My family lived in the Parkside District of San Francisco all through my grammar school days, but we moved to Ingleside Terraces about the time I started Junior High.
I'd always stammered very badly and had a lot of difficulty communicating verbally. I sang OK, but the stammer made me self-conscious and shy and, after being skipped a grade just as I was entering Junior High, I was pretty retarded socially. Everyone in my class was a year older, and when you're twelve or thirteen, a year makes a big difference.
Nevertheless, shy or not, I had terrific crush on Jeanette Wilson who lived just across the street from me. She was a year or two younger, and she had the cutest sprinkling of freckles across her nose. I would have walked on hot coals if at the end of the walk I could just hold her hand for five minutes. But being shy, I suffered in silence.
Imagine my surprise when I was invited to her birthday party. I was now in the ninth grade, she was in the eighth, and suddenly everything seemed to be coming up roses for me: Jeanette of the nose freckles actually wanted me to come to her party. Vision of ........ I don't know what ..... danced in my head. Alas, as I was later to learn, I was being invited as the favored guest not of the delectable Jeanette herself, but because Jeanette's cousin, Alma Lou Jenkins, had a crush on me.
Anyway, ignorance is bliss and so I arrived at the party in a pretty blissful state for one reason and another. As I said, I was pretty naive and a little backward socially. I don't know what I expected to find at the party: pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and that sort of thing, I suppose. But pinning the tail on any animal, donkey or otherwise, was the farthest thing from any other party-goers mind. I was a little surpised when, about ten minutes after I arrived, all the lights in the living room were turned out and a heavy game of spin-the-bottle began.
I suppose there are a lot of younger people who don't know anything about spin-the-bottle. It involved everyone sitting around in a circle and the person who was 'it' actually spinning a bottle, usually a milk bottle (once upon a time milk actually came in glass bottles, strange as that may seem). When the bottle stopped spinning it would be pointing at someone in the circle and that someone, if he or she was the opposite sex from the bottle spinner, had to kiss the person who had done the spinning.
Alma Lou must have been practicing bottle spinning in secret because she spun me on her first try. I was bound by the unwritten code of "teenagehood" to kiss her, but I was too shy to kiss her in front of everyone. I wasn't even completely sure how to do it: I'd never kissed a girl before, except cousins and other relatives, and I only kissed them because my mother threatened physical harm if I didn't. Cousin-kissing involved puckering as much as possible, putting at least a minimal distance between you and the kissee, and making minimal contact, usually with a cheek. Now, facing my first boy-girl kiss, I insisted that we do it in the dining room where no one else could see. To the derisive jeers of all the other party goers, Alma Lou and I traipsed into the dining room and situated ourselves behind the aforementioned door.
I 'puckered up' in a "kiss-your-cousin" pose, and aimed for Alma Lou's cheek. She had other ideas. She grabbed my head with both hands - which startled me more than a bit and put me off my guard - and gave me a kiss that she never learned practicing on a cousin. During the course of the kiss she stuck her tongue in my mouth and, as I remember it all these years later, about halfway down my throat.
The effect was wildly startling and yet somehow strangely pleasant. The overall effect was that basically I entered puberty instantaneously, in a split second, on the strength of Alma Lou's kiss. My voice changed, I could feel my beard starting to grow, and hot and cold chills ran up and down my back. It was not to be the only kiss I shared with Alma Lou that night, but none of the subsequent encounters had quite the same magical effect as that first one. I even, during the course of that game and a subsequent game of 'post office' (don't ask, it's too complicated to explain. Look it up on Wikipedia or someplace like that) kissed several other girls. I was really starting to get into the spirit of things. Most of them were eager and enthusiastic, if somewhat less advanced in the kissing department than Alma Lou. I'll even admit that I tried to spin other encounters with Alma Lou but the milk bottle was recalcitrant and I was not 100% successful. Even when I did buss Alma Lou again, the effect was less magical than that first encounter. I guess, when you stop to think of it, there's really only one 'first kiss'.
I was feeling less shy with every passing moment. I was even a little disappointed when Mr. and Mrs. Wilson turned on the lights in order to serve cake and ice cream. They managed not to cringe at the lipstick smears and other signs of bacchanal on various faces and the collars of white shirts. I guess, in their time, they'd had their own 'Alma Lous'.
Strangely, I never had a date with Alma Lou. I guess I was tested and came up short. Alma Lou was probably looking for someone who didn't have to stand behind the dining room door to kiss her. I don't know what happened to Alma Lou. I hope she had a wonderful life, full of passion and bottle spinning. I owe her, I reckon, a huge debt of gratitude. She got me started, so to speak. I suppose in time there might have been another young lady who was willing to test the - ahem - social waters with me, but Alma Lou was the one who did, and I'm still grateful. It's a well-worn precept that one should honor one's teacher, and she certainly taught me a few really important things.
Goodnight, Almo Lou, wherever you are. I thank you..... and I imagine my wife thanks you too.
