Kissing again..

Kissing your hand teaches you very quickly a most important lesson: the nose problem must be dealth with. It's unavoidable. You can't go right at the person you kiss. The standard kiss is direct. Straight on. No twisting. You pucker and squinch your face. Noses collide. It's inevitable. The only difference between kissing mom or grandma and a girl, is angling the nose. When you start thinking about nose placement, you know it's serious. Eventually, you figure out how to get your lips and a girl's lip together.

In fact, the whole sexual mess is about angles. I wonder if it's the same for women. It must be. The only apparent difference was that they often practiced kissing with and on each other. (Well, that's what J told me when we sat together in the schoolbus. I got her to show me after 35 days of begging.) But actually when she kissed her girlfriend K on the mouth.. I started to think that well, men liking women kissing women is so stupid. I don't think any woman fantasizes about two guys kissing. But once again we're two different species.

The loner

Guys never get girls when they need them. If they did, they wouldn't get into trouble. Trouble for most young men springs from unfulfilled desires. When we were 13, we were already on the roll. Testosterone is powering our body. We are all dress up but there's no party. We have no job, we have nothing to do, peer pressure is mounting and we are still too young for the girls our age.

So we get into trouble. there are new limits to explore, but it's dfferent from when you were smaller. Now we have real hostility, confusion and insecurity. And mom can't fix it anymore. Our group of guys even starts falling apart. One friend is drinking too much and lost his senses.. The guy across the street got electrocuted when he pees at the live wire. This is when you start becoming a loner, and have problems respecting authority.

To deal with the stress, we developed split personalities: half model citizen, half hooligan..

When I was with my friend's parents, I was the model kid they wished their kid would be. I made their brood look pitiful.

I'd go on trips with these kids and later their parent would call my parents "Your son is just a delight. He makes his bed and cleans up after himself. He is always welcome.."

But when my friends' folk were away, I became the other half, the evil instigator, forcing these kids to do my evil biddings.

"Okay, Johnson, they'll be back about ten o'clock. Now go get me some brown liquor and see if you find two loose women. Whatever those are."