Piccolo

So I was catting around with my friend, High Speed, and we were having a grand old time running to Denver for Transformers and every McDonald's in town. We went to Taco Bell when they came out with those Chili-cheese burritos and had them for 79 cents. We had a contest to see who could eat the most; I won after eating seven of them where he could only choke down five. I've always had a massive appetite.

I'm kind of surprised that all that happened in my first three months there. It seems like so much longer, but with so many new things going on all at once, I was cramming more into my days than I'd done the entire life I had before, so it comes as no surprise that so little time actually passed. My entire time at Fort Carson was only a year and eight months long, but you'll be surprised at how much actually went on by the time I get through it all.

Friends are good, but the first significant thing was a girl we'll call Piccolo. I say "girl," but she was a woman who'd graduated college already, had been engaged once to a guy who went off on her one night and hit her, so she left him right there. She'd been a band director in a school until the parents proved to be too much for her sanity, so she left the classroom, and went into the Army. I call her Piccolo here because that was the instrument she preferred to play -- not flute, piccolo. One of her favorite tunes was Stars and Stripes Forever because of the piccolo obligatto at the end.

She's actually seven years older than I am (I almost wrote "she was 7 years older than I was" but I imagine the age gap is still the same, even thirteen years later), but I was most attracted to her personality and intelligence. You'll find that intelligence is very prevalent in people I spend time with. Every one of them is very smart one way or another, which means they not only allow me to communicate with them on my level, but they also see right through me so I can't get away with anything. You may have also picked up that she was a teacher before she got tired of pushy band parents; the Queen is also a teacher. Wild, huh?

Anyway, I hooked up with her in July, I believe, and we went out multiple times over the next month or so. I told her who I'd hung out with at the SOM, and she remarked that I appeared to be the wrong color for that person (since that person started fully dating an African American guy shortly after I stopped hanging out with her and she broke up with her "fiancee"). Piccolo was significant because she was my first kiss. After hanging out in her room for a while after going out, we parted ways, and kissed in the doorway as I was leaving.

There were several things I did wrong during our time together that led to this relationship being rather short, though. She always initiated any kiss that we shared, because (have you figured this out?) I'm a big chicken. When the opportune moments arose, I couldn't lean forward and have at her. I froze. I couldn't release that fear within me that I might be crossing a line or something, even though we had shared those moments already.

Another problem I had could only be termed as an obsession. I was like a little puppy dog following her around EVERYWHERE. If she was in her room, I would show up there. If she was doing anything at the band room, I would be close by. I alwasy went to her room first thing in the morning to give her a ride to work, since she didn't have her car yet. I never gave the poor girl a moment's peace during that whole time. She told me once that she had heard I used to hang out with High Speed all the time, and that was cool (that would be her subtle way of saying, "Leave me alone for a little while and play with your friends."). Yeah, I didn't get it.

And let's go into the jealousy factor. I didn't understand at the time that when someone decides to be with you, they a) make that decision themselves and b) don't just change their mind without a good reason. It also means they can hang out with their friends (male and female), and you don't have anything to worry about -- especially if said male friend is supposedly engaged, but appears to be a bit of a "cupcake." (We gave his a theme song of "Cake Boy" and called his car -- ironically a Probe -- the "Cakemobile.") Therefore, fussing over her spending time with him will not lead to good things in the future...and it didn't.

Had I left well enough alone and been more mature through this whole deal, we might have had a nice time together while I was in the Army, but I was very much a child, and to be honest, she wasn't. I felt the relationship falling apart by the time I took her to the bus station for her to take a bus back to Montana for her to get her stuff, and I was determined to kiss her good-bye. I dropped her off, and it was a very quick kiss before she got on the bus.

When she returned a week later, she had her car, and I tried to resume things where we'd left off. Well, that was the problem, wasn't it? I still never left her alone, and since she had her car, I hitched rides with her to work, showing up at her room first thing in the morning. It didn't last long.

She chose to go out with someone else in the band probably to show me she was done, since that relationship didn't last long at all, and she was beyond disinterested in him after that. I went backed to moderately hanging out with High Speed again, but I also spent a lot of time alone.

During this period, I looked into writing on that musical again that I'd started while I was at the School of Music. I asked another guy who was in the Army about writing lyrics, but he dropped out quickly. I asked High Speed, since I'd heard him ad-libbing bogus lyrics to songs before, but he also dropped quickly. I wrote some lyrics myself and even had a couple more songs, but again, I found myself incapable of writing lyrics.

I wanted to write musicals, but I didn't know a whole lot about them. I wanted to learn more, but wasn't sure how to do it. Then the radio gave me the answer, like a lightning bolt from heaven. Auditions... for a musical... called Camelot. Little did I know that Camelot would give me more than just a lesson in musicals.