My first kiss was when I was sixteen years old, and was with my best friend’s cousin on her living room couch. I had just beat him at Tetris. The end.
No? Background? Okay. Let’s start with the “sixteen years old” part and get it right out of the way: I was a very late bloomer in terms of making out. While you, my sexy readers, were blossoming into young adulthood and totally getting to third base in the back of your friend Kelly’s dad’s car at Matt’s party, my fresh spring buds were still tightly furled, so to speak. Hardly showing a bit of green tinge in the leaves there. I was the kind of sixteen year old who took as her role model a hybrid of Anne Shirley, Ramona Quimby, Watts from Some Kind Of Wonderful, Olivia Davidson from Sweet Valley, and Buttercup from The Princess Bride, you know, and when I wasn’t being not asked to Prom I was writing plays to be produced at my high school or working with homeless people under the overpass in downtown Miami—none of which attributes, it turned out, drove any of the teenage boys I knew wild with the desire to make out with me or whatever.
I was extremely innocent and naïve about sex, in a way that seems weirdly antique now; I’d read a lot of teen romances (see: Olivia Davidson) so I knew kissing was this very big deal, but I still didn’t exactly understand how it worked, really, or what you were supposed to do, or what it meant if you ever got around to actually doing it. As far as any post-kissing activities, I couldn’t even think about anything like that; when my mom told me that she had put a box of condoms in my and my sister’s bathroom and that we (and our friends) were to make use of them if we needed to, I believe my reaction was “Eeeeeeeeeeeeewww!” So you see what I mean by late bloomer. In fact I sometimes think that I still, at the age of thirty-two, have not completely bloomed, that there is some lush undergrowth in me yet that has not quite seen the light.
Anyway, right: sixteen years old and sort of dreamy and histrionic and not quite ready to stop living in a fantasy world of my own devising. Not exactly a prime kissing suspect. There was that. And then there was my very best friend Amy, whose parents’ liberal sleepover policy led directly to the occasion of that first disastrously disgusting kiss, which I’m going to tell you about any minute now.
Amy was and is extremely beautiful; when she was sixteen boys would lay down on the floor and howl for love of her when she walked by. I don’t think she had any real idea how gorgeous she was, but every boy we knew was in love with her, even the ones that turned out gay later. (I was pretty much in love with her too, now that I think about it.) I always credit Amy with the choice of my future profession because it was these lovelorn boys who became my first therapy clients.
Her parents, you see, were very generous with their house, which was a couple of blocks from mine on the island; I slept over there every weekend. Her house had a bunch of movies and a ping-pong table and what must have been a Commodore 64 or something. There were kids in that house all the time, eating the family’s food, watching their movies, sitting in their daughter’s room and reading romance novels and making collages out of cut-up magazines. Anyway, all the boys who loved Amy would drive (or, in one case, actually bike out in the broiling hot Florida sun) to her house every weekend and just…hang out. Like, on her front lawn, hoping for a glimpse of her as we left to go to the 7-11. Her dad, no fool, would tell these boys that if they were going to be there they’d have to do some yard work, so the lawn would get mowed and the hedges would get trimmed by these poor boys as they broke their hearts. I think she knew they all liked her, but she probably wasn’t aware of how much they liked her because they were busy telling me all the details.
“Chiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaara,” they’d wail. “I loooooooooooooooooove her but she’s going oooooooooooout with my best frieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeend.”
“Well,” I’d say, nodding sympathetically. “You have to understand about Amy. She just…you can’t…it’s just not going to happen, you know? She has to be free.”
“AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH,” the boys would scream. Amy, all unaware of the free counseling I was providing, would continue painting her toenails and working on her magazine cutout collage in the next room.
“You want us to get you a Slurpee while we’re at the Sev?” I’d ask the boys. “Mowing the lawn can get really hot. Oh, and you can send the next client on in now.”
So, now, if your best friend was this amazingly beautiful girl, and all weekend every weekend you spent multiple hours listening to all sorts of boys cry about how irresistible she was, would you expect to get your first kiss anywhere in her vicinity? If not, you are just like me, and you probably wouldn’t have seen it coming either.
So there I was, sleeping over at Amy’s as usual. Her cousin Andrew from Sarasota—who wasn’t actually even really her cousin but her mom’s best friend’s kid—was staying with them for a couple of weeks, so he was sleeping on the couch in one room while me and Ames slept in the big fold-out bed in the adjacent one. I guess we’d watched a movie or two and probably eaten some onion dip and chocolate-chip Costco muffins for dinner, as was our wont, and then for a while we all played old-skool Tetris, which would, of course, not have been old skool in 1991. I loved Tetris. I still love Tetris. I was very good at it and played it all the time, and I was thoroughly enjoying beating Amy’s sort-of-cousin at it. Doop doop, doop doop, doo doo DOO doo doo doo DOO DOO DOO, doo doo doo, DOO DOO DOO DOO DOO. Nothing quite so satisfying as getting all four lines in a row, is there?
I forget exactly how it happened, but as I was trouncing him Andrew started telling me his life story, mainly about how up in Sarasota he was something of a ladies’ man. I was already used to boys telling me about other girls so I just sort of nodded and went “Mmm hmm” and concentrated on getting the shapes in the right position and slamming them down so I could beat him even more.
