My Second Kiss

Everybody remembers their first kiss. Some people write about it. I’ll write about everything eventually. Nobody asked me to. It’s just something I do.

Her name was Lynn Flannigan. I can tell you her name because she’s one of the boldest women I've ever known. I’ve also told this story for forty-five years, and most people have heard it. A good twenty percent of the people I know were there when it happened. In Mississippi, you tend to keep most of the same friends who were around when you learned to walk until you forget not only their name, but your own.

With a name like Flannigan, you’d think Lynn was Irish, and I’m sure she was, most people in Mississippi are Scottish or Irish, or African, and quite a few are a combination of all three. Her almond-shaped eyes and ruddy tan skin suggested to me that there might be more than one kind of pepper in her gumbo.

There’s a type of bone structure I associate with the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. I think of bone structure because that’s how Lucy Millsaps taught me to draw. First with skulls, then skeletons, then fully fleshed, but oddly behaved nude models. She avoided hiring models who were also students at Millsaps College. That would have been a scandal.

There was one nude model she hired that kept giving me her phone number, even going so far as to write it on the drawings I made of her. She had one breast that was two sizes larger than the other, and a tattoo that suggested witchcraft. Other than that, she was physically lovely, but I had to consider whether she was batshit insane and might kill me, so I never called. Besides, I was secretly attached to one of the Chi Omega officers. It had to be a secret because I was also the Owl Man, and I prefer these things to be secret anyway, even now.

In Mississippi, the possibility that you had a relative who wasn’t altogether white could be quite a scandal. I had a great uncle who shot a man and crippled him, that was far less scandalous than the possibility that his grandfather’s father was a slave or an indian. They’re not actually Indian. Mississippi is full of actual Indians from India, but the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians are the descendants of northeast asians that came to the United States long, long before anybody from the northwestern part of Europe had boats with sails. I prefer to call them “Native” or “Indigenous” because that’s more accurate, but their actual legal name is “Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians,” which I suppose we should change one day, but haven’t yet.

I’ve done my family tree back to Noah and done 23-and-me. I’m almost entirely Scottish. The exotic bits are from Ireland. Having read my family tree, seeing photos of Argyll and visiting there, I’m not at all sure why they left for flat and troublesome Mississippi. I suppose prospects in Scotland were so poor that Mississippi seemed better. That’s saying something.

My uncle Levi was a young physician in Mississippi when it desperately needed physicians. We had a five-room infirmary that grew into Mississippi Baptist Hospital, and that’s it. It would be another fifteen years before my other uncle and Mr. Kennington took a train north to ask some nuns if they’d come to Jackson.

Levi liked to drink at a time when it was openly illegal to do so. Being openly illegal meant you had to go to Rankin County to do so, which he did. At a speakeasy on the Infamous Gold Coast, Levi got in a fight with a fella who tried to use a slapjack on him, so Levi responded by shooting him in the hip, where the bullet lodged near his sacroiliac. Ironically, Levi was one of the few people in Central Mississippi who could have removed the bullet, but since he was in jail, it stayed in the fella the rest of his life, giving him a pronounced limp.

Taking a pistol to a slapjack fight was a crime in Mississippi, unless you shot a black man, in which case nobody would have cared. Levi was sentenced to prison, where he would have stayed, but the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs offered to spring him if he would agree to travel to New Mexico and be the physician for the Indians who weren’t from India there. He agreed, and a branch of my family moved from the South to the West.

Everybody in my family was pretty willing to tell me this story, but had he actually been Native American instead of the physician to Native Americans, nobody would have ever dared mention it.

I thought a few times about getting a tape recorder and recording his stories so I could write them down, but admitting to my family that I wrote was a problem. While I wasn’t technically a special education student, I took special education classes, and besides the exotic world of business in Central Mississippi was waiting for me.

I did once ask my other uncle, Levi’s brother-in-law, Tom, who was the editor and part-owner of the Clarion Ledger daily newspaper, if I might write film reviews for him. He asked for a writing sample, so I typed up a review of the movie “A Piece of the Action” with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier. He said he’d get back to me. I waited about twenty years until he died, but he never got back to me.

