MY
JOURNEY THROUGH THE PLANT WORLD
a
novel of sexual initiation
by D. Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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All
flesh is grass, and all the goodliness
thereof is as the flower of the field.
— Isaiah 40:6
Part
I
____________
1
MY ONLY problem with sex is that it’s always so unexpected. I don’t mean that it occurs unexpectedly (which is sometimes true), or that the particular way in which it happens is not what I expect (which is nearly always true). I mean that the very nature of sex is a big surprise.
For example: When a person gets to know someone by talking to her face for hours, does that really prepare him for how her genitals will look? For that matter, does having seen genitals before really prepare a person for how genitals will look the next time? Not for me — and this is still true at age thirty-five, with eighteen-plus years of experience to season my grasp on the graphic facts of life . . .
Oh, Christ. Now that I’ve actually started, I’m even more uneasy about this. But June has been hounding me for weeks to start some kind of journal. The other day she said that my everyday malaise — the all-pervading boredom of my life — is “symptomatic of an inner chaos of psychic forces.”
“What psychic forces?” I asked dumbly, like I still didn’t get that kind of lingo after listening to her for three years, and she said:
“Grief, guilt, sexual sadness, all those things we’ve been talking about. We’re going round in circles because you’re expecting me to sort things out for you. You’ve led me to believe you have some writing aptitude, Randall. Now I’d like you to use it on your own behalf.”
“But, doc,” I replied helplessly, knowing that June resents all references to her academic credentials, “where would I start?”
“Start with sex,” she said so directly that I flinched. “In fact,” she continued with growing certainty, “let’s start with your sexual history, going all the way back, as early as you can remember having any sexual feeling or perception. You’re carrying a lot of sexual anxiety that you need to sort out. You need to know what’s past and what’s present, for one thing, and you don’t know that right now. It’s all happening at once in your head. So . . . Good. Let’s try that, all right?”
Instead of answering right away I looked at the top of June’s head, where her hair is both caramel and gray, and wondered why I felt like a twelve-year-old told to wash a heaping mountain of dishes from the grown-ups’ dinner party. I wanted to say, “That’s not fair!” Instead I whispered quizzically, “Let’s?”
So here I sit, facing the computer screen with the kind of foreboding I used to feel when facing inventory in my first store — only much worse. How does one inventory the contents of a personal Pandora’s box, after all? But I think I’m on to something already, this thing about the nature of sex. Maybe the whole problem of sex is nature itself!
Because the truth is that lowering my attention to the sexual territory of the body is like dropping out of human civilization, and down into the world of plants. Seeds, shoots, blooms, roots, juices — it’s all organic down there, raw and unsocialized. All our romantic ideals about sex are like flowers sliced at the stalk, prissily displayed rootless and truthless in cut-glass vases. The damp soil upon which real sex feeds is too, well, earthy for most people to contend with. And that’s why they’re never prepared for what happens next with sex.
IN
THE year 1971 — when I was in the sixth grade — I was certainly
unprepared for what would happen next, but at least I could have
pleaded ignorance. After all, what was about to happen was my very
first sexual experience. It was subtle compared to adult situations,
but oh-so-unsettling — and it set up my lifelong pattern of
feeling behind the beat, always playing catch-up to females seemingly
more in-the-know about sexual mysteries.
It was the year before, the fifth grade, when I first met girls who were smarter than I. This was a profound shock, but administered early enough in my life to allow me time to recover without developing macho defenses. (At least, I like to think I’ve recovered.) Intellectually, I was treading water already; I’d mastered the most difficult books in the school library the year before, and spent most of my time since gloating over effortless spelling bee victories and getting heavily into stamp collecting. Beyond a nerdy coterie of fellow philatelists, all male of course, I didn’t socialize much with my peers in our semi-rural Georgia neighborhood. To most of them, being bookish was tantamount to being Martian.
My professor father, a social climber at Emory, didn’t like my increasingly superior attitude toward education. He tightened the family budget sufficiently to send me to a private academy an hour’s commute away from home, on the other side of Atlanta. The change eventually cost my sister Carolyn, who was fifteen when I was twelve, her riding lessons.
But my father was academically biased. After all, Carolyn was a mediocre performer at school, and I was possibly an unrecognized genius moldering away in my room, plastering the four walls with hundreds of letterless envelopes bearing First Day of Issue cancellations. The blanketing effect of this decor frightened my mother, so she readily seconded my father’s decision to place me in a more challenging academic environment.
