I met Gabbie at a Nine Inch Nails listening party at a club called Slim's in San Francisco. I remembered her name because I had misheard it as Cabbie. "Wow, Cabbie is such a cool name!" Dumbass. As it should happen, she lived in Berkeley, just a few blocks from me. She was cute, spunky, evidently into good music, so I gave it a shot and asked her out. She accepted.

Trouble was, she was only sixteen, which I found out as we were carded at the doors of the pool hall. Hmmm. We got hamburgers at I.B.s and danced awkwardly around the sticky subject of statutory rape laws, etc. The irony, of course, was that when the topic of age was finally breached, she was complaining about getting old. Evidently she had discovered a lone grey hair.

That was our only official date, but I did run into her three more times at Nine Inch Nails concerts. If you consider the size of the venues, that's a pretty amazing coincidence.

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