Kissing Lessons

Joseph Weisberg

The summer after seventh grade, I went to the Busby Berkeley Camp for the Performing Arts in Pinewood, Wisconsin. I went there because I liked to tap-dance. I liked to tap-dance because I had no friends, and when you have no friends, you gravitate naturally towards hobbies and interests which ensure that you will never have any friends.

The boys at Busby Berkeley were misshapen, bewildered, and talented. Beefo Kellner was tall and blubbery, spent most of his free time in his bunk clipping his toenails, and had a gorgeous tenor voice. Ed Waxman was squat, cross-eyed, and had numerous facial tics, but completely transformed into a sexy Brando-esque actor the moment he stepped onstage. Greg French had red hair gurgling up from his head like lava, never said a word to anyone, and tap-danced with grace and total abandon. The rest of us were hapless variations on these same themes.

The girls at camp were as perfect and put together as the boys were clunky and poorly assembled. Their hair was curled into loose ringlets that tumbled down to their shoulder blades, or blow-dried into lightly feathered Dorothy Hamill bowls. They wore diamond earrings and makeup with blue jeans. Some of them—Suzi Tefler, Shawn Coe, Nancy Rothstein—had women’s bodies, and moved around camp in a charged fourth dimension, like sexy ghosts. Only junior counselors could talk to them. Most of the others were wafer-thin, had tiny round butts, and tucked in their T-shirts to stretch them tight over their crab-apple breasts. In their own way, they were just as beautiful as the other girls, Kate Jacksons to their Linda Carters. All of them came from the suburbs of Chicago—Winnetka and Highland Park, Northbrook and Glencoe—and they seemed more open and sexual than the

Birth of a Tap Dancer

When I was ten, my cousin Tess took me to see a double feature of Singing in the Rain and Top Hat at the Biograph Theater. After that, I went to every Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movie I could. I renamed my goldfish Fred Kelly. I taped the poster from That’s Entertainment! over my bed. I got a pair of tap shoes.

Every day after school, I went down to our basement, put on the sound track from one of my favorite shows, and danced. I would clack away on the old chipped floor for hours, arms flying, body spinning, little clouds of slate dust kicking up around my feet. I’d arrive at dinner dripping with sweat.

After a year of this, my parents carpeted the basement. I tried dancing on the carpet, but they’d bought a particularly thick, spongy one. I tried dancing in my bedroom, but I wasn’t allowed to wear my tap shoes there because they would scuff up the linoleum tile, and tap dancing in sneakers is unfulfilling.

Soon my focus started shifting to Battlestar Galactica. I named my new hermit crabs Starbuck and Apollo, after the handsome fighter jet pilots in the show who streaked through the sky fighting Cylons. Cylons were members of a master race of robots that wanted to keep Captain Adama

Birth of a Tap Dancer

and his crew from reaching Earth. Instead of eyes, they had red beams in their silver heads that slid incessantly from side to side. I wanted to kill them.

The following spring, my parents decided that I should go to summer camp. Sales reps came to our house from places with names like Loxahatchee and Nebagamon. They showed slides of boys water-skiing and playing baseball, shooting arrows, turning Popsicle sticks into what appeared to be glued-together stacks of Popsicle sticks. The boys were always shirtless, completely flat from waist to neck, with little lines indicating where their chests were going to be.

Then Horace and Sylvia came. They were the owners of the Busby Berkeley Camp for the Performing Arts. Horace seemed to be about ninety years old, and had a pea-sized growth just above his upper lip. He’d had a stroke, and it

city girls I was used to. They made no secret of the fact that boys were the center of their universe. They talked unselfconsciously about the nose jobs they were planning for the end of the summer. And they flirted constantly. At home, nobody ever flirted with me, and now girls were winking at me from across rooms, giggling while they talked to me, hugging me. I felt like someone who’s been raised by a colony of apes, then returns to civilization and suddenly finds himself surrounded by the species he is truly meant to love.

Our show that summer was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Because the camp directors wanted as many kids as possible to get a chance to play a lead, the main roles were divided into four parts at Busby Berkeley. This meant that a tall kid with dark hair would come out for the

Birth of a Tap Dancer

was hard to understand him. Sylvia was somewhat younger, very robust, and made occasional jokes in Yiddish (which my parents laughed at, but I didn’t think they really understood).