Challenging hardly did the place justice. At Country Day I was an ordinary middle-class scrabbler trying to solicit dollops of attention from “professional educators” (not mere teachers, mind you) more attuned to the well-oiled manners of the school’s Ivy League-bound majority. My first year there I floundered about in the panicky loneliness of feeling inferior, barely squeaking by with a B-minus average. My parents had to come in for a long conference to discuss “the most pragmatic course for Randall’s academic future,” to quote the principal’s condescending letter at year-end — the most pragmatic course turning out to be summer school that would “equalize my opportunities” with those of my more fortunate peers. That was when Carolyn had to say so-long to Mariah, her favorite at the stables, and take a couple of long walks with Mom in order to find a way to speak to me again.
But summer school didn’t bring me up to par; JoEllen Jones did. JoEllen Jones was a miracle delivered to me at Country Day in my second year. Like my father and mother, her parents were overextending themselves on behalf of her brilliance. She was a natural-born writer who had won an Atlanta Constitution essay contest for young people during that year I was being cut down to size in private school. (I remember looking forlornly at the essay contest rules in the paper, too deep in shock over a failed geometry test to imagine actually competing.) JoEllen’s piece had accidentally been transferred from the 9-12 age group into the high schoolers’ competition, and she beat them all.
JoEllen was middle-class and lived on our side of town, but she came to Country Day as a minor celebrity. When our two sets of parents discovered in the first week of school that we lived only a few miles apart, they began taking us to school together in alternating family cars.
Suddenly I had an ally who was a star — and I pretty much hitched my wagon to her. JoEllen became my living, breathing crib sheet, my warm-blooded abacus, my arts & crafts muse. I shamelessly took advantage of her friendship in order to equalize my opportunities at Country Day. At that age, it wasn’t a scheme on my part — it just happened out of sheer necessity. But as JoEllen would tell me later in high school, we inadvertently struck a fair deal — because poor little JoEllen had no other friends. She had suffered socially at public school even worse than I, because little Southern girls were neither encouraged nor expected to be quite so frighteningly smart. Hence I was the first kid, male or female, to be her real true pal.
Actually, what JoEllen would tell me in high school was that she had loved me — desperately — way back in the sixth grade. Could that have been true? The notion of desperate love was only dawning on me at age sixteen, so it’s just as well that I was completely oblivious to it at age twelve. I was likewise oblivious to JoEllen’s precocious physical development until the very end of the sixth grade. What I mean is that she had noticeable breasts and very round hips at twelve years of age, and she already walked in a rhumba-like fashion that would later make her the butt — so to speak — of crude jokes among our adolescent peers.
Anyway, back on the cusp of adolescence, I was getting along swimmingly at Country Day as my second year there came to an end, all thanks to JoEllen. I guess we were pipsqueak valedictorians or something, because we were chosen to present twin graduation speeches before an assembly of the entire school. JoEllen’s mom was a former actress — “a bit of a tart” in my mother’s stern appraisal — and she dressed up JoEllen that memorable day in a flaming red, low-cut party dress and patterned sheer stockings. (Perhaps I’m not recalling this with total accuracy, but the past I must deal with is the past I remember.)
SO
OUT comes JoEllen, stage left, onto the purple velvet-draped Country
Day auditorium stage, amidst a swell of admiring — or scandalized?
— parental murmurs and some giggling among our peers. I was
already standing on the other side of the stage, nervously running
over the beginning of my three-minute oration in my mind. I had
learned in rehearsals that remembering the whole speech depended upon
recalling the beginning. After the first hellish thirty seconds I was
always okay.
But this was not another rehearsal. This was IT, a pass-fail test if ever there was one, and I felt weak-kneed, weak in the bladder, and far too weakly prepared for such a public demonstration of my savoir-faire. As the auditorium quieted and it became obvious that one of us on stage was supposed to do something, I desperately wished that I was back in my room poring over tiny, engraved squares of adhesive paper. In fact, I was so stage-struck that I wasn’t quite sure of where I was. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps if I shut my eyes tight enough, I could be magically transported to some other world, anywhere away from the awful test about to take place in this one.
Instead, by the grace of God, I cast a sidelong glance across the stage and saw JoEllen smiling ever so kindly at me. This reminded me that I was supposed to repeat my part of the oratorical duet JoEllen and I had been practicing in this very hall for weeks. Okay, I thought, I can do that. I turned away from JoEllen, my life-support system, and toward the soulless mike thrusting toward my face from atop its skinny silver spine, and bellowed the title of my speech:
“The Golden Opportunities of Youth!”