He started started telling me how he planned a seduction. “First,” he purred, raising his eyebrows so that I would know he knew his stuff. “I make her dinner. I turn the lights down low. I light some candles, and I put on some Bobby Brown.”
“TETRIS!” I yelled, but quietly, because everyone else was sleeping, including Amy, not three yards away. “Dang, I’m good at this game.”
“And then I tell her she’s beautiful,” he said.
“Uh huh,” I said, plying my joystick expertly.
“And then I go in for the kill,” he said triumphantly. “Works every time. So…what do you do when you want a boy to kiss you?” He was sly, this one.
“Oh,” I said, not getting it, my eyes on the screen. “I’ve never been kissed.”
“Oh really,” he said, hamster wheel beginning to rev up in his brain. “Why not?”
“Uh…” I put the game on pause. “Um. I don’t know. It just hasn’t happened, I guess.”
And that’s when he leaned in, grabbed my arm, and thwocked his lips in a circle over mine, forming a perfect seal and applying really amazing vacuum-cleaner pressure. Somehow—and I have still to this day never figured out how he did this–he also managed to inflict a pretty serious case of Lizard Tongue along with the already-distressing Plunger Mouth. It was not quite what Sixteen Candles had promised me, I tell you what.
Still, though, I was kissing a boy! And a boy, for some reason, was kissing me! The experience itself was disagreeably slobbery and left a big red ring around my mouth, but I wasn’t five seconds in to the forty-five minutes this whole thing lasted before I was planning how I would tell Amy all about it the next day. If only the kissing itself could compare to the joy of reporting it to my best friend!
He finally broke the tractor beam and released me, walking me chivalrously to the other end of the room where Amy was snoring softly in the fold-out bed, oblivious as to what-all we’d been getting up to. I lay down beside her and had to stop myself several times from waking her up and breaking the earth-shattering news. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed? Not any more, buddy!
We were all supposed to go to the very fancy Venetian Pool the next day: Amy and Andrew and a couple other kids, including maybe even future Key Girls Marah and Ashley. I fessed up to them immediately, before we even got in the car. Weirdly, I totally don’t remember what the boy himself was doing that morning as I was all squealing to my friends: was he just eating breakfast and taking a shower and watching cartoons? Did I feel embarrassed or shy or anything? Did I even like him? It didn’t seem as important as telling everyone about my vast and recently-acquired kissin’ experience.
“My cousin?” said Amy.
“Yeah! For like forty-five minutes!” I crowed. (Although now that I think about it, maybe it just felt like forty-five minutes.)
“Wow. With tongue?”
“Yes!” I couldn’t believe it either.
“So…how was it?”
“Uh. It was sort of…it was a little…it was fine. I guess.”
“Mmm. I wondered what that red ring around your mouth was.”
“Oh, man, is that still showing?”
Amy asked if I actually liked her cousin, and I said I didn’t know. “He lives in Sarasota, and I live here, and…”
“Yeah, you should let him down easy.” This was very exciting—not only had I just kissed a boy, I was going to get to reject one, too! This was turning into a pretty exciting weekend, when you factor in how hard I ruled at Tetris.
“Just tell him it’s not going to work out,” she said. She was the expert.
“Mm hmm.”
“Tell him you think he’s really nice but you live too far away.”
“Got it.” This was deeply thrilling. I had relationship problems. I was going to have to do something about them. Now I knew how Lizzie and Jessie Wakefield felt.
“And then if he wants to kiss you again after that, let him!”
The Venetian Pools were really lovely, with fountains and waterfalls and caves, all cut out of the native limestone. I don’t know if they are still there, but in the cave part there were all these underwater benches and this cool place where there was a hole in the wall through which you could swim if you could hold your breath long enough. I was all splashing around and pretending to be a whale when Andrew motioned me over. Uh oh. Here we go.
“Hey, come over to the cave with me,” he said, jerking his head in that direction.
Now, innocent as I was, I knew that the cave was totally where you went to make out, and I think I spared a semi-kind thought for this guy as I swam over to let him down easy. He thought we were going to kiss some more and I was going to break his heart instead! Ha ha! Poor guy. By that point I was pretty well versed in unrequited love and I think I thought it was high time I did a little dumping, for a change.
“Listen,” he said, once we got back to the underwater benches and secured a place among all the maker-outers. “You’re a really nice girl but…well…I live in Sarasota, and you live in Miami and…well, it just wouldn’t work. You live too far away.”
WHAT? He thought I was really nice but it just wasn’t going to work? That was my line! And! He didn’t even seem to want to kiss me anymore! WHAT THE HELL, LIZARD TONGUE?. With as much dignity as a dripping wet chlorine-smelling adolescent in an ill-fitting bathing suit could muster, I turned up my nose, dog-paddled away in a huff, and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the afternoon. He went back to Sarasota and the next time I saw him was five years later at Amy’s wedding, where I didn’t speak to him then either.
What this episode foreshadowed about my career to date as a kisser-of-boys I leave to your imagination…along with a thrown-gauntlet challenge to give as many details as you feel comfortable with about your first kiss in the comments! Someone has to have a worse (by which I mean “better”) story than mine, I’m sure. I mean, some of you probably didn’t play Tetris at all when you first made out, let alone beat the other person, right? Fess up, my friends. The winning story gets a kiss from me!