Kick Me

by Paul Feig

  It was also something I became more and more obsessed with as I watched Cathy and Dan engage in their public displays of affection.

  Cathy was a very tall girl. She was Italian and had shortish black hair that had been styled into one of those ubiquitous Dorothy Hamill cuts, with a subtle touch of curling-iron work around the bangs. She had a pretty face and a large mouth with full lips and big teeth. She wasn’t skinny but seemed shapely in a six-foot-tallgirl kind of way. She had a very natural beauty about her and never really wore makeup, outside of lip gloss. Back in high school, I thought lip gloss was the sexiest thing a girl could wear. I couldn’t envision a day in the future when girls would no longer put it on. Pretty girls, at least. On the wrong girl, lip gloss just didn’t seem to work. If a girl was weird-looking or had thin lips, the gloss simply gave the illusion that she hadn’t wiped her mouth in a while. Girls like this would end up looking more like my friend George, who was a nice guy but who always had shiny wet lips and perpetual strings of white spit at the corners of his mouth that would stretch and hang on for dear life whenever he talked. The faux moisture that lip gloss provided had to be used with care, since its usage walked a constant razor’s edge between good and evil. Lip gloss was a privilege, not a right. But on Cathy, it just made her beauty complete.

  Cathy had a pretty smile and was always friendly. In many ways, she didn’t really jibe with my concept of the kind of girl who would make out in public. That distinction was usually saved for the burnouts who populated the back of our school bus: tough girls in tight jeans and halter tops, the kind who fastened roach clips into their hair that had leather strings with a bead and pink feather hanging at the end. These were the girls who would wear long leather coats and black gangster hats, short rabbit-fur jackets and tube tops, girls who could be heard throughout the day yelling to each other, “Hey, Sandi, toss me a ciggy butt” and “Fuck you, Sheila, you slut!” They would occasionally show up in school pregnant and still look like they could and would kick your ass if you gave them a sidelong glance. To me, these were the kind of girls who made out in public. Girls like Cathy laughed at your jokes and actually cheered at pep rallies. You could introduce them to your mother and borrow chemistry notes from them. Simply put, Cathy was an enigma. And her enigmatic qualities were causing her to have a starring role in my sweaty little pubescent dreams more and more frequently.

  My growing obsession with Cathy made me feel guilty. I’d known Dan since middle school and he was an extremely nice guy. Like Cathy, he also wasn’t the type of person I envisioned spending his days indulging his libido in front of his peers. That was the job of the freak guys who hung out in the auto shop or on the smoking patio. They were the guys with dirty hair and wispy mustaches, who smelled like cigarettes and pot and gasoline and who would occasionally throw one of the burnout girls over their shoulders and run around the school slapping her butt as she screamed and laughed until the principal yelled at them to knock it off. Dan was on the football team and was a very handsome, clean-cut guy with perfect hair, big teeth, and a perpetual tan—a Michigan ski bum, the type who always wore a form-fitting, brightly colored ski jacket with a bouquet of lift tickets sprouting from the zipper tab. Dan was one of the most polite guys I knew, almost as polite as Chris Nubellski, and I never once saw him look sad in the entire four years we were in high school together. But I guess I’d be constantly happy, too, if I looked like he did and was making out with Cathy all the time.

  Cathy and Dan seemed to have everything in common. There was a picture of them in my freshman yearbook from a class ski trip. They’re standing hand in hand at the base of the ski lift, smiling broadly and looking as natural in the wintry sport setting as my friends and I looked at a Star Trek convention. I avoided that ski trip like the plague, having been taken skiing once by my church youth group—a trip that saw me screaming down the side of a mountain after an attempt at “snowplowing” failed. My downhill odyssey ended only after I smashed into a ski rack and sent twenty pairs of skis coasting down the beginners’ slope behind the lodge. Any fantasies about having Cathy as my girlfriend were always derailed by the thought of taking her skiing: her schussing gracefully down the diamond run as I did my best Ray Bolger impression on the bunny hill before colliding face first with a tree. No, deep down I knew we didn’t have a lot in common and, in true high-school fashion, that only made me desire her attentions more.