On the last, over-emphasized word my voice cracked for the first time ever — what a moment for puberty to announce its onset! — and something about the squeaky-booming timbre of my voice caused the PA system to have a major feedback crisis. A hair-raising mechanical howl went through the room, causing adults to cover their ears and a couple of infants to howl back, like little dogs, and causing Mrs. Smyth-Fifer, our amateur stage manager, to rush out and fumble with the microphone. I stared dumbly at her as she scurried back into the wings and frantically turned knobs on something back there. I kept staring until she turned her face toward me, half-obscured in the darkness of the wings, and theatrically flashed me a big “OK” sign with her right hand.
With fake professional aplomb, I turned back with a big bright smile to the audience — now edgy and justifiably fearful of what might next be done to them — and promptly forgot my speech.
Never before had I known that time could stop like that! . . . that a glacial eternity could interrupt the normal course of one’s life and bring the crushing suggestion of death — no, not death, but an endless dying — so terrifyingly near. Like an antediluvian fly snagged on a glob of tree sap, I felt irretrievably trapped in a gluey ether of stupidity. All I can remember from this public display of dumbness was fixing my eyes upon a thin Chinese gentleman in the front row of the audience and thinking, Who is that!? I couldn’t recall any Oriental classmates, and this fellow’s etched prominence among a sea of bemused Caucasian faces was clear evidence of a rip in the fabric of the universe, admitting an alien anomaly into this mundane Southern school auditorium.
Then I realized that this fellow’s face reminded me of Chiang Kai-Shek on one of my stamps. I was mentally attempting to confirm this identification when JoEllen’s sweet voice broke the silence, filling the hall with light, order, and salvation:
“Never before have young people faced a future so bright with possibilities!”
I turned like a doll on a music box and looked at JoEllen as if she had just handed me a pb&j sandwich back at her house. “What?” I mouthed silently across the cavernous stage, desperately wanting to be at her side, and not only because I was in trouble. There was something odd, novel, and heated in the feeling, something that had slipped in through the new fracture in my voice. JoEllen grinned warmly but urgently at me and leaned closer into her microphone.
“Never . . . before . . . have . . . young . . .” she intoned patiently, as if she had taken on the task of teaching English to the toddlers in the audience.
It was the first line of my speech! In the same instant that I realized JoEllen was prompting me, I realized that she had probably memorized my entire speech along with hers, and would selflessly recite it and let me take the bows if a full-scale intervention proved necessary. I was so grateful for this rescue that tears sprang to my eyes as I picked up the latter half of my deathless opener — “future so bright with possibilities!” — and I have no doubt that I finished my speech in the most impassioned manner that a sixth-grader has ever delivered such a sentimental mash of parentally incited homilies.
JoEllen followed with a faultless delivery of her own address — “How Young Women Are Changing the World” — and the applause was so lengthy and deafening that Mrs. Smyth-Fifer broke into a wild antic of arm-waving in the wings, the message being that JoEllen and I should take a bow together. I was slow on the uptake, so JoEllen came over, took me by the hand, and led me to center stage where I followed her lead of bending at the waist and bobbing up and down a few times.
It was during the downs of this up-and-down motion that I first noticed JoEllen’s shapely calves, sheer and shadowy in those grown-up stockings. Somehow it hit me that these sensual lengths of flesh were magically congruent — not to mention intimately connected — to the rest of her precocious form. This abrupt recognition of JoEllen’s physicality is what I consider to be my very first sexual initiation. That, and the sensation of a squishy electricity passing between our sweaty, hot little palms.
I wonder to this day what was going through JoEllen’s mind at that moment. I never did confess to her that I first lusted for her, inchoately to be sure, at that peak moment. I do know that my hand ached for the rest of the day, she had squeezed it so hard. Perhaps that’s because she was really in love with me already — being ahead of the curve on so many other counts — and somehow she also knew what was going to happen next. Because that near-apocalyptic, peculiarly sensual day was the last time I would see JoEllen for four years. Our two families went out to a festive Chinese dinner that night (I suspected the weird, lingering influence of Chiang Kai-Shek), and agreed that JoEllen and I should remain the best of friends over the summer. It’s even possible that our folks were trying to set us up for the future — what a dream couple, after all!
But the very next day my father received the crushing news that he was not going to get tenure at Emory. In a huff he quit the university entirely, spending the next several weeks initiating his drinking problem. Private school was off, our summer vacation was off, my mother’s long-standing art lessons were off. The whole Kendricks family sank into an ugly funk, with the notable exception of yours truly. For all I could think was that I could spend the rest of my life gleefully collecting First Days, with only the minor interruptions of high school and college somewhere off in the vague future. Plus: I would be free of the intense, mixed-up feelings I was having about JoEllen Jones.
