What I did for love

Phoenix writers reflect on the significantly surprising we do for significant others

Love has strange powers. Love makes us provoke fights, ride our bikes with no hands, and cut off an ear (or pretend to). Under the influence of love, we tell extravagant stories and believe equally extravagant lies. We dress like Britney Spears, or dress in leather, or dress in almost nothing at all and stand in wait outside someone's window. We do preposterous things without a shred of regret. In the words of one writer looking back on a half-year spent in Helsinki for the sake of a doomed romance: "The most remarkable aspect of the whole experience is that, as I look back on it now -- the cold, the cruelty, the terrible fish -- I do so with a sense of having done precisely the right thing."

The Hallmark/Valentine's/ military-industrial complex wants us to think that it has love color-coded. "For you" is a message that comes neatly packaged in pink, red, or diamond. But the truest, rawest expressions of love are the ones that mean nothing to the general public, the ones that could have been created by no one but their creators. Anyone can explain a dozen red roses. Only one lucky girl can explain the highway billboard that says JAB, STAY -- or the guy in smiley-face underpants standing outside her window holding a joint and a bottle of wine.

Risk ridicule -- or jail, or unemployment -- for love, and you're risking far more than physical safety. When you ditch the confines of acceptable behavior for the object of your obsession, you stake your sense of self on the acceptance of one.

Taking that risk, wearing those underpants, can be terrifying. It can be stupid, it can be glorious, it can be all of these things. And as the following exploits -- performed by a handful of Phoenix writers -- prove, it doesn't always work. But when considering the impossible this February 14, remember this: if you bet the farm and then bomb completely, at least you can use the story to impress someone else the next time around.

You can't say that about a dozen red roses.

Where did our love Gogh?

In college, I used to sign e-mails "Hieronymous Bosch," after the Dutch painter. I was only somewhat familiar with his work, but his name was catchy, and the reference fit nicely with my arty self-image. Sure, my "art" consisted mostly of a campus humor column that regularly included the words "my butt," but the rules were different at 19. I was a
bohemian-in-training, an artist looking for residence, and I knew the perfect Valentine's Day act would be to cut off my ear.

Unfortunately, I wasn't truly tortured -- damn that happy childhood! -- and Reservoir Dogs had left me a little queasy. So I got some craft-savvy friends to help me build an acceptable facsimile out of Fimo, which I presented to my girlfriend.

To me, the ear was a symbolic re-creation of the art world's most blisteringly sincere romantic outpouring, the quintessential summation of my love and devotion. My girlfriend said it was cute. That should have been my signal that we were on different wavelengths . . . and that my artistic posturing was a lot of bullshit. Later that week, I changed my e-mail name to Professor Cookie Monster and never looked back.

Under where?

This sounds like a lame Benny Hill skit, but I was hanging out fairly late one night with some buddies -- drinking, smoking -- when a girl I liked called. I can never tell if a girl just thinks I'm funny or if there's more involved, so I figured I'd try a blatant pick-up line right away and play it off like a joke if she was horrified. I asked: "How 'bout I come over with wine and a joint and we hook up?" She said "Sure," but I couldn't tell if she was kidding.

Why not push it, right?

I cruised over to her place, went to the window I believed to be hers, stripped down to nothing but a comical pair of boxer shorts -- you know, that pair with the big smiley face. Wine in one hand and joint in the other, I rapped on the window a few times.

This giant football-player type pulled back his curtain and was so shocked he spat out his dip.

I had managed to knock on the wrong window -- well, right window, wrong house. The football player called me a pervert and told me I was dead. I ran home, clothes and wine in hand, looking behind me all the way. I told the girl about it later. She said she'd talk to the guy, and that she thought I was funny.

Thank heaven for little girls

Last Halloween, my boyfriend and I dressed up as Abraham Lincoln and Britney Spears, respectively. My boyfriend took great care in advising me on exactly what length of Catholic-schoolgirl skirt to wear for the occasion; he picked out the knee-high socks himself, and helped me fashion the headset microphone out of Styrofoam and old Walkman headphones.

