Sex

I’ve had sex.  You know I’ve had it because I have a child, and that child looks like me, my wife, her family and my family.  Babies can be implanted now, and sperm donors are everywhere to be sure, but just take my word for it that the child my wife and I created was crafted using the age-old practice of sexual intercourse.

How dare I mention this?  How dare I sully my wife’s name by inferring that she is not chaste and virginal?  Well, for one thing, when the child was born, nobody started worshiping it as a Messiah from a virgin mother.  That tends to happen when people very much believe that a baby had no human father.  So I don’t think I’m spoiling anyone’s idea of our virginity.

To many, even bringing up the topic of sex is taboo.  That’s my point.  I won’t be going on and on about the ins and outs of sex.  We aren’t going to get down and dirty here.  But it is this feeling of forbidden subject matter that was the cause of much confusion when growing up and very possibly why so many problems around the subject remain today.

My sex education was odd.  I learned about boy parts and girl parts the way many kids do, bathtubs and a little harmless show-and-tell.  I had run across a magazine or two, and had peeked between fingers at inappropriate scenes of movies, but there was no “one source” that put the jumbled mess of imagery together.

Up until the fifth grade, my knowledge of sex was like a big box of Ikea furniture parts that I was slowly emptying onto the living room floor without a set of instructions.  I would think I had the basic structure figured out and then I would pull out two rods with oversized cap thingies and some kind of Allen wrench that didn’t fit into any of the holes.   Eventually I would have all the parts to jam together a couch, but it would be neither comfortable nor aesthetically pleasing.

I new that babies were somehow made using sex, that much was clear from the formula I had studied on the bathroom wall at West Ellensburg Park.   Being from Kittitas, I didn’t get out to that park very often, and when I was there, I had to split my time between the bathroom wall research and the park itself (it was hands down, the coolest park to play in that Ellensburg had to offer, with a big pirate ship wooden structure, and netting, and… I digress).

The formula above the urinal was simple: Jim + Rachel +sex = baby.  So I understood that there were three parts that created a baby.  And I pictured a young man with a t-shirt with the word “Jim” on it and a young woman woman in a slightly better cut t-shirt with “Rachel” written on it, sitting in a plain, well lit room.  On another chair, the word “Sex” sits, spelled out in large three-dimensional block letters.  Then a small puff of smoke erupts on the tiled floor in the middle of the triangle of chairs and a small, diapered baby appears.   Something about that just didn’t seem right.

TSo I scanned the raunchy glyphs around the other disgusting stalls—disgusting in both filthy writing and just plain filth.  I found another interesting etching:  Jenny and Pete are doin’ it.  Beneath that line, with an arrow from “it” in permanent marker was a side drawing of a naked woman with a large protruding belly.  Another, smaller arrow pointed to the belly with the words “baby in there.”

I began doing sexual algebra, solving for the unknown.  Babies came from a boy and a girl with sex.  But babies also came from a boy and a girl “doin’ it.”  The boy, the baby and the girl were all constants, which meant that sex must equal “doin’ it.”  Therefore sex wasn’t a word that just sat in a room making babies.  When sex made a baby, it was some kind of verb, something that was done.  If a boy and a girl do sex, then a baby is drawn inside Jenny’s naked body.  NO!  A baby happens.  That is all.  Babies aren’t cartoons, babies are little people.  I had decoded the mystery.  West Ellensburg Park’s poorly maintained restroom was my repugnant Rosetta Stone.

I had finally put together a major part to a puzzle.  It was frustrating being a kid, wanting to know the answers to questions that parents were too embarrassed to answer.  It was as if the answers to all my sex questions were all around me yet invisible to my mind.  As if sex was everywhere but vanishing whenever questioned—like racism.

Before my formal sex education, I knew only that sex occurred between a man and a woman to make a baby.  Sex required some nudity, some kind of gyrating or thrusting and all this was done during the highly distracting and newly intriguing act of kissing.  I also knew that I liked boobs.