  Sometime around November of my sophomore year, after a grade and a half of watching the two of them in perpetual liplock, I realized that I was seeing Cathy and Dan together less and less. They were still friendly with each other, but I didn’t notice a lot of making out going on. And finally, on the first Tuesday of December, my friend Tom brought me the news I had waited so long to hear.

  “Hey, guess what? Dan and Cathy broke up.”

  “Really?” I said, completely thrown. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they got bored.”

  “Are they mad at each other?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. I heard they’re still friends.”

  My mind raced. The Christmas Dance was coming up in a few weeks and I really wanted to go. I had never taken a girl to a dance. Not for lack of trying, though. In junior high, I took my next-door neighbor Mary to a school dance, but when we got there, they wouldn’t let us in because Mary wasn’t a student at my school. She was attending the Catholic school at the end of our street and, for some reason, it seemed my junior high had a policy against letting religious outsiders dance in our cafeteria. I was outraged as only a twelve-year-old can be and immediately saw us as two star-crossed, martyred lovers, caught in a world that neither understood our love nor would allow it. In reality, I guess I was more upset at the thought that I had been cheated out of my first official excuse to slow-dance with a girl. Not to mention the fact that my mother had bought me a spicy new blue-and-white-checked leisure suit and red turtleneck sweater that I was sure would make me a hit with all the other girls at the dance and drive Mary into a jealous rage. But I had been denied all of those pleasures, and now, with the Christmas Dance looming and Cathy a free agent, I saw my chance to set the record straight.

  I spent the next few days doing reconnaissance. Step one was to start talking to Cathy. This wasn’t a big leap for me because she was in several of my classes and we had a passing acquaintance with one another. She thought it was funny when I would do Steve Martin routines, which I would always pass off as my own. It was the year before Steve Martin broke big and nobody in my school had ever heard of him. I was able to get away with my plagiarism all the way until my junior year, when Steve Martin’s song “King Tut” became a hit. After that, my former admirers turned against me and every time I would make a joke, they would ask, “Is that joke yours or did you steal it from Steve Martin, too?” I was scared straight from intellectual property theft after that but, at the time I was trying to get in with Cathy, I was still living comfortably off of Mr. Martin’s repertoire.

  “I’m so mad at my mother,” I performed for Cathy, making sure to keep my tone just searching enough to seem like I was improvising the routine on the spot. “I mean, she calls me up the other day and says she needs to borrow fifty dollars so she can buy some food.” I put the proper disdainful emphasis on the word food in order to exactly replicate Mr. Martin’s delivery. The fact that the joke was only funny because Steve Martin was rich and yet I was only a sophomore with a couple of dollars in my pocket didn’t seem to ruin the routine for Cathy. She laughed at my unoriginal antics as I went in for the kill. “So, I decided I’m gonna make her work it off by moving my barbells up to the attic.”

  Cathy laughed again, covering her mouth. “Oh, Paul, you’re so funny. Did you just make that up?”

  I shrugged in a sly, yet vague, way that seemed to indicate “Hey, this stuff comes out of my head constantly,” covering my tracks in case I was put on trial for theft by Steve Martin’s estate. “Miss, did you actually hear Mr. Feig say that he had wr
itten the material in question himself?” “Well . . . um . . . not directly but—” “No further questions, your honor!”

  “You’re really clever,” Cathy said in a warm tone.

  I made a “thanks, I like you, too” face at her, then waited a few seconds. “Hey, I’m sorry that you and Dan broke up,” I said, making the universal sad face of the empathetic supportive confidant.

  “Oh, that’s okay. We’re still really good friends.”

  “Huh” was all I could reply. Things were looking promising.

