Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

SECTIONCODE: 39-food-utt
SECTION: food
SUBSECTION: under the table
HED:
SUBHED:
STARS:
P/Q: In school we were the two Angies causing all sorts of trouble. We greeted eachother on the lips as school girls do to gain the attention of male teachers.
W/C:
TEXT:
I’ve always been in love with Angelina. In school we were the two Angies causing all sorts of trouble. We greeted eachother on the lips as school girls do to gain the attention of male teachers. We had no idea then, at 14, we were entering the most powerful time in our lives. Being young and carefree, and discovering the powers teenage girls hold over men of all ages.
Angie was so aggressively feminine that if she was anymore feminine, she would be masculine. Full lips, full body, full hair, she was every adolescent’s dream of what it would be like if we had transformed into adulthood as quickly as she had. And she was nice. Every girl hated her. But I loved her, even now though I haven’t seen her since graduation. That is why I couldn’t wait to visit her in Beijing.
It was no coincident that I asked her to meet at Kiss Kiss, a yakiniku joint for the tragically hip. The Taiwanese owner gives complimentary plates of beef tongue if you make out with someone for ten seconds and let him photograph you tongue tying. This was the kind of perverted food love I love. I arrive early to secure a table right off the beatnik’s dining row of Nan Xi Gang. As I sit here by myself in this sticky black-box dive with graffitied walls plastered with Polaroids of couples in tongue tango, I make it a point to tell the entire staff I’m waiting for someone as random men will come up to you and ask for a peck. I turn around with every anticipation of the door opening, then slink when it is not her. I can’t believe I was this nervous.
My phone bells. Angie sends me a text: “BJ traffic. So sorry babe.” As I reply, the bartender comes over. “Want to kiss?” he asks a little too friendly. “No that’s ok, thank you,” I smile. An older gentleman with a detective moustache begins his approach and I just looked down and shake my head. This might be the loneliest place in the world.
An hour goes by before I see an angelic figure float across the windows. She was as majestic as ever, now with bone straight hair pulled back in a secretary by day/ sex kitten by night kind of way. I always knew she had cheekbones that would make her age gracefully. We greeted eachother with a kiss on the cheek and it felt like an arrow missing the bull’s eye. Her big, generous smile was brighter than ever, helped by peroxide.
The years did part us and we were strangers now struggling to find common interest again. Minus the gym class smoking breaks, the underage clubbing weekends, and experiencing our firsts together, we had nothing in common as adults. It was strenuous to even fill the gaps of silence between sips of beer and short ribs.
In the least sexy way possible the owner comes up to us with his Polaroid and asked if we wanted to make out for him. Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me, but then nearby tables started cheering for us to kiss. Girl-on-girl action was not well represented on these walls or in Beijing.
One look at Angie and I could tell she wasn’t into it either. But in a moment of temporary nostalgia, I shrugged and said to the owner, “Would you give us a free meal if we made out?” He took a second to think about it, but by that time the bartenders and cooks wanted a show. “Let’s do it like we did for Mr Douglass (our former tennis coach),” I said to Angie.
And like a pony doing his trick, we held lips for mere seconds fully realising this is completely ridiculous. Her lip gloss smelled like a drugstore and stuck to mine like rubber tree sap. There was no tongue, there was no fluid exchange, there was no breath as neither of us dared to breathe. We just held a Broadway lip lock for ten long seconds in angst awaiting release while people hooted. This was stupid. This was horrifically stupid. When it was over, it was over. We unlocked in awkward silence. And when the tables of teenage boys offered to buy second rounds, we pretended to need sleep.
My greatest days of youth-rebellion rewrote itself in ten seconds as a miserable show and tell of cheap tricks. Some memories are best left to remember, locked away as stories of being young, dumb and powerful, never to be restaged, or upstaged in this case, in adult life.