Kick Me Page 4

  Patty and I took three old blankets and went out to her driveway. We tied one blanket to the fence, so that it could hang down and block her neighbors from seeing us through the chain link. We put another blanket on the ground, then tied the third to the top of the fence. Then we pulled this blanket out at an angle and used a couple of bricks to hold it in place. And now we had a tent.

  We looked at our creation proudly. “Let’s get inside,” Patty said, giving me a strange smile.

  Patty and I crawled inside the tent and sat there. It was a hot day, and the blankets gave off the scent of the fabric softener Patty’s mom had washed them in. Pools of sunlight danced on the blanket hanging in front of us, the shadows of the leaves from the oak tree in her yard silhouetted on our tent’s fuzzy surface. The movement of the branches in the slight breeze that day made the shadows of the leaves float back and forth, and we stared at this peaceful light show for a while. I would occasionally look over at Patty. She looked pretty, sitting there staring at the sunlight. She had bigger eyes than most girls I knew, and when they focused on something, they had a hypnotic quality. The breeze would occasionally drift through the tent and lightly move the ends of her hair and everything started to feel like a dream.

  Patty looked over and saw me staring at her. She smiled, then got a look in her eyes that I had never seen before.

  “You wanna kiss?” she asked me with a small smile.

  I can’t quite describe the feeling I had at that moment. I guess it’s hard to explain what it feels like when your human sexuality pops like an egg in a microwave. It felt like someone had set off a small firecracker in the back of my head. The world seemed to flash white for a split second, after which my body started to go numb. I blinked at her. A barely audible “What?” was all I could muster in response.

  “Let me kiss you,” she said with a bigger smile and a look that I had only before seen on the faces of kids who were trying to talk you into doing something that was going to get you in trouble. We were both sitting cross-legged on the ground, and she turned her body to face me. She stared at me, her big eyes filled with anticipation.

  My scalp tingled. Hot flashes shot up and down the back of my neck. I had wanted to kiss a girl ever since I’d seen Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed kiss in It’s a Wonderful Life, but I never dreamed it would actually happen, at least not before my voice changed. The inside of my chest felt like it was filled with helium, and I knew right then that there was nothing I wanted more in the world than to kiss Patty Collins.

  So . . .

  What happened next will have to go down in my Book of Bad Decisions, planted firmly in the chapter entitled “I Have No Idea What I Was Thinking.”

  For some strange reason, I said, “No.”

  But it wasn’t a simple “no.” It wasn’t a single word said in a tone that implied “We can’t do this, it’s wrong.” It wasn’t said in a way that confessed “I can’t kiss you because I’m afraid.” Nor was it said in a manner that indicated “Euw, you’re a girl, and I don’t want your germs.”

  No, for some bizarre reason, my brain told me that I should become coy.

  And so the word no came out of my mouth in two distinct parts. The first part was an extended “nnnnnnnnnn” sound, which had a slowly rising pitch that indicated I was considering the idea and was working my way toward the rendering of a decision. Accompanying this “nnnnnnnnnn” was the action of rolling my eyes to the side, also meant to show I was deliberating the request and was more than likely to agree to it. Following the “nnnnnnnnnn” was the second part: a quick and debate-ending “oh,” which was accompanied by my eyes snapping back to meet hers with a look of “I know you want me, but you can’t have me.”

  In short, I had answered Patty’s sweet request in exactly the same way a stuck-up girl would in an ABC Afterschool Special.

  I don’t know why I did this. I’m sure a part of me was simply scared of kissing her. However, I know that a bigger part of me, my Jimmy Stewart side, wanted to kiss the Donna Reed sitting next to me. Maybe I said no because I’d heard my cousins Leslie and Laurel talking about playing “hard to get” with guys. Maybe it was because I’d heard my father tell my mother that the more he told salesmen he didn’t want to buy anything from them, the harder they’d try to sell him something. Or maybe it was just something I’d seen Gilligan do. I’m not sure, but all I know is that I was certain this was the way to handle the situation.

