She Was Popular, I Was A Nerd: My Improbable High School Romance
A first love that broke status barriers
Heidi was my first and only high school girlfriend. She disparaged herself to be with me. I use disparagement in its original sense–– to marry or have a romance with someone of a lesser rank.
This was 1979, and Heidi and I were like characters in a John Hughes movie before John Hughes movies even existed. Just like those 1980s movies that defined high school––e.g., Pretty In Pink and The Breakfast Club––the hundred kids in our grade at the Riverdale Country School had long been irrevocably sorted into castes.
In our case, Heidi was a beauty and I was a nerd.
Once, in the boys’ locker room, I witnessed a cool kid (long hair, lacrosse stick; later, a veterinarian), dress down a fellow nerd:
“you’re not a jock, you’re not a brain [a nod toward me], you’re not a druggie, no girl will look at you, you’re nothing.”
That day in the locker room, witness to that awful verbal evisceration of a fellow nerd, I was glad I’d been spared. I was glad as well to learn that cool kids such as this future vet considered me a “brain” among nerds.
Still, I was never invited to any of the cool kids’ parties, which were the only parties I was aware of. 1
Heidi was pretty, thus popular––long dark hair, a warm smile, and a pleasing symmetry of features. Her natural place was with the jocks and the cool kids. She had dated the older captain of the football team, the quarterback. He was handsome enough to later became an accomplished on-air TV journalist. His name was Billy McGowan, which became for me the only possible name for a football captain.
Heidi and I had a mutual schoolfriend named Andy whose home caste was with me and my fellow nerds. But unlike me, Andy was not shy. He had the gift of a keen Irish wit, and he would consort with anyone in the grade regardless of their status.
Andy was friendly with Heidi, and in the summer before our senior year, Andy included Heidi in gatherings of our small group of nerds. She found us amusing or interesting, and we became comfortable in her presence.
I don’t know what we spoke about, but I know we spoke with the undue authority of precocious seventeen year-olds who’d read a great deal more than we’d lived. We offered no opinions, only pronouncements. I talked the most.
Early that summer, Andy took me aside to tell me that Heidi liked me, as in “liked, liked” me. It was the most astounding, thrilling piece of news I’d ever received.
Along with my thrill came fright. I had zero experience with girls so I had no idea what to do with this scarcely believable information. No idea how to proceed. And I was too embarrassed to ask anyone.
Appearance and its close cousin “coolness” had been the sorting mechanisms at our high school, so there seemed to be a tremendous incongruity in Heidi being attracted to me. 2
Just three years earlier, in eighth grade, I’d overheard a girl say of me, “How could anyone possibly be uglier?” 3 And before I met Heidi, I’d heard that some mysterious electorate of boys had sorted the girls in our grade and ranked Heidi as fourth most attractive.
I wanted to go out with Heidi, but even with Andy’s assurance in hand, I was still too afraid to ask her. So Heidi, who’d had boyfriends, initiated our first date. We went to Adam’s Apple, a restaurant and disco, which shared ownership with Tavern on the Green and was decorated just as garishly.
Drinking age then was 18, IDs were not checked, so we drank. Over dessert, I made an emphatic conversational point by thumping my palm down and ended up catapulting a fork onto an adjacent table.
God bless Heidi. She thought it was hilarious.
Fool that I was, I didn’t kiss her that night. So she had to initiate our first kiss. It was the first time I’d kissed a girl. I remember the taste of that first kiss, electric and delicious.
In the summer we could be boyfriend and girlfriend away from the social glare of Riverdale, one of the “good” private schools on a large campus in the nice part of the Bronx, just above Manhattan.
Our grade was virtually all white and almost everyone lived on the Upper East Side or at least I assumed they did. Unlike the John Hughes movies, differences in wealth didn’t seem to me to be a factor at Riverdale. I was aware of some prominently connected kids: the daughter of a Bishop, the son of a media mogul, the niece of a famous writer.
Perhaps others were aware of wealth differences. My family had a very large apartment and some of the kids who came over must have noticed. There was one kid who asked me, incessantly, how many square feet our apartment was. I had no idea, and the question embarrassed me
I lived on 73rd and Park and Heidi’s family lived in a large townhouse on 69th street close to Central Park. That summer and during most of our relationship, we’d meet at her home because it offered us privacy. Since my two younger brothers ages nine and eleven were always around, we had no hope of privacy in my home, no matter its size.