In their slides, groups of kids were onstage, performing old musicals. In South Pacific the girls were in grass skirts and the boys in sailors’ uniforms. In Oklahoma the girls wore checkered blouses and jeans, and the boys wore cowboy hats and had guns on their belts. Every time a new slide came up, Sylvia would throw her arms out and burst into whatever song the kids were singing.

“We have a sports program, too,” Horace said, showing one slide of a chipped Ping-Pong table with a sagging net.

My parents looked at me, and in the dark, we communicated a silent “Yes.”

first quarter of a show, then a short kid with big red hair would come out in an identical costume for the next three or four scenes, and so on. I was cast as J. Pierpont Finch in the third quarter of How to Succeed. My big number was a college fight song called “Stand Old Ivy” that J. Pierpont sings with his boss. After the song, I had to go over and kiss Rosemary, the leading lady.

Rosemary was being played in the third quarter by Suzi Tefler, the most beautiful, most popular, and tallest girl at camp. She was a foot taller than me. The idea of kissing her filled me with a constant, jittery dread. I had never kissed a girl, and I didn’t really know how, and I didn’t know if when you were doing a show you kissed in rehearsal or waited for the actual performance to do the kiss for the first time.

For the first two weeks of rehearsal, we didn’t get to that scene. Then the day came. Everyone my age at camp was in the show, so they were all there, most of them sitting in the audience watching. I sang my song, a rousing anthem about how the Old Ivy Groundhogs were going to destroy their rival Chipmunks in a football game. Then I walked over to where Suzi Tefler was standing. I turned my back to the audience, closed my eyes, and moved my face towards her, praying that kissing would result.

I felt her breath. Then the electric tingle in front of her lips. Then Suzi jumped back and at the top of her lungs yelled, “HE BIT ME!”

The audience burst into a loud, punishing laughter. It went on and on, and every time it seemed like it was dying down, it built up again. I wanted to run off the stage but knew it would be a mistake to surrender whatever tiny piece of ground I had left.

Manon Guastafeste was my best friend at camp that summer. Guastafeste means “spoiler of the party” in Italian. Manon was short and hyperactive and had a big, beautiful nose on a Jewish-Mediterranean face. I had a crush on her, but she was going out that summer with Billy Zane, who would go on to play the handsome villain in Titanic twenty years later, and who looked exactly the same then as he does now. I accepted that I had no chance with her, and we settled into a friendship.

Manon saw how depressed I was after the biting incident. A few days later, as I was shuffling around the no-man’s-land between the boys’ and girls’ cabins, she came up to me and said, “I’ve solved your problem.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I got Nina Steinberg to agree to give you kissing lessons.”

Nina Steinberg was our friend. And she was cute. Although the idea of kissing lessons wasn’t particularly less terrifying than actual kissing, I said, “Okay.”

“She’ll meet you at Brigadoon tonight at nine o’clock.” Every building at camp was named after an old musical. My cabin that summer was South Pacific. The dining hall was Carousel. And the prop shed was Brigadoon.

That night, I rubbed Old Spice deodorant on my underarms and put on my best T-shirt. I opened the barn doors to Brigadoon ten minutes early. It was just a little clapboard shack, behind the main camp building. A chunk of roof from Fiddler leaned against one wall, a buggy from Oklahoma

My First Fight

There were two bullies at Busby Berkeley, Hank and Russell. They couldn’t sing, they couldn’t dance, and neither of them liked to act—it seemed like they’d gotten on a bus to the wrong camp and just decided to stay.

Their main victim was John Poderanski. John was a small, high-strung kid who wore black plastic glasses. Hank and Russell called him Numb Nuts. All day long they’d punch and slap him, pinch him on the neck until he started to cry, drag him over to girls and tell them he was “a faggot.” In the cabin before lights-out, someone would say, “Do the professor,” and Russell would snatch John’s glasses from his face, put them on his penis, and dance around singing, “Professor Cock ’n’ Balls! Professor Cock ’n’ Balls!” Once, they got all the boys to piss in a bucket they were going to dump on his head, but a counselor intervened in time.

