On Sunday afternoon I had coffee with a new friend, Leslie the poet from Philadelphia who is working on her Ph.D. in English Literature. She told me an intriguing story about a guy she knew in high school.
This guy (we'll call him Brian) was your stereotypical jock--not too smart, drank lots, dated lots--but Brian had a secret. One day an acquaintance of Leslie's came up to her and asked her an unusual question: has Brian ever stolen any of your underwear? Not knowing whether the information was to be used against her, Leslie refused to answer the question, but the truth was that yes, Brian had stolen a pair of her underwear.
Months later, Brian was caught stealing his friend's mom's underwear. Suddenly everyone was talking about how he'd stolen a pair of their underwear as well.
Time passed, the gossip died down, and then word spread that Brian had been arrested. An ex-girlfriend called the cops when she noticed his car parked across the street from her house. When the police arrived, they found Brian wearing a pair of the ex-girlfriend's underwear and masturbating.
This last image blew my mind when Leslie told me. The psychology involved in that...in actually wearing the ex's underwear WHILE parked across from her house. As though he were trying to somehow get closer to her than a conversation would allow, as though being in her underwear might help him get into her head, might provide a new level of intimacy. To me there's something beautiful in that image. Creepy, but also beautiful: a young man searching desperately for connection and closeness with women, restricted by cultural norms from developing the same kind of close relationships that women form with each other, finally resorting to desperate and pathetic strategies for achieving intimacy and being further ostracized for it.
And one final touch of drama: the reason Brian was on Leslie's mind was because she'd gotten news on her birthday, February 14th, that Brian had been found dead in his car that morning. He'd crashed his car into a tree and died on the day of love.
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