ASIDE: Actually, she tied with Heather Guth as the first star-crossed crush. Heather wanted to pursue things further than I wanted to take them in fifth grade. I wasn’t ready for such a forward public display as holding hands. I understand now that it had more to do with commitment than fear. Who wants to take themselves off the market with such authority at THAT age?

I could write Alyssa something much more beautiful now. I could veil my emotions in poeticism, be less forward, promise little and pique her interests. Probably most important, I’d leave out the photo. I’ve moved on, though. I know she has. And, given the great distance that time can create between emotion and reality, I see now that her beauty and talent could bested by the woman I am married to, many of the women I work with and a few seen in random places. Alyssa, like so many other Hollywood starlets, benefited from both timing and luck. Those factors are often more important than ability or persuasion.

Alyssa could be considered the male equivalent to New Kids on the Block, who will perform at the Sprint Center tonight. Corporate office buildings across the metro were alive today with chatter as female fans of all persuasions opened up about their infatuations with these former heartthrobs. To the ladies’ credit, they have kept their opinions of these gentleman returning to the stage amongst themselves this time, much more so than the New Kids craze that swept the nation in the early 90s.

The New Kids fans have also been surprisingly level-headed. They’ll admit, for example, that the guys are out of shape, were never that talented and that their new material can’t hold a candle to the stuff they churned out with bubble gum assembly line-like perfection in their heyday. And yet, the ladies are paying the steep ticket prices to see the show. Like me, they know better, but it’s hard to let go because, after all, these crushes are more about you and what you learned from them than it ever was about the idols.

These celebrities tap our imaginations that we tend to lose as we grow older and possibility narrows. We see people with real talent who don’t use it or don’t make it and come to realize that New Kids banded around the concept of making money – and the individual members probably knew somebody who knew somebody.

I don’t recall what Alyssa wore in my dream – the view granted me was neck up. I assume her wardrobe was pieced together from items I’d seen her wear in various Bop magazine photo spreads. I hope, for her sake, that she was lovely. Respect for her acting ability has waned more than likely as the footage of her “awkward stage” is replayed around the world hundreds of times a day in various languages.

In a metaphorical sense, reruns are the photo she’d probably leave out of her love letter envelope if she ever sent me a reply. But she needn’t bother. What would a writer be without unrequited love?

The storefront that once displayed New York Times bestsellers is now filled with mannequins in bridal gowns. But at 10:34 p.m., March 1, 1999, I stood in line at 5121 NW Roanridge Road and bought a book that I wouldn’t read and that wouldn’t deepen my dedication to writing until 2007.

Long before I became a near-broke father of three, I used to go to book stores and actually buy books that struck my fancy rather than arranging to check them out at the local library. This was in the mid- to late-1990s, when bookstores were being used by my generation as places to socialize rather book shop. People put on thick sweaters and posed as writers and other creative types while sipping lattes, pecking on laptops and looking over the bookstacks for someone to meet. Those practices as I’ve described them go on today, too, I suppose. One night I walked in from the rain and purchased a copy of Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Town and the City.

Like most great books I bought then – Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, etc., I had really intended to read Kerouac’s first published work. The book was sufficiently thick (I’d gone through a phase where page count was a determinate of literary greatness.) I took it home, reread the winding first few pages – his riffing on scenery – and set it down with intentions to read the reamining 400 pages of beautiful prose.

The book found a place on my book shelf in my apartment then was later boxed away and stored in the guest room at my mother’s house. After college, I’d lived at home for about a month, just long enough to find places for all the things I once thought I could never lived without, and then completely abandoned them all when I met my wife.

I’d always seen those books being carted along with me wherever I lived – just my meager clothes and cases of books. In them was nearly everything that KV, Jr., has written, Steinbeck’s greatest works, political philosophy manuals with thoughts from Rousseau and Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas, The Cloister Walk, among others. I’d kept some college textbooks: an Ansel Adams’ guide to photography that I couldn’t part with because the photos were so so real it would been like throwing away some of the most beautiful parts of the world; books on government; grammar and style guides; and a worn paperback copy of The Right Stuff that my writing instructor gave me.

Those were my most prized possessions during my junior and senior year of college. I strayed a few times and checked out books from the library when I was penniless or didn’t care to own them forever – Nabakov’s Lolita, for one. But those were the books I’d packed into Dole banana crates and carted from trunk to closet.

In the 10 years since I graduated, I’d picked over the books in the collection. When my kids visited their grandmother, I’d pull random books and take them home, the ratio of read books to never opened ones was about equivalent. Anything I don’t read now gets piled on the vertical shelves in the master closet with sweaters and sweatshirts waiting for the weather to turn cold and then switch places with khaki shorts and polo shirts.

