Last night, halfway through Jeopardy!, I asked my wife if she wanted to suck face. She shook her head in disgust. “Suck face” is not our usual nomenclature.
“How about a smooch?”
No.
“A peck?”
“No.”
“Buss?”
“Why do you talk that way?” She pointed at the TV. Alex Trebek was introducing Arthur Chu for the tenth time. Was there anything left to say about Arthur?
While the Double Jeopardy! categories loaded, I watched her. She saw me and refused to make eye contact. The truth is, I didn’t want to kiss. I just wanted to use that expression. And I wanted to see what her reaction would be. Finally, she glanced in my direction, gave her head another dismissive shake, and told me I was a fool.
Wiktionary teaches us, as if that’s really necessary, that “suck face” means “to kiss, especially deeply and for a prolonged time.” Free Dictionary (by Farlex) suggests: “to engage in French kissing (soul kissing).” And the online Urban Dictionary, which I use when confronted with youthful patois and argot, defines “suck face” as “a game where you make out in the least atractive [sic] way possible.”
I didn’t know it was a game. Who would want to watch?
The first movie kiss was filmed by Thomas Edison in 1896. I’ve seen the film and the smacker. The film is a re-creation of a stage kiss from a play called The Widow Jones. Edison must have been prim as a director, instructing the actors not to suck face. The film runs forty-seven seconds. Blink and you will miss the kiss.
Imagine a movie today called The Widow Jones. The kissing would be wet and wild. Indeed, for some time now, I’ve been inclined to avert my gaze when people kiss in the movies or on TV. The kissing is usually so earnest and hungry, so noisy. Do they have to slurp like that? I can’t watch. I do not find it attractive.
My first episode of real kissing was deep and prolonged. I was in eighth grade. My girlfriend and I attended a party in a two-car garage that had been converted into a rec room. We were eight or nine couples. We played records and milled about for thirty minutes, whereupon the lights were dimmed and we got down to serious kissing. From couches in corners, large La-Z-Boy recliners, and a few treacherous beanbag chairs came the sighs and sounds of slippery, wet mashing. Again and again that evening, I had the sensation of looking at myself from above, both participant and spectator. So this is what it’s like, I thought.
At intermission, a female friend I was not kissing asked me how it was going. What I wanted to say was, “It’s actually kind of boring.”
“Does she like it?”
I told her I wasn’t sure.
“Did you feel her up?”
“What?” I felt my face go hot and red. Didn’t she know I was a Methodist?
Sometime after that rec room romp, a girl in our town named Lila Elembaas came down with mono, which my mother informed me was “the kissing disease.” Lila was older and—I could only assume—way more advanced. Still, it was unsettling news. A few years later, when I learned to play blues harmonica, my mentor, Rod Gorski, told me not to French my harp. “You know how you kiss your mother?” he said. “The way you purse your lips?” He demonstrated: a round, tight pucker, at its center a whistle-sized aperture. “Like that,” he said. “Mainly, you draw. That’s where the good sound is.” From that sucking kiss, soulful music.
Experts tell us that in human history, kissing is a recent development. Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University and authority on the evolution of human kissing, thinks kissing probably happened by accident. Like other creatures, humans must have checked each other out by sniffing. Then one day Moog’s lips brushed against Gorga’s.
She said, “Hey, what was that?”
And he said, “I don’t know, but I liked it.”
They got right to work. The rest is history.
Texts of Vedic Sanskrit in 1500 BC make references to licking and “drinking moisture of the lips.” In Song of Solomon, we read, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. For thy love is better than wine.” Yea, verily. The Bible says it’s so. Sheril Kirshenbaum, research associate at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, reports that in the early twentieth century, perhaps 90 percent of cultures worldwide kissed. “With the rise of the Internet,” she hypothesizes, “and ease of travel in the 21st century, it’s fair to assume that nearly all of us are doing it.”
None kiss better than the French, we might think, though plenty of Frenching must have been going on long before there was a France. And if kissing is their thing, why is their language so impoverished in that department? Only now, in 2017, is there a word for French kiss in Le Petit Robert dictionary (galocher), adding to, and perhaps improving upon, baiser avec la langue (kiss with the tongue). The British, a poetic people, call it “snogging.” I’ll take “suck face” over that, but that’s me being patriotic.
My wife’s culture is kissy. In Italy you may be called upon to greet loved ones and friends with two kisses. Remember, right cheek first. I tend to go left (I also twirl spaghetti counterclockwise), crossing the intersection diagonally, which leads to awkward moments and embarrassing collisions. This kissing dates back to Roman times. Precise in all administrative matters, the Romans distinguished between the osculum, a kiss on the cheek; the basium, a kiss on the lips; and the savolium, a deep, prolonged, soulful pre-French kiss.
My wife is a far better linguist than I am. She learned Latin from the nuns. But I can’t imagine asking her, “Are you up for a savolium?” Maybe because it rhymes with linoleum.
She’ll give me a signal. Something obvious, like, “Kiss me, you fool.” And I will be there.