The real story behind the queen mother of all hickeys

When you spend close to 40 years in high schools — first as a student, then a teacher — you see a lot of hickeys. Or you see a lot of turtleneck shirts worn on 90-degree days, “Just because I felt like wearing one today. In fact, maybe I’ll wear one every day this week.”

But you don’t make too big a point about it, because you realize that there’s probably a perfectly innocent explanation for how somebody’s blood got sucked all the way to the tippy top of the epidermis, an explanation that has nothing to do with the sweaty, moist heat of oral passion.
Trust me. I know.

I know because of all the hickeys I have encountered in almost 40 years spent in high schools, the queen mother of them all was the one I saw staring back at me when I gazed at my stunned face in the mirror one day.

Now, before you jump to some smarmy, steamy conclusion, hold on. I can explain.

For one thing, I was married at the time — although it wasn’t my wife who gave me the hickey.

Hey, I said hold on! I saw your eyeballs bulge with gleeful anticipation when I shared that little tidbit of gossip. Hear me out.

In fact, not only was I married, but my wife and I had two young children, the youngest of them our son, Dave, who was maybe eighteen months old at the time.

Now admit it: If you went searching for hickeys, you wouldn’t focus your search in the home of a married couple so weary from chasing after a turbo-charged rug rat that they start snoring before their heads hit the pillow, would you? No, I didn’t get my humongo-hickey in the traditional way. Sad to say.

In fact, I blame our son for that behemoth blood-blemish.

It happened like this:

It was a Sunday afternoon, and all I wanted to do was lie on the couch and watch a football game. Little Dave had other ideas, though, as he scooted across the floor in search of a lamp cord to chew, or an end table that needed distressing with a wooden block.

So much undamaged furniture; so little time.

I picked him up and plunked him on my tummy, trying to convince him that the best action in the room was on the TV screen. “Hey, c’mon, pal! Catch football fever! You’ll love it!”

But no dice. He didn’t want to watch a game. He wanted to be in the game.

Some game.

Any game.

I considered it a sign of genius when I came upon a scheme that got Dave to sit still for close to an hour while I watched the game flat on my back on the couch.

He had a little Nerf basketball and a small plastic hoop with a suction cup on the back, so I stuck the suction cup onto my forehead and plunked Dave on my stomach with the ball in his hands.

He spent the next hour or so slam-dunking the ball through the hoop, bouncing it off my face with a joyous giggle each time. I provided play-by-play commentary and the roars of an adoring crowd.

Every once in a while, I had to lick the suction cup and re-attach it to my forehead, but the game held up all the way to dinner time.
And when I carried him to the kitchen, plopped him into his high chair and sat down at the table, my wife said to me, “What happened to your face?”
I went to the bathroom mirror, and there it was in the middle of my forehead — the queen mother of all suction-cup hickeys, perfectly round and so big you couldn’t hide it with a soup can.

The next day was a Monday — a school day, of course — and not even Bazooka Joe could hide a throbbing forehead-hickey by tugging up his turtleneck. My hair was too thin and short to comb over it. I had to face the music.

Oh, I invented some manly reason why I was sporting a perfect cyclopean circle on my noggin—frostbite, or soccer headers, or something like that — anything that wouldn’t leave a class giggling for the next hour, imagining how their teacher enjoyed spending Sunday afternoons watching TV with a basketball hoop suctioned to his face.

But high school kids know a bogus hickey tale when they hear one. Heck, they’ve tried them all, to no avail.

So I spent the next week or so enduring lamprey jokes, trying to make the best of it. I considered borrowing some of my wife’s eye-shadow to turn my monster hickey into a yin-yang symbol. High school kids know better than to tease a teacher about his religion.

In time the hickey healed. In still more time, kids who remembered it graduated and moved away. The hickey story could finally die, never to be reborn.
Until today.

I tell you this tale because some of you may have children or grandchildren in high school. Some of those darling teens may come home some day with a hickey too huge or too prominently placed to hide.

But don’t jump to conclusions. I’m sure they can explain. It was probably a completely innocent cause — not the sweaty, moist heat of oral passion you think it was.

After all, it’s a treacherous world out there. It may not be their fault.

They may be the victim of a drive-by hickeying.

• Author, musician, and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Con¬tact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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