Kick Me

by Paul Feig

  As the dance ended, I wondered if Cathy and Sandy would forget that we were all supposed to go out to dinner. It was a tradition, I had been told, to go to the dance, then to take your date out for a nice meal in a fancy restaurant. When I say “fancy,” I mean, of course, one of the several medieval-themed restaurants peppered between the fast-food chains and twenty-four-hour family restaurants that accounted for most of the eating-out experiences available to us noncoast dwellers. Within most small Midwestern communities, there is an equation that anything having to do with a king is somehow symbolic of the highest-quality meal a person can enjoy. Restaurants with names like Ye Olde King’s Table and His Majesty’s Court were the places where you took dates, celebrated birthdays, or proposed. I had made the four of us a reservation at The King’s Inn, a huge dark-wood restaurant that incongruously had a statue of a giant ten-foot-high steer out in front. Much like a lobster tank in a seafood establishment, I guess the sight of a beefy heifer standing out in front of a restaurant was supposed to be the lure that would prove too tempting for any hungry driver to pass up. But tonight, with the image of the vomiting Cathy lodged in my head, driving past The King’s Inn and heading home was my one and only wish.

  Cathy, Sandy, Walter and I walked out of the dance toward Walter’s car. Other dance attendees were loudly burning rubber with their cars, doing doughnuts and making the parking lot sound like a drag-racing strip. After Walter finished hooting and yelling “Burn it fuckin’ out, baby!” to a souped-up Dodge Dart that was wearing out its back tires by gunning the engine with the brakes on and sending a huge cloud of black smoke into the atmosphere, I yawned and tested the waters.

  “Man, I’m tired,” I said, stretching my arms above my head in the most unsubtle portrayal of a sleepy guy ever attempted.

  “Tired?” said Walter to me, as if the next thing out of his mouth was going to be an accusation of homosexuality. “I’m starving.”

  “Me too,” said Cathy. “I’ve been thinking about a steak all night.”

  “Yeah, you must be hungry,” said Sandy with a smirk. She then did an imitation of Cathy barfing. Cathy opened her mouth wide in shock, then punched Sandy on the arm.

  “God, Sandy, shut up,” she said, motioning toward me with her eyes, as if Sandy were reminding me of something I could possibly have forgotten.

  They were hungry. Cathy wanted a steak. This evening was not going to end.

  At dinner, in the dimly lit restaurant, Cathy ordered a large steak complete with onion rings and a baked potato with sour cream and chives. As if the idea of her having thrown up was not enough of a libido killer, watching her pound down this costly combination of bad breath–inducing foods was enough to send me to a monastery. As we ate, I could do little but look at her mouth, knowing that I was going to be expected to kiss that mouth good night in a very short time. Throughout dinner, Cathy and Sandy talked and laughed as Walter made “they’re crazy” looks at me. I smiled and nodded and laughed along with them as I pretended to be enjoying myself. But all I could think of was getting back to the safety of my house and my much more familiar geek life. It was only after Cathy had ordered a piece of ricotta cheesecake that I was able to herd them out of the place.

  As we left the restaurant, I made quite a show of taking some of the breath-freshening after-dinner mints out of the bowl next to the register, the same type of mints that news programs have since shown to be covered with urine from customers going to the bathroom, not washing their hands, and then using their piss-soaked fingers to grope around in the mint bowl. Fortunately, I did not know this fun fact back then and saw these mints as the only line of defense between me and Cathy’s barf-steak-onion-ring-and-cheesecake-tainted mouth.

  “Anybody want a mint?” I asked casually.

  “No thanks,” said Cathy. “I don’t eat candy.”

  No, just everything else, I thought.

  As we drove along in Walter’s car, Sandy turned to Cathy and me in the backseat and said, “Hey, you guys, let’s go park out at the beach.” Panic flashed through my brain as I realized this evening was supposed to continue and that its continuation would consist of nothing but going face to face with Cathy. It was officially Make-Out Time.

  “Oh, man, I’ve gotta get home,” I said, abandoning any attempts to try to sound remotely cool.