Because
along with my novel lust, I felt a disturbing resentment of my girl
savior, who was so smart and collected that she remembered my speech
in front of the whole school when I couldn’t. With everything else
that was going on, I guess that’s why I never called her again.
JoEllen would tell me later that she called several times in the week
following our speeches, but
I neatly avoided picking up the
phone. My dad was too drunk to answer, and Carolyn seldom took
messages for anyone, especially not her smart-ass little brother. My
mother did call me to the phone once. My response was to light out
the front door for the woods, the only haven that felt safer than the
little world of my room.
2
NEEDLESS to say I was stunned when, on the first day of high school four years later, I nearly ran over JoEllen Jones while hustling to my orientation class.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted artlessly, at which JoEllen blushed and demurely lowered her eyes to the floor of the crowded, noisy hallway.
“Hi, Randall.” she said softly.
I felt like a total jerk. “Yeah, hi, I mean.”
“My dad died this summer,” JoEllen said with adult seriousness, raising and locking her large, deep green eyes onto mine. “I had a scholarship to a prep school in Massachusetts, but . . .”
“Oh, wow,” I interjected, trying to sound suitably mournful but feeling up to my knees in a sea of fifteen-year-old shallowness.
“. . . my mom needs me at home for a while,” JoEllen finished, her eyes tearing slightly. Then, at completely the wrong moment, I noticed that she was drop-dead gorgeous, with the sixth-grade promises of her womanly sensuality already fulfilled. Her face was round and intelligently angelic, lit with a healthy glow, and skillfully highlighted with make-up that I naively took to be her natural colors. Scanning down her body with doubtless obviousness, I noticed that JoEllen’s breasts seemed ready to emerge at any moment through the violently stretched fabric of a white cotton turtleneck. Daringly enough for a Georgia high school sophomore, she was wearing very tight jeans with an oversized, shiny black belt around her waist. Her thick brown hair was pulled back into a generous ponytail. In a uniquely JoEllenish touch, she had a pair of mod sunglasses perched atop her head.
She looked, in short, like a precocious Gloria Steinem, which wasn’t far off the mark. After all, she had spent three more years in the accelerated liberal social atmosphere of Country Day after I departed. Hence she was well on her way to becoming one of the “young women changing the world” she had once spoken about so eloquently. Or so it seemed at the time.
Do I have to confess that I was in love from that day forward? The old resentment peeled off from my memories like a brown and wasted leaf; all I could recall was that JoEllen was the smartest girl I had ever known. Now she was also clearly the sexiest, a word I delighted in conjugating to myself while riding the bus home in the afternoons, whenever I took a break from reading JoEllen’s spirited letters. I guess she’d forgiven my grade-school disappearing act immediately — because she wrote me the first note, sharing some silly joke that was going around school, the day after we ran into each other.
Soon she was writing to me all day long, as we had hardly any classes together. She always finished off her quizzes and assignments wickedly fast, leaving her with time on her hands. Before her mom picked her up every day, JoEllen ran breathlessly to me and delivered that day’s thoughts. I answered her in my own hand almost every night — though never as prolifically — and gave her my letters in the morning. We always met by the school store and stood there, hardly speaking a word, sometimes holding hands if it wasn’t too obvious, while she read what I had written. As I remember, it was a very literary affair.
I
knew JoEllen was the sexiest of the girls because my pals in the
stamp club, often lunching informally in a library conference room,
never let me forget it. “JoEllen Jones — oooo-wee!”
they would hoot at every opportunity, one or two of them launching
into a raunchy rendition of
her hip-swinging walk. I was secretly
pleased, although I always acted embarrassed and would start punching
the guys to get them to stop making fun of my beloved.
“My beloved” was something else I would repeat to myself on the bus. I even used it in my letters a few times, but the words girlfriend and boyfriend made me nervous. All the other kids had girlfriends or boyfriends. I saw JoEllen and myself, intellectual overachievers as we were, as somehow above all that — the gossip, the intrigues, the dating.
In fact we didn’t date. JoEllen’s mother was traumatized by the recent disaster in her life, leaving her with JoEllen and a younger son to raise alone. She worked nights and weekends, which meant JoEllen was babysitting whenever she wasn’t studying. About twice a week we talked by phone at night, for hours, until my mother put a limit on us.
