Video Store Adventures: 'Bulletproof'

In the summer of 1997, I met a girl. I knew about her long before I met her, as she was the younger sister of a fellow summer theater camp participant who became obsessed with matchmaking the two of us. I had some mild experience with women before that summer, though the concept of "dating" was mostly foreign to me, and my girlfriends in the past had primarily been ladies who didn't hate talking to me on the phone and would let me kiss them. It was an inauspicious career that more or less stayed consistent for the rest of my social life. 

But Clara* was different. After hearing about her for a few weeks, I met her in passing on the very last day of theater camp, and I felt that lightning bolt in the brain feeling that you only get once or twice in your life, if at all. We had yet to speak a single word to one another but I somehow knew in that moment we were going to be connected on a deeper level.

We eventually found time to talk and watch movies and make out, but we were both 15 and lived a few towns away from one another, so logistics were difficult. Getting together took planning and convincing parents to make unpleasant drives and the careful calibration of schedules. We managed to make it work, until we didn’t.

Our most disastrous date was when I decided it was a good idea for her to meet three of my friends, all of whom were women and two of whom had a crush on me. Clara was late getting to my house and everything was just off, largely driven by the sheer cattiness of my three friends but partially because the film I rented was Bulletproof, a deeply unpleasant comedy from 1996. I had no memory of it getting released but it starred Adam Sandler (who I loved) and Damon Wayans (In Living Color was definitely my favorite show on TV for a while) and was directed by Ernest Dickerson (I hadn’t seen any of the movies he shot for Spike Lee but I had really enjoyed Tupac Shakur in Juice). But it’s a terribly unfunny movie with a lot of unearned nastiness (I have vivid memories of being mortified by a sequence of one of the characters being chained to a full toilet). Everybody in the room hated it, and both Clara and I hated the experience.

We lasted a little while longer but she broke up with me right before Valentine’s Day. We had a lot of great movie-related experiences (I saw Psycho for the first time on her couch, and we got dressed up to see Titanic in a theater), but I tend to associated that relationship with Bulletproof because the evening was such a nightmare and because it ended so disastrously.

(A brief list of other movies I associate with past girlfriends: Anaconda, American Pie, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Batman Begins, A History of Violence, Looking For Mr. Goodbar, Streets of Fire, Chasing Amy, The Kid Stays in the Picture)

*Her name was not actually Clara.