Maybe I should’ve realized there was something wrong when I first met him. There I was, as planned, waiting to meet him at the Multomah County Library. I see an Asian male, late 20’s, walking across the street on a cellphone. I get a call from him, he doesn’t know where the library is, although by now he is standing across the street virtually staring into my eyes. While I try to explain and I orient him, I was a little confused, so I just said to myself maybe he is new to the area. All I knew so far was he went to Reed College, he loved sports, and he is a really big self-professed nerd. I must that I never knew the true meaning, the flavor, the aroma of a nerd until I met Harry. There he was with 80’s style high-top sneakers on, whith his jeans lightly dusting the top of the laces, a great length for clam-digging or jumping in puddles, very deep puddles.

He finally found me when I waved and stood right in front of his ungodly sweater, something Cosby would have worn. And Cosby when he was on the Cosby show, past tense here. I gave him a chance, I saw his innocent, wide, charming…. Oh, wait, were those braces. They revealed themselves as some sort of matrix of wire and metal and rubberbands running along the side like wood paneling on a 70’s station wagon. I realized his rubberbands were not only running around every single bracket, but they were day-glo, something you would wave around at a wave, something that you would expect to glo in the dark, maybe for use as a nighlight to pave your way to the bathroom at night.

We started talking about books, since we were at the library and all, and I started to get reeled in as he talked about sci-fi,a nd at this point I didn’t quite know the genre of fantasy that he was into. Beyond the Lord of the Rings trilogy but quite into the Robert Jodan-esque, Crown of Swords genre. When I saw the books of fantasy after fantasy and the magic cards and the Game Boy console from 1989 and the orignal games, I started to get a whaft of the nerd I had just met.

Things proceeded normally—we went to coffee, we had long talks, and in retrospect I don’t know why I kept agreeing to going out other than I must have been heavily drinking or smoking something very strong. I had never met a specimen such as him. Kind of like an agate in your rock garden, but you have to keep in mind it is still a rock garden that you are looking at.

The the first love poem showed up with pink roses. I was just recovering from the flu and he had been my sole caretaker and I guess he felt compelled to reveal his undying love for me… yes, he dropped the l-bomb in the first week. The poem was so passionate, so intense, so much that I started to feel more light-headed than I already did. I threw it away after recovering because I figured he had made like a thousand of those at scout camp, and there would be more where that was coming from. I was waiting for him to tell me about his time machine that he ordered on the internet.

I was so curious about this dude. It was like having a whiff of sour milk, you just have to go back for another, and another.

The kicker was three months into our relationship, when he started to reveal that he was writing a story about a wizard, going on seven years he had been writing this. I didn’t ask for any details, at this point I would rather have not known. I realized I did have a B.A. in psych, and in some twisted way, he was my case study. But his enigmatic style did not end so soon. I realized him and his friends would stay up all night playing magic cards or strategy games in the vain of dungeons and dragons. It was around this time that I finally saw his underwear, or started to take notice of it. They were white Hanes tighty-wities that his mom bought him. There were holes in these things that two fingers could fit through. These were the types of underwear that would significantly lower a man’s sperm count, and his manliness.

I might as well mention it was about this time that the noise of 1997 Ford Aspire’s hatch to the “hatchback”began to get to me. It didn’t close all the way. Not only was the “aspire” turquoise but it had pink detailing. The hatch didn’t close all the way and would sometimes fly up on the freeway. I wore very dark sunglasses in this car and there was no radio to mask the noise, it was pure torture on pavement. I should have known….