Tuesday, July 27, 2021 Desk Pal

When I was a senior in high school, I was taking an English class from Mr. S. and one day I noticed that someone from another period had written “I’m a star!” on my desk. I couldn’t let that go unanswered, so I wrote in pencil underneath it “Boo Hoo – I’m only a square.” Oh, the wit. I thought that was the end of it. The next day, the anonymous writer had added, “I’m so sorry for you. Who are you?” to which I replied, “I don’t want your pity and I would like to remain anonymous.” Bam! The writer replied the next day “So sorry again. That suits me fine. To each his own. Tell me this, then, are you a foxy lady? Tell the truth.”

The plot thickens. Clearly some sort of hot-blooded male was doing the writing. I consulted with my friend Lori who sat next to me and was following the conversation. Should I keep going? I mean, what kind of question is that? I hedged a bit on my answer (okay, I hedged a lot).

Me: “It all depends on your standards of ‘foxy.'”

Him: “Everyone has different standards of ‘foxy.'”

Me: “What’s yours? I have a feeling you’re evading the answer.”

Day by day we wrote to each other, the answers getting longer, the questions getting deeper and more involved. Think of the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” played out on a school desk instead of email. Oh, if only life were like the movies. I know what you’re thinking – how big can this desk be? Well, we knew that eventually it would get washed off, so my friend Lori and I would write down the conversation every day just in case, so we could keep a record of it, and all these years later, I still have the entire dialogue. Anyway, we, too, were surprised that the desk wasn’t getting cleaned off much – we were starting to fill up the whole thing. Eventually we found out that the janitor AND Mr. S. were following the conversation out of curiosity. Sheesh.

Fairly early on, we started asking questions designed to give us clues as to other person’s identity, like “what hour are you in here?” or “Do you have 1st or 2nd lunch?” “Do you ride a school bus to school?” I tried to find out how old he was, not wanting to waste my time on a sophomore, but he was quick to point out my hypocrisy, since I had earlier made a fuss about his standards of “foxiness” being somewhat shallow. “Don’t you think a younger guy could be just as nice as an older guy?” He had me there, so I conceded. We found out when each of us had other classes. I got bold and asked him what his initials were and how far away he lived from school. He put his initials on the desk and I asked if he smoked. I put my initials on the desk and he said, “It depends on what kind of smoke you mean. Do you?” We told each other what we did on the weekends and I divulged that I didn’t drink or smoke because I hated both. We talked about what kind of music we liked. It turned out we were both keeping a record of the conversation. His initials were BK. He discovered mine were LB. It was just a matter of time at this point.

One day he wrote “What’s your name? Is it Lori or possibly Lynn?” Clearly his detective work had been better than mine – I had gotten no further than BK, even though I had tried spying on the classroom at other hours. Lori’s initials were also LB, so he couldn’t narrow it down further than that. He accused me of trading off writing with Lori. “I suppose you’re going to be mad now.” Well, I was mad about his accusation. “I resent your saying we’ve been trading off writing. …now that you’ve narrowed me down to two people, it’s only fair that you let me know who you are. …everything that has been written has been by ME. How do I know that you and your friend haven’t traded off? If you are really sure who I am, why don’t you come up and say Hi?”

Talk about laying down the gauntlet. I was nervous about meeting BK, to be honest. I was enjoying the anonymity of the whole thing and was apprehensive that meeting each other would put an end to the it all.

He admitted that he’d gotten his information from Mr. S. Now why didn’t I think of that – the direct approach! Then he came right out with it: “My name is [Beowulf] K. and I hope you’re telling me the truth about your name being Lynn.” He also divulged that his friend was a girl, which in his mind proved that they weren’t trading off on the writing. [Note: his name wasn’t really Beowulf – I changed it for the purpose of sharing this story).

We still hadn’t actually met each other, so the mystery lingered for a time. He asked, “Do you have anything against people getting high?” I told him, “I myself have gotten high before and I think it is a total waste of time. I wouldn’t do it now if you paid me. …I don’t really have anything against people getting high as long as they can control it.”

