kiss every man while you still can
I’ve been using the same chapstick since I was 13. God knows how many tubes I’ve bought over the last few years. I’ll blow four dollars on a pack, and invariably destroy all but one - they’d go through the laundry, get lost in one of my many messy bags, find their way into whatever time-continuum vortex it is that’s been eating my stuff since 1990. I was always left with the shitty orange kind, meaning I had to blow yet another four dollars and say goodbye to that Friday’s sub-health code Mexican food. As unhappy as angsty eighth grade Pay was about everything missing out on another death-defying Plaza Azteca night, my nineteen year old body thanks me now for keeping it from becoming an e. coli farm. But back to the chapstick. Blistex Fruit Smoothies saw me through a number of wild pubescent shitshows, and I’d like to tell you about a few of them.
Fabulous purple Berry Explosion lined my lips the first time I ever made out with someone. I was a couple of weeks shy of my 14th birthday, and he was a newly graduated eighteen-year-old knife salesman who’d essentially made the rounds of all my new ~*high school*~ friends in the four years prior to my arrival. I’d met him the Christmas before, when he was dating one of the girls I was in a band with. He called me Blonde. Even though he had something of an aversion to personal grooming, I overlooked it in favor of these ridiculous blue eyes he had that stood out ten times brighter against his dyed black hair and sallow gamer skin. Being a recovering chubster and, by extension, the Last American Make Out Virgin, I was dying to get it over with (a tendency of mine that would later come to haunt me in my wise old age of a couple months ago). Amazed as I was that this older guy who’d sparred with me about John Kerry and not thought I was a total nerd and holy shit those EYES seemed to be vaguely interested in me, I decided to throw hygiene to the wind. As I lay on that trampoline under him and his black trenchcoat, I smiled to myself when he pulled away and told me how awesome I tasted. Also that I probably shouldn’t use so much tongue, but as far as this particular yarn goes, that’s irrelevant.
Delightful green Melon Medley is another ninth grade relic, though considerably less creepy than its weird, berry flavored half-brother. A little backstory before I get into this particular nostalgia trip: I always say that ninth grade was my favorite year of compulsory public education, and the reason is more than likely that it was the most John Hughes-y out of the lot. Huge group of friends that hung out on the wall outside school in the afternoons, eating Chinese and sleeping three girls to a bed on Friday nights, and him. You know who I’m talking about. That one gorgeous, just-barely-attainable-yet-totally-out-of-your-hands senior whose very existence is enough to wrench you out of bed on the bad mornings, because he might smile at you from under that shag of dark hair that covered his face, and you’d be lying to yourself if you didn’t admit that was just the bee’s fucking knees. I didn’t have a whole lot of typical high school things, but I sure did have him. A couple of Fridays after the bizarre Weekend of My Eighteen Year Old Lovah, the group of us that hung out in the afternoons were enjoying a delightful round of Dirty Dice, which someone had on their phone. (My life has always been a giant game of grab-ass; getting eaten alive by the theatre has only made it that much more shameless.) Dirty Dice being what it is, everyone ended up kissing everyone else, meaning that this time, I’d kiss a boy I actually liked! Novel concept, that. After the first time he got me, he kept coming back - I liked to think it was because of me, but I know too well that, once again, it was because of the chapstick. He even stole one before I left. My birthday had been three days before that, and as far as I was concerned, even the iPod I’d gotten couldn’t top whatever the hell that was.
There’s also offensive orange Triple Tropical, but it tastes like something dead that got covered in bubble gum, then left in a sack to rot. In the sun. In July. In Virginia. Seriously, fuck Triple Tropical.
Limited edition Peaches and Cream was the whole reason I started buying this chapstick. One day at band practice, my drummer let me borrow her chapstick before we headed out to something or another that could’ve run me into the kid I’d had a crush on for eight years, who went to the same private school she’d gone to so she could skip out on the shitty public middle school the rest of us toiled through. I’d steal it from her every chance I got. I was only able to choke down my first Corona because it rimmed the bottle, and I’d get a kick of sweet every time I forced myself to drink that bitter Mexican piss. When I begrudgingly went to cotillion to show off my new, forty pounds lighter HAWT BODY to said kid, then watched him awkwardly slow dance with a girl who wasn’t me, it was there. I basically pumiced the lipstick off of my face, not wanting to taste the same sweetness I’d hoped he would. Two weeks later, when I got kicked out of the band, the smell would make my stomach turn, and that was the end of that. By the time I could handle it again, it was gone, replaced by whatever sexy new flavor would bring ‘em in that week.
Six years later, when I was at Walgreens for batteries and an Arnold Palmer, I walked past the aisle where my old friend hid, and saw that for the first time in forever, Peaches and Cream was back. I bought it, and put it on my lips right when I got in the car. Such as my awful, intense nostalgia can be, I was right back in that violently green room with a bass that’s bigger than I am strapped across my body by a fuzzy piece of leopard printed fabric, muddling through another song I didn’t particularly like with girls I loved. A few hours after that, I started writing this.
Amazing what four dollar chapstick can do to a mind with too much damn time on its hands, huh?