It took me a few days to realize that his conscientious attention to detail and "historical accuracy" wasn't inspired by Halloween alone -- he assumed my costume would find use after the holiday, in the context of late-night play-acting. Because my boyfriend looked so striking and commanded so much respect as President Lincoln, I felt he deserved a few months of Britney-on-demand.

Doing the right wrong thing

As I remember it, Finland was cold. It not only felt cold, it smelled cold. There are other things I remember: the weird tinned fish, the trams and their nonsense destinations, the angst of using foreign money. But it was the chill that stayed with me. And the girl who lured me there in the first place.

I'd met Sari, a Finn, in Somerville, where we roomed together for a few months. She was my first love, and I soon became afflicted with a passion that steamrolled all other considerations: familial, financial, moral. I dumped my previous girlfriend in the most pitiless way, took up watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous so I could sit and brush my knee against Sari's. When Sari went back to Finland, I quit my job and followed. For three months I shuddered through Helsinki's frigid streets, bungled strange currency, and ate what I now believe was some kind of herring.

But these sacrifices, I later learned, did not mark the true measure of my feelings for Sari. Neither did the four-figure phone bills we racked up after the Finnish authorities kicked me out -- nor even the sniveling poems, the snot-stained correspondence we pitched back and forth across the Baltic Sea.

It was 15 years ago that I made my ill-fated trip to Scandinavia. My dad -- when I skulked back home penniless and heartbroken -- did his I-told-you-so bit: I was crazy to have gone there in the first place. And he was right. For me, though, the most remarkable aspect of the whole experience is that, as I look back on it now -- the cold, the cruelty, the terrible fish -- I do so with a sense of having done precisely the right thing.

Aw, shoot

My boyfriend and his younger brother often go on male-bonding fishing trips. One day, in an attempt to earn a gold star from the sibling, I tagged along, fantasizing about sitting on a river bank all day, soaking up the sun, waiting for a tug on my line. Turns out the brothers are too impatient for fishing rods; they prefer to shoot their fish. With guns.

As we pulled up to the shallow part of the river, younger brother handed me a pistol. I'd never seen a real gun, let alone fired one, so as I rolled my pants up to my knees, he talked me through the basics of firearm safety. After a few badly aimed practice shots at driftwood, I was knee-deep in the river, chasing some huge fish into the reeds as little brother yelled, "That's a big one! Don't let him get away!" Finally I had it cornered. We all held our breath. I closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger. One shot, point-blank, right through the spine. When I lifted my prey out of the water, my boyfriend's brother grinned approvingly. And as I watched fish blood dribble out of the bullet hole and form a pool of red around my knees, I realized this would be the first time I'd come back from a fishing trip with a catch.

Submitted for approval

On our third date, over dessert, Bill told me he was into sadomasochism and wanted to tie me up. There was a pause as I choked uncontrollably on my crème brûlée -- I was a Nice Boy, and Nice Boys do not buy their active wear at Home Depot. I was too shocked to continue the conversation, almost too shocked to finish the crème brûlée, and he dropped the subject.

But as Grandma used to say (not speaking specifically of bondage), when you love someone, you make the effort. To Bill's surprise, I finally agreed to try it -- once -- and it certainly was an effort. There were books to read (like The Kiss of the Whip, which my mother discovered in my suitcase during a visit home), skills to acquire (more knots than I learned as a Boy Scout), and "accessories" to buy (never mind). To my surprise, I liked it. Three years later we are still together, and I'm still a Nice Boy. But under my Gap sweater, there's a chain from Home Depot.

Liar, liar

The day I met Alana, I gave up my friendship with Chris. I spotted him leaning over Alana at a local bar and moved in, ingratiating myself with her and alienating Chris forever. It was worth it. Just for the way she wore her ripped jeans it was worth it.

Alana was the most fashionable girl I'd ever dated. Her friends were the most fashionable people I'd ever hung out with. I was only mildly fashionable -- enough that they'd let me into a club, but not enough that anyone would dance with me when I got there. Alana, on the other hand, seemed to have found a portal into the inner circles of the music scene, and she took me with her.

Night after night, Alana and I would hang around backstage -- she mingling effortlessly, me being ignored by guitarists with large sideburns. It seemed like a good arrangement. Or it did until the night Alana stood me up. When she explained why, the depth of my girlfriend's musical appreciation began to feel more like a liability.

