Soundtrack — A Black Music Month tribute to the songs that shaped my memories — “Kissin’ You”

“Kissin’ You” (Julian Jackson, Raphael Saadiq, Janice Johnson, Brian James) is a single off the 1996 self-titled album by New Jersey-based, American female R&B trio, Total. Released on January 17, 1996, the song reached number 12 on the US charts and number 29 in the UK. Fun Fact: The average age for young people to experience a first kiss is fifteen.

My whole life had begun to shift just as I was turning into a teenager. I had been suspended from school for the first time ever and my household was full of complete chaos, all while I was still learning my changing body. It seemed as if the walls to our barely duplex half-a-house caved in on my emotional state with every chance it got, until they all fell upon me in late winter of 1996. My mother had decided it was time to leave the only home I’d ever lived in.

“I’m fucking sick of living here,” Mommie said.

She had been a resident at 17 Saul Place for about 14 years without bother, but all of a sudden, she was ready to throw our lives in boxes and ship them off to a nearby town where we had never even visited a diner.

“But, why Edgewater Park,” I asked. “Why an apartment?”

To a kid, 17 Saul Place was a “whole” two-story house with front and back yards and a playground at the mouth of the street. My school was just on the other side of the playground and I had known all of my classmates since kindergarten. At the time I didn’t understand what was happening, but a wave of depression had taken over me. I was sad all of the time, yet wishful that my mom might change her mind about the move.

And I thought my wish had come true when about three weeks before we were set to pack up and go, Mommie and her abusive boyfriend were both carted away by officers, charged with aggravated assault. As it was very, very far from her first offense or sentence, Mommie was set to serve 30 days in county jail. I was sure this would indefinitely suspend our move, so I stopped packing.

The yellow walls seem to vibrate when the wall-hung phone rang in our kitchen.

“Hello, who’s this,” I answered.

“Hi Angel, it’s Carl.”

Carl was my brother’s best friend from high school who worked at the county jail as a Corrections Officer. Mommie had often used him to deliver messages to us when she was incarcerated. He was close enough to my family to call me by my “home name.”

“Lucy wanted me to tell you to keep packing and make sure all of the boxes are ready to go. She will be home sooner than expected,” he said.

Like clockwork, Mommie returned home on the exact day we were originally expected to depart. The short drive to the opposite end of our county didn’t even give me a chance to feel anything. All I could think about was a new school, new girls I might have to fight to show them how tough I was, a new corner store to walk to for candy and milk, a new neighborhood, and the possibility of never having friends.

Iron Gate Apartments or “IG” was a semi-gated community with mostly black residents in a primarily white town. My new school was very close by, but I had to tightrope along a busy highway to get there. I kept my head down and my hands in the pockets of my Charlotte Hornets Starter jacket.

I wasn’t so much nervous as I was displaced.

The first person I met was a brown-skinned Puerto Rican named William, who was recently separated from his girlfriend. Apparently, I was looking like an equally mixed Puerto Rican replacement. We quickly found out that we were neighbors and he agreed to meet me the next morning to show me a quicker, safer way to walk to school.

“What’s your mom’s last name,” he asked me.

The next morning, I heard my mom open the door to multiple pre-teens.

“Good morning Miss Reyes, we are here to walk with Leslie to school,” William said.

Every morning after that I walked in a pack of neighborhood kids by a smelly dumpster, through a hole in a tattered wooden fence, over uneven tree roots and uncut grass to enter the back of the school yard, crossing through the basketball courts and around to the only open entrance. To this day I am not sure how much safer the trek was, but it was certainly more entertaining. It wasn’t long before William had become my first boyfriend, giving me a tiny piece of happy in my displaced year. It also wasn’t long before he wanted to kiss me.

Music has always been a major part of my existence, as such the powers that be always made sure I had a radio or something. That year I had a small handled radio with a cassette player. Bad Boy was all the rage at the time and record after record the label continually changed the landscape of music. The group Total had taken over the airwaves with multiple hit singles and their January released song, “Kissin’ You” and its remix were still in heavy rotation as spring breeze rolled through New Jersey.

The welcoming weather had us all outside “chillin’” around our buildings. We were actually playing — some of us riding bikes in circles, tossing a semi-flattened basketball, or shooting cee-lo — but we were way too cool to call it that. My radio was blaring music as loud as it’s small frequency would allow.

When I’m with my friends
I’m trying to figure out a way
To leave ’em behind just to get back to you

“Hey,” William said reaching out for my hand.

He led me to the open stairway at his building where we sat just out of sight from our friends. And that’s where it happened. Lasting just long enough for Kima, Keisha, and Pam to finish the song’s chorus before being interrupted by a chorus of our peers screaming.

“They’re kissing!”

I suspect plenty of first kisses went that way, but maybe not many with a title track playing in the background like mine. William and I were a couple for a whole six days before our 7th grade love bloomed into friendship. He was the perfect friend during a traumatic year for me, especially when he created a diversion so my mom could escape the rage of her abusive boyfriend, or the many times he stood at my window to talk me through depressive moments, or even when we just vibed on other levels.

I moved back to my hometown less than a year later, and as young teenagers do, I lost connection with all of my “IG” friends. It wasn’t until the 2010s that I started reconnecting with the crew via social media. I found William on Facebook in February 2011. We shared laughs and good time stories through Messenger, and I told him how much his support meant to me.

That December, a post from his page read:

This post is from William’s sister.

On December 16, 2011 William was killed in an accident. He was struck by car while attempting to cross a street in Kissimmee, FL.

There are several reasons I don’t listen to “Kissin’ You.” The first is due to grown ears that now realize how bad the singing was. The other reason is William — my first kiss buried beneath both repressed memories and soil, unearthed only during selective decompression.

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah