Fool in Love: One Man's Search for Romance . . . or Something Like It

PART I

THE LAWS OF LOVE

IT ALL BEGINS

WITH A …

S HE WAS A good-looking woman. At thirty, she had her stuff together: She had a good job at Hughes Aircraft and a new Volkswagen Rabbit. She was buying the Ladera Heights town house she lived in. She could have taught a naive kid like me, all of twenty-four at the time, a thing or two about life. And she could cook.

But as I left her place late that night for the second time in a week, clothes rumpled and passions unrequited, there was something in an otherwise beautiful picture that I simply could not ignore: The girl could not kiss.

The two of us wrestled amorously on her couch for the better part of the evening, and no matter how I approached it, the result was always the same—the instant my lips reached hers, she’d open her mouth so wide that she could have easily administered mouth-to-mouth. I tried sneaking up on her lips, to no avail; whenever hers detected mine in the vicinity, they’d again open up—as if to swallow the bottom half of my face. In the end, both literally and figuratively, I simply could not get past the woman’s mouth.

There are certainly bigger disappointments in life than finding someone decent, witty and earnest, who smells good and doesn’t embarrass you with the way she dresses, and then discovering she doesn’t know how to kiss, but there are hardly more frustrating revelations.

If you are a thinking adult over twenty-five who leads a fairly healthy social life and you don’t know how to kiss, then one of three things happened: (1) A true freak of nature, you never in your life dated one single person who could kiss; (2) you simply refused to pay attention; or (3) you’re a Resister, one whose mouth defiantly refuses to yield to experience and authority. Either way is a sad situation.

Especially when you consider what this deprived breed has gone proudly through life passing off as a kiss: dramatic, oral assaults of slobbering and slurping, probing, omnipresent tongues and clumsy teeth on the offense. Or indifferent, feeble, obligatory attempts at affection delivered with the romantic verve of a mannequin. There are those who view kissing as something only to be associated with impending sex. Indeed, there are others who don’t like to kiss at all and will tell you as much. Get as far away from these people as possible.

For the faltering marriage there is counseling. For sexoholics there is therapy. Every other relationship-associated dysfunction has some type of aid. There should, therefore, be a school for kissing. Because without the kiss, you’ve got nothing. I know who would be the perfect teacher for such an educational institution: Shirley Brown. When I was sixteen, Shirley lived five doors down from our house. She was just a year older than I was, but seemed a world wiser. For some reason, most of the girls at school despised her.

Shirley’s resounding, innate sexuality—her womanly curves, her insistence—scared the hell out of me. But apparently not enough to deter me from taking a nighttime stroll with her to the nearby State Capitol Historical Building, where, while sitting on the steps under a sexy, starry sky, Shirley gave me my very first kiss. She began by administering calming, lingering pecks on my lips before finally parting them with her wet, warm tongue and deep kissing me into a dizzying, euphoric vortex of passion.

After that night, Shirley and I would talk on the phone, and she’d persuade me to walk down to her house on Saturday evenings and watch TV with her while the aunt who was raising her fixed people’s hair in the back of the house, giving us the opportunity to smooch. I’d find the nerve to work my hand up Shirley’s skirt, rubbing her thick, hairy, brown legs until I’d reach the top of her thigh, where she’d gently but firmly stop my hand. If she had offered it up, then what? As it was, she gave up something sexier and infinitely more valuable: Years before I’d lose my virginity, I’d learn from Shirley that kissing was not an appetizer, but the main course.

Somebody once defined a kiss as something humans do when words are no longer sufficient. I have to agree. There are few things in the universe more powerful than a kiss. The moment you’ve experienced a great one, you won’t settle for anything less.

Thank you, Shirley, wherever you are.

And kisses don’t lie. Well, sometimes they do. But what a lie. A lie that no one would blame anyone for ignoring, for just a little while.

EAU DE FEET

(AND EVERYTHING

ELSE)!

IN 1987, just before Ramon Hervey flew to New York to marry actress/singer Vanessa Williams, he invited me to a bachelor party pitched in his honor one evening at a friend’s house in Los Angeles.

By the way, someone really should give this thing another title.

Bachelor party sounds like a set of randy college kids toasting a guy’s final night as a single man one last time before he takes the hand of a girl named Becky. In fact, every bachelor party I’ve attended was simply a reason for grown men to behave like rambunctious, frisky teenagers. The attendees hope the guy finds happiness and all, but it’s really about the strippers, and the three females for hire at Hervey’s send-off were in the middle of a no-holds-barred performance when comedian/actor Franklin Ajaye spoke up.

It wasn’t enough that these women, writhing through configurations only a gynecologist could respect, were already nearly as naked as the day they were born; Ajaye requested they lose the scuffed white pumps. I wanna see some feet! he and a couple other guys taunted playfully. I sat mute in silent hope.

We humans are strange creatures, driven by various peculiarities that climb into our subconscious early in life and make themselves at home. Most people, whether or not they are conscious of this, have something that floats their boat.

Myself, I’m a foot man.

I’m not obsessive about it. Not interested in eating a meal off a woman’s feet or having her walk across my face. However, a pair of good-looking well-maintained feet, plain or sporting a deluxe pedicure, will always get my attention. It would be great if said feet were attached to a pleasant, emotionally adjusted, smart and witty woman, but truth be told, pretty feet would allow me to look past the apparent inadequacies of the Wicked Witch of the West. For a little while, anyway.

