I’ve been working on a post about my former profession, Human Resources, and the role that profession has played in cooperating with the “COV!D” operation. There’s a lot to it and my head keeps exploding. So, I thought I’d take a break and do something different here and share a story I wrote a number of years back. It documents a true story featuring yours truly and a boy who grew up to be a very famous director and screenwriter. It’s a bit dated, but I thought I’d leave it as I wrote it. I hope you enjoy.
Because they consume us, most people can easily recall their first crush. Hers happened at age 11 during the sixth grade, lasting that whole school year. He, in the eighth grade and 13, was tall with thick, wavy hair and dark brows that framed light eyes. Were they green or blue or both? He was gorgeous.
She busied her mind with schemes to find ways to see him, to cross his path, to get him to see her. She holds a memory to this day of the overlap of her outdoor recess with his shop class. Sometimes from the playground, she could see him through the school room windows. One day, she decided to “casually” press her face to the classroom window, hands cupped by her temples to block the light just so she could peer in, just to get a glimpse. Other “casual” means of trying to cross his path involved biking 1-2 miles along Route 208, a road in Orange County, New York where they were growing up. A busy road, dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, her mother forbid her to ride along it, but that was the only way to ride by his house, so she disobeyed—something she hated doing. She never saw him at the house, an imposing stone building, a mansion to her.
She learned from her mother that the father of her heartthrob was a famous playwright who had won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Subject Was Roses”. Instead of impressing her, it disheartened her, making the son that much more unobtainable. He’s famous, he’s rich, he’ll never notice me, she bemoaned, merging the father with the son. Though her reasoning might have been wrong, she predicted correctly.
By late spring of that school year, still pining away unnoticed, she determined to give up, defeated and exhausted by it all. Though she had tried to be cool about it, everybody knew that she had this big, rather debilitating, crush on Tony Gilroy, first son of playwright Frank Gilroy. She’d endured and grown tired of her fair share of teasing, and besides, she knew he didn’t even know she existed. She steeled herself against any thought or mention of him. So, when someone—she can’t remember who—approached her and said, “Hey, Kathleen, I heard Tony Gilroy likes you,” she let the words wash over her. Fact or fiction, it did not matter at that point. She could no longer let herself care. Now age 12, she knew she had to let go and move on.
Though she never talked about him, the experience and memory of such a deep infatuation had buried itself deep within her. When she entered the same high school, she would see him occasionally, the sight of him still bringing a twinge. Somehow she knew that he wanted to be a writer. His two younger brothers, twins Dan and John, were a year behind her and she was friendly with them. Later, she’d heard he’d gone to Boston. She graduated, attended a local community college, and earned an associate degree. She decided to go to work full time in New York City, eventually moving back to her native Brooklyn. From there, she commuted via subway into Manhattan. She noticed at one point the seeming ubiquity of the novel, The Bourne Identity, in the hands of her fellow commuters. Not her genre, but she thought it must be a good read since it seemed to be everywhere. Some years later, she would leave New York City to finish her undergraduate degree. A few years after that, she would complete a graduate degree. She married. Her life proceeded.
On a Saturday night decades after leaving New York, living in the Boston area since graduate school, and married for many years, she plopped herself on the loveseat next to the couch where her husband lay, television on and a movie just underway. “What’s this?” she asked. “’The Bourne Identity’ with Matt Damon,” he answered. “Oh.” Expecting little given what she thought she knew, she soon found herself enthralled. “That was great!” she commented at the end. “I’d really like to see that again.”
A few months later, it repeated and there she was, ready to watch it again, this time more carefully and loving it even more the second time. She was hooked. This time, she would watch for the credits. She had to know who wrote it, who directed it, who played Marie, who cast it. Matt Damon was out of this world as Jason Bourne.
So, as she and her husband watched the credits, suddenly and out of nowhere this grown woman launched herself off the loveseat toward the television. The unexpectedness of her flight across the living room caused her husband to jump a foot. “What are you doing?” he yelled as she landed on her knees and slid up to within inches of the screen. Ignoring her husband, she repeated, “Tony Gilroy? Tony Gilroy? Tony Gilroy wrote the screenplay for this? Oh. My. God.” With no clue what was going on, her husband asked, “Yeah, so, who’s Tony Gilroy?”
Up on her feet, she ran to the computer. As she turned it on, she answered him, “Hold on! Hold on! I need to check something!” She googled, and there he was. Beautiful, handsome, fantastically successful, and the screenwriter for what would become her favorite movie trilogy. She just had to smile. She turned to her husband, prefacing her explanation by saying, “You are not gonna believe this.”
Giving him the Cliff Notes version of her all-consuming sixth grade infatuation, he responded, “Oh, really,” clearly not quite as moved by the evening’s revelation as she. While telling her husband the story, she kept glancing at the computer screen holding Tony’s image and then back at her husband. Then it hit her like a ton of bricks. There he was—that tall man with thick wavy hair, now salt and pepper, with those light eyes under dark brows. No, not Tony. The man on the couch—her husband. “Sweetheart, come take a look,” she said.
She’d met her husband, who is about a year and a half older than Tony, in 1986. Across the room, she had seen this handsome guy walking toward her. She noticed his thick, wavy hair and dark brows. He had a dark moustache, and as he got closer, she noticed his eyes. Were they green or blue or both? He was gorgeous. They met and she fell in love and married him. She would often marvel at her “handsome man” as she so often called him. Yet only until one Saturday night when serendipity brought memories and images together did she notice the startling resemblance between the boy who had infatuated her as a young girl and the man she married decades later. Now, standing at the computer, looking at this heretofore unknown man, her husband agreed. “Yes, there is a resemblance,” he admitted, “but I’m better lookin’.”
Very funny.
Since then, she has watched all three of the Matt Damon “Bourne” movies, literally dozens of times. She loves the character, the international locations, the dialogue, the intrigue, and most especially, Bourne’s redemption. Maybe that’s the title of the next Gilroy/Greengrass/Damon partnership—The Bourne Redemption—if they can work their way back to working together again. Maybe lots of actors can play James Bond, but only Matt Damon is Jason Bourne.
So, who was the girl? You’ve probably guessed that it’s me, the storyteller. I never spoke two words to Tony Gilroy, but he plays a starring role in memories of my adolescence. It embarrasses me to admit that I missed his presence in such great work as The Devil’s Advocate until I discovered The Bourne Identity, but now I know it’s the object of my sixth-grade flame behind that and so much more. I can only imagine how hard he has worked to have achieve what he has, thrilling millions with his creativity and talent. Decades later, I thrill for him—my first crush—the man who as a boy exhilarated and set on fire the heart and imagination of a little girl he never knew.
This is rather cryptic, but after 73 years of living, I am compelled to wonder. How coincidental were all the coincidences, the happenstances in this the patterned world? Of our meetings and various crossing of paths. And will we find out someday?
And also, those words 'Human Resources.' Kind of barren of flesh and bone ... and more like some commodity plucked of the earth. And sort of an abstracted ring to it.
Awesome story, Kathleen! This is something all of us as people can relate to. Thank you for sharing.
Stan Toncich