One day, John got in my face and started yelling. “Hey, Numb Nuts!” over and over again, trying to impress Hank and Russell. I shoved him, and he shoved me back. Hank quickly stepped between us. “We’ll settle this at the archery

My First Fight

field after lunch,” he said. Then he turned to John and said, “I’ll be your second.” Russell looked at me and said, “I guess I’ll be your second.”

After lunch, I went out to the archery field, where my second was already waiting with John and his second. John and I squared off. Hank immediately shouted, in disappointment, “Come on!”

We went at each other. He grabbed, I grabbed. A second later, we were on the ground. A second after that, I was on top of him. John twisted and writhed, but I had him pinned. Eventually, he stopped moving and stared up at me. His glasses were still on.

“Say you give up,” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Say you give up or I’ll hit you,” I said.

“No,” he said.

stood in a corner. The only light, from a street lamp on the basketball court outside, filtered in through one small window near the ceiling. I sat down on an old foot locker and waited.

At nine o’clock, Nina slipped in through the barn doors. She closed them behind her, then she came and sat down next to me on the trunk.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

We sat quietly for a little while.

“So you want to practice kissing?” she said.

“Ummm . . . yeah,” I said.

She leaned towards me. I leaned towards her. And then I was confronted with a problem I hadn’t anticipated—Nina

My First Fight

I pulled my fist back and tried more menacingly, “Say you give up on the count of three or I’ll hit you. One. Two. Seriously! It’s coming!”

He lied there, impassive.

“Okay, I’ll give you another chance,” I said. “But this time, give up by the count of three, or I’m really going to hit you. One. Two! Two!!” I shook my fist, as if I was just about to slam it down on him. “Two!!!”

I looked imploringly at our seconds. Hank had his arms crossed in front of his chest, and was watching us with an almost intellectual interest. Russell shrugged.

“Well, I can’t hit a guy in glasses,” I finally said. And I got off him and walked away. As I reached the edge of the field, John called out, “Hey.”

I turned around.

“Fuck you, you fucking pussy,” he yelled.

had huge breasts. As we moved towards each other, I knew it was my responsibility to avoid making any contact with her breasts. I reached my arms wide around her, pulled my chest back, and craned my neck in, but as we got closer, it became clear this wouldn’t help—our lips could not meet without her breasts being mashed into me.

Which is what happened. And in the same instant, our lips were together. Then her lips were pressing and pulling. They were plump. And wet.

She went back and forth between my top and bottom lips, taking each one between her lips and squeezing it. After a little while, I started squeezing back.

Then she turned her head sideways and came at me at an angle. She affixed her face to mine and her tongue darted into my mouth. It started moving in and out, this way and that, thick and fast. I lifted my tongue and sort of . . . blocked it. Then I started moving my tongue haphazardly, startled each time it collided with hers. After the tenderness of the lip squeezing, this was chaotic. In a place that felt like outer space, I thought, I’m French-kissing!

Finally, Nina pulled away.

“Okay,” she said. “You’re a natural.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah, you’re good at it.”

I didn’t believe her, but I was glad she said it.

“Okay,” she said again.

Then she got up and went to the door. She turned and waved before leaving.

“Thanks,” I said.

Manon lived in Glencoe, a suburb an hour from Chicago, and although we never saw each other after camp, we talked three or four nights a week on the phone. The conversations were mostly her talking about her day-to-day life, and me “uh-huh”ing. I still didn’t have any friends at school, and these conversations reminded me that there was an alternate universe where people liked me.

I went back to camp the next summer, but Manon didn’t. I played Sky Masterson in the fourth quarter of Guys and Dolls. I wore a double-breasted suit, and I sang “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” crouching and pretending to throw dice on the final “Tonight” of each chorus.

When I got home at the end of the summer, Manon called and told me her family was moving to Chicago, and she was transferring to New City Day School. We were going to be freshmen together. She shrieked and laughed about how great it was going to be. I was ecstatic, too.

On the first day of school, I waited against the wall in the big front entryway. All the kids I’d known for years were bouncing through the doors, practically hopping into each other’s arms. New City Day went from kindergarten through twelfth grade, but the move into high school still felt like a new beginning, and everyone was excited.

