Let me preface this story my saying that:
a) This is creative non-fiction, but not “James Frey creative non-fiction.” I don’t even think I took poetic license with a Goddamn thing.
b) All names (except one…can you spot it?) have been changed to protect anyone who wouldn’t want to be written about my yours truly and posted about the internet…If you recognize (or think you recognize) any specific person, please don’t divulge their real name. Contact me privately if you really want to know.
Ok…enough of that crap. It’s storytime:
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The First Kiss of Spring Training
When I was in grade school, the only TV I was allowed to watch after dark was the programming on Nick at Nite. This was due to my parents’ fears that modern prime-time television would warp my impressionable pre-adolescent mind and because it was on right after Nickelodeon’s original programming, which was all I ever watched in the afternoons aside from Cubs games on WGN and NOVA specials on cool stuff like sulfur-spewing volcanoes or killer Tiger Sharks. Throughout much of my childhood I would stay parked in front of the TV after Doug or Rocko’s Modern Life had wrapped up to watch the shows of my parents’ youth. I’m actually glad that my folks forbade me from watching primetime TV because Nick at Nite acted as a sort of cultural history primer for the last half of the 20th century. As a kid I watched the I Love Lucy with Vitametavegemin, the Happy Days where Fonzie jumps over a shark pool on water-skis, and learned that being stranded on a desert island isn’t so bad if you get to bunk with Ginger and Mary Ann. However, the show that I watched with the zeal of a Billy Graham devotee was The Wonder Years. For me, and countless other slightly awkward, unremarkable looking pre-teens, Kevin Arnold was the small screen manifestation of myself. We dealt with the same insignificant, yet important problems about school, friends, siblings, and most notably, girls. From the time I was ten years old on, I yearned to find a girl like Winnie Cooper. Winnie had everything: She had the always enticing girl-next-door quality, was smart enough to help you out with your homework, was good-looking without being unapproachable, and wanted Kevin, i.e., me. In the fourth grade I watched the episode during which Kevin and Winnie have their first kiss, sitting on the neighborhood swing-set in the twilight, locking lips with about as much sexual tension as is possible to show on network television between two prepubescent kids. From that moment on I wanted my first kiss to be like that one, which didn’t seem too hard to duplicate. The only problem arose from the fact that Kevin put his New York Jets jacket around Winnie to warm her up after they kissed, and I didn’t own a New York Jets jacket. However, I did have a Cincinnati Bearcats Starter jacket that I figured would work just as well.
By the time sixth grade rolled around it seemed like everyone had begun dating and, on a not entirely unrelated note, had been rammed by the puberty bus. In sixth grade I was running with the “popular crowd,” which really didn’t count for much at my tiny private school. The popular crowd would have been more aptly named, “the crowd most likely to throw their virginity away and get substance abuse problems first,” but I guess that would’ve been a bit to cumbersome to say. Despite its relative lack of import in middle school culture at large, the popular crowd did have looking pretty as a prerequisite for membership. At least, that was the case for the girls. A less-than gorgeous guy could still hob-knob with the pretty people if he was funny (read: class clown), really good at sports, or had parents that were loaded. For me, the combination of being humorous and just good enough at sports not to ride the pine resulted in my inclusion. Being a part of this semi-elite society of beautiful folk made me a desirable bachelor by association, and since everyone had to date in the 6th grade, I soon found myself with a girlfriend.
The dating scene at my school was pretty much illusory. At that age kids “date” because it’s the cool thing to do and because they’ve just discovered they have hormones. Kids could ask one another out, not talk to each other during the subsequent three weeks, and still be “in a relationship.” It was a lot like spring training in baseball. Nothing anyone did actually counted and people just dated to get a little practice in fooling around so that they wouldn’t get sent down to AAA ball when the regular season actually started. Sadly, I never understood that these relationships were supposed to be ephemeral and pointless. When I asked out Laura Kelly at the beginning of the year, I actually expected the thing to last and she most certainly did not. A good indicator of this was the Christmas gifts we got each other: I used my allowance money to buy her a pair of diamond earrings. She got me an ‘Nsync record. It’s bad enough that Laura’s Christmas gift to me was an album made by a group of whiny teeny-boppers, but the juxtaposition of the saran-wrapped CD cover and the black-felt covered box I gave to her was what killed me. It was like telling a girl you love her and getting a pity hug in return. Hindsight being 20/20, I probably should have seen her break-up coming from a mile away. Instead, I simply listened to that wretched ‘Nsync album on loop for a month straight.
