Spring 2003

There was a girl I was OBSESSED with my freshman year of college. She was a fucking psycho, an Irish Cali girl with no brains and the brawn of a wildcat. We will call her "She-Ro". She had a couple of superpowers: the first being the ability to magically change phone numbers: in the years I was in contact with her she must have used about 15 to 20 different phone numbers, probably because of the disproportionate number of guys she had in her phonebook to the amount of numbers her phone allowed her to store.

Her second superpower was the ability to magically switch boyfriends from one day to the next. During the time I knew her, there were about 25 different guys who she introduced me to, and I firmly shook hands with, who she was either "dating" or she claimed to be her boyfriend at the time.

EVERY guy in my massive dorm complex (second biggest non-military dorm in the country) had some kind of story about this girl by the end of freshman year. I would start conversations at parties like this:

Me: Hey, you know (She-Ro)?

Felix: Are you kidding me? How can I not know her?

Mike: She slept with 2 guys on my floor.

Me: REALLY?

Joe: I made out with that bitch at a club during orientation. In a bathroom. You hit that, Scotty Boy?

Felix: It's like "Hello". You really can't see anything but those boobs.

I didn't believe them. It was well known that I had a thing for this girl, my whole floor thought I wouldn't shut the fuck up about her, and my friends from back home started to gossip. But it was clear that I was chasing the classroom slut. And it was hard to tell from the start.

During freshman orientation, I had danced with her at some "break the ice" event with a dancefloor. Among thousands of people, She-ro found me and started a dance, unlike any of which I had experienced before. It was almost like 2 minutes of captivity, pulling me over with a massive masculine grip, and basically took full control of my upper body. Apparently she recognized me from the previous summer at Georgetown. After the next song came on, she immediately released me, stopped the dance, and basically disappeared out of thin air. I wouldn't see her again until the fall. I was transfixed.

First week of class, she made it a point to ask me for notes repeatedly, and during the second month of school, October 2002, which was a hellish month for me for other reasons, she really brightened one of my dark days with an old-school note-passing exchange during a boring lecture.

She-ro was sitting 3 seats away from me, with no one in between. When the professor started speaking, droning on and on about pre-Cold War Russia or post-nuclear physics or some such bullshit, this girl began smiling, giving me seductive looks. This girl was very, very masculine and so were all the guys she knew, but not to the point that I couldn't get a major, raging hard-on in the middle of the lecture hall. I tried to cover it up with my notebook, but she saw what I was doing.

Then, she tore out half a page in her notebook, wrote something on it, and motioned a couple guys sitting behind us to pass it over to me. The note read as follows: "I want you :)" Enough even to get me to smile. This was my response, which I wrote "Sure thing babe, that's awesome yo"

Not sure what I was thinking with that one, but it definitely elicited a giggle. Then the professor ended his lecture, and everyone went their separate ways, so I couldn't catch her again next day. That Thursday, I did manage to find her after one of my classes in the hall.

Me: Hey there, what are you doing this weekend?

Her: I don't know yet. Probably going to Rain Thursdays, then Luxe on Friday and The Roxy Saturday.

Me: Alright, well I'll give you a call and maybe we can meet up.

Her: Alrighty then. Maybe kid.

At the time, this was unthinkable to my 18-year old brain. How could a girl who seemed to like me so much be unable to spend even a fraction of her weekend with me? I actually ended up going to the Roxy Saturday night, paying a 20 dollar cover to get into the club and walking around asking everybody if they had seen a fiery redhead tearing up the dancefloor. She was nowhere to be found. I went outside and called her number, or the first of the many numbers she gave me.

Me: Hello

(Picks up phone, loud music and crowd noise)

She-ro: Who is this?

Me: It's Scotty. From class. I'm at the Roxy, just wondering if you're here.

Her (more loud music and crowd noise): Who is this?

Me: Scotty. Scotty Dukes.