“You’re entirely too young to be so wrapped up with a girl this way, even if it’s that smart JoEllen Jones,” my mother would say after I hung up the phone at her stage-whispered insistence. Thus she skillfully managed to make me feel that my personal immaturity was the only thing standing in the way of a full-blown, passionate romance with my beloved.
But I suspected it wasn’t really my immaturity that was the problem; it was Carolyn’s. Tired of competing for attention, my crabby sister had done what I could never do: gotten pregnant at the tender age of nineteen and eloped with her seedy, carrot-headed boyfriend Cody. Now the two of them were living in the more-or-less remodeled garage while my father forlornly watched his aging, baby-blue Aston-Martin deteriorate rapidly in the Georgia sun, rain, and hail.
By that time my father was honing his capacity as a functional drunk. He had gotten a department chair position at Stone Mountain Tech, a local community college, while he sent quixotic applications to Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and all the rest of the best. My mother tried to keep painting her pale and precise landscapes in the dim light of her tiny sewing room, and also tried to keep the peace between C & C, as I called them, who were usually squabbling after the young father-to-be got home from the motor-cycle shop every day. Needless to say, nobody was very happy around this time. One result of Carolyn’s life-altering indiscretion was that the clamps on my social life were screwed down tight.
“No dating until your senior year, and until you’ve had a full year of safe driving,” my mother had pronounced one night at dinner, my father nodding gravely as if he’d actually given some thought to the matter. But this was clearly a Kay Kendricks regimen. Then Mom had smiled tinily, even gently, around the corners of her thin pinkish lips, and added, “I guess you and JoEllen will have a couple volumes of great letters to publish by then.”
But we did have a date when we were sophomores, on a spring night that I still remember with embarrassment and a lingering thrill. Once a year the school held one of those Sadie Hawkins dances where the girls took the reins of the patriarchy away from their acne-ridden suitors. It was an event that JoEllen looked forward to for an entire quarter. Four weeks in advance, JoEllen told me she’d hired a cousin to baby-sit her little brother the night of the dance, and did I want to be her partner, please say yes? In a tone both helpless and grave, I told her my mother had said I couldn’t date yet. Within two days JoEllen had gotten her mom to talk to the student counselor, who called my mom and made things OK.
Talk about taking charge! In the week before the dance, I was experiencing the same mix of feelings that had visited me years before, after the speech-and-rescue operation. Again JoEllen Jones had saved me, made my life miraculously better, and made me feel like a total incompetent all in one fell swoop.
But as the night of the gymnasium ball drew closer, the ghost of past anxieties paled before the specter of oncoming anxiety — which I knew I would soon meet head-on in the shadowed confines of a flimsy, tackily decorated Kissing Booth.
ON
THE way to the dance in Cody’s growling, bucking Mustang, I could
think of nothing but the Kissing Booth. Cody’s vulgar innuendoes
weren’t helping the situation.
“Hey, I hear tell that leetle JoEllen Jones is a real ice cream sundy,” he muttered, leering at me while we roared through a red light three blocks from the house. “You gonna get in a lick or two tonight?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and said nothing, inwardly writhing over the vulgarizing of my beloved’s image by my sister’s greasy impregnator. At the same time, he had me — and in a male conspiratorial way, he knew it. Now I couldn’t help seeing that JoEllen was a real ice cream sundae and I did want to . . .
Fortunately these sick, implanted sentiments evaporated upon my entrance to the dimly lit, romantically decorated gym — where I immediately spotted JoEllen, dressed in a fantastically inappropriate knockoff of a 19th-century ball gown, white gauzy frills at her shoulders and waist and, I swear, hoops and layers of petticoats. Maybe it wasn’t that bad, but I do remember feeling the strangest mixture of pride — this amazing creature was mine, all mine for the night! — and a paternal embarrassment about JoEllen’s tendency toward excess. She swooped toward me, an unabashed Gone with the Wind aura about her, and put her face right up to mine like a flashlight. Now she was so luridly made-up that I couldn’t miss it.
“Hi!” she said excitedly, then giggled and seemed to shiver all over. “Hi there,” she repeated seductively.
“Yeah,” I said coolly. “So here we are.” As JoEllen’s attentive gaze was making me nervous, I attempted to scan the room in a sophisticated manner. It seemed important to demonstrate that we weren’t really part of this scene. We were Intellectuals, after all, culturally slumming for the evening.
