...and she was...
...the ballad of footeastman [part four]...
“To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady.”
-Wilson Mizner-
Calling a woman a drink does little to bring her into being. If I asked you dear reader to describe the fabulous woman named Champagne that I have been barely expounding upon, you would probably say nothing because I have told you nothing and you are reading this. So even if you said something I wouldn’t be able to hear it. Perhaps you could guessingly effuse like the drink itself, calling her bubbly or a tall glass of sugar. I wouldn’t disagree.
Champagne is many things. She is even more so, many not-things. She is not a banshee or a bangle. She is not a furry or a fairy. She is not an elf, or a wall, or a shoe or a shovel. She is neither ethereal nor cereal nor something strictly material.
She is a DJ, a VJ and a puff painting sewing cartoonist chef. She is a hiker, a dancer, a dogmother and a romancer. She is tall and pretty and also long and witty, and from what I am told, she comes from large and small cities. Above all she is a lady.
Champagne was not Champagne’s real name, but Champagne is a woman of many real monikers. DJ Don’t Tell Mom. BlanketHawk. Ms. Forevernor. Dabess. Sarina.
And LadyFriend.
You see I am a fella, and the opposite of a fella is a ladyfriend. This day and age a lady might not need or want a fella, but this fella certainly needs a lady. Or at least to look like one occasionally.
I called us both turds, but I did this with jest and care, because the name is not you. No matter how hard you try to live your life as your name, or chose to name yourself, it is inevitable at some point that you will be named by someone something you may or may not want to be named.
If you are Tim you might be called Timmy. If you are Timmy you might be called Tammy. And if you are Tammy there is a chance you will be called Tom. And Tommy let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with finding the time to be a Tim, ok Tammy?
I’ve been called many a name in my life.
Dude. Man. Hey guy.
Fool. Frank. Frudge. Fruitskin, Foreskin. Flapface. Forky.
Dorky. Drooly. Dangley. Sir Shrunken Sunken Bunkenstizz.
The Champagne you know, and the Champagne she is, share one trait. They are both just a fantasy. I’m 14 years into this D&D campaign. I signed on to be a wizard, but ended up a peg legged bard with his voice stuffed in a griffon that lives toe tied but breathing in a chest at the bottom of Lake Minnetonka. Meanwhile, Champagne is some 99th level mage breakdancing all over this story with just a pair of muddied burning man plastic bags to hold her helicopter on the sullied cardboard we set last whimsical.
This was just a super stupid and fancy way of saying I haven’t done much to describe the real Champagne yet.
After one quick foggy kiss in San Francisco, I was convinced I needed another one.
A kiss can go so many ways. Animals kiss infinitely. Cats rub, cows lick, flamingos go beak to beak. Elephants touch trunks.
Humans kiss in the myriad. My buddy was lampooned for a decade after he kissed his first girlfriend by grabbing her by the ears and pulling her for a full wet-lip smooch. That type of kiss is called an orangutang shmooke. My first kiss was at a Cincinnati live Double Dare whereupon the host asked some preteen to kiss her chewed bubblegum to the oversized glasses I was made to wear. That one’s called a soggy sally.
If you look to the world you can see all the ways we can share love with our lips. This is a PG-13 essay so I won’t over commit here, but let’s just say that that the idiom kiss my ass was meant to be a come on, until someone wished it wasn’t, because they were probably an ass. That type of kiss is called chalktalk, by the way.
A kiss creates.
A kiss says to the kissed, hey flapface I kissed you. And it says so much more. It says your breath is tolerable. Your face is findable. This moment is mentionable. And that another might be sensible.
When Champagne and I kissed and said goodnight, my mind marveled. What had I done and where should I go? I crossed the bridge and planned my next step. How about another e-mail about ALF.
Men are stupid. Women too. But men especially. And babies. Babies are idiots.
At that point of time I was just a boy hoping to be a man if only to have chest hair and dream about riding motorcycles unrented. I wanted to do manly man stuff like blow boxes up, get canceled, return a power drill to home depot, and bet on baseball poorly. You can’t keep emailing a woman who kissed you and expect to get anything other than the worst results.
There is no turning back from a kiss. It is not some daydream sunshined moonstone sent to question your sanity. A kiss is a consideration of interest at the very least. An invitation to entrance if you are lucky. Not in the perverted sense of course, but maybe. It can be an invitation to spend more time, energy, and existence to those which have kissed you. Unless the kiss was a fake, in which case you have just had a kisstake.
