By Jennifer Rutherford
Date: 5 May 1997

Casanova

         I know a guy that somehow has this total fascination for women.
 I mean, wherever he goes, he always seems to wind up with girls hanging
 all over him.  I don't understand it.  But whenever he walks into a room,
 the girls just seem to migrate over to where he is.
         I don't know why this happens, exactly.  I mean, he's not a big
 stud type of guy, he's not beautiful- he's just cute.  Well, really cute.
 Sort of like the guy you'd want to bring home to Mom and Dad, only
 slightly weirder.  And he's really nice.  Maybe that's it- the niceness.
 He's not mean at all.  And he's really sweet.  Maybe that's why he has so
 many ex-girlfriends.  Or maybe it's just his smell- he smells really good
 somehow, I can't explain it to you.  I love standing downwind of him.
 (That and borrowing his leather jacket.)  But really, he's just an
 average guy.
         I've seen this happen before, many times.  Like the last time I
 saw him, for example:  After a concert we had all been in, everyone
 migrated to the hallway, and in about twenty minutes we were all standing
 in a big circle together.  There were about three guys (including my
 Casanova) and eleven girls.  And most of the girls were all over him.
 Everyone wanted to stand by him.  A few of the younger ones were asking
 him questions about his life.  Melissa kept poking him to see if he'd
 notice.  Sometimes he did and he'd poke her back.  The ones closer to his
 age, like Kylie, got to stand next to him and touch his arm from time to
 time.  Another girl, Amanda, jumped into the middle of the circle and
 right onto him, grabbing at him and begging him to help her start a mosh
 pit.  I was standing across from him so I could look straight at him, and
 I had again borrowed his leather jacket.
         Now, I know what you guys out there are thinking:  The boys are
 thinking, "that lucky little s.o.b.," and the girls are all wondering if
 it's really true.  Some of you (the more belligerent ones) are even
 thinking, oh, come on, nobody's like that, and I would never lust after
 some guy just because he walked into the room.  All I can say is, well,
 you never know.  Even the girls who aren't attracted to him- or so they
 say, and honestly, I can't say I know that many who aren't- are somehow
 attracted to him anyway.  At least, they find themselves hanging around
 him a lot.
         To be honest with you, I don't know if "Casanova" knows of his
 strange power to attract women.  Girls come on to him all the time, and I
 don't know if he even has to pick up on girls himself.  He has no
 problems with girls swarming all over him, but he doesn't revel in the
 attention.  But who knows?  As my father put it, "What, does he think
 he's some kind of a Don Juan or something?"  He doesn't act like a person
 who knows about how he attracts people.  But he always seems to be the
 one who controls things when he's actually seeing somebody.
         I'll give you one final example of what I mean:  Right before the
 concert, Kylie, Casanova and I were sitting together in a corner of the
 room.  Kylie and I found ourselves absolutely swarming all over him, like
 we were bees and he was honey.  We sat like a triangle, with Kylie and I
 at the base and (of course) Casanova at the point.  Anyway, Kylie and I
 found that we just couldn't keep our hands off of him.  At one point he
 was doing this "centering himself" kind of thing with his eyes closed,
 and we couldn't reach him.  Kylie and I started waving our hands in front
 of his face, but he didn't respond.  So we talked by ourselves, but we
 both kept looking over at him to see when he woke up.  After he did, we
 went back to fawning all over him.  We kept touching him.  I kept leaning
 in closer and closer to him.  Kylie touched his chin- "Look, he didn't
 shave!"- and so I had to touch it too.  Then we both compared our hand
 sizes to his- of course, by putting our hands to his.  And at one point,
 when he started to flip out and get nervous about performing, Kylie and I
 gave him a joint neck massage, her left hand and my right.  And as we
 were doing this, I started to think, "This is really sick!"  You could
 feel the hormones coming off of the two of us.  I don't know about
 Casanova, but the way we were feeling, Kylie and I could have cheerfully
 pushed him over and jumped him right there . . . or at least have entered
 into some sort of menage a trois.  And we really shouldn't have been
 feeling like this at all!  Kylie had a boyfriend, and Casanova had just
 broken up with me . . . but still . . .