a good chance of an automatic no, because she couldn't accept. It would have to be a weekday, and that was when Joe B's was at least slightly less crowded anyway.
Now, the only question left was:
how
do I ask her out? There were only two ways: I could "accidentally" run into her, and ask her out in person, or I could do it over the phone. Since I knew when and where she had calculus, I could find her easily enough, but then I realized it was already Wednesday afternoon, and she wouldn't have calc again until Friday; it was either over the phone, or wait until next week.
I had to be casual, I knew. I kept thinking that there were some magic words that would guarantee acceptance, but I was never good with "lines." I did my best to write out a script, and even rehearsed it, even though it was very simple, 'cause it had to sound natural. I was getting the shakes just thinking about this. Yeah, if I hadn't been desperate before, I was thinking myself into being desperate over this. An ordinary looking girl, with zero sex appeal, and I was getting just way, way nervous about the whole thing.
It's too late today, I thought, it'll have to be tomorrow. Trouble is, I didn't know her Thursday schedule, didn't know when she'd be in her dorm. Well, Hell, the only thing I could do was call, and if she wasn't there, she wasn't there. There was always next week. Who knows, maybe calling and her not being there will be like practicing, without anyone hearing me!
Well, I picked a time. Thursday classes at UK usually ran 11:00 to 12:15 and then 12:30 to 1:45. I'd call her dorm at 2:15, which would give her enough time to get back from class,
if
she had a noon-thirty class, and
if
she went back to her dorm from there. She wouldn't be having lunch then, and there's still some time before dinner.
OK, I had my plan set, and now all that I had to do was wait calmly until tomorrow afternoon. I checked my wallet, realized that I didn't have enough money, so I went to the Convenient Food Mart on the corner of Euclid and South Limestone to cash a check. There were no ATMs back in the dark ages! I got out $40, which was a fortune for 1972! That was way more than enough for dinner at Joe B's.
I made myself a couple of bologna sandwiches, and that plus a bag of potato chips and an Ale-8, was dinner for me. I needed to work on a term paper, and some chemistry homework, but couldn't concentrate. I didn't have a television, so I dug out one of my old Conan paperbacks, the old Lancer Book 12 volume series edited by L Sprague deCamp, books which had already been read to falling apart. Naturally, along with slaying of countless bad guys, Conan always got the girl, and the girl was always splendidly formed, lithe but voluptuous, and not overdressed. Those were the women I was supposed to fantasize about, and here I was worrying and fretting about asking out a plain-jane-by-choice religious girl. The odds were that I'd get turned down, and if I did, big deal, no great loss.
Yeah, I kept telling myself that.
Yeah, I tossed and turned all night, but managed to get in a few hours of sleep.
Since I had some cash on me now, I could do something I usually avoided, to save money, and that was get breakfast at the Student Center Cafeteria. Scrambled eggs -- that was what they normally had, probably from powdered eggs -- in a huge pan, bacon, toast, and coffee. That was enough to calm my nerves for classes. I didn't bother getting together with any of my friends, but headed back to my student-slums apartment when I got out of chemistry at 12:15. That meant that I had two hours to wait before I called.
I was too nervous to study, so I picked up another Conan and started reading . . . and soon fell asleep on the couch! The Cimmerian warrior was fleeing a pack of hunting lions across the grasslands of Kush, and the lions were closing in, only to halt just before they could drag him to ground, just as I knew would happen, and I fell asleep.
