My sexual catechism was impossibly, achingly, embarrassingly slow. Not just slow, retarded. Retarded by a slow, lazy town. Retarded by parents who didn’t want me to know. And retarded by my own Brownerdom which precluded the sort of friends who might tell me what I should have already known. And in the late 70s and early 80s, I didn’t have the luxury of HBO or even cable.

I grew up on a farm. I saw cows piggy-backing each other throughout my childhood. But I didn’t know this was any more than bovine games. I was studious, but evidently not very observant. It’s rather hard to miss a bull’s, um, bullhood.

So in the schoolyard, in grade 5, I think, when relations were explained to me I was altogether incredulous. I suspected then, and for a long time afterwards, that it was some cruel joke the kids were playing on me. And they were just waiting for me to believe it, or, yikes, attempt it to point me out and lambaste me.

In grade 7 I took a girlfriend because it’s what 11 year old boys do. I was thoroughly and publicly rejected by my first choice. My second choice was kinder, dispensing her slow torpid rejection over a few months. For some reason, my grade 7 teacher, a woman I most thoroughly detested, read my journal aloud to the class in which I declared my intentions and my persistent love. I was heartsick and shamed while the class laughed. The next day I hated the teacher just a little more and the girl, my second choice, raced to the finish line of her inevitable rejection. But not so long after I pursued and caught my third choice, C. C. had some dermatological disorder that caused a constant flush of red in her cheeks. I didn’t mind it at all. In fact I thought it was quite charming and besides that she was sweet and dear and funny and pretty. But there was no mistaking that in the social stratus, she was firmly a freak. I didn’t mind so much. We had soda at her house. We went rollerskating often. When you’re a kid in a small town in the early 80s, rollerskating was the only scene. We would rollerskate holding hands. I didn’t particularly like that experience. I don’t know yet if it was me or her but when we held hands it was a very clammy experience. Altogether too wet for my liking. But I did it anyway.

On one Friday night, perhaps the second or third time we were out rollerskating – John Lennon singing, “I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round” – C. whispered to me, “You want to go out back.” I asked, “Out back where?” “You know, out back.” I didn’t know. Why would I want to go out back? I suppose she convinced me that it was a good idea. We went out back, behind our small town’s arena. Couples, all girls with boys, sat in the near dark, giggling and laughing, and touching. We didn’t. I twisted my foot into the dirt. And smiled, trying to look like I got the joke when I most thoroughly did not get the joke. We went back in without the giggling or the laughing or the touching. I was, after all, sexually retarded.

On another Friday night, perhaps a month or two after we had started dating, we were standing along the wall watching the skaters and sharing a drink of swamp water, sucking out of the same straw. Swamp water was a popular mix of Coke, Sprite, and Orange Fanta. It was horrid. The martini of the prepubescent. Over our swamp water, C. confessed that she had messed around with her cousin a little. I don’t remember how she put it. But I remember that it was an invitation to do something I didn’t know how to do. I knew it had something to do with that playground rumor I had heard and something, yes, to do with why the cows liked piggy-backing. I also remember thinking that it meant, if I pursued this odd ritual, that I couldn’t get her pregnant. I think I even started to ask, with more trepidation than I’ve ever asked any question, “So you can’t get…?” I remember her perplexed face. I could never tell when she blushed because she always looked like she was blushing. I don’t think she could have begun at all to understand my aborted and, what’s more, preposterous question. But, kindly, mercifully, she acted like she had and we emptied our swamp water and threw out the cup and took to the rink skating.

I think I only kissed C. once on the lips. She smelled sweet and powdery like SweetTarts. And I remember how soft everything was.

Near the end of the seventh grade, after dating for four or five months, C. had gone on a vacation with her family. The day she returned, the class was having a teacher-led meeting about some school event. Perhaps a dance or something. And when she joined the class late that day, she couldn’t find a seat. She came up to my desk and smiled at me. And I smiled to see her, whereat, abruptly, brazenly, she sat on my lap. The teacher made some joke. The class laughed.

The next day I asked a friend to break it off with her for me. I don’t know what that was. It was evidently common, as I remember, to ask a friend to break up with a girl for you. Now, it seems like a particularly nasty thing to do. In the boys’ room, my friend reported, “it is done.” And it truly was done. I don’t remember that there was ever any confrontation after that. We, C. and I, were kind if not friendly to each other in grade 8 and through high school. By high school she had got the blush out of her cheeks and, as I recall, she was very friendly with many boys.

SS