  Well, surprisingly enough, my two-part “nnnnnnnnnn-oh” had the effect I was looking for. Patty smiled again and scooted up closer to me.

  “C’mon, Paul. Let me kiss you.”

  In my six-year-old head, I knew I had her. And I suddenly felt like the coolest guy in the world. There was no reason to change my tactic.

  “No,” I said again, this time with more of a raised-eyebrow “Didn’t I already tell you once?” playfulness that I remember thinking was the perfect way to keep the game going and myself as appealing as ever.

  Patty laughed, moved closer, and asked again. I refused again, and so began several hours of some disturbing gender-reversed game of The Cowboy Tries to Kiss the Little Lady. During our time in the tent, Patty would (a) put her arms around me and try to pull me close, (b) try to force her face into mine to deliver a peck on my lips, (c) tickle me to try and get me to give in, (d) stare at me with a pouty look meant to guilt me into kissing her, and (e) several combinations of all the above. And during her repeated advances, I would alternately (a) giggle like a girl, (b) pretend to be very serious and upset with her, (c) cover my face with my hands, (d) do a singsong “no no no” chant, and (e) make a complete ass out of myself.

  As the morning passed, I remember that I was having the time of my life. There I was with a pretty girl I really liked who was desperately trying to kiss me and devoting every ounce of her energy and attention to accomplishing her task. Life didn’t get better than this. I had suddenly found myself cast in the role of a miniature Hugh Hefner and was now certain that life would no longer be the same for me. And the one thing I knew for sure was that Patty could never possibly get tired of this. Ever.

  But, alas, she did.

  In retrospect, how couldn’t she? If I were her, I would have given up after the first minute. I would have figured that I was repulsed at the thought of kissing myself and slunk away, my confidence in tatters. But Patty was too secure in her femininity to have that happen. Simply put, she knew that she was pretty, she knew that she was kissable, and she just got bored with the dork in the tent.

  It happened slowly. Her romantic assaults began to lose their vigor. I, of course, found myself cluelessly misinterpreting her deceleration to mean that I had to resist even harder. I figured that Patty’s letting up was a clever ruse to con me into succumbing, that her new plan was to dangle in front of me the threat of not wanting to kiss anymore, thus getting me to let my guard down, whereupon she would throw her arms around me and we would consummate our lovers’ game.

  I said “no” again and waited for the next onslaught.

  Patty leaned back, looked at me with bored contempt, and said, “Let’s go watch The Banana Splits.”

  At that moment, I knew I had overplayed my hand. Before I could figure out what to do, she got up and left the tent. I was stunned. How could she just walk away? Wasn’t she enjoying this little passion play as much as I was? Wasn’t she getting a thrill out of showering me with attention and affection? Didn’t she realize how much fun I was having? I quickly scrambled out of the tent in the hopes of luring her back, but she was already inside the house. I pulled open the screen door and went in, thinking that maybe Patty was tricking me into continuing the game in her room. However, I quickly saw that she had indeed come in to watch The Banana Splits. She was sitting on her couch, slouched back with her knees sticking up, wearing the impassive look all kids get when they watch television. I stared at her and thought I saw a look of disappointment on her face. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, I could see that it w
as something far less flattering than disappointment. Disappointment would imply that I had denied her something she truly wanted. What I saw on her face was the realization that she had wasted an entire morning on an idiot. I came over to her on the couch and tried to start the game again, pathetically leaning in to her and saying, “I bet you still want to kiss me,” but she was now far too engrossed in the low production-value antics of Fleegle and Snorky. I stared at her, waiting for her to laugh at the success of her newest ploy, then grab me and deliver the much anticipated soul kiss. But she didn’t. When I leaned in to her again, my nose mere inches from her cheek, she pushed me away and said, “Cut it out.” The game was truly over.

  And suddenly, all I wanted to do in the entire world was to kiss her. My brain spun as I tried to think of ways to get her re-interested. I acted goofy, trying to make her laugh. I stared at her with what I thought was a kiss-inducing face. I even tried to get her back outside and into the tent with me. But when her dad came in and asked us if we wanted him to take our tent down and she said flatly, “Yeah, we’re not using it anymore,” I knew I had blown my chance. Patty Collins would not be kissing me anytime soon.

