Travels with George, in Search of Ben Hur and Other Meanderings

Learning about Sex

Learning about Sex If I had to choose the one subject that occupied my mind more than any other after the age of ten or so, it would have to be sex. Never under this sun was there a child more ignorant of the act, the organs involved, or its marvelous potential for pleasure and fulfillment. And never was there a child who tried harder to understand. Not having a sister, and living in the country with few close neighbors, I seldom found myself around girls, except for those at school and church. Every boy I knew well had a sister, so they did not have to suffer the torment I did. What was so unfair was that they didn’t want to talk about their sisters’ private places to me. I mean, they had seen the light, and there I was crawling along in the dark looking for some glimmer. My mother was so modest about her body that, with the exception of the time I saw her naked in bed with Daddy, with nothing showing in the way of truly female equipment, I never saw anything of it beyond her face and appendages after I was old enough for my mind to record such things. She kept well-covered, indoors and out, so she could have been completely without the usual female equipment, and I would not have been the wiser. (I never saw my father’s genitals until one day in the hospital while he was dying—in some sort of delirium he yanked the sheet aside and I saw his penis flopped over like a little dead mouse.) My parents were, as I described them in the first novel I attempted, as sexless as stumps, and that is not an exaggerated simile. They never mentioned sex at all except for a blanket condemnation of any touching down there. “It’s nasty,” Mother would say. “That’s a nasty place. You ain’t sposed t’touch yourself there or touch anybody else there or let anybody else touch you there. It’s nasty.” (Nasty was the vilest word they seemed to be able to conjure to describe something bad. The way she said the word, I always got visions of sweat and “potato rows” and pus and scabs.) 144 Growing Up in Mississippi Once I challenged that admonition by asking her what about taking it out to pee, but she just said, “You know what I mean,” even when I really didn’t, because I had not made the connection yet, had not launched that rocketship to the stars. Of course I wondered just exactly what God’s punishment would be for touching yourself down there except when you unfurled it to pee. I concluded that the preacher’s warning about hell being hotter than your mother’s stove and burning you all over and forever applied in this instance too, and I winced thinking about what would get the focus of all that heat. It didn’t stop me from fooling with it, but when I was little I always felt guilty and scared when that delicious throbbing went away. I found then and still find today utterly incredible the notion of my parents making love. Yeah, I know everybody says that, but they don’t deepdown mean it—they can see it if they try hard enough and not be repulsed. I can hold my mouth every way I know and twist my mind in all directions, and drunk or stoned or dead sober I cannot fancy those two people coupled in bed or in the backseat of a car or in a hayloft or anywhere else where things like that might happen. When I walked in on them one Sunday afternoon when I was supposed to be off at the river and saw my naked mother lying on top of my naked father in their bed, there was neither sound nor motion. In fact I think that they were asleep. But something had definitely been going on. That image troubled me a long time, though they were sandwiched so tightly that I could see nothing of their private parts. Now in spite of all her silence and negativity about sex, that grand taboo, my mother did one of the strangest things I’ve ever known a woman to do: she kept all her used Kotexes in one of those mesh sacks that oranges or grapefruit come in. It hung from a nail...