On Hickeys

It's hot hickey summer, I guess

A few weeks ago I ran into a friend of mine at the supermarket. Seconds into our conversation, I noted that she had a dark mark on the right side of her neck. It was a hickey. My gaze moved quickly along, to the oat milk brands, to the wall of beers and to the dog food on sale—finally, some good news—$9.79 a bag instead of $10.89!

Meanwhile my friend’s left hand had found its way to her neck. “You’re looking at my hickey,” she said with an embarrassed smile. I hadn’t been, but now I did look, because she was forcing me to. It was the size of a thimble and the shape of Lake Tahoe. “I have a hickey,” she said.  

“I see that,” I said. Despite my best efforts to keep my tone neutral it had a schoolmarmish crispness.  

“I was late to work this morning trying to cover it up,” she said, “Because I don’t want anyone to see it.”

I said nothing and for a while we just stood there as she circled with two fingers the violated portion of her neck. During this time I was able to recall that she was involved in a romantic situation which was somewhere between top secret and public. I happened to be in the know, but not everyone was, at least they weren’t until she showed up at SPD with a hickey. This interlude of silence became increasingly awkward (for me only though; she was in a trance brought on by having had the lights fucked out of her sometime in the last 48 hours) so that eventually I was forced to wonder aloud, “How do people even GET hickeys?”

She looked at me with sensual thoughtfulness. “From kissing,” she said dreamily, “And sucking.”  

“I know how sex works,” I said. “I’m just wondering how it is that people get hickeys and then act as if the matter were fully out of their hands, like an earthquake.”

“Ha Ha Ha,” my friend said, “An earthquake, that’s pretty funny.” I could tell she was just repeating the last word she’d heard me say. She and her hickey shuffled off to the deli, because even people who have just gotten off the night bus from Fucktown need to eat lunch.

A few nights later I said to T., “Do you think people ever give people hickeys accidentally?”

“No,” he said.

“That’s all you have to say about it?” I said. “No?”

“That’s all I have to say about it,” T. said.

A few days after that another friend of mine who had just started sleeping with someone swung by the house. She had several hickeys. “What is going on?” I said “How have I of all people woken up in the middle of a junior high dance?”

“I know, right, like, who does this?” She was only pretending to be annoyed.

We chatted for a while and I tried to forget that she was basically disfigured. Then she said, “It’s just a fling. We don’t want it to be a big thing, or for many people to know.”

“Ok,” I said, “Maybe next time instead of the hickeys you guys can hire a plane to fly over the county fair pulling a sign reading: ‘WE HAD INTERCOURSE,’ with photos.”

“When you’re having sex things just happen,” my friend explained to me, a virgin. “People just get carried away.”

Nice try, buddy, I thought, but where I come from, someone has to give the hickey, and someone has to be willing to get it. Also, as confusing as it is that people have hickeys in the first place, it is doubly confusing that they think we’re all stupid enough to believe they had nothing whatsoever to do with it—that a hickey just fell out of the sky and landed on them while they were driving to the hardware store.

Last week a friend called me up distraught. He thought the woman he was dating had said “I love you” during sex, but he couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t know how to address it. “The way I’ve come to understand things,” he said philosophically in an extremely thick southern accent, “Is that sex is largely theater.” He waited a few seconds to let this sink in before continuing. “So if she did actually say I love you, and I can’t even be sure she did, or maybe I do know that she said it and I’m just a piece of shit, but if she did, and it was during sex, I mean, wasn’t that just part of a truly extraordinary performance?”

I said I didn’t know, but that I didn’t think he was a piece of shit. “Hey,” I said suddenly, “Do you think hickeys are ever accidental?”

“What?” he said, “Who says that? What kind of horseshit is that?”

Hickeys make me think of a guy I knew in college who would smoke pot in his room, then come out and say “I was smoking pot in there, can you smell it, can you smell it?” And we were like “Yes, we can smell it.” We started referring to him as Can You Smell It, which is a way catchier nickname than you might imagine, especially if you don’t say it to someone’s face.

My friend from the supermarket came over for dinner tonight and I let her read this. She laughed, but then she regarded me seriously. “The sucking sensation feels good,” she said, “The hickey is just the cost.” 

“I’ve never had a hickey in my life!” T. shouted from our bedroom. “I never gave one, and I’m never getting one.”