Her (shouting above the crowd noise): Gotta go. Bye (click)

I saw her the next Monday after class and cornered her.

Me: Hey, I was at the Roxy Saturday night. I looked all over, where were you?

Her: The Roxy? We went to Swirl Saturday night.

Me: I thought you said we were going to meet up at the Roxy.

Her: When did I ever say that?

Me: On Thursday, remember?

Her: I don't think so. anyway I got class. Gotta go.

What an bitch. The girl was ICE cold. Yet I chased it. Every weekend I would call asking where she is. Sometimes I got loud music and crowd noise (Note: NO ONE should ever pick up their fucking phone at a club. Maybe a dive bar, where conversation can be audible. But a CLUB? Only the worst of the worst have ever done that to me). Sometimes I would get the immediately recognizable "This is no longer a working number" tone.

Yet still, I chased this crazy, unpredictable dragoness. Then one weekend, I got a random phone call from her at 2 in the morning. Caught me off-guard, I thought I must be seeing things on my cell phone. All my friends from home were there visiting me at the time, and they knew what it was.

Me: Hey what's up?

She-Ro: Just got back from the club. I'm exhausted. You wanna grab breakfast in the morning? West campus cafeteria

Me: Umm, sure. My friends are here though.

Her: Bring them.

Wow. Holy shit. Didn't see that one coming. My friends were all intrigued as to who this person was whom they'd heard of so much. So they agreed upon my friend "Kadavir" as the breakfast guest.

So we show up there, and amazingly she is there, giving me among the most ackward half-handshake half-hugs I've ever gotten. We get food, sit down, and as soon as we sit down, Kadavir runs away from the table, leaving me and her alone. We chat, and she tells me she has a "very exciting project" coming up, which is why she called this meeting. Nearly half an hour later, Kadavir returns, panting and sweating hard.

She-Ro: Well, that was kind of a long time to be going to the bathroom. Where did you go?

Kadavir: Oh, well I had to take a call from this producer we're gonna be working with.

(I had told her the fake story that we were an independent rap duo trying to get a record deal. She bought it.)

Her: Oh, that's awesome!

Five minutes later, she had to "go run", and pulled one of her familiar diaappearing acts. Apparently, she had just come from an early morning run. Fake story. I asked Kadavir what that was really about.

Me: Dude, where the fuck did you go? I was supposed to tell her this story about our rap career, you were supposed to be the color commentary.

Kadavir: I just took the biggest diahrrhea shit in human history.

Me: For half an hour? Damn dude.

Kadavir: I dunno. I saw this girl, took a good look at her, saw how much of an ice queen she was and she made me nervous, made me queasy. I immediately lost my appetite. Icy cold.

If that isn't a sign that girl is bad news, I don't know what is. For the next month she vanished. She was not in class, not around the dorms, absolutely nowhere to be found. I wondered if she had failed out or got kicked out or transferred to another school, none of which was uncommon for freshman year. Maybe that's the "project" she referred to.

Then, sometime around early April She-ro suddenly resurfaced, in the most shocking way imaginable. Freshman year I had a dorm-mate named EuroBaller, who was a cool guy. He was the first guy to send me the leaked version of Eminem's "Lose Yourself", the first person on the floor to hear Radiohead's new album, discovered Homestar Runner years before everyone else. He obviously had his ear to the street.

Euroballer came into my room one Saturday afternoon.

EuroBaller: Yo Scotty. Remember that girl She-Ro who you used to be obsessed with?

Me: Yeah. What about her.

EuroBaller: You... you gotta check out this website man

Me: Oh no. Was she in a porno? That wouldn't surprise me.

EuroBaller: It's pretty freakin' close man.

He then took charge of my computer and directed me to a certain website. All the guys on our floor would pass around pornos and stuff to each other, so nothing really could have shocked me. But this did. My reaction to this website would have to be equivalent in nature to anyone reacting to "Two Girls One Cup" for the first time.

