Campus Sexpot: A Memoir

5

The facts of life as first told to me: Source: Alex Neumann, age 11 My age: 11 Place: On the roof of my clubhouse The Facts: “The man puts his thing inside the woman’s hole and goes.” I was appalled, yes, but I accepted it. I knew it would be something like this. But why? I had to ask. Why would the man piss inside the woman? Alex said, “Because it feels good.” Around this time, my father, perhaps sensing that the subject was in the air, sat me down for the big talk during an afternoon of hunting. I was eager to get his perspective. Source: Superior Court Judge Ross A. Carkeet, age 46 My age: 11 Place: Bald Mountain The Facts: “A lot of boys use a swear word for it, but I don’t want you using that word because it’s an act of love.” “It” remained hazy. My father provided even less below-the-waist detail than Dale Koby. Instead of practical knowledge, I had got5 47 ten only a strong warning about my verbal conduct, a librarian’s “shush.” During the talk, our dog frolicked near where we sat on the hill cradling our guns. My father said, “Go on, Brownie. You know all about the facts of life.” Brownie knew a lot more than I did. In high school, rumors about sex floated around campus, and I listened to them closely, drawing what conclusions I could: • When Mary Fraser got naked in Ralph Cunetto’s car, he got so excited that he threw up. • Track star Don Yaney exerted himself so much running the mile that he came into his jockstrap during a race. • Greg Theall was with a girl in his car, and she had her period all over him, and when he got home that night his father yelled from the living room, “I smell pussy!” • Eddie Tuttle and a girl at Lake Tahoe buttoned their Levi flies together and screwed that way. Precious images, to be sure, but they were mere fragments. I needed a panoramic introduction. The next possible fount of sexual truth, the public school curriculum , was bone dry. In freshman orientation, we learned about common sense in driving and heroin addiction. In a film depicting drug withdrawal, when the addict vomited into his wastebasket, the class pleaded with the teacher to run the film backwards. I was far too frightened to join in the request. I was sure that someday someone would grab me and inject me with heroin and turn me into an addict, and what then? By far, the most important mode of instruction would be the jokes I heard as a freshman on the wrestling bus, told as we motored vast distances to grope with alien youth in the Central Valley 48 towns of Oakdale, Modesto, Manteca, and Tracy. The jokes were intended to delight, not to instruct, but a young boy searching for truth will naturally draw inferences from tender narratives of the “act of love” such as these. THE JOKE: Two guys are lost and starving, and they come to a house in the woods. One says to the other, “You wait outside while I go in and see if they have any food.” He knocks on the door, and a really ugly woman opens it. He asks for some food. She says he can have all that he wants, but he’s got to fuck her first. (“Oh no,” we cried out on the bus. “How horrible!”) The guy agrees, but at the last minute he just can’t do it because she’s so ugly, so he grabs an ear of corn from a nearby plate of corn on the cob and sticks it inside her. The woman doesn’t notice. (“Right,” we thought. “She wouldn’t notice.”) The guy goes through one ear of corn after another , and he throws each one out the window when he’s done with it. The woman finally says, “Okay, you can have all the food you want.” The guy runs outside to get his friend and sees him sitting under the window patting his belly. Stripped corn cobs lie all around him. “I’m not hungry,” he says. “I’m full from all that hot, buttered corn.” (“Eww!” we cried. “Eww!”) THE LESSON: During sex, a woman emits something that is like melted butter. THE JOKE: A guy wants...