He said he’d know me if he saw me – I guess again he had done better detective work. I thought he had an unfair advantage, so I asked him to describe himself. “Well, I’m tall, kinda slim, I have light brown hair that’s about down to my shoulders – in the back it’s kind of wavy.” He owned up to getting high when he had a chance and said defensively, “If you want to ridicule me for that, go ahead.” I assured him no ridicule would be forthcoming and that my disapproval stemmed from seeing friends go downhill after they started smoking pot. At the end of that particular entry, I acknowledged our silent eavesdropper by writing “Hi Mr. S.”

We went back and forth on whether or not we should keep writing. We were erasing the desk ourselves at this point, knowing that each of us was keeping a written record. He quit writing for a couple days and I thought maybe the conversation had run its course. It turned out that he’d gotten into a fight with his grandmother and then ran away. He came back because “you cant run away from your problems, you have to face them all. Right?” I was sympathetic and agreed. Our entries were longer than ever and we talked again about whether or not we should meet. He said, “Are you going to the dance on Friday?” Ooh la la! He knew my friend Lori had seen him and had described him to me, which he thought smacked of cheating. Still, he was curious…”What was her description like?” My answer was surprisingly sweet… “She described you mostly the same way you described yourself…I really feel like I already know you though from everything you’ve written and a description doesn’t mean much anymore.” As to the dance, “I haven’t heard about any dance – are you going? Tell me about it.” Sounds like I was fishing for an invitation, doesn’t it? I probably was. However, he wasn’t going to the dance. We each were pretty sure now about who the other person was, having caught glimpses here and there. He pressed a little more about meeting and I demurred, saying I thought we should wait until the end of the trimester. I hinted that I thought I’d seen him and asked oh so casually, “does your girlfriend have a mid-length silver gray coat?” At the end of his long reply, he added, “By the way, I don’t have a girlfriend.” I described him pretty well, so he admitted “Well, I guess that was me. What did you think?”

Good question. What did I think? My answer: “I’d prefer to evade your first question if you don’t mind.” Later I wrote, “If you think my first sentence is terrible, please don’t be offended, but I just don’t want to say on this desk.” He finally figured out who I was as well, but we still hadn’t formally met. I noted “I saw you several times yesterday and I happened to notice that you were never smiling and you didn’t look very happy.” He admitted “That is one thing about me. I don’t really ever smile very much. I probably wasn’t very happy. Certain people bum me out to the max.” We exchanged information on what classes were were going to take the next trimester – clearly our time to write to each other on a desk in Mr. S’s class was coming to an end soon. I told him that I had seen him one day, but his back was to me and although I had considered saying something to him, I chickened out. At the end, I asked “Does max mean maximum? I hope you don’t think I’m stupid for asking.” Oh, for Pete’s sake – that really was stupid of me. How could he NOT think I was stupid with that question? GROAN.

He confirmed that max meant maximum (and it has to be reported here that he did not reassure me that it wasn’t a stupid question.). He encouraged me to say something the next time and not be a chicken. “I don’t bite. If I see you, I’ll say something, OK?” One of us was going to have to be bold. It was me.

“Well, you can’t call me a chicken anymore, can you?! I didn’t know what to say to you (you could probably tell) but I said something. Did I catch you by surprise?” I went on to tell him that the highlight of my weekend was getting kidnapped.

“To tell you the truth, you scared the ____ out of me. I didn’t know what to say.” (He actually put the blank line in there, not the word.) He was intrigued by my weekend and asked “What do you mean you got kidnapped? I’ll bet some handsome devil you know kidnapped you and held you hostage for the weekend.” He told me what classes he was going to be taking the next trimester since I had shared mine. “What did you think when you saw me before 2nd hour?”

“You have quite an imagination! (a handsome devil, yet). Well it turned out to be a party. I didn’t mean to scare you that much! I didn’t know what to think about seeing you. Why don’t you tell me?” I told him what lunch I’d be in and that I didn’t think we’d be sharing any classes the next trimester. At the end I added coyly, “P.S. Today I am one year older than yesterday.”

“I have a feeling that you thought was pretty funny about the handsome devil!” He didn’t appreciate me passing the buck on what I thought about him. He wished me a happy birthday and asked if I was 17 or 18. We talked about snow and ice skating. He did some judicious erasing and then wrote kindly, “A nice clean spot for you.”

