In Wilton high school there was this luminous, unstable, occasionally excitable Irish blonde named Sally Jo Quinn, whom I had a thing for. Short, slender, magnificent blue eyes, straight blonde hair, smallish feet, slender hands with chewed nails.

No dad at home; just her single mom who worked as an administrative something-or-other at the high school. I can’t recall if the parents had divorced or if the father had died or what.

I never quite closed the deal with Sally but she definitely liked or was drawn to me. I realized her feelings were strong when I ran into her at a summer party. We’d both been drinking but Sally was a little more bombed than I, and as soon as I saw her I didn’t try to chat her up or otherwise occupy her sphere — the opposite, in fact. I played it casual, blase, laid-back. Which infuriated her.

So she ran up to me, shouted my name and slapped me hard. I took it like Lee Marvin did when Angie Dickinson started whacking him in that scene from Point Blank. Sally became even more agitated. “Jeff!” and another hard slap. Wash, rinse, repeat…she slapped me at least three times, maybe four.

“This is good,” I was saying to myself. “She wouldn’t be hitting me if she was indifferent.” I stuck to my low-key Marvin.

Sally had several concurrent boyfriends at the time. I was fourth in line, I gradually learned. (Or was I fifth?) The others included a football jock (since deceased), a wealthy man’s son from Ridgefield (died from a drug overdose) and a local cop in his mid to late 20s. I was strictly backup. Scraps, leftovers. For someone already beset with low self-esteem, this situation fit perfectly.

I’m not saying all high-school girls are fickle and flighty, but a lot of them are. Or they were, at least, when I was an awkward, insecure WASP schlemiel.

Flash forward to the mid ’80s, when I had a brief thing with an extremely dishy lady who was dealing with an unstable ex. So unstable, in fact, that when I visited her one night he called up and came over and rang the bell (she told me to ignore him) and then started pacing back and forth on the front lawn, calling out to her and talking to himself and generally creating a neighborhood spectacle.

Girls sometimes choose badly, some guys can’t handle rejection, and sometimes you have to put up your dukes.

It did occur to me as this psychodrama was unfolding, of course, that anyone with a looney-tunes ex might be a little screwy themselves, or might be a little dishonest or manipulative or flaky. You are who you go out with.

This ex-boyfriend episode wasn’t enough to put me off (she was beautiful and curvaceous and breathtaking in bed), but it did give me pause. I know that if she’d had two ex-boyfriends knocking on the door I would have said “wow, this is really weird” and “something isn’t right.” And if she’d had three guys pleading for forgiveness and restitution I would have said “okay, she obviously likes guys fighting for her affections” and taken a hike.