Mirth and Woe: Gay

Mirth and Woe: Gay

Girls!

I turned fourteen years of age and realised how much I like girls.

There was a stirring in the trouser department, caused, it turned out, by the knowledge that girls had lumps and curves in all the right places. Girls that had, up until then, shared the same school classrooms as I, but as an alien species. An alien species with whom I had no desire to communicate.

I remember it well. I looked up from my books in an English classroom and noticed the beauty that surrounded me. Be still my beating heart for the memory of:

M***** P******
J******* W***
T**** J**
J**** B*****
J***** F******

Of course, I had absolutely no chance with any of these emerging fine examples of womanhood. This was because I had no idea that I was in fact:

A W*****

My one true love was reserved for a girl called G** C*******. Gay. Gay.

Her parents called her Gay. Which was a throwback to a more innocent, less bummy age. She was (and possibly still is) a cracking blonde with - let us do her justice here - a cracking pair. It was to be - for a couple of weeks at the very least - my life's work to ask her out, and one day, if I were lucky, hold her hand.

Gone were those miserable years as a Tom-Cruise-o-gram. She would be mine. My nights were filled with strange dreams of my beloved. Strange dreams involving nudey prod games and Fairy Liquid. I would wake up in a proper lather, I can tell you for nothing.

Knowing full well the terror of asking a girl out during school hours, and the pain and suffering caused by loud and public rejection, I decided to try to catch up with her one evening or weekend to pop the question.

It was just a matter of finding out where or when I could strike. Knocking on her front door was well and truly out. She had a big brother who would laugh at me and cream me into the pavement, and, of course, a dad who would do much the same without bothering to laugh first.

I discovered, quite by chance, that she had jacked in her job at the Big Fry chip shop in the village (on account of the damage all the grease was doing to my beloved marble-like features), and being a girl of means who looked much older than her fourteen years, was now waiting tables at a local garden centre cafe.

Having saved up my paper round money, I got on my bicycle and rode bloody miles on a drizzly Saturday afternoon to see her in her place of work and impress her with my irresistible charms.

"Plate of chips, please. And a cup of tea."

"Right you are love."

"And is Gay here?"

"What? Err... No. She only does Sundays."

ARSE.

So, I pedalled home in the drizzle and brought myself back the next day in the pouring rain, looking and smelling like a drowned rat. Worse, my paper round funds were severely depleted by the previous day's efforts, and there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to impress the lovely Gay in her waitress uniform and 80s feather-cut with my financial extravagance.

"Plate of chips, please. From the kids' menu."

"Anything else?"

"......"

"Plate of chips, then."

She returned, several minutes later with a kiddie-size portion of chips, which she placed in front of her pathetic-looking lone customer.

Now or never.

"Will you go out with me?"

She stood, magnificent, in front of me, and pondered my question. A smile spread across her face. A smile that lifted my heart.

"Why are you putting sugar on your chips?"

ARSE.

"Don't tell anyone. Please."

She didn't. And fair play to her for waiting until she was back in the kitchens before screaming with laughter.

As they say on these new-fangled internets these days: PWN3D.

Feigning enthusiasm, I ate the lot, and being in a garden centre, it would have been rude not to have bowked rich, brown vomit all over their incredibly expensive-looking display of topiary.

School dinner the following Monday was HELL.

"Hey Scary! D'you want some sugar?"

"Cup of tea, Scary? Want chips in that?"

And that from the teachers' table.

Too weak even to deliver a respectable cock-punch, I slunk away, entirely defeated by the cruelty of it all.

The following term Gay came in and announced that from now on, she would like to be known as 'Gail', thank you very much. I went right off her.