Urban Legends And Tales

Dinner With Vivianna

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster... oh wait, that's Goodfellas, let's try this again. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted a good-looking girlfriend and to be sort of popular. Yeah, that sounds more like it. How's everyone doing? My name is Cameron Dunn, and this is my story. Who am I speaking to? Who even knows, as my pursuit for love currently has me locked up in a cage. Yep, Cameron is caged, or so it seems. Who threw me in here, and why am I currently pacing the walls... heck, how am I even writing this? Well, some answers will be revealed, I promise.

A bit about me to start off, I guess. I was lonely. Hell, I was so lonely that the closest thing I ever had to a girlfriend came from my affinity to Julia Walker; she was the zombie girl from Return of the Living Dead 3, in case you didn't know. She was played by Melinda Clarke, and let me tell you, she made me fall in love in an hour and a half. That should sum me up a bit. I was the guy that fell in love with movie characters and would then doze off as I fantasized about fictional lives together with people that didn't even exist. Oh Julie, I would have loved you, zombie or not. My best friend is a guy named Ike Ruddock. He was a lot like me, in the lonely department. We'd sit up for hours on the phone chatting about the lives that we wished we had. We're both 16 you see; guess I should have mentioned that earlier. Our long nightly ramblings would generally consist of such gems as, 'I wish we had girlfriends,' or, 'This is how life would be if we had girlfriends.' Okay, not trying to sound too much like a copy of Kenny Leonard here. Trust me, we had our own issues, and not all of them were based around our crippling lack of physical contact from the opposite sex.

Neither Ike nor I were really miserable folks all the time either. We had our hobbies. Now, those hobbies consisted mainly of playing Final Fantasy 3 all night and then talking about it. We also liked renting cheap horror movies and making fun of them, and of course there were our semi-regular nights of egging cars and pouring sticky drinks over payphones. Ike had his driver's license, so we'd slip out sometimes and just go around doing dumb stuff like that. A good day out was a trip to the mall, waste a dozen quarters or so at the arcade and then get kicked out of Toys R Us for making the talking Stone Cold Steve Austin doll say vulgar things. (Shake them titties just sounds so strange coming from a plastic Steve Austin head.) However, there was a hole there in our lives, and that hole was a girlfriend.

I think we got shot down a lot because we went after the wrong types though. For our first couple years of high school, we went after the cookie cutter "hot girl" type. This usually was the preppy, popular chick that would look at us and laugh. It wasn't until we watched a little flick called The Craft that I finally realized that the problem was we were chasing after the wrong types. Remember how I mentioned falling in love with the zombie girl from Return of the Living Dead 3? Well, let's just say that when I saw Fairuza Balk's character in The Craft, my heart spun on its head. I knew that was the key. I needed to just find some socially awkward girl who could understand and appreciate the finer nuances that I brought to the relationship table. If that girl could be as attractive as Balk's character that would just be a double win for me. Who knows, maybe even Ike could find one too and we could go on weird double dates down to the local cemetery. We could try to summon demons and then do weird stuff on graves. See folks, I was thinking clearly, and the motivation to find my odd girlfriend grew from there.

So, forgive me here, I'm working with a 5000 word limit, which sounds like a lot, but in actuality isn't, so, I'll have to forgo the massive purple prose that you're obviously looking forward to, sorry. Here's the deal, Ike and I lived in New Orleans, (of course we did, I think it's a rule or something that we have to) and our high school, Warren Easton, was full of potential love interests. However, my idea that just finding a weird girl that would look past our obvious social shortcomings was quickly failing. Turns out that even the artsy, gothy types still had friends and interests that kept a gap between our virginity and romantic bliss. I wasn't into their music or fashion, (I actually thought Marilyn Manson was called Merlyn Manson for about 6 months and made that mistake a couple of times when trying to bond over music) and my clothes ranged from K-Mart to the bargain bin when J.C. Penney had a sale. Ike wasn't quite as on board with the 'get a strange girl' plan, as I think he was still holding out hope that Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All was a real person that would surely crawl out of his television any day. So it was just I, failing in glorious fashion.