Other than the breast thing and sex being a possible way to access one, or possibly two breasts, I didn’t see the appeal.  I gave up finding out much more, and when the subject came up, I just took the opinion of whoever was talking about it.  I would just nod, or agree that sex was probably pretty good, and that I would probably have sex sometime and have a baby too.  But I wanted neither.  Agreeing just became a way to move the subject along to throwing stars or comic books.

When the time finally came to find out what all the fuss was about, I was ready to fill in the gaps and put this question to rest once and for all.  Permission slips were sent home explaining that we were about to experience sex education, as only a small conservative town could teach it.  And on the off chance that you didn’t want your child to go to hell for viewing what the state deemed necessary to teach, you had the right to keep your child from attending the class.

It was a sunny day at Kittitas Elementary School when all the children were brought inside by the afternoon bell affixed to the charmingly old brick building that housed grades three through six.  The lunch recess discussion of the rest of the day’s schedule had been a flurry of wild speculation.  All the fifth and sixth grade boys and girls would be split up into different rooms.  The girls would be taught by the female teacher’s and the boys would be taught by the one male teacher the elementary school had, Mr. Fields.

By all accounts Dick Fields was a very good man.  He was stern, but fair.  He was kind to the students but didn’t take any crap, and you had best not offer Mr. Fields any crap, because he would simply handle your situation in a way that would make you uncomfortable and never want to do such a thing again.  He was good at his job of teaching a split fifth and sixth grade class of boys and girls.  He was organized, alert and capable of reaching different students with different needs of instruction.  I feel lucky to have had him for a teacher.

My first indication of how Mr. Fields would be at teaching sex education came the morning of the day the afternoon class was to take place.  A girl raised her hand and simply asked if Mr. Fields if he would be teaching her about sex today or would it be a woman.  Everyone perked up to hear the answer because it was a hot topic.  Mr. Fields however, did not perk up.  He perked down.  He looked as if he was about to swallow his tongue and faint right there on the stool he used to address the class with.  Because the other thing Mr. Fields was, was religious.

I had been fairly confident that all my unanswered questions would be crossed off my list that day, but after seeing Mr. Fields reaction to the mere mentioning of sex, I knew that these answers would not come easy, not easy at all.

But on the other hand, Mr. Fields had like five or six kids.  A man like that had to know a thing or two about the birds and the bees.  Thinking back on it now, with all my knowledge of the subject, the only way Mr. Fields couldn’t have the sexual know-how to make five or six children would be that all the children happened by pure chance.  Each child would therefore have needed to have been conceived by incredibly complicated physical accidents inside unbelievably unlikely vortexes of happenstance surrounding both Mr. Fields and his wife, the mother of his children.    He knew about the sex.  He knew plenty about sex but didn’t feel comfortable telling us any of it.

Now it was time for us to receive this knowledge of life-giving sin that was so hotly debated over.  All the boys from the fifth and sixth grades began to file into the old classroom to take seats on the floor, extra desks, the unused radiators or at the seats around the reading tables.  There was a film projector set up in the center of the room with no film in the “ready” position.  All the boys looked around at each other, nervously tapping pencils.

I looked over at my friend Dave, who caught my eye and shrugged.  He looked back at me confidently and gave me the thumbs up, looking like he had been “doin’ it” for years now and he was proud to see his friend finally getting up to speed.  Was it meant to be reassuring?  Was he just putting on a brave face to pump himself up?  Or did Dave possibly have several babies of his own that he wasn’t telling anyone about?

Mr. Fields stood nervously by the door to the classroom, behind two large filing cabinets that shielded him from the rest of the eager audience.  Many of us could see him fidgeting a little, as if he were waiting for something.  It was now one o’clock in the afternoon and he had two hours to pack our heads full of sexual knowledge.  Then it was five after, five minutes later, ten after.  The silent mob was growing internally restless.

The embarrassment in the room was so thick, it was approaching measurable viscosity.  We were at pre-Jell-O levels.  The guilt, shame and general nervous tension in the room was so strong that it would have impeded anyone attempting to flee the room.  The entire class jumped at the sharp two wraps against the classroom door.

Mr. Fields slipped out of the room to address the person who had knocked.  It was another teacher from down the hall where the girl’s class was being held.