My first kiss was not at all my idea. We’d been having boy/girl parties for over a year at this point. Lynn was from another school. I first noticed her hair, and then other things.

She said something about my arms, and then something else. At this point, I’d been moving iron plates from one spot to another spot for a couple of years, and I suppose my arms were large enough to be noticed. She asked if she could arm-wrestle me. I agreed. After proving she couldn’t move me a centimeter, I let her win three times. It was the gentlemanly thing to do. I suppose the kiss was in gratitude for that.

It happened against the hood of a station wagon, in full view of everyone. I wasn’t nearly bold enough to do that, but she was. Having seen this in the movies, I knew to put my arms around her waist, and she put her arms around my neck. It lasted around fifteen years, I think, but I’m sure from the outside it was just a few seconds. I could feel the tips of her hair brush aginst my forarms and biceps. Even now I can feel it.

The prospect of actually having a girlfriend was a bit terrifying. I managed to find her phone number. She lived in another county. In a few months, I’d get my learner’s permit to drive. This could work out. Had I asked my father for advice, he would have continued to make fun of me for twenty years. He would have found a way to mention it the day he died, and then Robert Wingate would have said something about it at the funeral.

Two of my friends liked her too. I found out she had kissed them as well. Bold women do as they damn well please. Fighting my friends over a girl wasn’t part of the plan. I knew a man from the gym who was a motorcycle cop in Jackson. He would later be my source for sports drugs, which weren’t illegal at the time. He gave me some advice on how to be brave when talking to girls and even role-played what it might be like if I called her. I ignored all that and decided not to call her. Women were just too dangerous.

It turns out, I might have been right. Several of my friends tried to tame her through the years and broke their prow on her craggy shore. Most men aren’t actually equipped for a bold woman. In the end, there was just the one kiss, but that was enough. I’d had a taste of battle and wanted more.

In those days, if you took driver’s education classes, you could drive without a licensed driver using just your learner’s permit. Everybody from all the schools in North East Jackson met at a place called Mr. Gattis Pizza, which had a giant projection television and pretty decent pizza. That’s also where we met during the great flood of 1979 and saw Mayor Dale Danks announce that they would have to open the spillway to the unfortunately named Ross Barnett Reservoir, or the levee would break and all of Jackson would be under water.

They built the reservoir to provide drinking water for Jackson, provide flood control, and provide sport fishing and boating. In the end, all it was really ever used for was sport fishing and boating. That’s not a criticism. A place to fish is pretty important.

Girls at my school were pretty much untouchable. Getting dumped is pretty bad. Getting dumped by a girl in a class of only fifty kids meant you had to relive the shame most of the school day. I wasn’t having any of that.

There was a girl at another school, though.

Even though Jackson itself was, even then, mostly black, Northeast Jackson was one of the whitest white places you could imagine. Our genetic structure ranged from Wales to Scotland, or so it seemed, but it wasn’t actually true. Jackson always had really good luck with Mediterranean people. Jews, Italians, Lebanese, and especially Greeks filled many important slots in the mercantile, restaurateur, and financial life of Mississippi’s Capitol City.

I like a very specific type of woman. I attribute it to watching so much Lost in Space as a child, where Angela Cartwright imprinted on me. I was too young to understand how reruns worked, and didn’t know Angela was actually a little more than ten years older than I until later in life. She was amazing, though, almost as interesting as the Robot. Almost. Later in life, I got to meet both Angela Cartwright and Bob May, who played the robot. They were lovely. I never told her that I judged all women against her.

There was a girl whose daddy was on the First National Bank board with my daddy. His father was from a war-torn part of the Mediterranean states. That it was war-torn was probably our fault. That it’s still war-torn is absolutely our fault. Most Americans don’t accept an ounce of responsibility for what happens in the Middle East, but they should. The current group supports Israel because they want to be on the right side when Jesus comes back. I have news for them.

