My friend Jimmy is a natural when it comes to getting girls. When he is not even trying, they flock to him. I don’t know how he does it.
A recent story involved a girl knocking on his door at three in the morning — a girl he’d never spoken to before but who had noticed him walking around the dorm. After a cordial introduction, they proceeded to Jimmy’s bed, soon after which he discovered that this particular girl enjoyed biting and scratching. When he told the story later, he pulled up his shirt, showing giant bruises, scratches and bite marks running from his stomach all the way up to his neck.
“So then what happened?”
“What do you mean? She left and I went to sleep. Completely ruined my sheets with all that blood, though.”
For some reason, there’s almost always some unexpected twist in Jimmy’s stories. Either the girl will want to dress up in her nurse outfit from Halloween, play the song “A Whole New World” from Aladdin on repeat the whole time or maybe just cry about her father afterward. We come up with nicknames just to keep them apart: the vampire girl, the ranch dressing girl, the girl who had an urn filled with her dead dog’s ashes sitting on her desk — not to mention the recently divorced 40-year-old woman he was with over break.
As a guy listening to Jimmy, I kind of have to applaud him. As a rule, though, these stories are kept strictly between friends — male friends, specifically. Nobody wants to seem like a slut to the opposite sex. You figure most girls aren’t looking for some guy who’s been with, by his account, more than 30 girls in the past year. Just the same way most guys would probably prefer a nice, classy girl — someone who wouldn’t go around with random guys — knocking on their doors at three in the morning and biting them.
It’s not that Jimmy’s a sexist or anything. In high school, he was in a long-term relationship with a quiet, normal-looking girl who didn’t go out much. Jimmy loved and respected her. Instead of going to parties with us, he would take his girlfriend out to dinner or he’d watch a movie with her or they’d just spend time together. Then, at the beginning of senior year, a few weeks after their three-year anniversary, his girlfriend started hanging around a group of devout Christians, cheated on him multiple times and went off to join a cult. She’s now dating a 22-year-old hairdresser and fellow member of the “spiritual cause."
In many ways it’s a perfect Jimmy story — a strange, almost unbelievable encounter with a girl — although, for him, it’s still a touchy subject.
But that was all more than a year ago, and Jimmy is here in Athens, and now he’s got a new girl and a new story every week. And I guess, at least in that regard, he’s doing better than ever.
Just once, though, I’d like for him and one of those girls to run into each other again. Maybe it’s a Sunday morning and they’re both in line at the dining hall. They talk for a while, get their food and somehow end up sitting down to eat breakfast together. There they are: two kids with messy hair and hangovers, awkwardly trying to figure each other out, while Jimmy slowly works up the courage to ask her, as delicately as possible, why she likes biting so much.
Evan Smith is a freshman studying journalism and a columnist for The Post. Have a similar story? Email him at es394910@ohiou.edu.
