Kiss and Make-Up (8 page)

Fantasy News
was a fan magazine done by someone I knew. I drew the artwork for the cover.

Then just before I turned fourteen, everything changed again. This time, it wasn’t music, and it wasn’t girls. It was women, and it was a whole different thing. I had a paper delivery route in Jackson Heights, Queens, where I would throw papers to people’s doors every morning, and then once a week I had to collect the subscription money from customers. Around Christmas I was going from house to house, getting payments, getting some tips. One customer was an older woman. In retrospect, she must have been in her early twenties, but to me she was a grown-up, and she was on the other side of the line: kids over here, grown-ups over there. Because she was a grown-up, I was mostly oblivious to her, but not totally oblivious, because I remember thinking to myself that she was attractive. Anyway, before the Christmas holiday, I went to collect the money, and she answered the door dressed in one of those frilly nightgowns and crying. I tried to leave. I said, “I’ll come back later.” She insisted that I come inside, and she started talking a mile a minute about her husband, and how he was away, and how she was lonely. She was clearly drunk.

She kept saying she would get my money for me in a second, but plenty of seconds went by and she didn’t make any attempt to get me my money. And then everything happened in a flash. All of a sudden, I was down on the couch and she was on top of me. I don’t even remember, to this day, how my pants came off. I wasn’t exactly a Casanova: I had my hands up near my shoulders, with my palms out like I was trying to stop an oncoming car, and all of a sudden it was over. Then she gave me a tip and I left.

I was terrified, both during and after. Whenever I saw her again—and I saw her many times, because she was still on my paper route, not having had the good sense to move away after this
episode—I would take her money and run. There was no one I could talk to about it, really. Sexual discussions with my mother were off-limits. I did eventually mention it to one of the guys at school, another self-styled rebel. And he must have talked it around, because soon everybody seemed to know. In the schoolyard, the girls would point, and I acquired some additional celebrity to go along with my band celebrity, because I had
done it.

I was oblivious, for the first thirteen years of my life, that I was endowed with a large oral appendage, my superlong tongue. It really was longer than everyone else’s, and I was soon to find out that having a long tongue came in handy with the girls.

One of the girls who seemed to like me was named Connie. She was Italian Catholic and she kept asking me to walk her home. I thought she simply wanted to be my girlfriend, but in retrospect it is clear that she had carnal intentions. One day when we were walking home after school, she explained to me what girls were like. I was stunned and fascinated. “You want me to put what? Where?”

She explained that she couldn’t get pregnant that way. When I escorted her to the entrance of her apartment complex, she led me downstairs to the basement where the laundry room was. It was dark and empty. We were alone. She lowered herself to the floor and pulled me on top of her. Between passionate kisses, she hiked up her dress, lowered her panties, put her right hand behind my head, and gently pushed me down, between her thighs.

I was scared. I had heard stories, especially from the Italian guys on the school grounds. “Hey, you crazy or sumthin? You put your face down there? You’re gonna get sick!”

She immediately started moaning and I became aroused like I never had. I thought she wanted me to kiss her there. I did. It sent her into further ecstasy. And then, as if a sign from heaven told me everything I needed to know, I heard a voice plead, “Oh, Gene, your tongue, give me your tongue!” I did. No sooner did I make contact with her than she went into violent convulsions, wrapped both of her hands behind my head, and rammed her pelvis into my face. She squirmed her entire body and used my tongue like a hot knife through butter.

Although the entire event sticks in my mind as having lasted a long time, it probably only took her thirty seconds to achieve orgasm. This was my baptism by fire. I owned her. She lay there on the basement floor in complete surrender. For the rest of my life, I would remember that early encounter and what I could do with my tongue.

But it wasn’t over, not yet. A few moments passed and we talked a little as I lay beside her. While I was in midsentence, she reached over and put her right hand between my legs. She raised herself up, undid my jeans and pulled them down, and immediately wrapped her mouth around me. Though I was barely conscious, I noticed that she held me with her left hand and was manipulating herself with the right.

Sadly, this was to be the only encounter between us. She soon moved away. And if she reads this, I hope she remembers it fondly. I certainly do. I started having off-the-cuff conversations in school about my encounter. When I told one of the guys about it and stuck my tongue out to show him what I had done with it, he remarked how goddamned long it was.

I never knew. I never thought it mattered. But when I started showing girls my length, they were clearly impressed.

