So during May and June of this year I’m in New York City, as opposed to my hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, the southernmost city in the United States and a city in which one’s idea of a really wild weekend is to drive ninety miles around the island to Kona, which is exactly like Hilo except it’s not the southernmost city in the United States and has less to do. There is a depressing kind of existential humor to be found in the inevitable reaction of a car-load of people who have just arrived in Kona and remembered this. We forget it on purpose, in Hilo, because otherwise we would either go crazy or be forced to become content with an occasional lack of stimulus, and both of these things are out of the question.

Anyway I’m in New York City, staying in the Village, in the lower middle of the most incredible and exciting and permanently alive city on the planet, a place where stimulus flows like milk, and so naturally I am staying in and reading a lot. When I am not reading I wander around the city with a stubborn aimlessness borne of a strident desire to look like anything but a tourist, because I am from Hilo and the tour boats dock in Hilo and the tourists get out and wow, they’re such dorks. I do not want to look like a dork and so I just walk around New York City looking cool, leather jacket, T-shirt (medium), legitimately masticated jeans, pair of giant dorky headphones. I am trying to find “Then He Kissed Me.”

I had always been dimly aware of “Then He Kissed Me,” as one of those girl-group songs with the big drums and the sixty-three-thousand-part harmonies and the Phil Spector slather and the constant fawning use of the third-person male pronoun; in my mind it had mated and joined with “Be My Baby,” “Stop in the Name of Love,” and a dozen versions of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” But it is brought to my attention in New York when I go to a restaurant and take my headphones off and hear the tail end of it, its last harmony whistling and rattling back into the dim speakers. I remember it vaguely and I remember liking it and so I make it my business to hear it again, reasoning that if one cannot find a way of hearing “Then He Kissed Me” in New York City, one is probably never going to hear it again.

The problem is, I can’t find it. I don’t have a laptop with me so I can’t do the normal honest thing and steal it; I don’t know anyone in the city who has it on CD; and I am not willing to actually spend money on it. Eventually I am carrying on the search only out of habit, the way I always order cranberry juice in restaurants because if I don’t it will be the first time in years I have not ordered cranberry juice in a restaurant. I just don’t know why I’m doing it, or why it was special, or if it ever was.

One night I walk all the way to 54th Street under the misapprehension that I really want to see Batman Begins. It turns out that I don’t and so hours later I stumble out of the 8th Street subway station and look around desperately for a restaurant. I want to live in New York and be authentically New York and be able to talk to people who live in New York with authority and equality, so of course the restaurant I go to is Johnny Rockets, because it is a gimmicky theme restaurant founded in L.A.. It has terrific milkshakes, though. And also it has a jukebox. And on the jukebox is “Then He Kissed Me.”

I drop my nickel in. I flip the jukebox’s pages. I punch its buttons. And a few moments later, as I purse my lips around the thick red of my milkshake straw, there issues from the speakers that song for which I have been searching so long.

It has a loping, theatrical start—instruments coming in one by one, the perpetual drum roll that is the percussion section not starting until the third measure. The emotion the music most particularly suggests is one of motion, always motion, forward motion, the walking and running and limping and staggering I’d been doing around New York City for the past weeks. There is a sense, before a word is uttered, that there is a story to be told, and a hint towards the universality of that story.

Well, he walked up to me and he asked me if I wanted to dance.

Tossed off airily, offhandedly, over the rumbling procession of the music. A flashpoint, a spark, a beginning, treated like nothing at first—he looked kinda nice and so I said I might take a chance—but one that develops, in two minutes and thirty-five seconds, into one of the most perfectly summarized love affairs this side of Graham Greene, and one with the advantage, over Greene, of not being so wracked by adopted existential guilt that it is incapable of enjoying anything.

The curious thing about the song is its simultaneous inevitability and breathless uncertainty. The title, if you know it going in, gives away the entire plot from the beginning, but even if you just happen to hear it on the radio, or in a movie, or as somebody else’s jukebox choice at Johnny Rockets, you never think for a moment things are going to work out anything but well. The music is so matter-of-fact, rattling and proclamatory, that it announces itself from the first second as something optimistic, something with an ending towards which it moves voluntarily. But then there are the lyrics, with their second-guessing and speculation—I might take a chance; he looked kinda nice—that progress, as the music shifts into the second of what is like three entirely different hooks, into an ecstatic kind of surprise—turns out that when he danced he held me tight, and all that—and finally end up, as if we’re amazed to be here, with that phrase that explains and ends everything: and then (of course) he kissed me. The music ambles along underneath, unfazed. This is a song in which the lyrics discover what the music already knows.

It is, then, both in its initial discovery and in its hyperactive run-through of the remainder of the courtship—by the second verse we’re already going home to meet his mom and his dad, and at the end of the third we’ve decided to always be right by his side and the music is tumbling away—a song, realistic or not, about the discovery of optimism. We rush about on the roiling surface of life, thinking people look kinda nice, wondering if we should dance with them, taking this chance, letting that one go, wandering helplessly about New York City in pursuit of songs we don’t even really know, second-guessing everything, unable to predict the outcome of anything that will happen. But underneath there runs this inexorable current, this stacatto drumroll train that fades in when it begins and fades out, unchanged, when it ends, running always towards the success, towards the dance, towards the Johnny Rockets jukebox—towards the kiss. We can panic all we like, the song says, but eventually we’ll be at the chorus, and you know what happens then. The lyrics gasp and sigh and swoon and cry; the music looks at the lyrics and shakes its head affectionately. It is terrific stuff.

And the song fades out and I finish my milkshake, and full with the ambrosia of Johnny Rockets and the cosmic optimism of the Crystals I wander out into the New York City night, ready to go home, but thinking really that I could walk to 54th Street again, to 104th, to the Bronx, to Maine. I have to force myself to go home. And maybe, though it seems too perfect, really, it occurs to me that even in Hilo, even on those long boring weekends as we speed to the nothingness of Kona, there is purpose; perhaps we are going somewhere after all. We are flying forward, on the surf of the percussion, and in the end, after one trip, two trips, three, four, a hundred, there may be that stop and that harmony and that breath. And then she’ll kiss me.

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