Hef's Little Black Book

Part 1

The Chase

Of Pursuit and Romance

The one he loved first did not love him back.

They jitterbugged together and laughed together, and his heart leapt whenever he saw her, whenever he thought of her. But she did not love him back. This was the summer before his senior year of high school, and she had asked another boy on a hayride, and he would never be the same because of it. "I turned myself into a different guy," he would recall. This different guy was self-assured, a dapper fellow whose new wardrobe bespoke his reinvention -- the jaunty flannel shirts, the yellow cords, the saddle shoes. He now wrote for the school paper under the byline Hep Hef. He also wrote songs and drew cartoon strips that chronicled the arc of his young life and his young loves. He learned then that he lived largely to be in love, to pine, or to yearn. He learned that his heart felt best when aflutter. Of this time, a classmate buddy of his later remembered: "His interest in girls was intense. Hef was constantly falling in love, one girl at a time, and would be smitten for maybe a month or so. If he wasn't in love, he felt incomplete and unhappy."

This would never change. The boy was father to the ma ... read full excerpt from: Hef's Little Black Book ebook