Manon came in the door, one hand gripping a Le Sportsac that hung from her shoulder. She scanned the entryway, and then her big, beautiful mouth spread wide when she saw me. She ran at me and threw her arms around me, jumping up and down while we hugged. “Oh my God! I can’t believe you’re here! I can’t believe I’m here! I can’t believe it! Oh my God! I can’t believe this!”

I looked down into Manon’s eyes and said, “You can’t hang out with me.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Nobody likes me here. If you hang out with me, nobody’ll like you, either.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“No it isn’t.”

“We’re hanging out all the time. You’re my best friend.”

“We can’t.”

“We’re going to be together all the time.”

I shook my head.

“This is crazy,” Manon said. “I don’t know anybody else. I love you!”

“No,” I said.

Then I pointed to a group of popular girls clustered together across the hall. Each had a different-colored Le Sportsac. “They’re popular,” I said. “Go hang out with them.”

“No,” she said.

“Go.”

“No, this is ridiculous.”

“Go.”

Manon looked up at me. She was crying, and she opened her mouth to say something. Then she turned and left.

I waited in the entryway for a little while, then went in to start high school.

Junior year, I started to fall into people. First Kevin Dorst, who I was in chorus with, invited me out to dinner one night. Then Bill Fritz, who was on the soccer team with me, started sitting next to me in Latin class. We both thought the word expugno (are, atus—to take by storm) was funny, and we

Dinner at Papa Enzo’s

One day after chorus, at the beginning of junior year, Kevin Dorst asked me if I wanted to come over that night and go out to dinner. I had never gone out with a friend before.

We took a bus to his building on Chestnut Street, dropped our stuff in the foyer of his apartment, and went around the corner to Papa Enzo’s. It was a neighborhood Italian restaurant with red booths and candles on the tables. Kevin confidently told me that the ravioli was excellent.

After we ate, we went back to his apartment. With the constant exhale of the central air, dim track lighting, and long, white-carpeted halls, it felt vast and desolate, Kevin’s corner bedroom like a far-flung outpost at the North Pole.

In his room, we sat on the floor and looked at his favorite Playboy—the Playmate had breasts that swelled out to cover her entire torso. Kevin offered to let me borrow the magazine (I never gave it back).

I took the 151 bus home through the deserted park. The walking paths twisted into the trees, the antique street lamps glowed, and the magazine in my bag pulsed secretly, like uranium. I could still taste the ravioli in my mouth, and the structure of my loneliness buckled.

started making as many jokes as we possibly could with it, chief among them simply repeating and declining the verb. (When a teacher has you convinced you’re being disruptive by declining Latin verbs, you are in the hands of a master.)

Eventually, my relationship with Bill spilled out of the classroom and into his father’s apartment on Lake Shore Drive, a bachelor’s lair with a huge sculpture of a penis in the front hallway, a bearskin rug in the living room, and a Jacuzzi and sauna in the back bathroom. This was an environment totally different from my own, and going there felt as magical and exhilarating as walking into a rain forest.

Bill and I played soccer with a guy in the popular clique, Jonah, and at lunchtime we started going to his house, which was only a few blocks from school. Jonah’s friend David usually came, too. I used to go to Shmendel’s, where I’d eat hot dogs and play pinball by myself. Now I went to Jonah’s basement, where I’d eat Chips Ahoy and play video games with a whole bunch of guys. Jonah could hiss exactly like the snake in the Dungeons and Dragons video game, and something about the frequency he hit was so creepy and primal that it gave us chills. It also made us laugh so hard we stopped caring about the game and played just to hear him hiss.

Once Bill and I were friends with Jonah, becoming friends with the girls in the clique was as effortless and quick as a sponge soaking up water—one moment you were talking to Jonah in the hall when they arrived en masse, the next you were sitting between them at Sarah’s house and watching Days of Our Lives.

Manon had been a member of the clique since I had pointed her to it freshman year. Now we were around each other all the time again. Our friendship regrew from the old root. We went back to talking on the phone for hours. We sat next to each other in class and at lunch, we snuck away from parties for conspiratorial discussions of whatever was on her

Bill’s Dad’s Apartment

Bill’s dad was a lawyer, but not the kind of lawyer the rest of our fathers were. He worked at home in sweatpants, he played tennis every day, he had “deals” instead of cases. One of his clients was Seka, the most famous porn star in the world at the time. I fantasized that on my eighteenth birthday Bill’s dad would arrange for her to have sex with me.