I could confidently project this air because I was wearing one of my father’s soft, elbow-patched jackets and his corduroy pants. The only problem was that maintaining this image seemed to require a certain gravity and detachment, and suddenly JoEllen had taken me by the hand and was leading me decisively toward the punchbowl. My heart sank when I saw her best friend Lainie McEwen over there — her habitually unhappy face looking like pink cotton candy dirtied with zits and a lot of sooty, scary eye shadow. By the darting of Lainie’s worried eyes I could see that she had come alone, probably at JoEllen’s insistence. That meant we were likely to become a threesome for most of the evening.
Now I had nothing against Lainie personally; I just didn’t understand her appeal to JoEllen. Lainie was what my mother would unhesitatingly call “trailer trash.” In fact she lived in one of those double-wide mobile homes up on blocks, maintained a slovenly C average and a very smart mouth, and was rumored to be a sexual veteran — even to the extent, darkly hinted by some, of having terminated a pregnancy. I knew Lainie was a down-the-road neighbor of JoEllen’s, but otherwise I didn’t get the connection. Most of the time I wrote the friendship off to JoEllen’s social naïveté. Smart as she was, she hadn’t had enough friends in her childhood to know better than to hang out with Lainie’s type.
The really damnable thing about Lainie, though, was that she could read me like a clock on the classroom wall. As JoEllen and I came abreast of her at the refreshments table, Lainie took one look at me, smacked her bubble gum loudly, and asked, “So what’s the matter with you?”
“What do you mean?” I said stiffly.
“Oh, you know,” she said, blowing an obscene red bubble, sucking it in, and grinning with gum-spackled lips. “Looks like you’re too good for the rest of us.”
“Lay-nee!” JoEllen whined, obviously taken aback because her accent came on so strong. “Now be nice,” she added, issuing a motherly look.
“I didn’t do anything,” Lainie muttered childishly, casting her eyes to the floor.
Fortunately, at that moment the band of long-haired, scrawny nineteen-year-olds up on stage blasted their way into a pop rock tune we had all heard done better on the radio, and further hostilities between Lainie and myself were narrowly averted. Given that start, the evening would have been a total wash if not for the Kissing Booth — actually a caravan-style tent set up in one corner with Christmas lights strung around the open flap. It opened for business about halfway through the evening.
For fifty cents, a couple could kiss briefly in the privacy of the tent — a privacy compromised by the presence of the student fee-taker, an adult chaperone, and two or three voyeurs at any given time peering through rents in the tent fabric. The money went to the building of a new outdoor track, said to be a good cause by some. You could legally commit as many kisses as you wanted as long as you waited in line each time and dropped another fifty cents. I guess JoEllen didn’t want to appear too eager for once, so she waited until there was a line of seven couples before formally asking, near the end of a clumsy slow dance, “Shall we go?”
“Sure,” I said confidently, slipping one hand into my pocket to finger the surprise I had for JoEllen. I was going to break with the reversed tradition and pay for the kiss myself — an event that would surely draw gasps of surprise inside the tent. Then I would bend JoEllen over and show the peeking rubes what passion really meant.
But when we gained entrance to the inner chamber I was struck cold with chagrin. I had known there would be other people in there, yet somehow I’d imagined they would be anonymous functionaries shipped in from parts unknown — but not Mr. Driscoll, the shop teacher, and Holly, the supercilious head cheerleader! Julius Driscoll was a kindly, balding, half-grizzled black man who took particular care to keep me out of harm’s way in shop, away from whizzing bandsaw blades and potentially lethal electric drills. More often than not, he just let me draw plans for elaborate gizmos in his office. Once we had even sat back there while the other boys made wall plaques, and talked about his family like we were adult buddies. His family was a fascinating subject for a kid like myself, avowedly liberal like my sociologist father but with very little real experience of minorities.
Holly was that bouncy, vapid kind of cheerleading girl — someone I ordinarily didn’t pay any attention to, but here she was, about to take the money for my romantic ambush of my beloved. The sight of her, flanked by a paternally grinning Mr. Driscoll, was paralyzing. I was so ready for someone to start laughing out loud that I almost missed my cue. Holly had opened the gray metal change box and was staring at the two of us intently, while JoEllen fished around in her little fake-pearl purse, before I remembered my plan.
“Wait a minute,” I barked harshly, when I had meant to be suave, placing one hand over JoEllen’s on her purse. “This one’s on me.” (That was a little rougher than I had rehearsed it: Please allow me, my love.)
“Oh,” JoEllen cooed dramatically, like I had just unveiled the Taj Mahal to her. Mr. Driscoll chuckled in his deep baritone before murmuring “Attaboy!” I dropped two quarters in Holly’s delicate, bony palm and turned to JoEllen. Startled by the reality of her wide, red lips simultaneously parting and approaching me, I tilted my head sideways and planted a near-miss, shearing kiss on JoEllen’s cheek, making a short transit from the left corner of her lips almost to her ear. Basically, I slid off her face.