  That night, I had the most vividly erotic dream I’ve ever had in my life. I was dressed as a bee and was standing around in some crappy-looking beehive set from a grade-school play. Patty, also dressed as a bee, was lowered down from the sky. She smiled at me, then backed her stinger into my stomach and dragged me away as I had what I now believe was my very first orgasm. What the symbolism of this image was or why it resulted in such a strong physical reaction, I have no idea. All I know is that I woke up feeling light-headed and giddy. I was now completely in love with Patty Collins and desperate to get back inside that tent with her.

  But I never did. She and I only saw each other at school after that, and our interaction consisted solely of saying hello. Whatever romantic feelings Patty might have had for me had died in that tent made of blankets on her driveway one tragic summer morning when I decided it would be cute to be coy.

  Over the next few years, as my male classmates were spending their days trying to become proficient at tetherball and playing the drum solo from “Wipe Out” on the edges of their desks, I was busy developing crushes on girls.

  It’s hard to say why we have crushes on anybody at that age. It’s not like we’re that in touch with who’s beautiful and who’s not, or who would make a good girlfriend or boyfriend. Many times our crushes are simply based on people’s hair or their nose or the way they dress or if they’re nice to you. In the third grade I had a big crush on Teresa Andrews, and in her case, I liked her because she was smart. She always seemed to get answers right and was usually the first one in the class to raise her hand. Maybe it was her confidence that attracted me, or maybe it was simply that she was the only girl I knew who wore glasses. I would spend hours of class time drawing pictures of her in the back of my notebook. Once our teacher, Miss Patton, caught me not paying attention during class as I was adding yet another artist’s rendering of Teresa to my already stalkerlike notebook gallery. Fortunately, Miss Patton found my lovelorn doodlings to be heartwarming, and so she simply gave me a sympathetic smile, closed my notebook, and told me to pay attention. Even Miss Patton could see what a good couple Teresa and I would make, I figured. And by the middle of the school year, I decided that it was time to make my move.

  I didn’t know Teresa very well, even though she rode the same school bus that I did. I never had the nerve to talk to her because I was always too shy to talk to girls I had crushes on. Instead, I would try to figure out ways to get them to notice me. With Teresa, I knew I could impress her by showing her how smart I was. There was just one problem—I wasn’t that smart. My grades always hovered around the letter C, and I knew it would be hard to win her over by reciting the alphabet or stammering my way through times tables I hadn’t yet committed to memory. And so I knew I would have to default to the only means available to me to grab her attention . . .

  I would try to make her laugh.

  It had worked before with several other girls over the past couple of years. It wasn’t that they would hear one of my supposedly funny comments and fall in love with me, but it at least opened up the lines of communication and gave me hope that one day I might get them to the point where they would drag me into a tent and try to kiss me. And so it was decided—this was the strategy I would use on Teresa.

  The next day, I got my chance. We were studying science and Miss Patton broke us off into pairs to work on our reports. As luck would have it, she paired me with Teresa. I wasn’t sure if Miss Patton had done it because of my crush or if the Fates had simply been on my side that day, but I was grateful and vowed not to squander this opportunity.

  “What do you want to do our report about?” she asked me. I stared into her glasses and found myself unable to think.

  “I don’t know,” I said, a bit too politely. “Whatever you want to do, Teresa.”

  She gave me a strange look that seemed to say “Thanks for all the help, jackass” and leaned back in her chair to think. I watched her furrow her brow as she pondered our report, and I tried to imagine what our children would look like. I envisioned her and me holding hands as we strolled along on the college campus where she would be a professor and where I would not be a professor. I saw us out camping, as she kissed me in a tent and I let her. Our life together was unrolling before my eyes, and the mere thought of it made me all the more desperate to crack my first joke and break the ice between us. However, the academic mood was proving to be an obstacle.