If you look back at the first few seasons of The Wonder Years it’s striking how much older Winnie looks than Kevin. It’s one of the cruel tricks of adolescence that girls’ bodies develop about two years before boys’ do, but everybody’s libidos kick into overdrive at the same time. In the pilot episode of The Wonder Years Winnie is a slender girl on the threshold of womanhood and Kevin is a squat boy who still has baby fat in his cheeks. In my case, Laura had breasts that made jogging a hazardous activity and I was still looking under my arms for any sign of follicle life. To this day I have no valid explanation as to why Laura agreed to go out with me. I asked her out right before my school’s homecoming bonfire and was ecstatic until I got home that night. When I went into the bathroom I remember staring at my reflection, wondering what could have possessed this girl to make her want to date me. I was a skinny little, five-foot-nothing kid with a comically bulbous nose and nappy brown hair that frizzed out like the bottom half of Albert Einstein’s afro when it was humid. I guess it goes with out saying that I was horribly self-conscious as well. For the entirety of our “relationship” I felt like there had been some sort of clerical error wherein I got placed with the wrong girl, and that in some other high school there was a little GQ-model-to-be who was dating the average girl I was supposed to be with. In my defense, it’s hard to be confident in a relationship when your voice hasn’t dropped yet.
Over the course of the four months that we were together, I did everything in my power to be a good boyfriend to Laura, only to be smote by her overbearing parents. When I asked Laura to come down to the haunted steamboat on the Ohio River with a group of friends, her parents nipped the plan in the bud because it was too “inappropriate” for their daughter. In place of the haunted steamboat–a date sure to frighten Laura enough so that I could at least cop a feel when an out of work actor jumped at us covered in stage makeup–I went on their suggested date for us: a parent-student hoe-down held in the middle school gym. Instead of holding Laura for an hour in the cramped quarters of a dilapidated riverboat, I found myself going to what was widely acknowledged as the lamest event ever. I only brought my mom along with me because my Dad had the antisocial savvy to stay at home and watch The McLaughlin Group instead of attending dosey-do hell. Once we got to school, I immediately began speed-walking from our new Plymouth van to the gym doors in an attempt to make it clear to any passers-by that I didn’t know the woman following me in an embroidered Halloween sweater with little black kitties and pumpkins on it. However, when I walked into the gym and saw Laura surrounded by her nuclear family, I knew nothing good would come of the evening. The “MCs” consisted of a geriatric couple both sporting black cowboy hats, with the husband wearing an outfit that was about 80% denim along with one of those hideous string neckties worn my used car salesmen in Texas and the wife wearing a floral dress with a hoop skirt that could have doubled as a family-sized tent.
The actual events of that evening have evaporated with the passage of time into a blur of horrible country music and humiliation. Laura and I tried to avoid the festivities by sitting on the plastic blue bleachers and speculating on how much fun our friends were having aboard the haunted steamboat, but her mom kept on sucking her away like a maternal black hole. Whenever this happened my mom would feel compelled to grab me as well and make me line dance with a bunch of aged boomers and their miserable children. Every time my mom saw my scowling face she would put her hand on my back and say, “It isn’t that bad now, is it honey?” But it was that bad. When you’re 12, square dancing with your girlfriend’s mother in front of said girlfriend is about as traumatic as being forced to sing “I’m a Little Teapot” buck-naked in front of your entire class. Laura’s parents, on the other hand, were having a fantastic time. This was probably because they would be able to rest safe and sound for another week with the knowledge that their daughter was still unsoiled by my grabby adolescent hands.
The hoe-down was only part one of her parents’ nefarious plan to turn me from boyfriend to best friend. Apparently, even though she was twelve, Laura wasn’t allowed to see PG-13 rated movies, something that came as quite a shock to a kid like myself, whose father had sat him down on the couch and made him watch Alien when he turned ten. This meant that I was only allowed to take her to movies that were rated G or PG and resulting in us going on dates to Babe: Pig in the City and I’ll be Home for Christmas. Aside from Schindler’s List, I can think of few films that would make worse date movies than one starring a talking baby pig. As for I’ll be Home for Christmas, it was a Jonathan Taylor Thomas vehicle (JTT to the well initiated) and was therefore not only a shitty film, but one that attracted an audience of screeching nine year old girls hopped up on Sour Patch Kids and Slushees. I think it goes without saying that I got no ass during these outings.
As pathetic as it may sound, I never got so much as one kiss from Laura during the four months that we dated. The most intimate we ever got was a sock-clad game of footsie during English class, while the teacher read from Where the Red Fern Grows. In retrospect, it seems a tad twisted to be fooling around underneath a desk while listening to a story about a boy’s prized bloodhounds slowly dying, but what would you have done? After paying for dates for over three months and not getting so much as a peck on the cheek, I jumped at even the smallest opening to get a little lovin’, and if any guy out there says they would have done different…well, they wouldn’t have. I think it’s physically impossible unless you’re a eunuch or something.
