50. Irish Catholic Sex (1 of 2)

I’d say I had an ordinary childhood.  I dated girls, got drunk on occasion and eventually became a contemplative monk.  I’m not saying all my brothers traveled the same route as me.  Some of them never came closer to sex than Playboy magazine, that staple of  young manhood that taught us what women really looked like with their clothes off.  Really.

In truth, I didn’t get much closer than “girlie magazines” myself.  Sex wasn’t a permissible  topic in our Irish Catholic home when I was growing up in the 1950’s.  No one in my memory ever brought it up.   Anything that even smacked of it was quickly squashed.  I remember my father turning off the car radio one Sunday afternoon when Peggy Lee began to sing “Fever! ….  Fever all through the night!”

In fact, I first came across the three letter  word as a youngster while completing an application for a free Polio shot at the old  Health Clinic a few blocks from the business district of my home town.   There was a fill-in  line on the application that read simply, “Sex”.   I looked at the woman clerk across the counter from me and pointing to the line on my card said, “I don’t get this.”  Not realizing what I meant, she laughed and said, “Neither do I !”  Then, seeing my confusion, she leaned forward and  said in a whisper, “It means whether you’re a girl or a boy.  Put down an M.”   I didn’t know how  an “M” could mean boy, but  I did as I was told.

Now, you may think me a bit slow, but I was a newspaper-reading 9 year old holding  the second highest grade average in my class at school.  So you can imagine how little the word “sex” was actually seen or used at that time in America.  Desi and Lucy slept in separate beds on their TV show.  In any Hollywood-style passionate kiss,  the camera faded to black if the couple tilted over more than 35 degrees from the vertical, 25 degrees if they were in a bedroom, even if they were standing up and the beds were made.   Just reading the movie titles in the Legion of Decency’s  C category (for Condemned!)  was good for a little quiet titillation.

Since many of us wouldn’t be here without  sex being easy and instinctual,  it is unsurprising that even when young we were excited about it, sought it in one form or another and yet didn’t know anything about it.  Not exactly. 

A few years later on a Friday night toward the end of seventh grade, my boyhood friend George and I got dressed up in shirts and ties (pink and charcoal)  and walked from our neighborhood to our first dance.  Each year a group of girls called the Children of Mary put on a dance at our Catholic school.  Seventh and Eight grade students were invited.

Standing on the sidelines,  I was unable to bring myself to ask any girl to dance. I was telling myself yet another imaginary reason why I had come here … to write a story on the dance for the school newspaper, to count the missing light bulbs in the ceiling while on special assignment from the janitor …  when a girl I’ll always remember came up and asked me to dance.   I was so elated to have the “male burden” of having to ask pass from my shoulders that I almost sighed audibly.   Her was name was Maureen. She wasn’t the prettiest girl in my class at school and she was an inch taller than me,  but  we marched out onto the dance floor and I was glad I had practiced a step my mother called  the Foxtrot, first with myself and then the previous afternoon with George’s older sister, who smelled strongly of  chewing gum and Clorox as we leadenly stepped through our drill while standing 3 feet apart.

So that night I put my 13 year old arms around Maureen and we danced … sort of.   The first thing I noticed was that she was warm.  Like a really nice kind of warm.  I could smell a little perspiration from her neck along with a flowery perfume that  smelled delicious.  She didn’t seem to be the same Maureen I saw daily in class chewing on her pencil and lost in her roomy school uniform.  This Maureen had boobs!   They were pointing right at me and I was trying to keep my distance from them.  I must have looked like I was either leaning back from the edge of a cliff or afraid she was going to rub something off on my new tie.

Years later I realized that Maureen was the first person in the world I had ever put my arms around.  Oh sure, my mother put her arms around me, but I was a man before I embraced her in a hug.  And I certainly never put my arms around George!  He would have knee’d me.  Putting my arms around Maureen was an intimate thing, really, even though it is often treated  as commonplace.  We come into each other’s space, get a whiff of each other’s aroma and feel the warmth if we linger a moment. It’s bound to leave an impression the first time.

Of course, more sex was on the way … sort of  … when I entered the whirlwind of catechism and hormones that defined  our local Catholic High School.  Here the boys and girls were regarded as little sinners on their way to becoming bigger sinners, unless they had a 95+ grade average and could bring honor (and donations) to the school.     Continued.


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