To somebody into elbows or women who smoke cigarettes while eating Mexican food on Tuesdays, my thing sounds unusual. Alas, as Diana Ross moaned during Love Hangover, if there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it. Besides, I firmly believe that if we were all honest about our fixations—as long as they are pursued between consenting adults, no one is hurt and no property destroyed—the world would be a less stressful place.

For many, the origin of a certain sensual craving is inexplicable, but I know distinctly when and where I developed mine. I was in kindergarten. My teacher, Miss Garner, my first teacher’s crush, had us unfold our mats on the floor for the after-lunch nap. I loved Miss Garner and stuck close to her when I could. I ended up camped near her desk. She sat in silence, reading The Daily Oklahoman and munching on cafeteria butter cookies, and had slipped out of her shoes to reveal her stocking feet.

I was startled. At age four, I didn’t know teachers even had feet. But there Miss Garner’s were, little more than arm’s length away, motionless but for the occasional twitch of a toe.

I lay entranced in covert observation, fascinated by the sight of a woman’s feet, confounded by my sudden light-headedness and the knot forming in the pit of my stomach. Then came the utterly strange sensation that I now know was the first erection that I can remember.

On a certain day at a certain moment, an emotional/sexual sensation can be sparked by any number of experiences. Obviously, I’d seen women’s feet before in my young life, but my crush transformed an ordinary occurrence into a seminal moment of sexuality.

During the humid summers of my adolescence, I discreetly paid special attention to barefoot neighborhood girls who went past our house to Butler’s Bar-B-Q or Washington Park, seeking relief for tender soles from the hot sidewalk in whatever cool, green grass lay along the route. I wouldn’t truly make a sexual connection to my curiosity about women’s feet until adulthood.

I am hardly alone in my penchant. It’s just that leg, butt and breast aficionados have openly had their desires satiated, while the foot man has languished in the shadows. More respect has been given to men who are into high-heeled women. What deviant mind invites a woman to bed in shoes?

Things have come around for the foot man, though. Television commercials that have absolutely nothing to do with feet will feature a woman showing hers off. Entertainers and models pose for magazine and CD covers with their feet strategically positioned to enhance the shot. Since these images seldom feature ugly feet, you have to believe all this is done consciously.

Pedicures, once optional, became commonplace years ago; toe rings and anklets are familiar even among the most conservative dressers.

But I am the last one to talk a woman out of the choices she makes in her personal notion of sexuality, especially when I consider the vast lists of utterly stupid things men do to impress women, and the years it took me to be honest about my own interests.

Marvin Jenkins was the first guy I met who made no bones about his interest in women’s feet. Marvin fascinated and embarrassed me with frank, expert discussion about arches, shoes danglers, and his preference for thick ankles.

One time he and several friends, myself included, engaged in a lively game of bid whist at the apartment he shared with his beautiful wife, Toni. The two had had words because Marvin decided to hang with us although he and Toni had committed to attending a birthday party.

Toni opted to go alone, and when she finally emerged from their bedroom, a crony who knew Marvin’s preferences mumbled something about his actually letting his wife go out dressed like that. The uninitiated would find nothing provocative about a flowered Laura Ashley-type number that literally covered her from the neck to just above her ankles. Her footwear, however, was another story.

Toni had slid her small, pedicured and painted feet, adorned with a silver anklet and toe ring, into a pair of wooden, flip-flop-styled Dr. Scholl’s sandals. As she smugly made her way across the room for the front door, every flap of that bleached Dr. Scholl’s wood against her soft, lotioned soles was like a slap upside Marvin’s head. After she left, Marvin was never quite the same. His mind was on his woman’s feet—feet that could attract some other guy with Marvin’s particular preoccupation.

If Dana was aware I was interested in her feet, she never let on. Not that she would have asked, and not that I would have mentioned it. But she kept her feet covered for so long that I began to fear what I might find. My inexact science—she had little hands with a small fingernail bed—indicated she had pretty feet, but I couldn’t be sure.

When she finally displayed them in open-toed Manolo Blahniks at Mirabelle’s during an after-work drink, my first thought was that it is a good thing wings are an angel’s primary mode of travel, for somewhere in heaven was one without feet.

Her toenails were resplendent in pink polish and well proportioned to the rest of her feet, which exhibited a perfect, not too high arch and not too skinny ankles. I felt a rush. Damn you, Miss Garner.

Dana noticed that I took more than a passing interest and met my generous compliment with a congenial but firm admonishment: She’d briefly dated a kooky guy who was obsessed with her feet to the point it made her uncomfortable. I don’t want nobody messing with my feet, she scoffed.

I laughed and assured her that neither she nor her feet would have problems with me.

And she didn’t. When, the following weekend, she kicked off her Donna Karan sandals on our blanket in a secluded area of Will Rogers Park, I was cool. When cuddling led to petting and kissing, the mere idea that I was in the company of a woman who performed Tom Jones’s It’s Not Unusual at karaoke with gleeful abandon was enough.

But then Dana unbuttoned my shirt and with impassioned