[…i will continue to name kiss types throughout this blog until our lips are chapped or sealed…]
“Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you.”
-Joey Adams-
All this hubbub and hubris is not to say I had never been kissed before. I had practiced kissing on dolls, and newspapers, my hand, and a very specific stuffed animal that I hope no one ever finds […Shermal i miss you…]. Those kisses were called Barbo, Ink Stain, Slow Five, and Stuffed Peppers by the way […goodnight sweet Shermal…]. That first kiss with Champagne was a beckoning for discovery of what that might lie beyond the valley of hands and dolls.
Struck inside all the loves you ever loved before sits an arrow. You might be the archer or you might be the bullseye. But you also might be an archery academy filled with endless targets to be stripped at each striking and tossed holey to the trash. Live life as the target and you will get shot at, but there is no guarantee of the accuracy or quality of the arrow. Become the arrow and similarly you may be plagued with shots for sport only.
At an early age I knew I was neither a target or an arrow. I was a gamekeeper ensuring all tools of the sport were set steady for use. I was a janitor cleaning up afterwards. But really I was just a bartender that worked 12 blocks over from the event. And with Champagne I had a chance to be making martini’s flecked with olives of the finest salt, vodka of the purest potato, and vermouth made of the very best vermouthy things.
I wasn’t sure how to immediately follow up our kiss, but fishes came to mind. They say fish is the food of love. I actually wrote that thinking no one ever said that, but turns out Harvard said it, so it must be true [or born of incredible wealth and privilege].
I grabbed squid, snapper, striper, crab, cod and flounder and spent a few hours getting them all fried saucy alongside a couple of bottles of cheap wine. I directed Champagne to the warehouse via what I thought was the easiest and safest bike path in town.
Some years later I had the fine experience of a man dropping his bottoms and staring me dead in the eyes when I biked her home on this route. It seems no road is safe in this world. But the road that night led to about fifty filets and Champagne made the journey with no issues, all while holding a list of reader’s digest fish puns.
She was the gill of my dreams.
A kiss after a fish feast is called fishlips. Fishlips after a first date is called Huck Finning. And a second date scheduled after Huck Finning is called Tom Sawyering. Trust me Tammy. The great gain of our extended slow motion courtship was that Champagne and I were in no rush.
So we set no plan in place and then plans placed themselves in front of us. A birthday party shucking oysters and cartwheeling the ocean under the moon. Jokes and shushed hisses in speaker filled circles. Irish potatoes and a bus full of raving eastern europeans stealing us to an abandoned military base.
You could name your dates like your kisses in which case we went on a Brendan Bolo, a Blue-Barry-Bupkis, a Tiny Tim-Tour and a Gentlemanly Philbert all within a month's time. And amongst all the Gee-Gosh-Gerrys and Oh-No-Oswaldos we had kisses named Herbie, Herlando and Cool Carrie Rose.
Our life made moments and monikers, and our roommates quickly grew tired of us mating with their room. A love growing outgrew shared spaces. So with a handful of Franks, Freds and Frogeyes in front of us we shared a Filthy Fozzy facing a fountain, and imagined what would come next.
We would need new rooms.
E-mails began to hit my inbox from someone named MagicPony sharing new spaces. Some were large and for many. Some were small and for few. And I had no idea who this web wizard was. The Carlas, and Kimmys, and Casio Colas kept coming while I open housed myself, unaware that this lady in front of me was not only a lady. Champagne was also an equine enchantress. She was the magic pony.
We found an 1800’s victorian duplex with sailboat windows overlooking a garden and with that, tiny thoughts born of a kiss on a sidewalk turned into Tonys, Tims and Terrys, had now transformed into something potentially bigger.
Sharing a kiss is simple, you just press lips and hold. Sharing a moment is harder. You need to nest the minutiae of your mind in some imagined treetop you can both climb to. You need to test your nest.
So it was that a man and a pony grabbed their most important belongings, a stool made of ballerina legs and a pair of bushy ghillie suits, and began their climb together. Branch by branch we flapped and hopped higher. The time had come to move in. The time had come to go home.
"Struck inside all the loves you ever loved before sits an arrow. You might be the archer or you might be the bullseye. But you also might be an archery academy filled with endless targets to be stripped at each striking and tossed holey to the trash."
🔥