A Monster is Born

It's true that awkward men come from awkward boys, and I am no exception. No, honest, I'm not.

Apparently awkward boys are not the preferred choice of the discerning 12 year old girl, so needless to say I was not the front-runner in female-male relations amongst my friends.

There was even a time, back before college, and high school, and pubic hair, when I didn't know the first thing about kissing a young girl. Honest. So take heart young boys, because you too can become the swaggering adonis that I did, in time. Right.

Thankfully the cure for my inexperienced predicament came from a young girl by the name of Athena. We were about 14 years old, and both members of 5th Field Army Cadet Corps. She was a year younger than me and so by the time she had joined I had gained a meagre amount of seniority. Basically I was no longer the scared new guy.

I have always been certain that 12 and 14 year old girls join Army Cadets purely to meet 12 and 14 year old boys. Call me big-headed, but Army Cadets was all about guns, and uniforms, and marching around yelling at each other, and I often wondered how that appealed to girls my age. Regardless, in Athena's case, it worked.

I don't really remember the whole "courting" phase with Athena (as if 14 year olds court), although I'm fairly confident that it included a fair amount of "my friend likes you, do you like her?" and the like. Probably a bit of hair-pulling and name calling.

Needless to say, after a bit of diplomatic relaying of messages, the two parties met and hammered out a treaty agreeing that they were officially dating. Back in grade 8 this gave me the privilege of holding her hand, buying her sweets, and most importantly, telling people that she was my girlfriend. It gave me a certain degree of social esteem to be considered dateable.

What surprised me about this set up, though, was that it didn't mean that I automatically knew how to kiss her. I had assumed that went with the agreement. Obviously we'd done the peck-on-the-lips thing many a time (we were dating, after all, and the Public Display of Affection was an important part of showing off to our friends). But that was as far as it went, mostly because that's all I knew how to do. Any advanced sexual maneuvers were terrifying and completely foreign to me, and I didn't want to mess them up. I had visions of just relying on instinct, only to find Athena pull away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and shouting "What the hell are you doing?!" Kids have a knack for assuming the worst.

Conveniently my friend Chris was dating Athena's friend Janet (see where I got this theory?), so we double-dated a lot. Chris was a year older than me, and into a lot of punk music. He showed up to cadets one night with eyebrows died with zebra stripes, and we never let him forget it. Janet was a good girl, and a year older than him. Her mom worked very closely with the corps, arranging fundraisers and anything else to be helpful.

Double-dating with these two generally meant driving around in Janet's car, watching movies together at her house, or wandering around the mall. The girls gossiped and chatted about us behind our backs while we complained about Army Cadets.

Chris and Janet were a few years older, so they were farther ahead than us and kissing was no big deal. They did it all over the place, and in front of us. This of course meant that Athena wanted to, too.

I remember thinking that I'd just let Athena kiss me, and she could lead the way. I hoped that I'd just pick it up that way, 'cause surely that's how everyone does it. I wondered, though, if that's the case then is learning to kiss like passing a torch of knowledge from one person to another? Do people pass on different methods of kissing? Do various methods (or strains, even) just crop up spontaneously every few years when someone invents something new? 'Cause how would you know unless you've kissed someone who does it differently? Does that mean different parts of the world kiss in different ways, like languages, with various methods evolving and spreading around the globe amongst the romantically inclined like a joyful STD? To this day I'm still doing the research.

Athena goaded me, tried to kiss me a few times, but I kept it to simple pecks by casually pulling away and distracting her. One particularly difficult dodge was when we were at Janet's house watching films (no parents!) and as we were getting ready to leave I remembered that I'd dropped my sweater in Janet's room earlier. I ran downstairs into a dark bedroom to pick it up off the floor and as I stood up with it in my hand, there was Athena right in front of me, leaning up for the kill. A quick peck dispatched her and I was already out of the room while she was likely pumping her tongue in and out in front of a Craig-shaped cloud of smoke from where I'd just disappeared.

This could only go on so long before Athena either tied me down or broke up with me, and either method was fine with me. I guess my 14 year old masculinity was coming into question and I was clammed up and avoiding the subject like any self-conscious junior high school kid should. Had I been a young girl I would have spoken to my girlfriends about it, and maybe even done some practicing with them. That's how young girls learn in all of my fantasies, anyways.

Fortunately for me Athena was persistent, and we stayed together long enough for us to go on a camping trip with Army Cadets as a couple. Not that we let anyone else at 5 Tribe know it of course, because fraternization with the opposite sex in the military is considered gravely un-cool. It broke down the chain of command and undermined authority. It confused the rank structure with personal relationships, but most of all it called into question your ability to march in circles and iron your uniform, amongst other key skills required to be a good Army Cadet.

After the sun went down on the first night of any Army Cadet venture the first point on the agenda was Capture The Glowstick. This game was an absolute institution, where one privileged, senior member of the corps stood on a rock in the dark with a flash-light and tried to spot kids in camouflage crawling on their bellies towards them. The ultimate goal for one of these little sniper-wannabes was to leap up at the very last second and dash across the rock to snatch a glowstick hanging from a post without being tagged by the person with the flashlight. If they were spotted in the field and could be accurately described using a quick flash of the beam the contender had to start again from the road. The prize for capturing the glowstick without being tagged was the exalted honour of standing on the rock with the torch for the next round.

The location for this game was so good that I always assumed the game had been specifically designed around it. A small rocky surface, about 15 feet around, rose about a foot high out of a field next to the beach. The field was full of dry, swaying straw about 2 or 3 feet long, and dotted around the perimeter were staggered patches of brush. At night it became an incredible place to skulk about the bushes, crawl amongst the grass, and pass whispers to your mates when the wind picked up enough to cover the sound.

The best part of this game, and the reason it was staged without fail every time we went out, was not playing. The senior cadets who ran the weekends (senior meaning over the age of 16, or someone with tight friends over the age of 16) took this game as a rare opportunity to walk off into a bush far enough out of earshot that they could sit in the dark to smoke and complain about the other kids.

Janet being fairly senior in the cadet corps, she had informally excused Chris, Athena and I from the game, which meant allowing herself to be seen walking away into the bush with us. The two couples paired off and we found a comfortable bush each to park in for the next hour or so and be alone to hold hands freely.

I distinctly remember laying on my back, holding hands and passing the hours with Athena while the stars peeked through a scraggly canopy of bushes over our head, listening to the occasional shout from the other kids when a beam of light found it's mark. In the background the waves washed lazily up on shore and reflected the moonlight back into the sky. Occasionally Janet would have to get up to sort out a disagreement amongst players, or we would see the glow from a watch. Nothing could possibly feel better than laying there at night, abusing the little bit of power I had to spend some time with a girl holding my hand. It doesn't sound like much of a first date any more, but I often wish I could be back in that damp field by the sea again.

And even with all this going on to look at, Athena picks this minute to suddenly roll on top of me, plant her lips on mine and throw in a little tongue for good measure. She lashed it around in my mouth a few times before I got the hang of it, and I soon started to mimic her moves. It wasn't so bad, even if I didn't love it at first. When it was over I turned my head quietly and grinned to myself in the dark. I knew that I didn't have to worry about it anymore, because I knew how to kiss.

I pretty much figured the rest out from there.