Alana hadn't fucked Mick Hucknall, the lead singer from Simply Red. She'd just befriended him. She told me this over the phone, and I hung up the receiver with so much force it shattered. But I believed her. And when Alana's sister, Freckles, let slip that the pair had spent the entire night on the band's tour bus, I swallowed Alana's "We were just talking" line like a big fish. I even accepted one of Hucknall's complimentary tickets for the following night's gig.

A couple of years ago I ran into Alana. It had been 10 years since we dated, and I guess she thought the time was right to get a little something off her chest. She had fucked Hucknall, she said. All night. He was so vociferous she thought the neighbors would complain.

I already knew, of course -- except for the crazed-howling bit. But at the time I'd managed to convince myself that I believed her. I had too much to lose. When you'll buy someone's horseshit despite all evidence to the contrary -- that's amóre.

All night long

As a senior in college I wrote an article for the campus political journal. When I called to ask the editor a question, I noticed she had a very sexy voice; I placed her in the "crush" column of my fruitless inventory of campus women. After writing the article I ran into her at a graduation party, and my inventory was subsequently reduced to one name: hers. She agreed to look at a second article I had written.

There was no such article.

Although I was graduating in a matter of hours, I ran home -- leaving behind the best keg beer of my academic career -- to pull one final all-nighter, my last chance to beguile with political wordplay. I finished the article about an hour before I stumbled across stage to receive my diploma the next morning. The day after commencement exercises, while most students were leaving campus, I was waiting tables at the town inn. The beautiful editor stopped in for breakfast. She told me she'd mail suggested edits to the all-night article, if I wanted. I happily gave her my address. I waited. I waited tables. Months later she got around to sending me the edited article; I wrote back. We struck up a correspondence. Six years later, we're celebrating our third Valentine's Day together. I don't remember what the article was about.

Hello, sailor

I love to sail, but when my reckless, trust-fund-baby boyfriend suggested a 12-day sailing trip in August from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Penobscot Bay, Maine, aboard his 40-foot wooden yacht, I was understandably skittish. August is high fog season, and he had recently been kicked out of the sailboat racing league for cutting in front of a tanker during a race. Against my better judgment, I went anyway.

We left the mouth of the Piscataqua and ran smack into a wall of fog so thick we couldn't see the dinghy. He immediately got seasick. Since wooden boats don't show up well on radar, no ships could see us, and I spent the first five days on the bow of the boat, honking an air horn, then banging a metal pot and spoon when the air horn ran out, scanning the milky fog for oncoming prows. Twice, we came within feet of being rammed.

I was also in charge of navigation, which was fine until the third day, when some angry fishermen blew up the loran station in Nova Scotia and made our navigational system useless. That was the day I learned to navigate from one buoy to another using a compass and chart -- a technique known, ominously, as dead reckoning. We reached our destination, finally, where we hosted one annoying group of his friends after another for a week. On the return trip, right in front of me he blatantly hit on one of the nubile young female guests. I left him shortly thereafter.

Sign of the times

She was short and sharp and shit to be around when she had somewhere better to be, which was always. We called her Jab on account of her always needling; she knew better than to fight that one. Sunday mornings she'd bike off her Scotch on the way to the BMX track, where she'd torch all comers.

I didn't even know I needed her until I heard she'd left for the bus station. With no time to lose, I climbed on my fixed-gear and sprinted downtown, up the on-ramp to the interstate. Blood pumped through my brain like breakbeats as I sluiced through traffic, barely making the median. Then, rung by rung, up the billboard ladder to the catwalk, where I uncapped the Krylon I'd use to leave my message. The ampersand in "J&B" morphed easily into an A; a simple "Stay" and I was done. I thought I saw her bus go by at dawn, just before the troopers escorted me to night court.

Only thanks I got was a blank card postmarked Nogales. Then and forever -- just out of my reach.

Queasy rider

Her name was Clare, and I was a fool in love, a fool with no chance in hell, a fool who thought he could ride his bike around in circles, arms extended in the air, as if in victory, shouting, "I love Clare Golden! I love Clare Golden!"