“What?!?!” we all heard Mr. Fields exclaim loudly only seconds after stepping outside the door.  Then there was a muffled moan, followed by Mr. Fields stepping back in the classroom and shutting the door.

He took a moment, a solid moment to compose himself.  It didn’t work.  When he finally raised his head to speak, he looked both defeated and as if we were all pointing pistols at him; it was a very complicated facial expression.

“Uh,” Mr. fields began slowly, “the film didn’t come.”  He said it in a way that made me think it was a statement he was repeating to grasp the idea himself rather than to announce it to us.  He looked at the projector and then remembered he was standing in front of about fifty pre-teen boys that needed to know what the hell was about to happen to their bodies, and more importantly, what was going to happen to the bodies of the girls just down the hall.

Mr. Fields, now faced with the very real idea that he would have to walk us all through a subject that he not only didn’t want to talk about but that he believed should not talk about, took a step over to the clean, unmarked slate blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk.   He raised it to the board and touched it to the blackboard.  It looked as if upon contact of the chalk and board, about 400 volts of electricity went through him.  Not the way people on television get shocked, with the flailing and the screaming, but the way someone really gets electrocuted.  The body spasms a little but hunches in on itself quietly.  It looked as if Mr. Fields may have had a small seizure.  He looked up at the board, chalk still resting on the same white, powdery dot that it had been.  He swiveled his head to all of us slowly.  He just needed to write or draw that first thing to get the ball rolling.

Was he about to draw Jenny, with a baby in her belly?  Would the rendering be better/worse/equal to the drawing at West Ellensburg Park?  Or—would the drawing reveal that Mr. Fields was the artist behind the graffiti-gossip message on the dented wall of stall number two?  That was probably a stretch.

It would have been amazing if Mr. Fields had just sucked it up and drew a large cut-away view of a penis and then, next to it, a detailed rendering of a vagina, labeling each area and then gave us a hint at how they connected.  But clearly, that idea was going through his head too and he hastily removed the chalk from the blackboard.

“Does anyone have any questions?” He asked hoping that he had a classroom full of cowards or know-it-alls.  I waited to see if anyone else was going to ask a question, hoping my question would be asked before I had to ask it.  I had about fifteen questions, fifteen, fifteen part questions.  But I looked around the room waiting for someone to ask them for me.  Time felt like it was moving backwards.  I saw the clock on the wall’s minute hand jump back a notch and just stay there.  We all just hung there,  wanting anything to happen, it stayed stone quiet, with nobody breathing too loud, as if an old batch of nitro-glycerin was about to be upset and explode.  It appeared Mr. Fields was about to win our little Sex-Ed standoff—until Kenny Paul raised his hand.

Mr. Fields was terrified.  The rest of us were relieved.  Finally, we were about to get some hot, sexy info courtesy of Kenny “I-talk-about-sexy-things” Paul.  (Before this, he was known as Kenny “I-once-walked-into-the-ocean-in-my-cowboy-boots” Paul.   This new nickname was a blindingly better moniker.)  Mr. Fields called on Kenny with a slight gulp in his throat.

“When a lady has her period, is that the same as a cow going into heat?” Kenny asked in his fake southern accent.

“No,” said Mr. Fields quickly and then scanned the room for other hands, “No other questions?”  He gave half of a beat and then brought his hands together quickly in a very satisfied clap.  “Excellent!  Looks like we’re done a bit early, let’s go play some baseball.”

As much as we all wanted to learn about sex and lady parts and the mysteries of our bodies, sitting in that classroom was like sitting in a pressure cooker.  Nobody complained.  Nobody laughed.  Nobody said a word.  We all simply rose from our seats in unison and filed out the door and onto the baseball diamond for an hour-and-a-half of something we all understood just fine.

As for sex, I just resigned myself to the idea that it was probably going to be something I would really like later and that it would be just another thing for me to mess up and be lousy at.   That summer, I was able to cross off most of my questions by piecing together clues from Three’s Company episodes and an errant partial viewing of Porky’s for which I was punished.

Eventually views lightened up and I was instructed properly on where babies came from and the how’s and the why’s.  It wasn’t nearly as complicated as I had made it out to be in my head—until I started having it, and that’s the Damm truth.