Car Crash Crushes: Part 1

When I was young, a kid trying desperately to grow up, I had my first crush.  I remember him well; Chris Isaak of 'Wicked Game' fame.  

I was painfully prepubescent and did not talk to anyone about my crush, until one day the pressure in my chest became too much and I HAD to share it with – my mother.  Perhaps my choice in confidant was due to a lack of trust in my friends; a quiet knowledge that they would use my secret against me.  Perhaps I should have remembered that later in life.  

I took my mother aside one day and breathlessly admitted my crush, blood streaming to my face from the need to unburden myself, but not entirely sure how I would ever look her in the eyes again.  To her credit she did not laugh, but looked at me seriously and tried to treat me like the adult I would not be for at least another eight years, and then only by law.

She acted like a true professional and I felt a weight had been lifted.  My adult feelings had been approved, and really I should have stopped right there and walked away.  But I didn’t.  Oh no.  As my relief flooded out of me I just kept on talking.  

“ You see,” I said quietly, still fighting some embarrassment, “ I like him because he is not perfect.  I know he looks a bit odd but

that is why I think he is really cool.”  In hindsight I think my mother’s silence was due to her motherly duty to stifle any laughing before her impressionable daughter could hear it and be scarred for life.  At the time the conversation just seemed to take on a bit of an awkward tone and, finally, I decided to leave it and go back to playing with my Polly-Pocket.

 

Fast-forward to later that night.  So maybe I had not been playing with my Polly-Pocket, for I was old enough to watch Taggart.  This routine had started at a fairly early age to induct me into Scottish life (or so the Australians would have you believe), and after I had survived ‘The One With The Dolls’ (as it will forever be etched in my memory) my initiation was complete and I was allowed to enjoy Sunday Night TV with the rest of the family.  

On this one, ill-timed occasion the murderer turned out to be a homosexual serial-killer who murdered his unsuspecting mates, picking them for one common characteristic; they were all inherently flawed.  Any man with a scar or a squint was possible prey.  Eventually Taggart picked up on this link and tracked down the killer, who upon arrest told them of his lovers/victims, ‘ I don’t like them perfect.  I like them with a flaw; something wrong with them.” 

Oh God.  If life was kind then the ground would have happily swallowed me up and taken me away from what I imagined to be my mother's judgmental stare.  My feelings, the ones which were so new to me and which I had made public just that day, were akin to those of a mass-murderer.  We were kindred spirits, both liking our men a little less than perfect with that one flaw we could really sink our teeth into.  It was awful!

I had to suppress this realisation and normalise the coincidence.  I told myself that the strangest people in life find regular people to love them because that was how nature works.  I was normal.  After all, even Screech made that porno, right?

This thought kept me fixed in reality and stopped me from flying away into the fanciful world of the criminally insane.

   

Then, a few weeks ago, the whole precarious theory on which I based my sanity was threatened.  But that is another story…….