Dark eyes are important. Hers were holes leading directly to outer space. I used to imagine looking in her eyes and seeing not just myself, but the whole world behind me. In reality, I never dared get close enough.

Even though we were all at the same Pizza Place, we went to different Junior High Schools, and tended to clump up according to that. In the parking lot, near my mom’s Ford, my little group stood chatting near her little group, but we never interacted.

When her ride home came, she did the most remarkable thing. We hadn’t spoken at all, but she put her arms around my neck and kissed me resolutely but gently on the lips. I didn’t have time to close my eyes, so I could see directly into her dreamy ebon eyes, but they were closed. “Bye,” she said. And drove off in her mom’s car with her mom driving.

I was dumbfounded and paralyzed. My friends were making catcalls and giving me some pretty advanced advice on my next move in this romantic adventure. Some of it was things I still haven’t done with anyone.

I was keenly aware of who her father was, where he worked, and where they lived. Right there in the phone book was his home phone number, and the “children’s line.” We had a children’s line too, but it was mainly for my grandmother so she could call her sister Edith every afternoon after General Hospital was on the air to discuss how terrible those people are.

It took a few years for me to realize that Nanny wasn’t talking about neighbors or family members getting abortions and having affairs, but people on television. General Hospital got considerably weirder as I got older. They even had aliens, demonic possession, and vampires. Every soap opera should have vampires.

Talking with the other kids, I knew that most romance in Jr. High were prosecuted over the telephone. We had a children’s line and my lady-fair had a children’s line, She clearly had made the first move, so now the ball was in my court.

my court.

Oh, shit, the ball was in my court.

I looked up the country her grandfather was from in the encyclopedia. I learned she was in the school choir. Her house was close enough to our house that I could drive by, and I knew she had a dog and a sister. A house full of black-haired, black-eyed angels, but I’d have to be bold. I can be bold at a lot of things, but not that. She was Catholic. If I booked it out of our church fast enough after the eleven o’clock service, I could catch a glimpse of her family getting into their car.

She was just old enough to start wearing stockings. You hear a lot about how women’s clothes hang on their frame. Hers hung in the most remarkable way.

I really needed to do this. The brass ring can pass you by in life, and at fourteen, it was too early for me to die unloved.

I wrote out possible scripts of what to say on the phone. Since I was basically a stalker at that point, I had lots of ideas for things to say and ask.

Taking the phone from the playroom into my room, closing the door, then locking the door, it was time to make my move.

I’m not going to tell you her name. It’s been forty-seven years, and only a very small number of people know her name. Surprisingly, her father is one of them. We became friends later in life and would eat lunch at the Mayflower. My condition for telling him was that he would never tell her. Her dad is a gentleman. I’m sure he stuck with our agreement. Let’s say her name was Miranda.

“Hello! Is Miranda there?”

The little sister answered. I figured if I sounded confident, I would be confident.

“Um, yeah. She’s outside. Hold on.”

Saying “Hold On” when you’re waiting to talk to the most beautiful woman in the world is not much help. I did hold on, though.

“Hello, this is Miranda.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I have the wrong number.”

One of the reasons I never told anybody when I liked somebody was the very real possibility that I might fail, and at this, I absolutely failed.

She eventually married a boy from Ole Miss. They had a trio of mahogany-haired adventure kids who wore Col. Rebel shirts. The boy she married wasn’t faithful, so they didn’t stay married. I should have avenged her honor and broken his legs, but I didn’t, mainly because I didn’t know about it. She found somebody else and moved away.

As far as first romances go, there have been plenty worse than mine. Don’t ever read “Bridge to Terabithia” or see the movie. It’s much worse than this. The best I can do is hope that Miranda found happiness. It won’t be too many more years before she’s a grandmother. With any luck, her grandkids won’t have Col. Reb t-shirts.

And that’s the way it was in Mississippi. Feist-dog says it’s time for the sun to come up, and I should make more coffee. If you made it this far, thanks from me and from Feist-Dog for reading my stories.