"You're doing it wrong"

Continuing my account of my senior year in high school, in Punta Gorda, Florida…

The year dragged on. Eventually it was spring. On April 29th, 1988, I’d turn eighteen. I was haunted by the fact that I had never kissed a girl. I determined that this would not stand. I would not turn eighteen without having kissed a girl.

Having lost touch with Marcy, I considered my options. My best bet, I decided, was a girl named Kimberly who worked with me at Publix.

Kimberly was not my type. At all. She had no intention of going to college; I don’t think she ever read anything more challenging than People. Nor was she particularly attractive. She wasn’t exactly unattractive; she had a nice face but she was a little heavy. Still, she was a sweet girl and I was pretty sure she had a crush on me.

We used to hang out in the parking lot after work with a couple of other employees. I mostly sat and listened to them gossip about other employees. I had nothing in common with them and nothing to add to the conversation, but I would rather be in the Publix parking lot hanging out with rednecks than sitting alone watching Just the Ten of Us in room twelve of the Cadillac Motel. So they smoked and gossiped, and I sat and listened.

One night one of the redneck employees was showing off a set of nunchuks that he had bought somewhere. Oddly enough, I had recently made a pair of nunchuks myself in the garage of the motel: one weekend, bored as usual, I had connected two foot-long wooden rods with a small chain and a pair of eye screws. I practiced for hours, trying to swing one end beneath my right armpit with my left hand and catch it over my shoulder with my right. Then I’d swing it under my left armpit with my right hand and catch it with my left. It seemed like the thing to do. I don’t know what else you can do with nunchuks.

Anyway, I whacked myself in the back of the head about a hundred times, but I eventually got pretty good at it. I don’t know what the point of any of this was, but I did know that if I ever had the opportunity, I’d be able to put on a pretty impressive nunchuk demonstration.

So when this guy hauled these nunchuks out of his trunk, my heart leapt. This was it! I was being handed an opportunity by God Himself to finally look cool. The nunchuk-owner swung the thing around a little; he obviously had no idea what you were actually supposed to do with nunchuks. He handed it to his friend, who also tried. Nunchuks aren’t like a sword; you can’t just swing them around and look cool. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you just look stupid, and you might even hurt yourself. Frankly, as a weapon, nunchuks are ridiculously impractical: on the off chance you hit something with the swinging rod, it will inevitably ricochet back at you forcefully at some unpredictable angle. You’d be better off attacking your opponent with a paper bag full of angry wasps. Still, the ability to adroitly swing a pair of nunchuks is a skill prized by all teenage boys.

Finally it was my turn. I shrugged and took the nunchuks, inspecting them like an expert. Then I took hold of one end with my left hand, allowing the other end to swing freely. I brought it forward, then back, swinging it under my right arm and over my shoulder, catching it with my right. I repeated this motion on the left. Then again on the right, faster and faster. I had been worried that the weight would be different from my homemade pair and might throw me off, but they worked the same. The nunchucks sailed through the air, cutting a continuous, graceful butterfly shape. Once I had made my point, I caught the end one last time, folded the nunchuks together and handed them back to the owner.

He shook his head. “You’re doing it wrong,” he said. “You’ll whack yourself in the back of the head if you do that.” The other redneck nodded his assent.

Moments like that made me suspect that I was somehow marked, like Cain. It was like the word DORK was burned across my forehead. If sixteen ninjas with katanas and shuriken had leapt out of the bushes, and I had fought them all off with the nunchuks, somebody would still find a way to point out what a dork I was. “You should have left one of them alive so that we could find out who sent them, you big dork.”

Kimberly, the sweet, pudgy girl that I had determined to kiss, didn’t need a nunchuk demonstration to be impressed. I could tell that she hung around the Publix parking lot with these losers mostly so that she could be with me. One night I asked her if she wanted to go get something to eat. So we went out, probably to Taco Bell or something, and ended up back in her car at the Publix parking lot. There was a lull in the conversation, and I leaned over and kissed her. It lasted for maybe a second. She leaned in for more, but I pulled away. I had no plans to make out with her; I just needed to kiss someone before I turned eighteen. Her kiss, as Hall and Oates sang, was on my list.

I continued to see her at work, but we never kissed again. We never even went to Taco Bell again. I imagine that she hoped this was the beginning of some kind of relationship, but the possibility never occurred to me. I was so depressed and self-absorbed at this point that I rarely considered the notion that other people might have feelings as well. If this girl was heartbroken about me, I reasoned, then clearly she had some deep-seated psychological problems. What could she possibly see in me?

I mean, other than the fact that I was hell at nunchuks.