I had no basis of comparison so I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have such a sweet and kind first girlfriend. Of her own volition, Heidi would bake chocolate-chip cookies for my little brothers, something they still remember. She was aces in their eyes.
Heidi was an accomplished artist, but not a natural academic student. My talents were the opposite. During our senior year, I was forced, under protest, to take art in order to graduate. Heidi tried to help me with my art projects,, i.e., help me cheat by drawing them for me. But she had too much talent to pull it off. She just couldn’t draw badly enough.
Summer was over and our senior year at school loomed and then started. I suggested to Heidi that we keep our relationship a secret. I feared that her cool friends would ridicule her for dating me, and then she would dump me. More so, I feared being ridiculed myself for daring to be in a relationship with someone well beyond my social station.
When I suggested secrecy to Heidi, I hid my real reasons. Instead I left it vague, telling her that remaining clandestine would be fun, like a game.
But she immediately assumed it was because I was ashamed of her. We were in the park at dusk. She pushed me away and started to cry. I told her that I loved her, that it was my mistake, and that there was no need to keep it a secret.
I’d underestimated her.
School started, and we got the result I’d feared. Guys made nasty remarks to me about Heidi. They hurt, but I ignored them. I still remember the identity of those classmates. The half-life of the grudges of a writer are much slower than a normal person’s. And some grudges last forever.
The nastiness of those boys came from jealousy. And whether they knew it or not, it came as well as a reaction to a revolutionary threat to their social order. If a nerd, even a brainy nerd like me, could have Heidi as a girlfriend, then what did it really mean to be a jock or to be cool?
Heidi also got blowback. She told me she asked one of her best friends if she could see how Heidi might think I was cute. Her good friend (initials EA) said, “David Roberts? Come on, you have to be kidding me.”
But Heidi and I stayed together throughout our senior year. On school nights, when we didn’t see each other, we’d talk on the phone for hours. The opposition to our romance bound us together as rebels against the system. She would tell me gossip about all the cool kids, mostly about who else was in a real relationship like ours. Very few, actually, which made us feel superior, enclosed in our little pod.
I don’t remember Heidi and I discussing what would happen when we graduated. She didn’t plan to go away to school. I was headed off to UPenn. I just figured that somehow we’d stay boyfriend and girlfriend. That somehow nothing would change. That I had no need to do anything to preserve or advance the relationship.
That summer I worked on Wall Street for my uncle’s investment bank. Heidi worked as a camp counselor where she met a fellow worker, her boss, an older guy named Cliff. He was already in his twenties.
She told me that Cliff had asked her out. She asked me what she should do. I was completely unprepared in both experience and maturity to answer that question. So I resorted to a facsimile, or disguise, of what I thought being a tough guy was all about. I told her she should “do whatever you want.”
Maybe it was the answer she wanted to hear or maybe she wanted to know how committed I was. In either case, it’s a moment I look back on with wonder at how I could possibly have been so utterly clueless, so utterly stupid.
When Heidi told me it was over, we were in my parents’ living room, the largest and most formal room in the apartment, many seating areas to choose from. She sat near but not next to me on one of the sofas, and when I tried to move over and put my arm around her shoulders, she removed herself to a facing chair.
She told me that Cliff had asked her to marry him and that she was considering the offer. I realized then that for quite a number of weeks Heidi had been avoiding seeing me. She’d used various excuses that seemed plausible at the time.
She had a big heart, and it must have been hard for her to tell me she was moving on.
I took the news as I thought a real man should. With a minimum show of emotion and a vibe of “sure, if that’s what you want.” Inside, I felt great sorrow, until I quickly buried the feeling away as deeply as I could.
As an adolescent in constant fear of being mocked, I had developed the skill to suppress any specific unpleasantness. Instead I was left with a general and undifferentiated sense of dread.
So I arrived at college without having the security of a girlfriend back home. There, I convinced myself that my senior year had been the exception to the rule that had been established in my first three years of high school–––no girl would ever want me.
