Snaring

It strikes me as a little bit ironic that while I grew up in the Age of Aquarius and the “love the one you’re with” period, I never saw any evidence of physical affection until one night in 1973.

At the Pizza Pub, a parlor near home, I saw something that was remarkably remarkable. In a semi-secluded booth not far from our table, a black man and a white man had their arms around each other and were kissing on the mouth!

Our party was sizable and skewed young: a sister or two and their boyfriends, a brother or two and their girlfriends, a friend or two. While no one swooned, every forehead got damp and every cheek pallid. There came elaborate dartings of eyeballs and lots of scandalous whispering.

“Look!”

“Jesus H. Christ!”

“Do you see that?”

“Stop your staring!”

“You wonder what drives some people!”

One lad in our party couldn’t decide if he was more repelled by the fact that two men were smooching or by the fact that the smooching was interracial.

Up to then, kissing was mostly a rumor, something that well-paid actors did on television because they had to. In any event, a door had been opened. I realized that some adults did sometimes choose to kiss. And it gave me a lot to think about.

An uneventful year or two passed—and by uneventful I mean to say that I saw no kissing and took part in none. But then someone in authority at school came up with the idea of a skating night. A yellow school bus would transport kids to the Coachlight skating rink out south for a couple hours of good, clean fun.

I’d been a decent enough athlete on the playground—good at kickball and such. But the prospects of trying to walk on wheels in front of my peers terrified me, and so I adopted the attitude that I was much too cool for something as sissy as skating.

Opting out may have been the biggest mistake of my life. That’s because the bus ride home was a microcosm of Woodstock, according to several reliable sources. Reportedly, a number of older kids had paired off in the back of that bus to kiss. A friend listed the names of each pair, and with each citation I got angrier at myself for having missed out on the excitement.

Thankfully, I soon got a second chance. Because the skating event had been so successful—and those days nothing at our school was successful—another event was scheduled.

I began strategy sessions with my friend M. The purpose of these sessions was not to strategize ways to land a kissing partner, I must sadly confess; instead, they were all about how best to observe the make-out sessions. Our conclusion, after much painstaking debate, was to procure a pen light.

Happily, the skating went well. I fell time and again but always laughed it off gamely and displayed a great good sense of humility because none of this mattered. The ride back to school was all that mattered. So when the lights in the rink blinked on and the final song—“That’s the Way (I Like It)"—faded out, M. and I tore off our skates and hustled for the bus.

The rear quadrant was already occupied by amorous older kids, most of them with pinwheel eyes and silly grins. We managed a seat somewhere in the middle of the bus. As the cabin darkened and the bus grinded out of the parking lot, I looked M. in the eye and gave him a solemn nod that spaketh thusly: “This could be amazing.”

When things got quiet in the rear, I brandished the pen light and leaned into the aisle. I trained the light in that direction and took a deep breath and then turned it on.

Only, I discovered it was already in the ON position. But nothing was illuminated.

“These are brand-new batteries,” I whispered as I flicked the device off and on a hundred frantic times.

“Shucks,” M. said.

We soon deduced that on one of my many falls to the rink, the pen had gotten jammed into the ON position, where it proceeded to spotlight the baseball cards in my pocket until the batteries were drained.

There may have been plenty of righteous necking in the back of that bus as it rumbled north on Interstate 435. Tongues may have slithered from one mouth into another. Hickeys may have been meted out, for all I know. I was so consumed with disappointment in my pen light that I made no effort at all to monitor the proceedings.

The next autumn I attended a different school, if only to wipe the slate clean and help me forget about the pen-light fiasco. At this new school, the concept of necking was rather passe. Among my fellow seventh-graders there were boyfriend-girlfriend relationships that dated all the way back to fifth grade. Boast-offs in the lunch room even made frequent use of the term “second base.”

My new buddies employed a term that was foreign to me: snaring. There was a lot of talk about snaring a Debbie or a Stacy or an Elizabeth, and though I should have figured out that snaring meant smooching, I pictured all sorts of possibilities, most of them involving complicated traps.

By then I had dropped out of the Beaver Cleaver Academy, where I’d long been taught that kissing a girl was creepy. By then I had rejected the teachings of Gilligan, who advised that when seduced by a starlet you flee with such celerity that you must grasp your first-mate’s cap with both hands. By then I had read most of Joseph Wambaugh. I had read The Catcher in the Rye and The Last Picture Show and even some Shirley Ann Grau. I was armed and ready to snare a gal, no questions asked.

And, man, the opportunities were unlimited!

In the eighth grade, there were so-called graduation parties every weekend. We’d gather in the finished basements of small Cape Cods and bungalows. This was 1977, and so you can imagine the typical décor: navy or olive-green shag carpeting; dark paneling on the walls; a wet-bar in the far corner; non-functional furniture, such as bean-bag chairs and ill-proportioned love seats; an aquarium that bubbled and hummed; a big stereo with furry speakers; and stacks and stacks of the dad’s LPs, invariably with Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights featured most prominently.

After a while the lights dimmed and a few couples ended up on bean-bags or the love seats, where they’d neck until their moms were honking in the driveway. Most were seasoned pros; the rookies you could always detect because they sounded like thirsty kids attacking a garden hose.

The rest of us—and by “us” I do include me—passed the evenings by slow dancing, usually to Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself.” For me, slow dancing consisted of clasping my fingers on the small of a young lady’s back, safely above ass-latitude, while she clutched my shoulders (or what passed for shoulders). In this semi-embrace, we’d sway a little as we moved incrementally in an orbital path with no pattern or destination in mind.

On an average night I might slow dance for two or three hours with five or six girls, and every single minute was spent plotting the perfect “move”—some crafty line or gesture that would get the two of us onto a bean-bag chair. All these years later, I cannot remember the details of my internal deliberations, but I’m sure they were solemn enough and wrenching enough to make Hamlet blush. I do know that I never put a single one of them into play.

Late in the year at one particular gathering I was asked to dance by a heavy-set girl who resembled Andy Taylor’s Aunt Bee. When the song ended (Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself”), she did not free her hands from my shoulders. So I continued dancing with her into the next number.

Midway through it, she said, “Do you want to kiss?”

I did want to kiss. Desperately so. But not her.

“What?” I stalled, hoping to think of a graceful rejection, for she was a nice girl.

“You want to kiss?” she repeated.

“Not really,” I said.

It got a little awkward. The song continued and continued. It had to be the longest pop song ever—perhaps an “extended play.” Or maybe it was one of those talky Arlo Guthrie pieces that go on and on, like “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Anyway, after a long darn time the song did end and we did separate and I strayed off the dance floor, all by myself.