  “Really? It’s only 11:25,” said Cathy, looking at her watch. “I don’t have to be home until midnight.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sound disappointed, “but my dad said I have to be home by 11:30. He’s weird about stuff like that.”

  I saw Walter and Sandy exchange a look in the front seat that indicated whatever nerdy things they had been thinking about me throughout the evening were now confirmed. And at this point, I didn’t care. I just wanted out of that car.

  Walter drove me back to my house and pulled up in our driveway. My stomach was in knots the whole way home, since Cathy kept throwing looks at me that said she wanted me to kiss her. I had been able to hold her off, even as Sandy was kissing Walter as he drove. On top of everything else, their mobile necking made me feel like I was in one of those driver’s training films I had to show to upperclassmen during my A/V hour. I just knew that Walter and Sandy’s kissing was going to lead us right into the path of an oncoming train as the narrator says, “Was it really worth it?” The whole time Cathy was staring at the side of my face, trying to get me to turn toward her and dive in. Between nervously watching the road whenever I knew Walter was distracted and pretending to be fascinated with every business sign along the boulevard on which we were driving, I was a mess by the time we reached my house.

  “Well, thanks for the ride, Walter,” I said jovially, as if he were my Little League coach dropping me off after a game. I turned to Cathy and she gave me a smile that said, “Now it’s time for you to kiss me.”

  D Day had arrived.

  Up in the front seat, I saw Walter and Sandy start making out. How people could just start making out in front of other people perplexed me. When I had seen Cathy and Dan doing it for the last year and a half, it looked cool to me. I guess I hadn’t ever considered all that went into making out—the exchange of spit, the physiology of pressing your face against that of another living human being, the consequences of your partner’s food intake, the matter of germs and contagion. Not to mention that kissing and making out were supposed to be highly personal activities, performed out of love and affection for your partner and not to be used as some status symbol to lord over those less fortunate or more discreet than you. Displays of affection were supposed to be private matters, not spectator sports. And now, with Sandy and Walter making out in the front seat like two primal beings whose libidos made them unable to sense my utter discomfort with the entire situation, I started to feel mad. I looked at the front of my house and, through a space between where our curtains came together, I could see my father sitting in his chair watching television in his pajamas. This was the time of night that he and I usually watched Benny Hill reruns on the local VHF station, channel 50. I saw my father laugh and knew that Benny was probably hitting his little bald sidekick on top of the head, something that never failed to crack my father up. I turned and looked at Cathy, who had shifted herself closer to me but had leaned back against the seat so that she was braced for me to lean in and kiss her heavily. A montage of the evening ran through my brain—the beer, the vomit, the stinky dinner, and the mocking laughter between Cathy and her dancing friend—as I prepared myself for what I knew I had to do. It felt like a gateway moment to me, the door through which I would pass to leave my childhood forever. Once you’d kissed a girl—really kissed a girl—you left your innocence behind, I thought. You’d no longer be able to enjoy simply holding hands, you’d no longer feel a hot flush at getting kissed on the cheek, you’d no longer feel your heart pound uncontrollably as you danced the box step with a girl at a wedding. Only physical acts beyond openmouthed kissing would provide you any thrill. No, I was standing
on a cliff looking down into the darkness of adult pleasures, and peer pressure was forcing me to jump off. I wasn’t sure if I could do it.

  But I knew that if I didn’t, I’d always be judged for it.

  And I knew that if I blew this opportunity, I might always feel that I’d made a big mistake.

  And just like that, it was decided. I was going in, whether I really wanted to or not.