The tongue incident ushered in a whole new era in my love life. I had only just turned fourteen, but since I was tall, I kept being invited to Sweet Sixteen parties, even though I was a little younger. There were all these girls whose names I still remember, Belinda and Irene and Barbara and Andrea. They were the cool girls, the ones the guys wanted to go out with at night, and for some reason they wanted me at their parties. Those parties were filled with the kinds of things I had never seen before: turning down the lights and playing records and spin the bottle. There was also slow dancing. Irene, I think, was the first girl who picked me to dance; it was ladies’ choice, and we were moving together, and the lights were down, and everybody started kissing. Then all of a sudden she stuck her tongue in my mouth. I thought I was going to throw up or drop dead. And then while she was sticking her tongue in my mouth, she took my hands and moved them down below her waist. I had a queasy feeling, that
same tingly feeling I had from the girl jumping rope, but stronger. Then I got the hang of it, and I stuck my tongue into her mouth, and all of a sudden she started moaning. Then the song ended. We parted, then everybody went over to the table to have chips.

While I was thinking over what had just happened, two other girls came up and asked me to dance. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but apparently word had gotten around that I knew what I was doing, and they wanted to try having me stick my tongue in their mouths, too. The seeds of what would later be KISS were all planted during this period: television, the Beatles, superheroes, science fiction, girls. Everything about America was coalescing in my mind.

Being in a band also opened up certain social situations. For example, I didn’t know what a country club was—we were still relatively poor. But in the summer my next band, the Long Island Sounds, got invited to play at various country clubs around the area. We walked into these places, and we were amazed. Everyone there was being served. They had drinks that they took with them into the swimming pool. They drove nice cars.

After one of the dances, a girl invited me to come back the following Saturday for a swim date. I came back happily, and the two of us went swimming, which was really just an excuse for making out in the pool: our heads were above water, but our bodies were under water, and we were hugging and necking and kissing. Her parents were nearby, but they couldn’t see us or pretended that they couldn’t. I must have been nervous, because in the middle of this, I felt as though I had to let out some gas. In fact, a major amount of gas. I thought I was pretty sophisticated, and that I could do it so that it would come out silent—in class, at least, I never let a raspberry go full steam; I finagled the cheeks left and right and kind of squirmed for the sake of subtlety. In the pool, I figured that it was even easier, but for some reason logic escaped me, and it didn’t occur to me that the gas would rise. All of a sudden, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the water started bubbling, there was a huge noise, and the beast emerged. The girl untangled herself from me and swam away. I never saw her again.

Cosmos Stiletto
, which I edited and published, was the merger of two magazines,
Cosmos
and
Stiletto.
My friend Stephen Coronel did the artwork for this issue, #11.

When I wasn’t in New York, I was in New Jersey. By that I mean that during the summers my mother sent me off to summer camp. She had started doing better and had managed to save a bit of money, and one summer she announced that I was going off to Surprise Lake Camp. The big surprise at Surprise Lake was that there was no lake, just this little pond. I stayed there for three weeks, which seemed like an eternity, mainly because there was no television. I thought it was a prison. To me, it was like yeshiva again, where everybody ate communally, where you had to line up just to get something else to drink. The last thing I wanted to do was hike, and the second to last thing was play sports. One day I left the campground and went into the nearest town, which was Monticello, I think, and I bought a
Fantastic Four
comic book. That was my support network for the rest of the summer; I kept rereading it and rereading it. Eventually, I learned to make do with the camp’s arts and crafts program, because they had a mimeograph machine, and I learned how to publish a newspaper.

I also sang in the camp talent show, which would have been pleasant if it weren’t for the fact that it was the site of one of the most horrific things that ever happened to me. Those summer camp talent shows are all the same. Someone tap-dances. Someone else juggles. A group of people form a choir. I had some kind of singing group, and we were onstage, and since it was the middle of summer the bugs were everywhere, more so because there were spotlights onstage. Right at my moment in the show, the rest of the stage went black, and I was in the spotlight by myself. I opened my mouth to take a deep breath, and I swallowed a giant moth that died violently, squirming all the way down my throat. I couldn’t wait to get back to my bunk and read the
Fantastic Four
comic book again.

Camp was the first place I became aware that the world also has homosexuals. There were public latrines, where everybody would line up and then do their business. There were no walls between the boys, just this trough. Next to me was a guy who I think might have been my age. He kept looking over at me, and at my member, and
asking what bunk I was in, and commenting on this and that, and asking me if I wanted to come over to his bunk. I said, “Do you have any comic books?” This took him aback a bit. He didn’t have comic books, he said, but he was there. “Well,” I said, “I don’t want to go if you don’t like comic books. Unless you know where I can get some TV?” This totally threw him. TV? Why? “Because I want to watch
Superman
,” I said. This was a classic example of miscommunication: he was trying to pick me up, and I was trying to watch TV and read
The Fantastic Four.