  “Let’s look through a science book and see if we get any ideas,” she said as she stood up, talking more to herself than to me.

  “Great idea, Teresa” was my enthusiastic reply, even though she was halfway across the room by the time I said it.

  Teresa returned with a large book titled Science and You. She sat down and opened it. I moved my chair next to hers so that we could read the book together. She didn’t look at me as I leaned my head in beside hers to read along, and I found myself waxing poetic over her concentration skills, as if her ability to read without being distracted was yet another good reason to dedicate my life to her. Teresa had the book open to a chart that showed man’s ascension from ape to human. There were about eight apes in various stages of development, going from the hunched-over primitive ape-man up to the fully erect Homo sapiens. The fourth ape was a semihunched half ape–half woman whom the illustrator had decided to endow with hairy sagging breasts. Being a third grader, I immediately found this funny but instead of just laughing and pointing at the breasts like one of my less erudite peers might have, I decided that Teresa could only be won over by a more sophisticated quip. My opportunity had arrived. Science and comedy had merged. I thought hard and after a couple of seconds, I realized I had a real zinger, sure to melt Teresa’s brainy heart.

  I looked around to make sure the coast was clear, leaned in to Teresa, pointed to the picture of the ape-woman, and whispered in an amused tone, “Teresa, look, it’s Miss Patton.”

  Whereupon Teresa immediately raised her hand and blurted out loudly, “Miss Patton, Paul said you look like the ape in this book.”

  My jaw dropped. As quickly as that, I was thrust into the spotlight. Miss Patton came over and looked at the picture, as did several other kids. You’d think that out of a roomful of third graders, somebody would see the picture of a hairy, saggy-breasted ape and deem my comment funny. But whether they were afraid to because Miss Patton was standing there or because they had suddenly all become sophisticated connoisseurs of highbrow comedy, nobody laughed. Instead, they all looked at me with a mix of contempt and disbelief. And Miss Patton, my onetime ally in the world of romance, was highly insulted. She told me that my remark was insensitive and immature and then made me go sit in the corner for an hour.

  Teresa Andrews never gave me the time of day after that, although she had never given me the time of day before that, either. But I couldn�
�t get over what a tattletale she was. And I was now completely confused as to what my relationship with women was going to be in the future. Was I destined to be the dope in the tent who felt compelled to push away the things that he wanted in life? Or would I be the clueless buffoon, pointing at pictures of apewomen with no idea when he was going too far in his search for love and acceptance?

  Or would I just be the guy who overanalyzes everything and makes a big deal out of a stupid mistake? Sitting in the corner that day, listening to my peers living their lives behind me while I counted holes in the cinder block, I knew that only time would tell.

  But I had a feeling the answer wasn’t going to be good.

  OUT OF THE CLOSET

  Seek and ye shall find” is a quote that I believe comes from the Bible. I’m not quite sure, though, since thankfully I haven’t had to go to church or Sunday school in about twenty-five years. For all I know it could have been a line of Spock’s from the “Trouble with Tribbles” episode of Star Trek. But seeking and finding were two things that I did quite well as a kid.

  One of the things I used to constantly seek was my yearly stash of Christmas presents. Or at least I did once I found out there was no Santa Claus.

  On Christmas Eve, when I was seven, as my mom and I made a last-minute trip to the mall to buy a copy of The Naked Ape for my radical cousin Leslie, my mother had finally cracked under the pressure of having to lie to her only child about the jolly fat man for all these years. Doing so violated every ethic she had ever learned in church, and she resented having to do it simply because as a parent she had been ordered by society to march in lockstep with the wishes of the corporate world. Whenever a gift-getting holiday would roll around in which unearned gains were supposedly delivered by a mystical third party, I always forced her to tell me more and more about these Santa Claus and Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy people. I think that deep in my heart I never really believed that these enigmatic, science-defying figures existed, but since all my friends seemed to be so into them, I wanted desperately to believe, too. As we drove around the mall parking lot looking for a space while Christmas music played on the car radio, I guess I finally pushed my mother too hard for a concrete answer.