My parents never told me about the birds and the bees. I can understand how they might have struggled with this. It’s an awkward conversation to have with your little “Scottyboy.” I can just see them, Mom and Dad, sitting on the couch with suspiciously stiff posture, asking me to take a seat or a sip of water or something. Just get comfortable, they’d say, we have something funny to tell you. “You see, the thing is, you didn’t actually come from a stork.”
In a way I’m glad my parents spared themselves that moment. I love them and want them to live forever and those are the kinds of conversations that snip a year or two off the end. Besides, with Madonna making her sultry splash on that new music television network, sex was becoming more ubiquitous. They could see the lipstick on the wall. It was only a matter of time before I’d figure it out on my own, which of course, I did. Everyone does. It’s just that some are a little slower on the uptake.
Take me for instance. It took a friend’s intervention in fourth grade to bring me up to speed on the logistics of childbirth. As I saw it, the doctor gives a woman a seed or pill and nine months later she’s eating macaroni and cheese and talking to her husband at the dinner table when suddenly she screams “I’m having a baby!” and they race out of the house. This is where the penis fits into the equation. At the hospital the woman strips naked and he gets a boner and slides it into her vagina hole. The baby instinctually grabs on and then he gently pulls his boner out. My friend looked at me in horror, as if I had just said the baby grabs onto the penis and is then pulled out. I was nine.
Soon after, I tried to redeem myself by spreading a juicy rumor I overheard. “Did you hear that Bon Jovi got a blowjob and now he has sperms?” My little cousin Pete hadn’t heard. We were riding in the back of his station wagon, when he called up to his parents and asked for a little clarity, “What are sperms?” Pete! Shhh. His mother’s head whipped around and she asked him to repeat the question.
“Scott said that Bon Jovi—”
NO PETE!
“That Bon Jovi what?” Aunt Mary wanted to know.
“That Bon Jovi got sperms and now has a blowjob.” Screeeeech!
The wagon skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder. A thick cloud of amber dust rose from hell, giving the sun an Apocalyptic tint. This was the eye of the storm before his father’s wrath —“Ahhhhhh.” The door swung open and an incredibly hulkish figure with veins crisscrossing his neck reached in for us. Uncle Pete, the former New York Jet looked like a green monster to me and in a single swoop yanked both of us out by our shirts. He bore down on me, Where did you hear that?, before ranting about sperms and sins and sacrilege, in no particular order. He asked if I even knew what a blowjob was, and I said no, of course, even though I was fairly certain it involved pointing a blow drier on your penis until you got sperms. Little Pete must have been nervous or scared or something because he kept asking his dad what blowjobs and sperms were. “What are you a frickin’ parrot? Get in the car!”
I know their intentions were pure, but I think the adults of my family underestimated the power of their God-guilt. That stuff, especially of the Roman Catholic strain, can really keep a child in the dark about things like lust and evolution and the joys of the jerkstick. There’s a fine line between sheltering and censoring and that line wasn’t on their map. I remember going to the movies and seeing Harry meet Sally and Sally making loud, funny, screaming noises. Mom and Dad covered my ears and eyes and whisked me out of the theater for another popcorn. Moaning like Sally was obviously a bad thing. If it were up to them, I’d glide through this world never seeing, speaking or hearing any Evil.
They won, for a long while, too. By senior year the joke in the pre-Frat circle I spun in was that even if I could get a girl in bed I wouldn’t know where to put it. Whatever. My fingers had already mapped the terrains of four different girls and my tongue even briefly swept across one carpet. And I’d seen the “Wicked Game” video enough times to know how everything lined up.
It’s not that I never had the opportunity to have sex. But if I was going to commit a mortal sin, I reckoned, it couldn’t be with just anyone. It would have to be with a girl I could marry.
Lindsay Riley, the new girl who showed up senior year, she fit the bill. She had green eyes that made Ireland look grey. And those freckles, those freckles and her puffy, puffy pillow lips. I was all church bells and bagpipes. She was laughing and laughing and exuding molten warmth, and those legs, those legs that stretched for months. Ah! It was rumored that she liked me and I liked her so I asked her out and then the fun began. We ran circles around each other for week after week and month after month, exhausting all possibilities from zero to 69. She was fun and creative and the morning after we hit that mile marker I open my locker and am surprised to find that the books on the top shelf of my locker have been cleared to make room for Barbie and Ken’s fellatio-fest. Within this devilish diorama a thought bubble dangles over Barbie’s head, “What CUMS after 69?” CUMS, of course, is capitalized and sparkling in gold glitter with three underscores in case I miss the witty pun. I’ll tell you what comes next, Marriage! This sure as shit feels like that One that all the movies and songs and soaps keep talking about. I turn to God. Since I’m going to marry this girl anyways, I tell him, it’s not that big of a deal, right?