Then began a long and painful romantic drought 4 that lasted for two and a half years until my next and final pre-marriage romance, which involved a different type of disparagement.
Come back next week for that.
Question for the comments: How does your high school experience relate to what I’ve written?
In the clip below from Pretty In Pink, James Spader as Steff represents the cool kids at Riverdale, Andrew McCarthy as Blaine represents Heidi, Molly Ringwald as Andie, off-screen, represents me.
Writer’s Note:
It is a blessing and a curse to excavate the feelings of a long ago past romance. A blessing to understand myself better and examine what happened with the benefit of 45 more years of experience (and a lot of therapy). A curse because reliving these emotions is bittersweet.
A curse also for the writer’s spouse because if the writing is any good, the spouse may feel the writer’s long ago passion come off the page. She may think he is searching for something that’s missing in his current life. That’s far from the truth in my case, but once released, a piece of writing becomes alive and malleable in the hands of whoever reads it.
In other words, my wife Debbie––we met in 1984, were married in 1985–– read a draft of this post and was hurt by it. Debbie is the editor and final arbiter of all posts I send. She initially interpreted this one as an expression of my regret rather than an attempt to relive something I hadn’t thought about for over forty years.
My daughter Lauren (36), to whom I often turn for guidance in these matters, helped me understand exactly how my writing struck a nerve with Debbie. The pain already felt and addressed, this post is going out with Debbie’s infinitely loving blessing permission.
The cooler parties, however, were the ones in the city where kids from multiple private schools would take over whichever townhouse had been vacated that weekend by parents––as my wife Debbie, a NYC cool kid, said: “there was always a parentless party my friends and I knew about.”
I’m struck by how much I and others judged everyone by their appearance. I didn’t need social media to understand where I stood in contrast to Heidi.
One of my wife Debbie’s first nicknames for me was “Ug,” short for ugly because in her eyes, she “didn’t want my good looks to go to my head.” I hadn’t told her about that hurtful eighth grade comment––“How could anyone possibly be uglier?”
My romantic drought was not helped by my habit during freshman year of having a full pizza for lunch and many Hostess Twinkies for dinner. #freshman25
Brings me right back to my only real high school boyfriend; I fell madly in love when I was 16. He was 15 and a year behind me in school. We were both what you’re describing as in the “cool” crowd, but still few girls dated “down” age.
I saw him from across the central quad during the first few weeks of school, which meant like every year I’d worn my contacts too long and had to wear glasses for a few days until my eyes got back to normal, which meant between classes I was walking around in a literal blur since I didn’t want to be seen wearing glasses. From a distance of about 50 yards - it seemed longer - I saw this tall blond with a cast on his leg and fell in love. I asked my best friend who he was. “That’s Lynn C——‘s brother.” (Protecting the innocent.) “Who is Lynn C——?” was my answer. So I had to orchestrate meeting two people, not just one.
To this day, I don’t know how I did that. The first date was the first dance of the year, always the Sadie Hawkins dance, so I asked him out. He didn’t have his drivers license yet, so I picked him up and met his parents, the whole reversal deal. As soon as we drove a block away we switched places. And that’s how it continued for about 4 months.
Naturally, he got bored and wanted to move on before I did. Teenage boys . . . But it wasn’t a large school and were in the same circle of friends. My defense was pretending he didn’t exist. He started seeing a girl two years older, a girl who was more “sophisticated;” she dyed her hair and wore a lot of makeup, which ended up on his shirts in a way his mother didn’t like. That lasted even less time.
And we started to see each other secretly. No idea why it was a secret. That next summer he would hang out at my house, or I would go to his, because he had a pool! And his sister was my cover. She was my friend, too. She was leaving for college that fall and I was a senior, he a junior. We had a class together, Asian Civ, studied together, were friends. I still cared, but “moved on.”
I left for college the next year but came home after one semester of the wrong choice of school, to save money (it was a private, expensive school), and figure out what I was going to be. I treaded water at Arizona State for three semesters, where he had begun, too. I took art classes, wanted to be a photographer, maybe. He joined a fraternity, wanted to drink beer, maybe. We saw each other but definitely were not running in the same direction then. We stayed friends, even better friends.