One night, after taking a Jacuzzi, Bill, Jonah, and I were heading toward the kitchen in nothing but towels wrapped around our waists. We were winding through the narrow, cool hallways of the apartment when we turned a corner and ran into Bill’s father and Seka. She had a sweet, plain face and, stretching a white T-shirt into horizontal ridges, breasts that we knew were heavy and oblong.

“This is Dottie,” said Bill’s dad.

Seka was Dottie.

“Hi,” Jonah said.

“Uh, hi,” I said.

“Hi, Dottie,” said Bill.

“Hi, boys,” she said.

There was a great awareness of towels.

Dottie then scanned each of our chests.

“How come you’re so much tanner than they are?” she said to Jonah.

“Um . . . I just am,” he answered.

“Okay, that’s enough,” said Bill’s dad.

Dottie smiled slyly at us and furrowed her brow in comic suspicion.

We turned our backs to the wall and sidled past her, three half-naked boys in formation, fully understood.

mind. We were constantly huddled together, talking about love, complaining about school, reminiscing about camp. The only thing we never discussed was our separation. There was an unspoken agreement between us that it hadn’t happened.

Near the end of junior year, Manon and I were going to a party together at Jonah’s house. It was my sixteenth birthday, and I was vaguely entertaining the thought that it might be a surprise party for me. It was around eight o’clock, and we were parked on one of the quiet side streets of Lincoln Park, a few blocks from Jonah’s. We were talking for a while before going in, in the way we always talked—her going on and on, me absorbing little bits and pieces of what she said.

At one point, when Manon was saying something I wasn’t listening to at all, I saw her eyes narrow and focus in on me. “You know, you’re a very confident guy,” she said. “And confident men have big penises.”

There was a quiet moment while her comment filtered through me. I could feel my mind reaching for it, but there was nothing there except blackness and the faint, fading echoes of confident and penis. Then, for just a second, I felt a whirring in my head. And then I shut down. I stopped hearing anything, seeing anything, feeling anything. My head slumped a little, and my eyes locked blindly on the dashboard.

Time passed.

Something clicked. The world came back on. The inside of the car, full of an electric darkness. The trees outside, crisp and still. I sat up straight, and I looked over, and Manon was still talking. I felt something in my toes, and it started climbing, working its way up my body. A feeling of action. Of one fear breaking against another. I started moving across the seat. As I got closer, Manon turned her head and looked at me, all eyes now. And then I was there, and my lips were on hers. Her lips were there. And then they were gone.

She pressed the back of her head against the car window, went a little bug-eyed, and said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

We sat there for a few minutes, silent.

Then Manon said, “Well, it’s not a big deal.”

Surprisingly, I believed her.

Only her.

A few minutes later, we walked into the party. Nobody yelled “Surprise!” There were boxes of pizza, Cokes, and Diet Cokes (which the girls called “Dokes”).

After we finished eating, the room went black, and everyone started singing “Happy Birthday.” Sarah and Cindy came in carrying a cake. In the dark light of the candles, I saw David’s mouth wide open as he hammed up the song. Sarah’eyes locked on me, as if they were searching for something inside me. And Jonah, still eating a piece of pizza, brimming with optimism and joy.

I didn’t really know why these people had taken me in. But tonight they were singing to me. It didn’t feel like love, but it felt like hope.

A Cab Ride

When I was in my late twenties, my father died. I had moved home to help take care of him, so I had to deal with his death and the exhaustion and agony of spending an entire year watching him die. It was too much for me, and I fell into something that might be called a depression. I continued to function, to get up in the morning and eat and work and see friends, but in an emotionless, empty-headed way, as if I’d been unplugged from the world. This lasted for a year.

Then I went into therapy, where I learned that you have to face and share the full weight of your grief. But this made me feel even worse, because my family was dealing with things differently, and didn’t want to constantly discuss how horrible we all felt.

I was visiting Jonah in New York, and we were riding in a cab together down Ninth Avenue. I started to explain to him that I felt as if I’d died along with my father, and that I didn’t know how to make it back to this world. I told him that the worst part was that my family wasn’t interested in digging into their feelings the way I was, and so I was left to grieve alone, and I didn’t see how I could do it.

“I’ll do it with you,” he said.