  Later that day, as I was heading out of my geometry class, I spotted Dan in the hallway. I quickened my step to catch up, then slowed down and feigned surprise as I came up next to him. “Oh, hey, Dan. I didn’t see you there. How’s it going?”

  We exchanged a few pleasantries, and I shrewdly asked him what his skiing plans were for this winter, just to throw him off my scent. Then I came in for the kill.

  “That’s too bad that you and Cathy broke up.”

  “No, not really. We’ve been together for a while. We’re just really good friends.” I couldn’t fathom how someone you’d spent over a year French-kissing could suddenly be just a “really good friend.” But, then again, I was a newcomer in the arte de l’amore.

  “Cathy’s really great, isn’t she?” I said, trying very hard to keep an objective tone.

  “Yeah, she’s the best. She really likes you, too. She’s always talking about how funny you are,” said Dan. He definitely threw me with that one. And, because I was fifteen years old, just hearing that Cathy liked me made me start to get a boner. I shifted my books to the front and continued.

  “Really? She does?” My nonchalant tone had been put to the test with that one. My voice came off sounding as if I were trying to talk in a car that was driving down a very bumpy road.

  “Yeah,” said Dan with a friendly smile. “You should ask her on a date. I think she’d go out with you.”

  Boner ahoy! I pressed down on my books and tried to walk normally. This was unbelievable. Dan was pimping his ex-girlfriend out to me. It was all going so well that it made me wonder if I was being set up. I’d always remembered an episode of My Three Sons where Ernie started going out with his best pal’s girlfriend. Uncle Charley got all scary when he found out and said, in a tone that sounded like he was going to punch Ernie, “A real man doesn’t take another man’s girl.” Did Dan know that I was angling for Cathy? Was he laying a trap that would end with him and his football buddies going Uncle Charley on my ass? I had no way of knowing, but my fifteen-year-old libido was in too high of a gear for me to care.

  In the cafeteria, I went over to Cathy, who was emptying the beef fritters from her hot lunch tray into the garbage can.

  “Hey, Cathy, um . . . I was wondering . . . uh . . .” The reality of what I was about to do hit me at that very moment, but I had clearly reached the point of no return.

  “What?” she said with a sweet look on her face.

  “Um . . . do you want to go to the Christmas Dance with me?” Right around the word want I started to feel faint. I know the rest of the words came out of my mouth, but, just like when you’ve been driving and suddenly realize that you have no recollection of actually piloting the car, I couldn’t remember finishing the sentence. It was only Cathy’s face and response that made me realize I had actually gotten the full request out.

  “Sure, Paul,” she said with a smile. “I’d love to go.”

  I had done it! My weaselly little plan had worked. I had set a goal and seen it through. I had longed to be the guy making out with Cathy for a year and a half, and now I was well on the road to making it happen at the Christmas Dance. I was beyond happy. And I had a raging boner that was fortunately camouflaged by the garbage can.

  I had entered a whole new world.

  I spent the next few weeks getting nervous about the date. Cathy and I didn’t talk any more than we normally did, but there was now a connection between us. She would always give me a smile and a big “Hi, Paul” when we would see each other in the hallway. On top of that, word started getting around. The same gossip machine that had disseminated the news of Cathy and Dan’s breakup was now busily spreading the word of our unlikely Yuletide rendezvous.

  “Man, you’re going to the dance with Cathy?” was a phrase I heard out of several of my friends’ mouths. I would always respond with a Hugh Hefner–esque “Hey, she wanted to go with me.”

  Even Dan came by to give me his blessing. “That’s great that you’re taking Cathy to the Christmas Dance. She’s really happy about it.”

  It was a relief that he was taking this so well, but it also made me feel like a dork. The subtext of his words seemed to be “I’m glad Cathy’s going with a guy who’s such a nerd that I know nothing other than dancing will happen between them.” I resented the imagined implication. As far as I was concerned, Cathy and I were going to spend a very romantic evening of slow-dancing, groping, and making out. An epic romance was about to blossom, and I knew I was mere days away from my new life as a guy who was very comfortable engaging in public displays of affection with a tall, pretty high-school girl.