Tonight’s the night and we’re naked and nude and tonguing in a bedroom just down the hall from where Mom and Dad sleep and pray but not tonight because they’re in the city. She tells me to put it on and I know what she means so I slide my hand under her pillow and feel for the hidden condom. I’m smiling as she rolls it on me because I think my pillow-trick is pretty clever for a virgin. She lays back and parts her long leggy legs and counts out loud – seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two – and says that she had better be screaming before she hits one-hundred. I crawl over her like they do in the Red Shoe Diaries, slowly and seductively with my eyes locked on her green green eyes, and enter her. Her puffy lips puff hot hot breath into my ear and it feels so good that I start to moan and thrust faster until she finally says, “You don’t think you’re in, do you?” I look to find myself wet humping her meat curtains.
I lie and ask her if she likes to be teased and she says yes, but only until one hundred, and starts counting again, ninety-seven, ninety-eight…. and then a voice rings out from somewhere and it’s either Brian or Ricky or one of my friends saying that I wouldn’t even know how to put it in, and I wonder if Lindsay heard it even though I know it’s only in my head. Ninety-nine, she says, but I’m distracted and rapidly losing inches and I’m really sorry, but I need to run to the bathroom.
“Hold that thought!” I shout from the bathroom floor where I’m sprawled out, desperately wanking my withered wand. The loose latex is chafing my chop and I pull off the condom. Blood slowly filters back in and I feel relieved and like a sexual beast again before good old one-eye blinks and my bellybutton fills up with white sticky failure. “One-hundred!” she shouts. I’m coming, I say, and she says you better be, not knowing that I really just did. But I’m not even hard! I silently scold God, but I’ barking up the wrong tree because by now God is in stitches. On second thought, I tell her, I think my parents might be home soon and I’d rather save it for the woods or beach or anywhere other than right down the hall from where my parents sleep and pray and probably have sex. Rain check? I suggest. We kiss and dress each other and kiss some more and I tell her that next time she can start her count at one hundred. I think this is witty and sexy until the next day when I swing open my locker to find Ken and Barbie and the promise of glittering CUM has been replaced by an origami breakup note.
Once the pain and tears recede the shame sets in. I’m impotent, I think, although I’m not sure what that means. Impotence ads always run alongside ones for balding men in the sports pages so whatever it is I know I don’t want it. These are the good old days, of course, where information still comes from libraries and television and adults, and after being ripped out of the station wagon I’m not about to ask adults any adult questions.
Before I ever open my heart again, I vow to conquer my impotence. For once, there’s a pit in my stomach that weighs more than God-guilt and I decide that I just need to get this virginity thing over with. It doesn’t matter who or where.
It ends up being with a woman named Honey. Or at least that’s what she says her name is. I find her in the Yellow Pages or the Ottawa newspaper or some publication. I’m not sure. I made a lot of calls. The first girl who showed up to my hotel room didn’t make it through the door. My brother was in the lobby screening them. When the first one walked past him, Chris called up to the room and said, “Don’t open the door unless you want your dick to go limp again.” I blew out the candles in the room and hid in the dark as the door banged, banged, banged.
I called another one and now, when the phone rings, I hear my brother say, “The beaver has landed.” I floss one more time and brush my tongue before the door knocks. I take a peek through the peephole and Oh God! she’s not 21 or firm or fit and she certainly does not look like a young Farrah Fawcett.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“How old do you want me to be?”
Twenty-fucking-one! I want to scream. But I don’t.
I don’t say much of anything, except that I’m a virgin and nervous and just testing out my engine, so to speak. She puts her finger over my lips and lays me down on my back and tells me not to worry because Honey will take care of me. She slowly, seductively peels off her clothes like they do in the Red Shoe Diaries and I want to call Chris back and tell him that I don’t want to fuck a beaver. I want a 21-year-old Farrah Fawcett, like promised.
Somehow still, blood rushes to the right place and I’m ready. She rolls me safe and I close my eyes and she pulls me inside of her and I thrust my hips. We do this for about ten minutes until Honey starts screaming like Sally and then I’m finished and smiling. Finally, at the age of eighteen, I learn about the birds and the bees from a hooker named Honey.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 3:09 PM
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