CHAPTER 14 -HORMONES
My Awkward Lolita
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes
-Shakespeare, Macbeth
We kids all knew from being Catholic that sex was a sin —wrong and bad unless you were married —when it became good. But that didn't help us deal with the feelings, both physical and emotional, in our bodies.
New hormones in my brothers brought new aggressions and interests. Their physiologies turned beastly, and I clung to the tail of that wild animal.
I was 11 when Bryan climbed into the upper bunk with me at our lake house. He wanted to try the 'free love' the hippies talked about. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but it involved being naked together. That was an icky idea to me, like eating a food I didn't like. I pushed him away. His friends laughed, and that was that. Funny how something like that can define an entire life’s trajectory or not.
Pavel began to suspect something was unusual about himself when he was attracted to a male singer on T.V. At the town library, he found a book about men who wanted to have sex with men, and a new word, homosexuality, entered his vocabulary. The childhood insult 'homo' was a real thing, and he had it. Pavel slipped the book through a crack in the window, then hurried past the librarian at the checkout counter to recover it behind the bushes. If he could learn more about this condition, he'd know how to hide it.
”No, that just couldn’t be,” I said to my friend Joanne Naylor as we walked through town on a crisp New England day.
I grabbed her jacket and made her stop walking. “You’re kidding me, right? They get in bed together, and he sticks his dink in her thing? That's what my parents did to have babies? I don't believe it."
"So don't I,” she said — a Massachusetts colloquialism. “Patty said so." Joanne had an older sister who told her everything. She was proud to hold this currency of information.
"That’s what sex is."
"Gross!"
"I know! Wicked gross!" Joanne agreed.
My young mother had tried to teach me about sex by pulling me next to her in bed to read from a little booklet all about fallopian tubes, eggs, tadpoles swimming, and junk. She told me years later she had been proud of herself in that seminal moment for being so clear and modern. I got the 'when a man and a woman love each other very much' part, but I never got the insertion part.
As we approached the town library, a brick Colonial on a triangular piece of land in the town commons, we saw Ernie Wallace coming toward us. Ernie was a kid we knew from the neighborhood, a diminutive, freckled guy stuck in an awkward stage of growth that rendered his head too big for his body.
"Ernie, oh my God, do you know what sex is?"
"Sorta."
"Isn't that gross?"
I looked at the roof of the library building where Joanne and I sometimes smoked cigarettes.
"Hey, you guys wanna try it?"
