Mildew and old boyfriends

I came home today and when I opened the door to the house I got a faint whiff of basement mildew and the first thing I thought of (fondly) was my teenage boyfriend, Jake LaValley, because he always had a slight case of mildew smelling body odor and back then I was so in love with him it smelled good. I told Mitch that it smelled like my old boyfriend and he said, "He was........Musty???"

The basement is mildewy because I was trying to be diligent about keeping my basement mildew-free during the humid summer so I set up the dehumidifier.  Yay me!  How grown up and preventative!   Ironically, it leaked all over the carpet and sped up the mildew breeding process by about a million percent.  That's what thinking ahead gets you, a basement full of mildew and bittersweet memories of stinky teenage boyfriends.

Normally I would never call out a person on the Internet using both their real first and last names and blabbing about their strange teenage body odor twenty-some years after the fact, but as far as I know, Jake LaValley fell off the face of the earth because although he was self-confident enough to have a Que Sera Sera attitude about his own B.O., he wasn't self-confident enough to break up with me face to face.  One day he was there, and the next day he was gone.  He drove off to Montana and called me a few weeks later to tell me he left. (classy!) He was my first love and my heart was broken into tiny, jaggedly shredded, bloody, infected shards.

So he'll never know I wrote this because who knows whatever happened to him?  He successfully vanished.  I'm over it now (I really am) but it took a LONG time.  I seriously thought I would marry him.  I overlooked the fact that he shushed me once while he was totally mesmerized by that Whitesnake video Here I Go Again with Tawny Kitaen crawling all over a car (gross).

 Get your junk off my Jaguar, skank.

I also overlooked the fact that whenever we made-out his bucky teeth would give me disgusting hickeys in about two seconds flat.  On the up side, I learned that a cold spoon and a comb will make hickeys go away a lot faster than natural healing.  Seriously, it works.  He would give me a totally innocent peck on my forehead and boom: hickey.  Hey thanks!  Can't wait to explain this bruise to my parents.  A turtleneck in the summer is strange, but a turtle neck covering your entire face is something people will ask you about. 

Love really is blind.

I haven't thought of Jake in a long time, but now that I'm watching TV in my stinky basement, I can't seem to get him out of my head.  Aside from the alluringly unique B.O. and the bucky teeth, what really hooked me was the fact that he was so funny. He made me laugh every day.  (I mean, of course, except the day he vanished.  I wasn't laughing much that day.)  What I learned from him is that funny is important, hickeys are gross, orthodontia: not such a bad idea, and deodorant is a must.


Hey,... revenge IS a dish best served cold!