The First Time I Kissed A Girl

Okay, so I took this memoir class recently with Carol Lightwood at Burbank Library. And I thought I felt young at a Steely Dan concert. This class skewed way older than the Steely Dan demographic. There were lots of folks in their 70s and 80s. Lightwood assured us that we can be the celebrities of our family by writing our memoirs. True, most people aren't going to bother to publish a book of their life stories and yes, people who are thinking about it tend to be those who are, statistically, much closer to death than I am. Some people read their essays aloud, as I did the one that I'm about to share, but I think that other people's may fit better into a family album than mine. Or as I put it to Lightwood when I finished: "I don't know if I'll put this in the family book." And it's even weirder to write something such as this now that I've connected with so many high school and childhood friends on Facebook. When the Internet made me seem very anonymous a mere few years ago, I was much more willing to share my thoughts with the world, thinking that not many people, if any, I grew up with would be reading them. Now that the Internet has come to Possum Trot, however, which is right down the road from where I grew up, there's no telling who might read my stuff one day. Still, I do need to write this stuff, for some reason that I've yet to figure out. So, here goes:

The First Time I Kissed A Girl

We were sitting at Angel's house, during a Friday night party, in her funky bedroom. I knew her because her boyfriend worked at the radio station where I worked. Her boyfriend and my boyfriend were in another part of the house, probably talking about Metallica and smoking some weed.

"Have you ever wanted to kiss a girl?" she asked and I told her that I had. A few days later, she asked if I wanted to go to a movie. We went to see "The Serpent and the Rainbow," at her suggestion. She wore a skirt, nothing dramatic--a simple denim--white socks that looked like the anklets I hated to wear as a child, and white sneakers. The movie was playing in Cary, a suburb of Raleigh that I was not very familiar with at the time. She was very prim and proper and clean and there was not much about her that looked in any way out of the ordinary. She looked, in fact, very ordinary, in a beautiful way. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail; her make-up was immaculately placed on her face, a light and natural look that complimented her sweet smile. The old-fashionedness of her look, her almost girl-like quality in a woman's body was attractive to me in a way that frightened me. A few years earlier, I would have been going to church in the small rural area where I grew up and then coming home, spending the afternoon with a girlfriend or going to the Kmart with my boyfriend. Seeing the mysterious "Serpent and the Rainbow," a movie that involved mysticism and voodoo, on the Lord's Day seemed subversive to me. For my boyfriend, it was some time spent alone. He always found a way to keep himself busy when I wasn't around.

The movie was as dark, deep, and mysterious as Angel herself, although she was pale and blonde in coloring. Afterward, she talked about the use of color in the film, comparing it to "Fatal Attraction." I'd never thought about the things she said and I found it very interesting to listen to her. "Oh, Trish," she would say sometimes to me when I did something she thought was funny and she would give me a somewhat devilish smile.

After we finished watching the film, we drove back to my apartment in Raleigh. I was living with two other girls at the time. We were all had either just graduated from college or were soon to graduate. We each paid the rent according to the size of our bedroom. Sharing an apartment made living in Raleigh more affordable for me, as I was working at an entry-level job in television and doing some voice-over work at the time. My bedroom was the middle size and I paid a little over $200 for what was then deemed a luxury apartment. The view from my bedroom window was especially colorful in the fall, with the various oranges, yellows, and reds of the autumn leaves. But on this cloudy, almost rainy February day in North Carolina, the view was of bare trees, trees that had yet to show the green sprouts of spring. Into my middle-size bedroom, we brought a bottle of wine and I went to our kitchen to borrow two of my roommate's wine glasses.

As usual with roommates who live together for economic reasons rather than mere friendship or romance, we came and went easily in the apartment, with a politeness toward each other and sometimes, moments of friendship. I do not know what my two roommates were doing when Angel and I closed the door to my bedroom and started drinking wine. Nor did I much care what they were doing or how much of the conversation they could hear; wine made me not much care about anything but drinking wine with Angel that afternoon.

At some point, Angel began kissing me, very innocently and gently and wonderfully, in a way that I'd never been kissed before. I kissed her back. She took off her shirt and we drank more wine; we drank until we finished the bottle. My feelings were unfamiliar, as if I were in a foreign country; I longed for more familiar feelings and yet, I was ecstatic in a way I'd never been before.

Although sex with my boyfriend was certainly enjoyable, sex with Angel, or whatever I would call it--I was unsure of its name at the time--was so wonderfully delightful, so romantic and vivid and new, that it scared me. I was so frightened about what I had done, so unable to handle my drunken feelings, that I did the only thing I could think of when all the wine was drunk: I called my boyfriend and said, "I just had sex with Angel." Those were probably the words I most regret saying to my boyfriend.