"The Kiss"

The kiss happened, and Milford's brain exploded gently.

To make matters worse, or better, Miss Alcott put her left hand (her right hand remained pressing against the back of his head) on Milford's right thigh, and even squeezed it, and he at once felt blood rushing in a warm torrent down to his supposed member of procreation.

"Oh, no," Milford managed to say, withdrawing his narrow lips (the only kind he had) from Miss Alcott's plump lips.

"Now what's the matter?" she said,

"Please don't be angry with me."

"I'll be angry with you if you don't tell me what the matter is."

"I have become possessed of an erection again."

"What?" she said, removing her hand from the back of his head. "Already?"

"Yes. I'm sorry."

"That was quick."

"I couldn't help it."

"I'd better stop kissing you then."

"Yes, I think so, because I feel as if I have a growing monster in my Levi's, tying to escape."

"Well, don't let him do that. This is a public place after all."

"It might help if you took your hand off my thigh."

"Oh, yes, of course," she said, and she lifted her delicate but strong hand away.

Milford sighed. This would be his twelve-thousandth and thirtieth sigh since unwillingly re-emerging from the world of dreams into that of so-called reality the previous morning.

Meanwhile the combo crashed and wailed, and a Negro voice sang:

Bang a wang dang doodle

I got a riot in my noodle

she wags her tale like a poodle

so I will bid you all toodle

toodle-oo toodle-ay

all the livelong day

just don't you lose it

anyway you choose it

'cause Grandma's got a rolling pin

and she ain't afraid to use it…

"Well," Miss Alcott said, picking her Lucky Strike up out of the ashtray, "look at it this way, Milford, at least you got your first kiss of your life out of the way."

"Yes," he said, "there is that, and I am grateful."

"May you have many more, dear boy."

"That's kind of you to say," he said. 

"Perhaps someday you will even, oh, how can I put this nicely?"

"Lose my virginity?"

"Yes. That would be nice, wouldn't it?"

"Possibly," he said. "I don't suppose, um, oh, never mind."

"What?"

"Well, at the risk of seeming presumptuous, I was wondering, hoping, daring to wonder, and to hope, if you, that you would – not that I deserve it, but nevertheless if you could possibly see your way to, to –"

"To relieve you of your virginity?"

"Yes," said Milford. "Forgive me."

"Oh, I forgive you," said Miss Alcott, exhaling a cloud of fragrant Lucky Strike smoke. "But, tell me, did you intend to mount me right here –" she tapped the polished wooden bar top with a fingernail, "on the bar, to the amusement of all these dusky-fleshed revelers here?"

"No!" said Milford. "Not at all, I meant that maybe we could go somewhere –"

"'My place or yours?'"

"Yes, although, on second thought, even though I live just a couple of blocks from here, I live with my mother – it's her house, you see – and I'm sure that if I brought a young lady home I would never hear the end of it –"

"So you'd rather go to my home, with my sisters and parents."

"Oh, it never occurred to me that you live with your family, I beg your pardon. So, uh, well, never mind, I take it all back –"

"You give up so easily."

"Yes, that is a trait of mine. I have been giving up, or trying to, since I reluctantly learned to walk."

"Maybe we could go to an hotel."

"I hadn't thought of that."

"It would have to be a respectable hotel."

"I actually know what might be considered a respectable hotel near here. The Hotel St Crispian."

"Oh, is it nice?"

"Yes, I think so. I've never actually stopped overnight there myself of course, but I have had lunch there with my mother fairly often, they have a dining room and lounge called the Prince Hal Room –"

"But won't it be frightfully embarrassing just walking up to the desk with no luggage, and asking for a room?"

"Yes, that would be awkward."

"Everyone knowing what we had in mind."

"Yes."

"And an hour or so later, after the deed is done, when we emerge from the elevator, my hair a fright, all the staff staring at us knowingly."

"I imagine they're used to it though."

"The long walk of shame across the lobby floor."

"We could stop in at the Prince Hal Room first."

"For a post-coition cocktail?"

"Well, I would only have a ginger ale, probably."

"It all seems so sordid," she said.

"It wouldn't have to be. We could think of it as romantic."

"Oh, could we?"

Milford sighed again. Number twelve-thousand and thirty-one of this long day's and night's journey to an unknown destiny.

"Oh well," he said.

"At least you got a kiss," she said.

"Yes," he said. "There's at least that."

"That's not nothing," she said.

"No," he said. "It's far from nothing."

Milford realized his fat brown reefer had gone out, and he saw no good reason not to light it up again, as the music continued to crash and roar, and all around him people laughed and shouted. 

Yes, at least he had gotten his first kiss, from a female to whom he was not related by blood. 

This was not only not nothing, but undoubtedly something.

{Please go here to read the unexpurgated "adult comix" version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}