That January, Laura broke up with me the only truly proper way a 12-year-old girl knows how: by spreading a rumor around school that she was going to break-up with me, letting it circulate until my best friend Matt heard about it and instant messaged me to see what was going on, thus causing me to call her on the phone to see if she was really breaking up with me. When Laura told me that we were breaking up, I choked up and had to do that guttural hiccup trick to stop her from knowing that was I crying over the phone. When she hung up on me I spent a good 15 minutes in my dad’s study crying until my tear ducts were dry heaving. It might look like I was just being a melodramatic kid who didn’t know any better, but to this day I really think I was in love with her. I mean, I went to see Babe: Pig in the City and saved up my allowance for 3 months to buy a Christmas present for this girl without receiving so much as a goodnight kiss over the course of four months. If that’s not a 12-year-old’s version of love, then I give up.
Tragically, this isn’t the worst part of the whole ordeal. At this point I could delude myself into thinking that Laura was just a prude who didn’t give it out to anybody. But low and behold, a couple of months, later she got caught by her parents getting felt up by Nick Strotz on their living room couch with her shirt off and her tongue so far down his throat that it was using his uvula for a punching bag. Where was this when we were going out? And why did it have to be with Nick Strotz, who was a notorious perv? I mean, just say his name out loud. It even sounds like the name of a kid who’d be charged for date rape by his sophomore year of college. I would’ve beaten the ever-living crap out of that kid if he hadn’t outweighed me by a good 50 lbs.
It was at this point that anxiety about losing my oral virginity began to set in. If I didn’t kiss a girl soon, I’d be branded as a loser and sent to the Siberia of our middle school social hierarchy with all the other social lepers. Then and there I made it my mission to kiss a girl before the school year was over or, if I failed, move to a different state where I could assume a new identity–preferably an identity that had already gotten to second base. It no longer mattered if it was that “perfect first kiss.” I just wanted to avoid being relegated to sitting at a table with kids who played Magic: The Gathering during lunch and smelled like my gym locker. However, despite my increased efforts, I managed to make it to the last day of school without getting a single girl to make out with me. Thankfully, there was the end-of-year pool party.
The party to kick off summer vacation that year was held at the house of Erica Weber for the sole reason that her garage was larger than the local branch of our public library and her house proper was a super sized McMansion. She had an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a two-story glass-encased patio, and a log cabin playhouse equipped with a TV and air conditioning. Calling her parents rich would be tantamount to calling Stephen Hawking smart or Malcolm X black. After swimming for a little while and getting a hamburger along with some corn on the cob, all of which was prepared by a catering staff, I paraded my half-naked bony ass down to their pool house.
Now, when I say they had a pool house, don’t get some half-baked idea in your head of a smallish shack for housing pool-cleaning equipment, inflatable rafts, and water noodles over the winter. Erica’s pool house was as large as my actual house and came complete with a fully stocked kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, and a newly refurbished basement. This was where the family’s “help” lived when they weren’t busy catering to the whims of Erica’s mother during cocktail hour or polishing the hood of Mr. Weber’s Rolls Royce. I entered the pool house with a small group of my friends and headed upstairs to the master bedroom, where it was decided that we would play Truth or Dare. Here was my shining moment. The only reason Truth or Dare exists among teenagers is to either make your peers do stupid shit naked or to get them to make out. I suppose it was the easiest way our forefathers found to break down the oppressive puritanical values that dominate our society. Why we had to be the nation founded by prudish zealots who thought that their testicles were instruments of sin is beyond me, but I’m sure karma had something to do with it.
Once the game of Truth or Dare got started, it took a couple turns for us to get warmed up, giving out tepid dares like, “kiss Mike on the cheek” or “scream penis as loud as you can,” which my friend Ryan was more than willing to do with or without being dared. This stuff is kind of like Truth or Dare foreplay, because if you just jump right into “take your swimsuit off,” you’re liable to get the same response as if you’d propositioned a woman with, “You’re cute, let’s fuck.” Eventually I was signaled out for a dare by Carolyn Bennett, a girl who was universally acknowledged as the most ridiculously beautiful person in our grade and a woman who was about half a decade more mature than anybody else in the room. I really wish I could tell you that my first kiss was with her. I also wish that I owned 1985 DeLorean that took me backwards in time once I hit 88 mph. I received neither of these wishes. Carolyn, who was reclining on the guest house’s queen size bed, sat up and placed her hands in her lap: “I dare you to make out with Amy in the closet for a minute.” The Amy she referred to was Amy Frey, a girl who stood about 4’ 10” with her shoes on and had a very Muppet-like facial structure. Her head appeared to be slightly wider than it was long, with a bob of jet black hair hanging above a face-splitting smile that was punctuated by a nose so angular that it could probably pop a balloon. I wasn’t particularly enthused at the prospect of having my first kiss come with a girl who looked like the offspring of Cher and Ernie from Sesame Street, but I couldn’t say no to the dare. This was the first legit dare of the afternoon. If I didn’t accept it my friends would think I was a total pussy and I would have to face the terrifying possibility of entering the 7th grade without having kissed a girl. Oh yeah, and it probably would have hurt her feelings, but that didn’t really enter into my thinking at the time.
