the ballad of babe and bimbo

What had happened was, I had a piece of mail from a friend of mine during my first couple months at undergrad, and he had graffiti’d the outside with all kind of random nonsense. “WARNING: TOPOGRAPHICALLY UNSTABLE CONTENTS”, “OPEN IMMEDIATELY unless HAVING SEX”, that kind of stuff. And in that spirit, I did something similar with a piece of correspondence to a former high school classmate at Randolph-Macon Women’s College. And what I got back was not from her, but from a couple of upperclass women who had been amused by it and posted me back a note to tell me so, scribbled on a piece of cardboard from some free publication distribution rack.

I have no idea what I replied with. That’s the downside of the five years before my first email account: I have no record of my sent correspondence. As embarrassing as it might be to read from 2020, I think it might be illuminating to see the thought processes of my brain thirty years ago, if only to marvel at how much has (and has not) changed. Be that as it may, I sent off a reply to them, expecting nothing to come of it.

What I got back was a homemade scrapbook of sorts. One populated with magazine cutouts, biographic details and the like. Babe, so-called, was from St Louis (and somehow an Auburn fan), and Bimbo from the greater NYC area and of Italian extraction. They detailed what they liked and didn’t like (it being 1990, Kevin Costner figured highly in the “like” range), and more to the point, actually invited me to an event at RMWC. Along with the note “We know your real name…and we still wrote to you,” along with an addendum to the party invite “THIS IS NOT A JOKE. Contact your friend for details.”

This was kind of earth-shaking. It was interest. Not even in a sexual or romantic context — just the fact that two women were curious about me was a mind-blowing development in a time and place that had made it abundantly clear I was no one of interest. The vast majority of my undergraduate institution closed the doors as soon as I flunked out of fraternity rush, and I was left on the stoop, all alone save for the girlfriend I had desperately made a play for the moment she evinced an interest herself.

And here we ran into the problem of the bird in the hand. I had absolutely no way to get to Lynchburg, Virginia, to the best of my knowledge. I had never driven anywhere further from Birmingham than…Gadsden? Maybe? This was an eight or nine hour drive. I had ridden to Knoxville countless times, so that would be familiar, but the back half of the route…I might as well be driving to Mars. My car was a seven year old Monte Carlo with 150,000 miles on it already. I had functionally no money, no prospect for lodging, and certainly no way of explaining to my girlfriend, the one person at this school who would speak to me, that I needed to drive 500 miles to meet two women I’d never met and only knew through two pieces of mail.

Call it fear, call it anxiety, call it a catastrophic attraction to the devil you know, but I chickened right out. I must have counter-offered them the spring band festival at my own school, and mentioned my girlfriend, because in December came a care package: liquor filled chocolates, a can of Coors Light, a can coozie,  a candle (“for when you want a romantic interlude with {$NAME}”), a pink disposable razor (purpose unknown?) and some other things, all detailed in a blue book along with grips about Auburn losing to Alabama and their rider requirements for attending Southern Comfort that spring.

And I don’t know what happened after that. I assume nothing. I probably never had the nerve to reply. Four years later, with a reliable Saturn and practice wheeling everywhere from Nashville to Chattanooga to New Orleans to Pensacola, with the added utility of email…maybe? I certainly could have done it by 1997, because I did, but in 1990, the pieces weren’t in place yet to make it feasible even if I’d had the nerve to go for it.

But I think something important was lost when I didn’t have the chutzpah to try it anyway.