  The evening of the dance, my mother dropped me off at Cathy’s house. The plan was for Cathy and me to drive to the dance with her friend Sandy and Sandy’s boyfriend, Walter. Walter was seventeen and had a driver’s license. I was a bit nervous about double-dating with a guy who was two years older than me. Since I was such an inexperienced dater, I didn’t want my embarrassment to be compounded by some guy who “knew the ropes” watching me and judging my every move. But, realizing that being driven to the dance by a seventeen-year-old was far less painful than being driven by my fifty-five-year-old mother, I gave in.

  “Have a great time at the dance,” my mom said as I stepped out of the car, replete with a wide-lapeled velour jacket with my large shirt collar worn on the outside. I looked down, admiring my tight-fitting Angel’s Flight slacks and black platform shoes. I look just like the guys on Soul Train, I thought to myself. My hand came up to check that my puka shell necklace, bought not in Hawaii but at Silverman’s disco clothing store down at the local mall, was properly in place. I was ready for action.

  “You look so cute,” my mom called out from the car.

  “Mom,” I said in a whiny tone, turning the monosyllabic word into two syllables. Her use of the word cute had been a bone of contention between the two of us for the last few years, and she knew what I really wanted her to say.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. You look ’cool,’” she said in a mocking tone that foretold the fact that she would call me “cute” and not “cool” yet another day.

  And with that, she took off down the road as we had agreed, so that neither Cathy nor her family would see that I had been driven over by my mother. I walked up to the front door of her house and rang the bell. My heart was beating quite fast. I had been imagining what this evening would be like, but now that I was staring down its cocked and loaded barrel, my nerves were really kicking in. However, everything was about to start happening more quickly than I was prepared for.

  Her father answered the door. He was a normal-looking man with a mustache, a dad like most dads in the Midwest, the kind of guy you could easily imagine being in a bowling league and enjoying the wide-eyed exploits of Dondi on the funnies page.

  “Well, you must be Paul,” he said in a casual tone that showed he had greeted Cathy’s dates several times before.

  “Yes, sir. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “C’mon in. Cathy’s almost ready.”

  I entered their house. Cathy’s mom was at the top of the stairs, gazing down with a look that said she was trying to control her giddiness about something.

  “Cathy’s almost ready,” she said, not knowing that her husband had just uttered the exact same three words to me seconds earlier. Cathy’s father gestured for me to sit on the couch. I complied.

  “So,” he said, sitting down heavily in his armchair, “I see they don’t make
you wear ties to the Christmas Dance, huh?”

  The thought of wearing a tie to a dance in 1977 was as foreign as wearing pegged pants. “Oh, they only make you wear a tie to the prom, I think.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty nice. What I wouldn’t give to not have to wear a tie to work. You know, you’re lucky you don’t go to a Catholic school. They make you wear ties with those uniforms.” He shook his head, his eyes getting the look of a man whose mind was going back to unpleasant times. “They made me wear a tie to school for years. Man, did I hate that.”

  It’s always weird talking to someone else’s parents because you realize how different your life could have been if you had come out of a different womb. I’m sure Cathy and her family had heard her dad get spooky over his lifelong battle with neckwear many times, but for me, a guy whose only goal was to French-kiss his daughter, the man was starting to creep me out. But I forced myself to look at him sympathetically, just in case Cathy and I fell madly in love and he was destined to become my father-in-law.

  “Huh, that’s too bad,” I said, trying to sound empathetic. “That must have gotten hot in the summer.”

  “Oh, Christ. Don’t get me started on summer school.”

  Fortunately for me, Cathy’s mom came down the stairs and saved me from having to journey any further into her husband’s dysfunctional past. “She’s read-y,” her mom said in a singsongy voice that announced she had probably spent most of the afternoon helping Cathy prepare herself for this big evening.