There were only about six of us in the guest house, so our dare was met with awkward fanfare. Carolyn got off the bed and picked Amy up off the ground by her arm-pits while Ryan proceeded to scream “ow-ow!” and mimic that “bow-chicka-wow-wow” baseline that you hear in pornos. After a moderate amount of this poking and prodding, Amy and I got up from the pow-wow on the floor and walked over to the bedroom closet to consummate our dare. We stood outside the door for a good 15 seconds flashing sheepish smiles and expelling air out of our noses in short, forceful bursts until Amy finally mustered the courage to walk into the closet. I followed her in and Carolyn flashed a demonically angelic smile as she shut the door and told us she’d start counting when she screamed go. It was pitch black and reeked of moth balls. I knew that Amy was in front of me somewhere, but exactly where I didn’t know. I started to get a little pre-kiss anxiety and worried that I would lean forward and kiss her on the eye by accident or that I wouldn’t do it right, whatever that meant. I heard Carolyn yell “go,” and did nothing. I just sat there, cross-legged and petrified, afraid to make any advance: Did I really want my first kiss to be with Amy Frey? I didn’t even like her as a person, much less think she was hot. Plus Truth or Dare is a really lame way to get your first—and there was now someone else’s tongue in my mouth. Amy began attacking my face with her gaping mouth, shoving her tongue so far into my mouth that I gagged and had to compose myself before going back in to kiss her again. Amy was going at my mouth like Mike Tyson went after Evander Holyfield’s ear. She was pressing her mouth against my face at an angle that caused her little thumbtack of a nose to dig a crater in my cheekbone. In addition to that, Amy was pushing me backwards with the force of her face so that my back was getting skewered by a high-heeled shoe that Mrs. Weber probably wore once in 1983 and then forgot about. My lower back was being gored by a shoe, Amy’s nose was in the process of piercing on my left cheek, and she was trying to asphyxiate me with her tongue. It was all viscous and slimy and I didn’t know what else to do but timidly swirl my tongue around hers and count the seconds until it would be over. Worst of all, the Webers, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to fill every room of their house, tree house, and pool house with snacks. And, apparently, Amy must’ve owned significant market shares of Frito-Lay because she had devoured about three bags of Nacho Cheesier Doritos over the previous hour. Anyone who has ever eaten a Dorito knows that they leave a very potent aftertaste in your mouth. Kissing Amy was like having that nauseating Dorito aftertaste swabbed on the inside of my cheeks with her tongue. It was during that minute, with the taste of rotten Doritos invading my mouth, when I sat and prayed for those closet doors to open so that I could go eat an entire canister of Altoids.
Eventually the Gods showed some mercy and ended our impromptu make-out session. I walked out of the closet, faked a smile, and proceeded to brag to all my friends that I’d just made out with a chick so that no one would think I was queer. When I got home I sat on my couch watching TV and downing a 2 liter of Coke in a futile attempt to get the grody Doritos aftertaste out of my mouth. All I could think about was how awful making out with Amy had been, and I tried to convince myself that I just hadn’t done it right. I mean, guys wouldn’t do so much stupid shit to get a girl’s attention if that was the reward. The more I thought about it, the more I knew that it went awry because a kiss wasn’t supposed to be forced and timed like some erotic laboratory experiment. I knew that Kevin Arnold never would’ve made out with a random girl because his friends told him to. Then I remembered that there was an episode where Kevin had to play Spin the Bottle at a party and he felt awkward, too. He was luckier than I was because Doritos weren’t around in the 1960’s, but the overall experience was similar enough. I guess that’s why I identified with him so much; because most of his experiences were my experiences, only mine happened thirty years later and weren’t produced on a Hollywood back lot. The main difference between us was that he had a Winnie Cooper and I didn’t. I always knew I should’ve bugged my parents to buy me a New York Jets jacket.
