Ten years ago, in a Saturday night.

I was a college freshman. I lived off-campus at first, so I didn’t know a lot of people. Pinky and I were just becoming friends. My long-time friend was in Guam. I had long hair, a chin beard and a smoking habit that — combined with the amount of coffee I drank — made me very very thin. I was just beginning to get the chest hair that comes out the top of T-shirts now. I was confused and lonely. I decided a few weeks earlier to major in philosophy because I originally went to Goucher to be “a writer,” but I totally chickened out when I got there and discovered that everyone else wanted to be a writer, too. There, I said it. Philosophy was never my first choice. I was just good at it.

But I was in a band. And we were pretty good. We got an offer from a local indy label to do some recording after our guitar player showed them our demo, of a song called “Testikles” (pronounced like an old Greek name) that was mostly stacked-fifth chords, a la The Police. We were becoming good friends, enjoyed each other’s company. So when Paulie wanted us to play at the birthday party of his ex-girlfriend, we said we’d do it. I admit that I was not entirely on board. My school was showing The Rock outside, projected onto the library that night. I really needed to get to know more people at school, and there were not going to be very many people at the party to make it worth dragging our gear, setting up, practicing, etc.

But Paulie is just one of the nicest people I knew (and know still, like his brother), so we did it. I had some vintage clothes on. We video-taped it. Paul sang while he played drums because we didn’t have a singer.

There were exactly four people there beside us. A strange girl and the pompous guy she brought. The birthday girl (who would later date our guitar player and become our singer). And a tiny little dark girl in a red shirt with one of those poison/suicide rings, to whom I was asked to deliver a caffeine-free Diet Coke in a golden can on my way back from my last cigarette before we played. I look sullen in the video, even through the songs I really liked. I sat on the floor when I switched to my purple, sparkly five-string bass for a while.

But everything changed afterward. We all chatted. We watched Aladdin for the part when he says, “Take off your clothes.” We talked about how the girls at the party knew my brother because he was dating a girl who went to the same Catholic school that they did. And the petite, dark girl asked if she could braid my hair. I was never one to decline a girl playing with my hair, let alone one so attractive. So I sat on the floor, with her behind me, pressing her bony pelvis into my scrawny back. I was floored.

The rest of the evening is a blur. I don’t remember her leaving, but she left her poison ring, which I learned was returned to her later. We packed up and left. On the way down I-83, Paulie and our guitar player were in boisterously good moods while I drove my dad’s Blazer with our gear in the back. I was trying to be fun, but I was sad because — like most other times in my life — I didn’t ask the girl who braided my hair for her number or anything. I wussed out, and I was both sad and mad at myself about it.

Come Monday night, my brother comes to my room and says, “I heard you were picking up chicks at that party the other night!” “What the hell are you talking about?” He told me that a girl from the party asked his girlfriend for my number, that she dug me. That she corrected my huge mistake by getting a hold of me. That his girlfriend said she was pretty nice. A few nights later, my brother and his girlfriend were at the ring dance, and they saw my lovely. Gave her my senior picture from high school with my phone number in it without telling me, which she made her date hold (A friend of a friend who I don’t like to this day because he was with her as a friend that night — because I can be a freaking cowboy sometimes, too. I have it on good authority that I am a much better bassist than him, too, but he’s never been anything but nice to me, so I should not take so much pleasure in that).

A week later, on the next Saturday, we spoke on the phone. Her parents had their number blocked, and my parents block the numbers of people who do that. So she was on the phone with the operator, trying the code. When she finally got through, I was out, so I called her around 11:00 p.m. My brother’s girlfriend wrote her number down for me, a PA number. I still have that paper.

We talked for three hours, long distance, which was expensive in 1997, remember. We talked about the female singer we auditioned for our band that day, how we tried to freak her out, how I smoked a Camel Red with my own blood on it and felt sick afterward. How she wanted to go to Harvard, major in history, be the President, how she thought the sound of me smoking over the phone was attractive. We made plans to talk later that week.

I was beside myself.

And surprised by the truth of that old adage about finding true love “when you never expect it.” I found it at a tiny party I almost didn’t go to. And today, ten years later, she’s ten feet away, drinking coffee and smiling at me.