Euroballer: She has a nice ass, doesn't she? The girl, front and center. You recognize that hair?

Me: Oh... OH god! NO way. That's her! Holy shit!

Euroballer: Comes out next month. You might want to check that out.

Euroballer went on to call the other guys from our floor into my room to tell them of his discovery:

C-Rock: OH SNAP! Scotty's girl is in a porno movie. OH SNAP! (this was C-Rock's famed expression whenever something crazy went down on our floor)

Famguy: Jesus Almighty. What section is she in?

Me: 301.

Famguy: Mind if I sit in on your next class?

BillBrassky: Boobs have got to be Double-Ds at least. Ass is definitely a bedonkadonk.

Jada: That is a hell of an ass. I would kill to touch that in da cluub.

Basically, She-Ro was chosen out of millions of girls to take part in this movie produced by MTV which showed normal girls turned into viscious sluts when placed into a promiscuous situation: Spring Break. Basically it took a group of like 20 people, 10 guys 10 girls, and put them on a Spring Break trip together with cameras everywhere at all times and documented every raunchy detail of what happened, who had sex. what fights broke out, etc. High-quality entertainment for my dollar. And HER ASS in a tiny bikini was chosen as the cover shot of all the movie's posters, website, promotional flyers, everywhere. The hair was recognizable. It was definitely her.

I would MUCH rather she be in a porno. Then, it would only be a small and select people who see her open up. Here, her promiscuous spring break exploits would be shown on a big screen in every theater in the country!

Ultimately, after much deliberation I just decided to see the movie. I bought a late-night Sunday ticket the weekend it came out, and asked my friends Linzo and Madrid to go with me as "moral and emotional support". And with that kind of movie, I would need all the support I can get. We walk in, the theater is practically empty except for the three of us. Good sign.

So the movie starts, everyone gets off the plane looking all conservative. Then the second day there, they all have a wet t-shirt contest, and this conservative dude breaks out of his shell, goes apeshit and wins. Next scene, it's a hotel pool late at night, and it's the wet t-shirt winner alone, with my friend She-Ro, on the big screen. They are in the pool, naked, making out and fooling around. Next scene, they are in a bedroom, a nightvision camera capturing them having sex.

This is when I start freaking out. Not really, but mentally i did. Let's say I had hooked up with her after that note-passing exchange? Does that make me automatically eligible for contracting an STD? The shock of it all was too much to handle for my poor young brain. If it was any redemption to me, the movie was an absolute bomb and MTV wasted millions of dollars on advertising for it. Very cool. On the other hand, she came out a winner with a free Spring Break trip and her 15 minutes of fame, neither of which she and her friends would shut up about for a very long time. Not cool.

I was "friends" with She-Ro for the rest of the time we were in college. Sometimes I saw her, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes she had another dude on her arm, very rarely she didn't. But I never looked at her the same way again. Never chased her again. Even had an opportunity to make out with her at a party, the following fall. Possibly. Either way I turned it down and it never happened. And for my long-term health, it's probably better that it never did. She was "that MTV girl". Those thoughts had long been filed into foreclosure.

Even a few weeks ago, I got a random IM from She-Ro (not sure how she still had my IM)

She-Ro: Hey there.

Me: Umm, hey. I thought you moved to Iraq or something after we graduated.

Her: Yeah, I was in Iraq with my soldier boyfriend, then I lived in Egypt for a year. Now I'm back in the states and I'm moving to NYC (doesn't everyone eventually?).

Me: Oh. Well that's great.

Her: You know, I really could use some help getting around. Can you show me around maybe, how to use the subway?

Me: Oh sure. Maybe. I'll give you a call.

Her: I changed my number again. It's (number). Just making sure you had it.

Me: OK sure I'll call.

That Saturday night I called her 5 times, no answer. The following Saturday, called 5 more, just for the heck of it. No answer each time. The next week, I got a new phone, and did not bother giving her MY number. She can chase now, because I'm done. Good riddance.