  I took a deep breath, tried to put my visions of the inside of Cathy’s mouth out of mind, and slowly leaned forward to kiss her. That is, in my mind I was slowly leaning forward. In reality, I lunged forward very rapidly. I immediately made contact with Cathy’s lower lip and the better part of her chin. I tasted what I knew had to be makeup and quickly dragged my lips upward. In doing so, I got an even bigger blast of pancake base. With my mouth now directly on top of hers, I felt her tongue start to move in toward mine. In a panic, I quickly thrust my tongue at hers and firmly pushed it back into her mouth like a Hong Kong subway worker shoving riders into a packed rush-hour train. Finding my tongue was now inside her oral cavity, I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do in there. I had heard one of my teachers use the phrase “tongue wrestling” once when he yelled at two burnouts to stop necking. And I recently overheard a jock say he was going to stick his tongue down his girlfriend’s throat. So I did some quick math and figured that I’d better move my tongue around and try to engage something. My tongue snapped upward and immediately hit her teeth. Feeling the sharpness of them pressing down on my taste buds, I pulled my tongue back so that the tip of it was now pressed against her front incisors. Not knowing what else to do, I proceeded to run my tongue sideways across her upper teeth, then down and back the opposite way across all her lower teeth, then back up and across again until I had completely licked the front of every tooth in her mouth, turning my first French kiss into a full-fledged dental-cleaning session.

  I quickly pulled away and looked at Cathy. She had a look of surprise on her face that I could only interpret one of two ways—it was either the best kiss she’d ever had or the absolute worst. Her eyes had a look of shock that was impossible to read. The only thing I knew for certain was that for me the kiss had been the most disturbing moment of my life up until that point. I fumbled out a “good night,” halfheartedly thanked Walter again for driving, and quickly made my way into the house. I entered the living room as my dad was laughing at the fast-motion antics of Benny as he was chased around by several girls in bikinis.

  “How was your date?” he asked.

  I quickly moved past him and headed down the hallway. “Fine,” I called back and ran into the bathroom. I closed the door, grabbed my toothbrush, and proceeded to brush my teeth and tongue vigorously for the next fifteen minutes.

  I went into my room and looked around at it sadly. My posters of Steve Martin looked back at me, his smiling face the same as it had been before I left for my date. I stared at Steve’s mouth and lips as I changed into my pajamas. Did Steve French-kiss? Had he made out? Did he have sex? Would a person ever be able to be funny again, to be happy again, if they did any of this? I didn’t know, but at that moment, I didn’t think any of it could be possible.

  I went out into the living room and sat on the couch. Benny Hill was just ending, and I felt a wave of sadness wash over me, realizing that I had missed what would have been a fun evening watching TV with my father for a misguided desire to make out with a girl, an activity I was now sure I was not cut out for. My dad looked at me with a concerned expression.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. From the look on his face as he studied me, I could tell he knew something had gone wrong. I looked at the TV and grew more depressed as I saw the final producer’s credit flash on the screen as Benny and the bikini girls disappeared from the frame and the picture faded to black. The evening was over. I had blown it.

  “I was gonna go to bed,” my dad said, shifting in his seat. “But I was looking through the TV Guide and it says they’re going to show some Laurel and Hardy shorts next. You mind if I stay up and watch them?”

  I looked at my dad, who gave me a fatherly smile. At that moment, the thought of watching Laurel and Hardy shorts with him was the only thing in the world I wanted to do.

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’d be cool.”

  And as we sat there watching Stan and Ollie trying to move a piano up a very long flight of stairs and laughed our heads off, I remember feeling extremely happy that I was only fifteen years old and wouldn’t have to French-kiss anyone anytime soon if I didn’t really want to.

  HAIL TO THE BUS DRIVER

  I’ve never liked to judge people, especially when it comes to their jobs. We’ve all done terrible things for a paycheck at one point or another. And our reasons for doing so usually have more to do with that annoying need to eat every day and have a roof over our heads than with any burning desire to start a lifelong career as, say, a clerk in a dry cleaning store or a busboy at a children’s pizza restaurant. We live in a capitalist society and, like it or not, we all have to pay the bills somehow. And so, to anyone who is struggling to make ends meet in a less than exciting career, my heart and admiration go out to you. But, having said that . . .

  Anyone who would voluntarily take a job as a school bus driver has to be either a masochist or just plain out of his or her mind.

