Sugar Hill.

I had only recently discovered the power of music that I chose myself.  Not my parents’ John Denver and Neil Diamond records furtively slipped on the turntable when they weren’t home, and not the disco-heavy pop music and classic rock that permeated every invisible wave that could be captured with the bent antennae of my radio.  After I realized I could control what I heard and form my own tastes, I would sit in front of the radio on Sunday nights, cassette recorder in front of me and holding my breath so as not to pollute the background with excessive bodily noise, repeatedly pressing record and stop during the Top 40, trying to trim away the commercials and Dick Clark’s unnaturally upbeat and too-young voice from filling up even a precious millimeter of my 90 minute Memorex cassette tape.  This was my weekly ritual.  I would sit on my bed, recently swathed in a polyester comforter that my Mom let me pick out of the Sears catalog, with matching curtains.  It was my foray into adulthood, picking out the brown and orange graphic sunset and mountain range to replace the nauseatingly frilly pink that my Mom had tried to force on me for years, hoping to pull me back from the brink of tomboyhood.  Dick Clark’s picks only got 45 minutes on one side of the tape, for the other side was saved for Dr. Demento, who underwent the same laborious and largely inaccurate editing process.  For the rest of the week, that mix-tape was the soundtrack to my life, to be covered up by new selections in about a month, once I had cycled through my other hand-me-down tapes from my brother’s job at the Radio Shack.   

In the summer of 1979 I’d discovered two things that I felt heralded this coming adult-hood: kissing boys, and rap music.  Both had been discovered the same weekend, while staying at my friend Lynn’s house in Park Hill.  Park Hill was glamorously in the city, walking distance from City Park and the Museum, and miles away from our suburban townhouse nestled in the foothills of the Rockies.  Since the houses were older, Lynn lived in a modest bungalow next to what I considered a mansion, since it possessed three Victorian stories and a pool in the back. 

The pool came with two brothers, a short one, and a tall one.  The shorter one, whose name I don’t, but should remember, became my crush.  Which didn’t mean Lynn took the taller one – living next door to him, he lacked any appeal.  I had no clue how to act on this crush, though, so I kept it to myself, admiring his cannonballs off the roof of the garage into the pool and pretending that I didn’t care.  Later in the summer, he would miss, breaking his arm, but by that point my pretend lack of caring had become real, so his sympathetic cast gained him nothing but my signature in purple marker. 

Our Saturdays that summer consisted of roller-skating around the pool and listening to tapes – the brothers, of course, bought their tapes at the record store instead of relying on staticky homemade mix tapes.  One weekend, they played something none of us had heard before, something that made us stop our clumsy circling in tennis-shoe style skates and listen, rapt, for the full 15 minutes.  We spent the rest of the day rewinding and repeating the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight.  It was like nothing we’d ever heard before, and we were mesmerized. 

By the end of the day, we knew most of the words and would yell-sing along, most raucously during Wonder Mike’s part, which we would try to do without giggling:

have you ever went over a friends house to eat 
and the food just ain’t no good 
I mean the macaroni's soggy the peas are mushed 
and the chicken tastes like wood 
so you try to play it off like you think you can 
by sayin’ that you’re full 
but your friend says momma he's just being polite 
he ain’t finished at all that's bull 

This, of course, was the part of the song we could relate to.  After all, our knowledge of pimps, sperm, and bootie was limited in the seventh grade, and we were a couple of thousand miles from the Bronx. 

After a full day of rapping and roller-skating, we wound up on the third floor, far from any adult activity.  Like any hormonal pre-teens with nothing to do, there were but two options: Spin the Bottle, or Seven Minutes in Heaven.  And we didn’t have a bottle.

Lynn knew all about my crush on the short boy – we’ll call him Jack.  He was round-faced and one of the few boys around shorter than even me, with a bit of baby fat and sandy blond hair.  Before anyone else had a chance to say a word, she had picked us both out and wordlessly shoved us towards the closet.  We both protested weakly, but it was disingenuous at best.  My heart racing, we went in and closed the door with a click that seemed to echo with an unnatural loudness.

Surrounded by ghosts of coats and single mittens, he smelled moist and dirty, and faintly of Wonder Bread.   I towered over him, although I was used to being shorter than everyone else.  Without saying anything, he leaned up towards me, and stuck his tongue out, and I fought the urge to pull away.  I wondered if he had ever kissed a girl before, or if he could tell I hadn’t kissed a boy.  My friend Jackie and I had once kissed to practice, although for her I think it was less practice and more thrill, since she spent most of her time trying to concoct scenarios via which her female friends would have to disrobe.  But we drew the line at tongues, just too gross. 

Now, I was presented with Jack’s tongue, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do.  In the back of my head, I could hear “goin on n n on n on on n on the beat dont stop until the break of dawn” and I tried to mentally fast forward through the song, looking for a more appropriate-sounding lyric, maybe one that would remind me of what I was meant to do.  Our lips came together, and his salty breath steamed the bottom rim of my glasses.   His tongue, slimy, like a dead fish, lay there limply, unsure of what to do.  We pulled apart quickly, and then tried again, not much more successfully than the first try.  All I could think about was the snack his Mom had fixed us, worrying that it had lodged itself in my braces and that he was tasting it for the second time. 

When we emerged from the closet, red-faced and triumphant, our friends whooped loudly enough for the parental units two floors below to holler a stern warning regarding indoor voices.  It hadn’t been anything close to seven minutes, but no one seemed to notice.

According to what we’ve been told, that first kiss should have been the most important memory of that weekend, of that summer, of that year.  But its sweaty awkwardness could never live up to the rhythm of the boogie the beat.  Wonder Mike and Master Gee had captured my heart completely.  After all, their names, I still remember.