Although we knew each other on sight, we still weren’t really talking to each other in person. I think each of us knew that we had peaked out in our written correspondence and a face-to-face friendship (or anything else) was unlikely to take off. I told him I was 17 (at last!), asked him why I never saw him by his locker (which, ironically, wasn’t far from mine) and asked him about his plans for the weekend. He had said he was thinking crazy things and was so talkative in his last entry that I responded, “I think I like it when your mind is thinking crazy things ’cause you write more.”

We exchanged a few more thoughts about where we were in the school at certain hours of the day and what our plans were for the weekend. He was going to a concert. Which one? Edgar Winter. I told him that he was a very unique individual and he wasn’t sure what that meant, accusing me of saying in a roundabout way that sometimes he was mature and sometimes he wasn’t. I told him that being unique was complimentary and I didn’t know him well enough to comment on his maturity, but he seemed mature to me. Things were a little tense suddenly. I asked him why he carried a radio.

“HOWDY LYNN. I’m sorry that I misunderstood. Thank you for saying that what you know of me seems mature. …the reason I carry a radio is that I have this great liking for music (if you know what I mean.” He agreed to give me one of his yearbook pictures if I wanted one (I had asked). We were only a week and 1/2 away from the end of the trimester and with that in mind, he said, “I hope we can still remain in some sort of contact. Sometime I would like to meet you somewhere (in school) and maybe spend an hour or so just talking. How would you feel about that?” And at the end, he conveyed a sense of insecurity. “P.P.S. About the question about me and my radio. I’m sure it’s because you’re curious, but could you possibly object?”

We were having a hard time communicating, prone to misunderstandings. Our worlds were clearly very different and yet, it was still so much fun to keep up the writing – I loved it and looked forward to it every day. I wrote, “Music is a big part of my life sometimes. I hope we remain in contact, too and I would like to talk to you sometime. But I would like to write to you, too. I will miss that. No, I don’t object – I just wondered. P.S. HOWDY TO YOU, TOO BEOWULF!”

The truth was that I enjoyed the Beowulf on the desk far more than the Beowulf in person. In person, he struck me as too young (he was indeed a sophomore) and too much like the druggies in school. I had built up some pretty strong romantic fantasies about this guy that went up in smoke fairly quickly after we met. He was a nice guy, but not my type. He must have detected something and felt perhaps he had left a bad impression, for his next entry in part said, “I think that sometimes I give off the impression of being stuck-up – I’m sorry if I have seemed that way at all lately. Sometimes I get in a mood where I don’t want to talk to anybody and people mistake my silence for snobbishness. Do you ever get in moods like that? Did you bring your picture? P.S. I didn’t know you were behind me in the hall after I talked to you or I would have said something.”

Before long, we were approaching our last day of writing, after having commiserated with each other about the evil of final tests and both admitting to being mightily sick of school. Thanksgiving (referred to as “Turkey Day” by Beowulf) was coming and we were both going to stuff ourselves “to the max.”

On the last day, Beowulf wrote, “Yep, today is the last day. It certainly has been [fun] and I’ll miss it (if you know what I mean). Remember how it started? That was rather unique in its own way. Don’t you think so? …hope to see you at different times during the rest of the year. Bye now. Say bye to Lori for me too!”

“Hello, Beowulf! Yes, it was rather unique and I’ll surely miss coming in here and reading what you wrote on the desk.” I should have left it at that, but instead threw in these fairly blah and prosaic thoughts “I think I’m going to be stuck with a cold all weekend. What a horrible thought. Well, I’m glad you got a good score in Driver’s Ed.”

The correspondence with Desk Beowulf was really one of the best parts of my senior year, at least that first trimester. It was unexpected, romantic at times, and held a lot of mystery and promise. The anonymity lent us both a freedom of expression that we lacked in person. I wonder whatever happened to him? He seemed to have a somewhat dysfunctional home life and was prone to using pot, but he really rose to the challenge of writing to me on that desk and I’m forever grateful.

This has been Tuesday True Stories with Lynniebeemuseoday.

I’ll probably write this post on a desk and then erase it to make room for more.