Dear Lad,
° What did we know?
° Not much. You?
° What did we know?
° Not much. You?
§
° It startled me when I startled you by my memoir of Bussy Frisson, Kosciusko’s Designated Default Fellator back in the good old days. For I, naiflike, mentioned that Bussy, velvety blond that he was, was not only pretty cheerleaders’ first choice for a prom date, but also the Village Peckersucker; and then I added erroneously, as you shall see, that peckersuckery was all we knew could be done, ignorant as we were of assification.
° Something in that confession stupefied you at my childhood ignorance.
° And so, in case Margaret Mead comes back to life and wishes to study the savagery that was Western Civilisation back in the Good Old Days, I may as well record the data as fully as may be.
§
° When we were fiveyearold chirren, we knew what our own eyes told us (all ignorant of Epicurus as we were), and we knew what the older chirren told us:
1. We knew how to have sex, for we’d seen dogs do it; one had sex by the male’s mounting the female from the rear and pissing into her big fat beehind; we all agreed it was the grossest thing we ever heard of, and hoped we’d never have to do any such thing.
2. We knew that female dogs dripped blood on the floor from time to time, that cats yowled and prouded from time to time, that cows bulled from time to time, that--but our mothers didn’t do any of these things from time to time, so we never dreamed of such a disgrace as human menstruation.
3. Edith and I knew that if the older chirren told us to go inside a tent and strip naked, we would be sorry when they suddenly pulled the tent down. And so we were.
4. Edith and I knew that if we asked each other to sleep over, the Old Ones looked at us as if we were three weeks shy of 120 Days of Sodom.
5. I knew what "pussy" was. It was a word that authors used in chirren’s books to refer to "female housecats," but that fiveyearold giacs got their mouths washed out with soap for using in front of the darkskinned tenants.
6. And I, at five, knew all about fellatio. For after I innocently used the word "cock" for chirren’s book "rooster" in front of O---, and demanded the why of the soap, I was informed that lowerclass men sucked each others’ peepees. This was almost as gross as dogpee buttsex, and absolutely as pointlessseeming as anything I ever heard of in all my born days.
Out of the mouths of babes . . . .
§
° But what did we know at ten, as we were entering puberty?
1. Our understanding of mixedsex dogpee buttsex was entirely confirmed by N----’s eyewitness account of her mother’s having accidentally given birth to an unexpected baby while constipatedly straining on the toilet.
2. I had my first passionate crush, on a football player classmate. Next year I had my second passionate crush, on the girl who, midterm, transferred to L----------- and was expelled for dropping waterfilled rubbers from the balcony onto the basketball team.
3. We did not know where on earth B--- got enough rubbers to waste on waterballoons, for we knew only one student who possessed one--he used to show it off at dances--and only one place--an Interstate truckstop vending machine--where rubbers could be bought. God only knew what they were for, but they were certainly cool.
4. We knew that L---, now a regionally famous samesexer entrepreneur, and C---- and indeed N---- and indeed my secondcrush B---, had found a way into the elevator penthouse at Kosciusko Wesleyan, wherein was a couch, whereon they claimed they were doing IT. They claimed they liked IT.
5. We knew for sure that babies came from being married, with or without dogpee buttsex, and that no one unmarried ever could get pregnant. We dreaded marriage.
6. We boys knew that rocking one’s jeans zipper back and forth and back and forth helped relieve the tedium of Miss C-----’s schoolroom (though, according to her, it was something that only lowerclass men did, apparently like peckersucking, so of course we stopped. Bimeby we found that the zipper only got in the way.)
So we were well prepared for puberty.
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° But what did we know when we were 15, all hormoneragey and pimply?
1. We knew that prostitutes were fat and ugly, ‘cause our class prostitute, T--, was. Also, N---- and I learnt that if we called her a whore, she’d sic her pimpboyfriend on us.
2. I knew that syphilis was a bad thing, because my father was forever pointing out which of the married men in the neighbourhood had given it to their wives. And to this day, I say boldly that Syphilis is a Bad Thing. Though I stand firm with los Indios on the question of the clap.
So, yes, we were well armed for the Sexual Revolution, just bring on the dogpee buttsex!
§§§§§
° But, you will ask, what didn’t we know?
1. We didn’t know whether masturbation caused feeblemindedness and sexual dysfunction, or whether it was just a mortal sin that invariably resulted in the loss of nextday’s football game.
§
° My definitive abandonment of the doctrine of dogpee buttsex resulted from rifling through my brother’s chest of drawers and finding a What Men Must Know and a What Women Must Know that he had smuggled back from University.
° My first accurate understanding of Bussy Frisson came from Catullus, not the Iuventius poems, but the Caesarian tirades.
° While my master’s degree in Venereal Disease derived from a virally obsolete edition of Manual of Communicable Diseases, a single syphilis foto worth a million abstinence classes.
° And after that, even married dogpee buttsex seemed less gross.
° Affectionately, if not frottagily, Giac.
P. S. O yes, Bussy. He got married, sired velvety blond children, the oldest male currently being blown to smithereens in Mesopotamia.
