Bo Diddley - “Pills”
1961
It’s probably high school apocryphon, but it has stuck with me over the decades. We would sit in our nook of the commons before classes started in the morning, a crumpled-up-little-milk-carton’s toss from this couple, not being able to hear them but fascinated nonetheless. The guy was a wrestler. The gal was a cheerleader. What fascinated us was that he would totally fawn over her and she kinda held him in disdain. Like doing her nails or makeup while he talked to her. And he was nuts about her. And not crazy like in a puppy-dog-teenage love kind of way. Like in the way they were sitting there one morning, and he was talking to her and she was obviously ignoring him. Finally he groaned and ripped his teeshirt to make some sort of psycho point. (Over in our group, a fellow wrestler said: “Hey I loaned him that shirt!”) A week or so later we heard that she had broken up with him. Then a few days after that we heard that he showed up at Happy Joe’s Pizza Parlor where she worked one night and approached her at the counter and showed her a handful of pills. “If you don’t get back together with me,” he said, “I’ll take these.” And as the story went, she poured him a glass of water.