Then I drew back and, to my heart-stopping horror, saw a deep frown of disappointment clouding JoEllen’s face. She sighed, glanced quickly at Mr. Driscoll and then at the line behind us, and in a blindingly quick movement drew two more quarters from her purse and dropped them in the change box. Holly had no more gotten the word “But” from her mouth before JoEllen had lunged at me, one hand going up behind my neck, then fixed her lips firmly on mine and shockingly pushed her tongue well into my mouth. It fished around, warm, strong, and persuasive, for a few eternal seconds during which my head reeled and my groin tightened. Then JoEllen just as abruptly backed off, her eyes half-closed and a floating, dreamy smile on her smeared lips.
“Sweet Jesus,” muttered Mr. Driscoll, seeming to suppress a laugh in the tent’s semi-darkness. “Randall, you better get yore lady outta here before she takes ever’body’s turn.”
I nodded dumbly and stumbled out of the tent with one arm around JoEllen’s waist, no doubt flushing red from head to toe. As we came out of the tent Lainie came rushing up from behind it, arched her eyebrows at us and exclaimed, “Wow!”
THUS
began two months of foolish and frustrating seduction — more or
less mutual, but always spiked, it seemed to me, with superior
knowledge on JoEllen’s part. Ever after the kiss that night, I
wondered if JoEllen hadn’t learned a lot more from Lainie than I
had suspected. After all, I’d heard some seamy rumors that Lainie
and JoEllen actually practiced
things together. I always laughed off such scuttlebutt, but then
wondered darkly about the possibilities when I was alone in my room
at night.
One thing was for sure: Lainie never seemed far away when JoEllen and I were getting heated up. Our trysts usually occurred at lunchtime, when we would skip eating and take a long walk down the Ecology Trail, deep into the verdant, viney woods, and find a little shaded glen to lie in the grass and talk, kiss, and fumble. To me sex seemed to belong in the woods, as if the leafy foliage had been designed to camouflage the kind of action that would have seemed too stark in a bedroom or, God forbid, the back of a car.
But we were both brought up so well, as my mother would have put it, that we never got beyond rolling around and kissing. Once I unbuttoned JoEllen’s blouse and she, blinking with excited eyes, pulled one of her substantial breasts out of her bra, holding it in front of me like a soft trophy. I wasn’t sure of what to do. I extended my index finger to her soil-brown nipple, half-expecting to get electrocuted, and found it instead to be incredibly tender. I watched with surprise as it contracted and pushed itself out under my circling touch.
Then there was a noise way off in the bushes — a bird, a wolf, the principal? — and JoEllen rapidly stuffed and buttoned herself back into her clothes. We hastened back toward the school hand-in-hand, running as if we had narrowly escaped an emergency. About halfway back we bumped into Lainie coming down another branch of the trail, munching an egg salad sandwich and wiping her brow as if she’d been on a vigorous hike. Only that night did I realize that Lainie was hardly the hiking type. She usually smoked at lunch.
A few days later, the three of us were sitting out on the front steps of the school at noon. It was quite hot — too hot for slipping away down the Ecology Trail — and getting near the end of the school term. I didn’t catch on right away, but eventually I realized that JoEllen was upping the ante on our sexual anticipation by wearing some daring short-short culottes that day. The loose fit of her shorts bared one of her thighs all the way up to the crotch, and she openly let that leg rest in the sun that way. Both Lainie and I could see the trim of her panties and an ample fringe of dark, curly hair jutting out from underneath. I was transfixed by the sight, and Lainie kept winking at me. I tried to glare back, but my gaze was always drawn back to JoEllen’s commanding thigh.
“Girl, you are pushing the line with those kew-lots,” Lainie finally said a few minutes before the homeroom bell would ring.
“Why?” JoEllen said innocently, batting her eyelashes.
“Shit, you know why,” Lainie retorted crudely, casting a dirty glance at me. “We can see your frizz and everything. If Mrs. Amberley sees you like this, she’ll send you home to change.”
JoEllen patted the cuff of her shorts to cover her inner thigh, then raised her other knee and skillfully turned toward me so that I could see down that leg anyway. Leaning back like a magazine model and pulling down her sunglasses over her eyes, she replied defiantly: “Well, I didn’t dress for Mrs. Amberley today. I dressed for Randall.”