I decided to use my natural talent and become a clothing designer. I left after those three semesters to go to New York, Parsons School of Design. He stayed in Arizona, decided maybe a dentist would be good. Next time I saw him was at his sister’s wedding. A year later he sent me an invitation to his. I planned to go, but at the last minute I decided not - I had called to get directions to the church and spoke to his father; he seemed stand-offish, not friendly as he’d always been. The vibe left me thinking it wasn’t a great idea to go.
Moving on - finished school, didn’t want to stay in NY so moved to LA where there was a burgeoning industry. Started working and worked my way up to full designer within a short time, but didn’t like LA and has always wanted to live in San Francisco. After two years in LA my job in San Francisco opened up, I moved there, where my brother lived, as well.
Ok, sorry to bore you, I’ll wrap it up. Eight years after his sisters wedding, seven after his, he called me out of the blue. Of course even that has a story - I was working late, he called and left a message. (Before cell phones, of course.) I was leaving for a big men’s wear show the next day, so didn’t call him back until I came home. I had stopped by my brother’s house on the way home from the airport, told him something big was happening. I didn’t know what it was, but I got this call and I had a feeling.
Called him back, had to leave a message on a business answering machine - CD Medical. I thought he’d done it, he was a dentist! The “C” of the name! Then nothing. Then about four days later his boss returned the call, told me he was on vacation. Did I need something? No, I said I’d returned his call, it was personal, and what kind of medical practice was this? Oh, it’s a hemodialyses provider. Oh, thanks.
Maybe 3 days later he called me back. This was late September, we spoke for about 3 hours. He lived in LA, and thought I did, too. He’d called my mom to find me. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried that, but the other time she mistook him for a different guy I’d dated in LA with the same first name, and hung up on him. He told me about his divorce after five years, no kids. His sister had a son, three years old.
A few weeks later he stopped in San Francisco for the day on his way to a training in Oregon. We spent the day walking and talking, first over coffee in the morning, then over a beer in the afternoon at Washington Square Bar and Grill. The bartender there told us we should never fight - it was obvious how in love we were. We went to dinner, I took him back to the airport and asked when I’d see him again. He said how about the next weekend; he’d changed his ticket to come back, spend the weekend.
Six months later I moved down to Huntington Beach where he lived (I still didn’t like LA, but . . .), we set a wedding date for 5 months later. And we lived happily ever after - for 18 years. He died just after he turned 48, of colon cancer. This week I turned 70; I think I’m reviewing. I was right, something big was happening. Yesterday was my last day working full time - didn’t stay in clothing design, went into tech. My mother-in-law just sent me a text to see how I was spending my first day of semi-retirement. She’s 90, my last parent left.
First love, and the best love of my life, Bruce was his name.
I loathed high school. I loathed school. It was a prison sentence as far as I was concerned. Only during my senior year when I learned to effectively flirt my way through...everything, was I able to exit Browning during class time and head to the Plaza Hotel's lobby where I'd read whatever the hell I wanted and watch adults check-in and out. I never once did my homework (do not tell my 5th grade daughter; about this I happily lie). I had an unrequited crush on a beautiful Hewitt girl (sister school; we were all boys at Browning). I was the captain of the tennis team. The head of the investment club (pretty much a Ponzi scheme, alas) and a truly shitty student with underachieving grades but good SAT scores. To this day, I can count four classmates as life friends. To quote Robert Frost "And that has made all the difference". The author, my eldest brother, was my hero. I thought he was super cool regardless of what he says or feels about that time, the 1980's. When one's path to diabetes was daiquiris (if you were tall and not a buffoon, you'd get served on second avenue at the age of 15) and Mrs. Field's cookies. I can also attest that Heidi was beautiful and her cookies bribes worked. My brother Samuel and I rooted for David's romantic self. It gave us hope. We too were solitary, bookish, nervous around girls. That David had Heidi was pure inspiration. My "Heidi" was a Benneton model the summer before college when I was 17. She was 19 and attended Mt. Holyoke. I had no business rolling with her. I suppose when it comes to young love, us Roberts boys over achieve. And, frankly, Heidi led the way.