I don’t know what drove me to pull The Town and the City from its dusty crate and take it home. I suppose it was guilt for never tapping into the knowledge that sat as though it was heavier than the air beneath the shirt cuffs and jacket tails.

I still remember that night in 1999, typical for March and perfect for a bookstore or for lying in bed, reading. The book had been picked by one of the booksellers as their favorite read and, as so, was displayed near the entry to the fiction section. I plucked it from its stand along the bay of windows because I recognized the author’s name. A friend on the college newspaper was an avid beat literature fan with his own interesting sense of style – one that I could never pick up. He was often unshaven, wore plaid, loose-fitting jeans and was outspoken in a careless and yet not reckless way.

I picked up the book and leafed through it and found a description of the Merrimac River, a beautiful metaphor for the sweeping nature of time and the perfect connector of the town, Lowell, and the city, New York City, both of which are central to the book’s setting. Kerouac obviously had a tremendous appreciation for this place he grew up and a tremendous memory. I took the book back to my apartment and my memory goes blank from there. I don’t recall opening it again or mentioning it to anyone until last year.

I discovered it just as the leaves were falling, which made the opening chapters in which Kerouac describes his hometown in autumn all the more vivid. His description of the town qaure and of being the hero in the big Saturday afternoon high school game is some of the best writing I’ve read. Wrapped in warm clothes and blankets, I read the entire book and felt let down on the last page because there was no more to read except his other books.

Kerouac has written other titles, but The Town and The City is the only one in which his writing is more traditional. This was written before he incorporated the spontaneous nature of jazz into his work and created bob prosity, so in that sense, it’s a singular book. I was influenced by it and an eveing writing course I was taking at the time. The book led me to make a greater commitment to the writer’s life in hopes that I would one day write something equally as great or greater (wishful thinking.)

My life can now be dated by antiquated things. The places I’ve been are recorded on paper so old it can’t hold ink any longer. But the books are intact. The words are there forever and it’s the solace I take from that fact that has carried my hope to one day write something great.

We said little to one another. I was just another autograph hunter, second or third in a line that stretched about 30 feet and he’d barely spoken to the few fans that greeted him before me. He’d come out to visit with the audience after his performance but had done so unprepared. He had to borrow a pen to sign with and, though he was far from impolite, he seemed reserved and not quite ready to talk after such a demanding stage show.

I carried a few books along he’d authored and I asked him to sign them. He did – just inside the front covers. I told him that I thought this monologue, called Morning, Noon and Night, was his best work and he responded with a calm “Thank you.” When he’d closed the last book, I offered my own thanks and sat next to my wife on a bench in the Folly Theatre lobby while he finished signing programs for his other follwers.

Gray, who in no way physically resembled a movie star or anyone extraordinary, for that matter, had just given the most impressive performance that I’d ever seen. For the 90-minute show, he sat behind a wooden desk with a notebook and cup of water, wryly re-telling the story of how he became a father to his own newborn son, but also to two step-children that came with his new marriage. He’d also taken to living the quiet life in upstate New York, a stark contrast to the city dwelling that was so central to his character and the neurotic, tightly-wound stories he performed for years.

The sweater he wore that night was the same color as the roots in his parted gray hair. About 20 minutes had passed since the show ended. He’d no doubt showered and was more relaxed now, off stage, but it was astounding how much more subdued he was. He seemed almost post-coital – not nearly as hilarious and poignant as he’d been moments before with the stage lights up.

My wife and I were especially moved by Morning, Noon and Night since we were contemplating the addition of another child. We sat on the bench about 10 minutes and exchanged a few glances with Gray. We were partially in awe, as silly as it is to say so, and we didn’t want the night we had together to end.

I’d been a Gray fan since college when a rather eccentric friend introduced to Gray with a washed out, almost bootleg -like copy of Swimming to Cambodia. The film involving the K’hmer Rouge’s rise to power and the ensuing genocide throughout Cambodia was shot in Thailand and Gray’s experience portraying one of the last American’s evacuated was the film’s centerpiece.

That was the first time I’d seen him reel off endless lines of dialogue that must have filled several notebooks – only he recited it all from memory, with voice inflections and real drama, as though he was telling the story for the first time and it wasn’t scripted. On that video cassette, I first became familiar with the strange happenings in his life and the precarious situations where only he could find himself.

But I also remember a difference in me. I remember imagining how completely un-entertained my family and friends might have been to sit down and try to watch the movie with me. I felt like I’d discovered a piece of myself that day, which is why I felt I lost so much in 2004 when Gray was reported missing.

Gray, who’d always been haunted by his mother’s suicide, was in a car accident in 2001 that left him severely depressed and physically damaged. He later committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry.

I wish I had said something more in our short visit, maybe something about the impression he left on me, but those comments come off as mere flattery from fans. He was a genius but an ordinary man, just as he looked – dressed warmly and gracious to those of us who wanted to be in his presence.