Bird didn’t have much to do with girls in any sort of serious way until he got to high school. Which he did at the age of fourteen on account of having been able to skip grade three, for reasons that were only explained to his mother but not to him. He was just given a pat on the head and told he was brilliant.
Bird never believed he was brilliant or anywhere near it. But he wasn’t any sort of dummy either. He was fairly clever and witty. And he liked to make people laugh.
Being a year younger than all the other kids seemed to hold an attraction for a number of girls in his grade nine class. The fact that he wasn’t shy around them and talked a pretty mean game added to his appeal. But for the most part, it was all a ‘fake it till you make it’ kind of game for Bird, as one of his friends explained it to him.
Although Bird had quit the Catholic religion and going to church, he still attended the Friday Night Catholic Youth Organization dances, which were held in the athletic hall of his old school, Our Lady Of Victory. The original school, where Bird attended Kindergarten and grades one and two, had burned down over the summer he was supposed to go into grade three.
It was a testimony to the industriousness of the construction business in Fort Erie that the new school was rebuilt in record time. After that a massive new church was also built with a nunnery attached, and a separate gymnasium, which was used for all kinds of things from gym classes to wedding receptions to CYO Dances.
You didn’t have to be Catholic to go to the CYO dances, but a lot of the girls who attended them were the girls he had gone through elementary school with, so he felt a lot more comfortable with them than he did with the slightly older high school girls. The fact that Bird didn’t attend high school dances actually worked in his favour, giving him a kind of mystique. He also hung out with a lot of the older Italian guys, who he knew because he lived across the street from the West End Billiards & Lunch, which is where some of them hung out.
Bird was considered a bit of an oddity at Fort Erie Secondary School. He was a good student back then, because he had grown up with the feeling that he was always playing catch up, on account of the skipped grade way back in the day.
He was a voracious reader and loved writing essays on the stories he read, so his marks in both English and history were very high. He also did well in gym class. He could run fairly quickly and was, as it turned out a pretty good high jumper too. The only thing he sucked at was math and that was mostly because he never really figured out the utility of things like algebra and even most of geometry.
In his second year, which was grade 10, Bird decided to play football. In the touch football games he played, he was always a wide receiver, because of his speed and agility. In high school football, he thought he could do the same sort of thing so he tried out for receiver, and lo and behold was chosen for the team.
On the very first play of the very first game of the high school season when Bird’s team was playing against a team from Pelham High School, which was further inland on the peninsula, Bird got the surprise of his life. It came in the form of a low tackle that fractured his ankle and nearly broke his knee.
That was the end of Bird’s football dream. It was the end of a lot of his hockey dream too. Because for several years after that Bird’s leg let him know that every step he took had to be a careful one. So he settled for playing goal, which, surprisingly, he got to like quite a bit.
But, by and large, Bird was pretty much finished with sports and turned his attention to another game, which was finding a girlfriend.
Bird hung out with a lot of guys who had sisters who hung out with other girls and he got to know a whole lot of them. Over the next few years bird got to be the boyfriend to a lot of different girls, because romance back then was more like a game of musical chairs that it was about finding true love. True love had a half-life of about a couple of weeks, or maybe a month if the kissing was compatible, because mostly that and the odd feel was about as far as those things went.
To Bird, it felt like he was really on a journey going from one girl to the next in the hope that one day he would end up at the last girl, and that would be that for the rest of his life. And he felt like the more girls he got to know intimately the more certain he would be when he found the right one…the last one. The forever one.
There was a strange osmosis to the way relationships developed back then. Bird would see a girl at skating at the arena for example and ask her if she wanted to skate with him. After skating he would walk her home. And they would agree to meet up again the next day or at lunch at school. Or go for chips and cokes at one of the local restaurants.
Bird had very good luck with girls and the more girls he got to know the more girls wanted to know him. After a few years, he knew almost every girl in his high school and they all liked him because they were comfortable with him. And they were comfortable with him because he got them talking about themselves. After all, he wanted to know as much about them as he could to decide whether or not they were the one. Even at the tender young age of sixteen, Bird was focused on forever.
Why Bird didn’t realize, then, was that his search would take him much farther than he ever imagined and be filled with more girls than he could count.
A lot of the guys Bird knew were only interested in how far they could get with a girl. From necking to French kissing to copping a feel and so on, all the way to real sex.
But Bird figured that if he played the game that way, he would be cheating them and himself because any kind of romance needed to be grounded in knowing each other. Otherwise, at least to Bird, it felt like anything less would be a pretty shallow view.
The other thing that was driving Bird all through. his school years was the fact that when he was finished high school, he was no longer going to be in Fort Erie. He would be eighteen and one way or another he would find a way out. Because from the day he had that conversation with Jim McKitterick at Eriedowns, he knew what he was going to be and that was a writer, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to happen in a town of 11,000 people like Fort Erie.
So Bird’s mission when it came to girls was to find out as much as he could about what made them tick, because he figured the more he knew about that, the easier it would be to spot the one he would spend his adult life with. Bird was as confused as any teenager about a lot of things. But about this, he was dialled in and dead sure.
Bird spent the rest of his high school years with girlfriends from all over the town, even a few from Buffalo who he met in the summers when he worked at the local IGA grocery store, in Crystal Beach. Back then there was a big amusement park there that was filled with girls from Buffalo and even a few from Toronto. He liked the Buffalo girls because they were spunky and had attitude, so there was more to them than just a hand to hold or lips to kiss.
This all went into Bird’s head and he was starting to get a picture of the kind of girl that could be ideal for him. He wasn’t sharing these thoughts with anyone, because he knew that if he told any of his friends what he was thinking they would laugh their asses off. But Bird was keeping track and he knew that if he plowed through enough different experiences, one day the real thing would manifest itself and it would be something really good.
One of the unique things that Bird had going for him with the ladies was that he was a writer. He would write each new girlfriend a little poem or even just a pithy paragraph about how much they meant to him, which was, at the time, not fake. He would then glue it into a card and hand deliver it to them. They loved it, and since Bird believed he was himself a writer, it was also good practice.
Yeah, it was kind of manipulative but that was not the intention, at least as far as Bird was concerned at the time. But looking back after quite a few years had gone by, he wasn’t so sure.
(Part 5 of 6 … To be continued)
