The Facelicker

While I have already written about my daughter’s involvement with competitive cheerleading, my oldest son has a passion for competitive robotics. If there was ever a total opposite to a competitive cheerleading tournament, it would be a competitive robotics event. The only commonality is my inability to comprehend how either event is scored.

My understanding is that when you get into higher levels it is more sudden death battle-bots than collaborative Amazon warehouse drills. While both cheerleading and robotics are full-day endeavors, the S.T.E.M. crowd is more of my scene. The emphasis on engineering, science, and programming is needed more now than ever and I sincerely hope that programs like this continue to expand.

While I was walking by two gentlemen at the Robotics state tournament, I overheard a conversation I was unlikely to hear at a competitive cheerleading event. They were each laying out a case for which one’s offspring exhibited autodidacticism at an earlier age. “He was reading before he could walk” was a common theme. I fought the urge to downplay the achievements of their kids by telling them that my son marked his gestation by tapping out the Fibonacci sequence on my wife’s uterus.

There were a large number of attendees wearing NASA gear and robot-themed puns on shirts, but one older gentleman’s attire caught my attention. It was a T-shirt styled like college alumni gear. In arced script, it said “Facelicker” and underneath that was “Est. 1979.” For a split second, I entertained the idea of asking about the meaning and origin of his garment, but other tasks needed to be completed before we could retire to the hotel for the evening. Perhaps it was a small liberal-arts college whose primary endowment came from someone with an unfortunate surname or an obscure psychedelic jam-band. Whatever it was it would just have to remain a mystery.

The next morning at the hotel, I just happened to wander onto the elevator with the very same gentleman wearing the same shirt. Since it was just the two of us and a softball coach engrossed in his phone, I decided that there was no time like the present. I motioned toward his shirt and said, “I have to ask.”

His face lit-up with an intensity that let me know that his entire life had been leading up to this moment. Day after day he wandered the earth just begging for someone to give him a reason to tell his story and I was just the moron he had been searching for.

He set the scene for me. It was a 1979 worship service at an undisclosed denomination and he described sitting on the pew sandwiched between his wife and her best friend. His arms were around both of them when, at some point during the service, his wife leaned over to him and challenged him to suddenly turn and lick her best friend’s face.

If he had entertained any reservations about tongue-bathing another woman during the scripture reading, it was not conveyed in his recounting of events. I was fuzzy on the details of the wager itself, but whatever was at stake, he smiled broadly while bragging that he “got her from chin-to-ear” smack dab in the middle of exalting the Almighty.

At this point the third passenger, who had been absorbed in authoring a lengthy text message right up until the moment that “chin-to-ear” made its debut, looked up with what could only be described as involuntary revulsion. Unabated, Facelicker Jones chuckled as he said, “Boy, you should have seen the look on her face after I got done! At any rate, she went and had a T-shirt made to commemorate it soon after and here we are.”

There had been many scenarios floating around my head before hearing his tale, but tracing a woman’s jawline with your tongue in the name of the Lord had not been on my bingo card. As the door began opening and the softball coach all but threw himself from the elevator into the lobby, my mind swirled with questions:

How old was the shirt he was wearing and why did it not look worn at all? Did he have an entire wardrobe of these like the batsuit? What woman’s reaction to unwanted face-licking is to present the offender with a commemorative T-shirt? How did his wife feel that he continued to memorialize the moment he violated the sanctity of her friend’s neckline? Where was his wife now? Did he and the best friend get together and continue to regale strangers with their origin story? Can you imagine being out to dinner with them and stepping on that landmine? So, how did you two meet…..

Would she answer, “It was love the moment he turned away from his ex-wife during the fourth stanza of Shall We Gather at the River and baptized my jawline with his saliva. We have been inseparable ever since!”

After parting ways with him in the lobby, I found my wife and recounted the sordid tale as she valiantly attempted to continue consuming her waffle before ultimately giving up. She then made it clear that despite 22 years of marriage, when it came to Face-licking she did not think that we “were there yet.” Then, for what must have been the thousandth time in our lives, she gave me the, “This is why we do not talk to strangers” reprimand.