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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Inspirational
- Subject: Biography / Autobiography
- Published: 01/13/2021
Spring Awakening
Born 1955, M, from Manasquan, NJ, United States.jpeg)
If only Mr. White had been able to pronounce ‘mature’ correctly, perhaps my education regarding human reproduction would’ve been more formal. But no, mature rolled off his plump lips sounding something like ‘matoorah’, and when it did, which was every other sentence, Walter McKay and I sat in back of the class with beet red faces trying to contain our explosive laughter. Further negating Mr. White’s credibility was his toupee. Granted, hair replacement for men has come a long way since the 60’s but still, it would’ve been more convincing had he worn a coonskin hat. On that first day of sixth grade boys’ health, when Walter tapped my shoulder and I turned to see him with a handful of pencil shavings on his head mouthing the word ‘matoorah’, it was game over for the prematurely balding, verbally challenged Mr. White.
This left me mentally susceptible to wisdom expounded by my eighth grade friend from the junior varsity baseball team, Steve Gorky. He convincingly put forth the notion that masturbation causes blindness. It happened to his grandfather, he explained, shortly after coming here from the Ukraine. The old man’s eyes remained squinted shut right up till the day he was buried, and glasses did him absolutely no good since his lids refused to open! With this terrifying notion brewing in my uninformed psyche, I had nobody to validate, or better yet invalidate, this first hand experience of my older teammate. Raising my hand to ask Mr. White was out of the question, especially with Walter McKay at my back mumbling about ‘matoorah wacoons’. The best I could do was ask a somewhat bewildered Dorothy Loretta when my next eye exam would take place.
How my classmates and I stumbled onto these fascinating topics remains unclear. No one ever intentionally brought up our mutual emerging sexuality, it just seemed to organically occur. I recall hanging upside down from the top of the monkey bars with Nick Bibis when he uttered a non-sequitur about peeing on a girl’s butt to make a baby. He knew it to be true, since his older brother, Dimitre, told him. This, he explained, is why it’s so important to have separate gym classes and locker rooms. Even though obtaining consent from a girl seemed like a socially insurmountable task, the idea itself was nevertheless intriguing; in fact, any idea involving girls’ butts was intriguing, especially after hanging upside down for a while. Again without anyone to ask, Nick’s theory, like Steve’s about going blind, had to be filed in the ‘wait and see’ category. In the meantime urinating was never quite the same.
Adding to my confusion was my best friend, Reuben, who explained what a wet dream is. He learned about it in eighth grade health class and, needless to say, did not have Mr. White for a teacher. It was reassuring when he told me not to worry if I wake up one day thinking I wet the bed like a little kid, because it really isn’t pee at my age but rather sperm that makes a child. Yet I now had to fear the possibility of waking up not only blind, but with a baby in the bed as well. The connecting thread of this seemingly steady bombardment of misinformation, half truths, and outright falsehoods was an element of shame. That’s what made researching these topics or finding an adult to confidentially ask questions about them impossible.
Ultimately experience turned out to be my best teacher. It began with Jeanie Pulaski writing me such a brazenly direct, somewhat vulgar note inquiring about my sexual experiences at the start of ninth grade. That was like a test on the first day of class to see how much I knew, and when I failed, Jeanie reassured me that by the end of the year I would graduate summa cum laude.
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