I don't remember doing this; I don't remember falling; and I certainly don't remember my head cracking open and spilling brain fluid and all my love onto the cold pavement. But my sister and my best friend at the time both swore it happened that way. I regained consciousness 30 minutes later with the words "I feel queasy." That night was spent in the hospital, hearing lecture after lecture on the importance of wearing a helmet.

I was 10 years old, and it would've been a disaster if Clare and the rest of the school heard about it. But my sister knew she'd get a brotherly beating if she talked. And my best friend -- well, he had shit his white jeans a few weeks earlier and certainly didn't want that getting out.

Tripping the lights

Valentine's Day is the Super Bowl for die-hard romantics, and every year the challenge is to make the halftime show something memorable. I was fortunate that this particular Valentine's Day my girlfriend and I were still in that giddy phase where grand romantic gestures seemed a daily priority.

For our first Valentine's Day as a couple, I arranged for the standard ho-hum dinner at a restaurant as disguise for the night's true payoff, which I had dutifully worked out over the course of the day. The dinner went kind of as expected. On returning to my place, the evening ostensibly over (wink wink), I walked her up the back stairs, out the fire door, and onto the roof, where to her knee-buckling surprise she saw what I had done: defying the admonitions of the condo building I live in, I'd snaked 150 feet of orange extension cord from my basement apartment and strung about a thousand feet of white Christmas lights in rough concentric circles to create a 10-by-10-foot dance floor right in the center. I walked over to the CD player I had cued up and pushed PLAY.

We danced under a cold, clear sky and the Christmas lights to the old Flamingos swoon song "I Only Have Eyes for You." I was never really able to match that moment over the course of our next six months, and our relationship finally dissolved, but it still ranks as one of my finest efforts. I know it lingers brightly among her favorite times, too.

Bar fright

Had we already started "going out" -- i.e., had I slept with her? I think so, because I remember the nervous, crazed feeling. She'd rejected me, and now I wanted her back. There were four or five of us in a booth in a bar near South Station. It was crowded (restaurant people like us, artists, musicians, townies) and it was smoky, late -- the "after hours" scene, such as it is. A group of three or four white boys, leaving the bar, walked past our table, and one of them scooped up a dollar that was lying there.

I don't even know if it was my dollar, but I followed the guys out. You have to understand, this was before therapy, before Model Mugging, before any kind of assertiveness training whatsoever. I was shy, introverted, depressed, with the self-esteem of a bug. But I wanted this woman: I was wild, madcap, capable of all kinds of fun. If only she knew. On the sidewalk I said, "Hey." They stopped. "What?" one of them asked. "I want my dollar back." One guy grabbed me by the sweater, another guy cuffed me on the side of the head. They tugged at me and pushed me around a bit and then walked off. I went back into the bar, my sweater ripped, and sat down.

"That was pretty stupid," she said.

Later, we started going out again. Three years.

Circles of love

The snowstorm that forced me to spend an extra night at my girlfriend's parents' house wasn't bad enough to keep my girlfriend home from work. Result: I had a whole day to spend with . . . her mother.

At breakfast, her mother spoke in rapturous tones about the joys of cross-country skiing. When I confessed that I'd never tried it, she was incredulous. "I can't believe that! You've gotta try it!"

I said, "I'm sure I'll get around to it one of these days."

"That's right! Today! I've got a pair in the garage. What size shoe are you?"

I really wanted to go back to bed, but a girlfriend's mother is someone you do not disappoint. So before long, my girlfriend was at work and I was outside, skiing in circles around the house. And around. And around. Every so often I'd start to ski back toward the house. Then I'd look to the window and see "Mom" grinning and waving at me between the curtains. I'd respond with a mock-enthusiastic smile, raise my snow-dusted glove in salute, and slog back to the well-worn path I'd created.

Finally, after a few hours of this mind- (and finger-) numbing repetition, I figured my dues had been paid. I headed in, thanking "Mom" for awakening me to the joys of skiing in circles. Soon my girlfriend got home from work.

"I hope my mom wasn't too annoying."

"No, of course not! We had a lot of fun."

And later, when my girlfriend found out how accommodating I'd actually been, we had a lot of fun too.