And I never should have said/That the books that you read were all I loved you for

All this talk about kissing on the internet has got me to thinking about crushes.

And then something happened while I was driving two hours to an appointment the other day that made me think of a brain-jarringly significant crush I had when I was 16 years old.

When I was that age, I had a summer job at a bookstore. It was a good job: it only lasted four weeks and at the end of the summer I got a bucketload of cash to buy my first ever stereo (which I remained proud of until the day the speakers died after being knocked off the top of our fridge by a cat in 2003) and a bunch of new clothes etc.

One thing erased from my memory while I banged on to all and sundry about the aceness of my stereo, was that this month in 1992/3 marked the first real “secret” crush I had on a boy. Secret crushes are funny things – why we keep them secret I have no idea (although I suspect in my case it was because I had another, separate and much more obvious crush percolating at the time).

Secret crushes are strange too for their rareness. We all claim (or at least I did countless times while a teenager) that we keep secrets, when what we really mean is that we only tell four or five of our “close personal friends” (and in this age of the internerd, a bunch of anonymous strangers). And the crushes we most wish to keep secret we cannot really – because the blushing, averted eyes and quick exits from rooms are a dead give-away.

Heartbreakingly, this boy was a complete cliché. He worked in the stock room. He was totally laissez-faire about work. He had thick black hair and blue eyes. He smoked*. He made the kind of comments around 16 year old girls that he probably shouldn’t have. He would have been thirty then which would put him in his mid 40s now.

I remember going to get a book for a customer one afternoon to find him ripping the front covers off a pile of books. I was horrified. He laughed and explained that that was how they got sent back to the publisher. I was appalled – both at the destruction of what I considered perfectly good books, and also that I had embarrassed myself in front of “a cool guy”.

So I’m not sure what was significant about this – but I know it had a profound effect on me at the time. I suppose what it confirmed to me was that there was a lot more to blokes than teenage boys – something I’d always suspected but somehow had never confirmed.

When I went back to visit a few years later (I had friends still working at the store), he wasn’t there any more.

I wonder what happened to him?


* People who know Mr Fix may recognise this physical description, and may feel free to shut the hell up.