All day long your clique at school kept interrogating each other: "Who you going to call? Is she hot? How big are her boobs?"
All night long your parents kept prodding: "Who are you going to call?" "When are you going to call? What are you going to say?"
The pressure was intense. Getting a "yes" meant tearful "Our boy is growing up!" exclamations from your parents, plus an extra $5 allowance to pay for the date; it meant back-slapping congratulations from friends and even teachers in school the next day. It meant that you were a person of value; you had accomplished something marvelous.
Getting a "no" meant, at best, hand-on-shoulder consolation, as if you were suffering through a major tragedy, and more likely jeers and put-downs; it meant that you were worthless, a failure. You were a child, not an adult; a "fag," not a man.
The date request call put lot of pressure on the girl, too. It told her "You are the Girl of My Dreams. You are my One True Love. This request is not for one evening together, but for a lifetime."
No wonder mean girls would laugh and slam the phone down, and nice girls would make stuttering, embarrassed excuses: "Oh...um...well, I think I'm...er...busy...hang on, I'll check...Dad, do we have that thing on Saturday night?"
For that reason, there was no such thing as serial dating. That telephone call was the equivalent of a marriage proposal. If the date went well (whatever that meant), you would henceforth be "going together." You would walk to class together, sit together at lunch, telephone each other every night. You would have to "break up" in order to date someone else.
If the date went badly, the girl and her friends would never speak to you again.
So who are you going to call? Most discussions in school for the duration of the week involved imagining the sexual ecstasies awaiting on Saturday night (if she said yes), or evaluating prospects for next Tuesday night's call (if she said no). There were many stipulations:1. No one older, not even by a few months.
2. No one who you had called before.
3. No one who had dated one of your friends.
4. No one who was a friend (if she said "no," she would never speak to you again).
5. No one who was fat, wore glasses, or had inadequately sized breasts (I'm not sure why; there would be no babies around to breast-feed, so what did it matter?).
1. I hadn'd figured "it" out yet. I had no idea that gay people existed, that same-sex desire existed. I thought that no boy was actually attracted to girls; we dated them because it was required.
2. The long night of sexual ecstasies turned out to be optional -- girls were perfectly satisfied with a good-night kiss on the cheek. You just had to make something up when your friends asked the next day.
3. Gay people might not exist, but "fags" did, boys who were so frustrated at their inability to attract girls that they decided to become girls. Every "no" moved you a step closer to that precipice. Eventually you would be swishing down the hallway in a cloud of lavender perfume, carrying a handbag and calling everyone "Sweetie." We made that Tuesday night call because the alternative was disaster.