  Even as a kid whose idea of the perfect job was to be a waiter at a Farrell’s ice cream restaurant (home of the Zoo and the Pig’s Trough), I would look at the shell-shocked unfortunates piloting those black-and-yellow, smoke-belching behemoths and think, Oh my God, I would never do that. No other career in the history of mankind ever invited so much disrespect and downright hatred as that of school bus driver.

  Or, at least, this was the case in my neighborhood.

  I’m not exactly sure why so many of the kids who lived around me hated our bus drivers so much. I guess the main reason was that bus drivers were the people who transported us to the one place on this planet where none of us wanted to go. If you were driving us to the amusement park, you’d be our best friend in the world. But once an adult, no matter how nice or cool or friendly he or she was, sat behind that giant black steering wheel, switched on that rickety little fan, and started grinding those gears for the express purpose of taking us somewhere to learn things, then he or she might as well have been Mussolini as far as the gang on my bus was concerned.

  My neighborhood was quite famous throughout the school district, if not the entire state of Michigan, for our bus etiquette nihilism. The Wendell Avenue route was an assignment that immediately struck terror into the hearts of experienced bus drivers. I used to imagine that they’d all sit around in their break room and trade their personal horror stories with one another like old sailors after years on the sea. Young, inexperienced newcomers would be warned of their impending peril by the older seasoned salts, with stories that always began, “It started out as a morning just like any other . . .”

  The strangest thing about all this rolling rebellion I witnessed over the years was that the guys on my bus were never the ones who misbehaved. The torturing and tormenting of our drivers was the sole work of girls—more specifically, the burnouts or “freak chicks.” In retrospect, I guess it really wasn’t that surprising. During my ninth-through-twelfth-grade tour of academic duty, I learned the hard way that high school girls who decided they didn’t want to play by the rules could be far more terrifying than even the toughest high school guys. This was because these girls had the ability to get completely out of control. They could scream and yell and hurl insults with cruel unbounded energy and nobody ever really tried to stop them. Who in their right mind would? Society isn’t set up for this kind of thing. Guys, no matter what age they are, have all been taught to be nice to girls, and, on a deeper psychological level, all men are essentially terrified of women—or at least of women who clearly don’t like them. And a woman who is looking to make trouble can very e
asily destroy a man’s psyche with an insult regarding his physical appearance or by the simple act of laughing at him. Teenage girls looking to rebel throw out the Geneva Convention–approved rules of engagement and do things that guys who are the worst of enemies would never dream of doing to one another. Any unfortunate male teacher who dared to attempt to control a group of anarchistic girls would find himself having either his nose, ears, hair, skin, stomach, ass, breath, or any combo of the aforementioned items referred to as either “big,” “gross,” “dorky,” “hairy,” “ugly,” “fat,” “stink-ass,” or “retarded” by his female adversaries. If he was strong enough to survive this first onslaught, the inevitable accusation of his having a “small dick” and being “a fag” was usually enough to finish him off. And any female teachers who tried to step into the fray were simply written off as turncoats and dismissed with a venomous “Get away from me, bitch,” which would stun the usually mousy teacher long enough to allow the marauding girls to head off down the hallway in search of an illegal place to smoke their cigarettes. No, girls who wanted to be mean pulled out all the stops, and heaven help you if they aimed their guns in your direction. And the freak girls on my bus always had their sights aimed directly at the driver’s seat.

  We always seemed to get Viking-esque women as our drivers, types that my father would refer to as “sturdy” and “no nonsense.” They were the kind of ladies who had small, compact beehive hairdos and wore electric blue Team Cobra racing windbreakers over their polyester blouses and green Kmart stretch pants, women you knew were married to garbage men, truckers, and janitors, and for some reason always wore earrings and red lipstick on the job. I was always aware that they were probably somebody’s grandmother and could never figure out why a family would ever let a loved one take part in this horrible profession. But then again, I’m sure they simply saw it as “the perfect job for Mom, now that the kids are all grown up and out of the house.” Perhaps in Mayberry, but not in Mount Clemens.