October 1990, Halifax, Nova Scotia

By Ryan Murphy

They say you never forget your first kiss. I should know. For the last 15 years I’ve been trying to do nothing but.

I locked lips for the first time in the fall of grade seven. I was 13 years old and the extent of my sexual education was limited to two sources:

When not instructing us in the intricacies of the summersault, it was Mr. Cross’s duty to teach us boys about the birds and the bees. Mr. Cross was a nice-enough man, but you have to be suspicious of any 55-year-old whose job allows him to wear sweatpants to work. He explained to us, without the slightest hint of irony, that a boy’s genital organs are like a baseball bat with two softballs, while a girl’s are like a catcher’s mitt. To this day I can’t help but get aroused every time I pass by a sporting goods store.

It was equipped with this impressive body of bodily knowledge that I went to Megan Doyle’s Halloween party that October. Before that time every party I had gone to had consisted of 15 boys and one incredibly ostracized girl. She was usually the cousin of the birthday boy and more often than not was decked out in her Girl Guide uniform. She would sit on one side of the room awkwardly chatting with the mother, while we would sit on the other side eyeing her suspiciously. At that age every girl in our midst had to be treated as a spy until proven otherwise.

With an equal number of boys and girls, Megan’s party represented a dramatic departure from my previous fetes. There were those among us boys who still craved a George Wallace-like segregation of the sexes, while other clearly savored the opportunity to mix after hours. Among them was my friend Matt Ramsey. Rumor had it that Matt had gotten to second base that summer at sleep away camp. More importantly, he was the only one amongst us with a real, verifiable girlfriend.

That’s not to say that others didn’t claim to have girlfriends: they did, but when you pressed them for details they’d usually reply, “You don’t know her, she’s from Idaho.” We heard it so often we started imagining Idaho as a state with nothing but lovelorn women waiting to be scooped up by any boy with a pulse. Needless to say, more than a few parents were perplexed that year when their sons begged to be taken to Boise for March Break.

I’ve always had an affinity for Halloween, so the opportunity to get dressed up for Megan’s party seemed too good to pass up. That week I secretly worked on a costume sure to turn heads, spending nearly every spare minute after school perfecting my design.

When my father dropped me off at Megan’s house that Friday night at 7:30, he wasn’t dropping off his youngest son, he was dropping off Evel Knievel. I was magnificent. From my homemade star-spangled suit to my gleaming motorcycle helmet to my spit-shined white boots, I was the master of disaster himself.

Striding through Megan’s yard I made my way up her porch and rang the doorbell. I waited for several seconds as a cocky little grin formed on my face.

I was going to be incredible. I was going to be the man. I was going to be … overdressed.

Megan opened the door wearing the same jeans and flannel shirt she had been wearing that day at school. As it turned out this was going to be a Halloween Party without a Halloween theme.

“What are you wearing?” she asked.

“Oh, this?” I sputtered, trying desperately to come up with a way of saving face. “I always wear this when I go out.”

Nope. That definitely wasn’t it.

“Can I put my helmet somewhere?” I asked, a shadow of my former daredevil self.

As goofy as I may have looked I was grateful at that moment that I had decided against wearing the cape. Handing Megan my helmet I descended downstairs to the basement to join the party, already in full gear.

The Debbie Gibson was blaring, the Chessies and Tang were plentiful and I was unquestionably the only one wearing a costume. The good news was things certainly couldn’t get any worse from there.

I walked through the crowd and joined my friends by the vegetables and dip. They were all there, Matt, Chris, Marty and Jeremy. Chris was the first to greet me.

“What the hell are you wearing?” he asked.

“I couldn’t find anything to put on,” I told them.

“You should have looked harder,” Matt retorted. It was the first time Matt had made a joke that didn’t involve simulating farting noises in his armpit, and the group gave him a round of high fives for the effort.

The alpha male once again firmly ensconced, we stood around and made small talk. This time around there were no girls in Girl Guide uniforms, but we eyed them suspiciously just the same.

One by one each of my friends was approached and asked to dance, and one by one they were allowed to return after trampling on their partner’s feet like an out-of-control jackhammer. So far everything was going pretty much as expected. The girls were signing along to Tiffany and us boys were discussing the batting average of Wade Boggs as though it were a matter of national importance.

That’s when things took a turn for the worse. Megan turned off the record player and raised an empty bottle of 7-Up in the air, a mischievous smile creeping across her face. It could mean one of only two things. Either we were going to play Spin the Bottle or we were going to take turns using it to beat each other viciously about the head. Frankly, I was hoping for the latter.

Megan instructed us to form in a circle and get ready to pucker up. The rules were simple: The most experienced kissers would start first and play would continue in a clockwise manner until everyone had been kissed. Mr. Cross has warned us there would be days like this.

Megan picked Matt and his girlfriend Jill to lead off. They had been going steady for nearly two months now - everyone wanted to know how they kept the romance fresh. The answer seemed to be making out. The pair swapped spit like a couple of hungry St. Bernards. All the guys were envious. Not only did Matt have a girlfriend that put out, he was also dating the only girl in all of grade seven with a B cup.

As Matt and Jill leaned in to lock lips Megan started a stopwatch. Most of us had never seen kissing so close up, so we watched, completely rapt. Some of us were amused while others, like myself, were terrified that we’d be next.

We watched as the time ticked by. First 30 seconds, then a minute, then a 1:30, then 1:45, then 2:00. I was amazed. At that point I had no idea you could breath through your nose while kissing. I had always assumed you had to hold your breath. Actually I think Mr. Cross had probably assumed that too.

Matt and Jill finally stopped at 2:45. It was an impressive performance. Matt got another round of well-earned high fives and approximately 18 gallons of girl cooties.

Next up was Monica Pritchard, the smartest girl in our class. At 6’0, Monica’s ponytails were taller than many of the boys at the party. Apart from her height Monica was best known for spending 93% of her spare time drawing pictures of unicorns and rainbows. Evidently no one had the heart to tell her that MoMA was in the market for something slightly more upscale.

Reaching down, she gave the bottle a spin. It wobbled twice before it finally landed on me. Like it or not, Monica had a date with Evel Knievel.

We looked at each other and giggled nervously as our classmates started chanting our names. I smiled at her. She smiled back uncertainly, removing a saliva-soaked purple retainer from her mouth. The chanting increased. This wasn’t going to be easy.

I steadied myself with the knowledge that Knievel had once successfully jumped the Snake River Canyon on little more than a rocket powered “Skycycle.” Given that stellar accomplishment a mere kiss was nothing to fear.

Monica leaned in halfway. Assuming the goal was to beat Matt’s record I opened my mouth as wide as I could and took in a huge intake of air. My mouth still open I enveloped Monica’s puckered little lips ready to hold on for 2:46. My mouth wasn’t just planted, it was vacuum locked. Overwhelmed by the Knievel’s technique, Monica instantly pushed me away, creating a loud popping noise like a champagne cork going off in an echo chamber. We had lasted for all of two seconds.

Despite its brevity it became our school’s most talked about kiss for the next three years of my life. My classmates, Matt especially, went over it like the Zapruder film, analyzing and over-analyzing every shameful moment. I was a legend for all the wrong reasons, just like Knievel after his disastrous attempt to clear the fountains at Caesar’s Palace.

They say you never forget your first kiss, and now I know why.

An award-winning writer and comedian, Ryan Murphy has written for HBO, A&E, The History Channel, Walt Disney Studios, Maxim, and many others. He presently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he tries his best to limit his daily intake of Starbucks and fleece.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 | Email This Post

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