Kick Me (4 page)

I AM BETRAYED BY A GIRL

C
hildhood is built on bad decision making. In fact, if it weren’t for all the bad decisions we were constantly carrying out as kids, there’s a good chance that none of us would have figured out all the things we weren’t going to do when we became adults.

A few of the more obvious lessons I learned as a kid were:

* Don’t ride a bike with no brakes down a very steep street that dead-ends into a feculent, stagnant river.

* Don’t hold a lit firecracker in your hand to see if it’ll hurt when it explodes.

* Don’t save your urine in a flowerpot for more than a week in a hot garage if you don’t want your parents to find it.

All obvious conclusions. All painfully learned.

The good thing about those epiphanies was that they stuck with me. Once I’d done them and realized how stupid I’d been to do them in the first place, I never did them again.

Unfortunately, this was not the case with all of my bad decision making. Because there was one area where I just kept making the same mistakes over and over again:

Girls.

I know that most people have ill-fated stories concerning their interactions with the opposite sex. But they usually don’t begin to appear until their junior-high or high-school years. For me, my stupidity with girls started as soon as I walked out of my preschool.

As a kid, I was somewhere around the mean average when it came to emotional maturity and intellect. I wasn’t the dopiest kid in the class but I wasn’t the most advanced, either. The kids who you could tell were going to “go places” were already starting to show the beginnings of leadership qualities even at an early age. While it didn’t manifest itself in anything as overt as some future class president’s jumping up on his third-grade desk and leading us in a revolt against our teacher’s unfair demand that we hang up our coats or organizing a sit-in next to the teeter-totters in order to protest the shortness of our recess periods, you could just see that some kids were the types that other kids followed.

That wasn’t me.

Fortunately, I wasn’t a member of the paste-eaters either, the underachievers I would routinely observe digging their fingers deep into the inner reaches of their noses to extract something green that would immediately be snuck into their mouths as a sort of chewing tobacco for the younger set. These were the kids who routinely fell off the monkey bars and peed their pants and threw off the rhythm of the teacher’s lessons by raising their hands and uttering such pithy phrases as “What?” and “Huh?”

No, I was not one of them either. I was a youngster who clearly fell in the middle of the social bell curve. Except for the fact that I liked girls.

I’d always liked girls, ever since I was five. Maybe it was because I grew up next door to a house with eight kids, five of whom were girls. Of them, my best friend Mary and I started playing together when we were babies. And so I was quickly broken of the “euw, cooties” instinct before it ever had a chance to take effect. This set me apart from my male classmates, many of whom were still begging one another well into the sixth grade to “spray” them after they had been brushed against by a girl. (For those of you who didn’t grow up in my neighborhood, “spraying,” was the act of holding an imaginary aerosol can about six inches away from your friend’s cooties-infected area and making a
psssssht
sound while moving the imaginary can back and forth over the offending patch of skin, thus decontaminating the victim from whatever disease was believed to result from contact with a female.) No, I was a much more worldly five-year-old who had watched too many sappy romances with my mother on the
Afternoon Million-Dollar Movie
and had thus been transformed into a pint-size Lord Byron who decided that girls were to be sought out and wooed, not sprayed against and run from.

And it was because of this that, when I was six years old, I had a girlfriend.

True, it was in the most patronizing sense of the word, usually uttered by my parents at bridge games to their friends in the form of “You know, Paul has a little
girlfriend
now.” Their fellow bridge players, upon hearing these words, would look over at me as I sat there watching TV and give me one of those annoying “isn’t he cute in his ignorant six-year-old way?” smiles that I now find myself giving to little kids no matter how hard I try not to. But whether they or anybody else chose to believe it, Patty Collins
was
my girlfriend.

At least for half a day.

It was a warm, sunny morning in the summer between kindergarten and first grade, and I had walked the four blocks over to Patty’s house to play. When I arrived, the day started out like all the others we had spent together. We played a few games of Candyland and the ironically titled CootieBug and were having a nice time. It was then that our play date took an unexpected turn.

“Do you want to set up a tent?” she asked me.

“A tent?” I asked, uncertain. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “We could play inside it.”

It seemed like an innocent enough idea to me. After all, when you’re a kid you always seem to be desperate to hide inside things. Whether it’s a plastic cube at the top of the playground slide or an appliance box or a makeshift fort made by taking your mom’s wooden fold-out drying rack and covering it with a blanket, we as kids always seemed to enjoy sequestering ourselves away from the rest of the world. I think when you’re that age that it’s the only time you seem to have any control over your life. Hiding places were safe havens where we couldn’t be forced to eat brussels sprouts and could cough without covering our mouths and could make goofy faces without fear of being told our faces were going to “freeze that way.” Inside our boxes and forts and treehouses, we were kings and queens. We were our parents, and we had ultimate authority. Or at least we did until somebody yelled at us to get out of there.

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 was 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.