That
really got to me. I don’t know why exactly, but I was cool toward
JoEllen for the following — and last — month of school. We still
took our walks and kissed, but my ardor was leveling off. Hers was
heating up, probably because she sensed that I was too cowardly to
make a big effort to see her over the summer. So I think she wanted
to get something going that
I wouldn’t be able to resist.
Without understanding my motives, I was determined to maintain the
status quo.
By
the end of school, JoEllen was pretty mad at me for my mysterious
distance of the concluding few weeks. Still, we had both arranged
unnecessary do-gooder tasks for ourselves on the last half-day, when
virtually everyone else had lit out for the lake. Being teacher’s
pets was in our blood since elementary school, and we weren’t above
using that status to arrange some last-minute trysting time for
ourselves. We both knew that while we were supposed to be filing
records for Mrs. Chastain in the school office, there would be plenty
of time to sneak off together into vacant halls or empty classrooms —
or perhaps down the deserted Ecology Trail — one
last time.
But the day turned out to be weirder than either one of us could have imagined. The school was so lifeless that it was downright spooky — my footsteps echoed queerly down the halls — and JoEllen came in crying. She wouldn’t even speak to me for an hour. That only left two hours, and getting in some kissing had suddenly become a life-and-death matter, because of my news. But if I told her… well, she might not even touch me.
Finally, with less than an hour left, I crossed the empty office and gingerly seated myself on the desk facing JoEllen, who had been disconsolately staring through the window at white cottony clouds in a brilliant blue sky. It was a beautiful early summer day, but neither one of us could feel it.
“What’s the matter?” I said as softly as I could.
JoEllen’s eyes immediately teared up. She violently slammed the desk and said, “Are we going to see each other this summer or not? You haven’t said anything, and soon we have to go home!”
I tensed up, chagrined that I should have said something by now instead of waiting for a cue. Then I remembered that things were already beyond my control.
“I have some bad news,” I said evenly, as if I were announcing that the film projector was broken and we couldn’t see a movie in English class that day. “I found out last night that my father got a job in California, and we have to leave now. Next week, I mean.”
JoEllen raised her watery eyes to mine as if she were going to ask me to repeat what I’d said, but the shock had clearly registered. “You’re going away?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling helplessly, crossing my arms, gazing out the window.
“Not again,” JoEllen sighed, her tone suddenly adult and world-weary. “Not again.”
3
WHY
IS
the vivid link between the two women who sexually initiated me made
up entirely of dark, prolific pubic hair? Does the image linger
because I’m unbalanced? Or are my suspicions about the vegetative
compulsion of sex — that the tendril is mightier than the mind,
in
this case — well-founded in natural fact?
I worry about this, I really do. It’s the kind of thing that I withhold from June, because no matter how objective she may be as a therapist, she’s still a woman (and a native Berkeley crone at that) with doubtlessly thin patience for men’s obsessively physical neuroses about women. Perhaps I shouldn’t be seeing a female therapist at all. Perhaps I should be pounding antelope-skin drums in a circle of men with our shirts off, stomping about in a funky sweat deep in the dark woods, questing for a vision . . . but frankly, the notion strikes me as ludicrous.
I like June’s analytic style. She has that down-to-earth yet high-class refinement that Jungian academies magically impart to their graduates, and she helps me frame my problems more profoundly than I could alone. As June once remarked, “People lose their will to act when they regard their predicaments as overwhelming yet insignificant.” Translation: You’ve got to afford your fuck-ups some dignity to make life worth the struggle.
Still, the pubic-hair connection between JoEllen and Anna feels too weird to bring up in our meetings, even those open to the sky on June’s sunny back patio. Perhaps that’s why she suggested I undertake this journal of my sexual history. I’ll bet she knows I’m keeping secrets.
But when you get right down to it, I’ve been pretty damn open for a Southern expatriate. I even cried when I told her about that last day with JoEllen, about how it took me all these years to feel the grief that JoEllen seemed to suffer then. She was literally rendered speechless by the news of my departure, sobbing with her head on the desk while I helplessly petted her long brown hair, feeling the most awful mixture of guilt and mad desire. There was something almost criminal in the way that I was secretly relieved to be getting away from JoEllen’s directorial presence in my life — an uncanny replay of the end of the sixth grade — while at the same time I was wanting to consummate our long-checked passion (like I would have known how) right there on the floor of Mrs. Chastain’s office.
“I
think it was the closest I ever came to a psychotic split,” I
dramatically confessed to June about that long-ago, conflicted hour
of parting, my eyes stinging as I looked up to her lined, birdlike
face for confirmation. June only nodded, silently and inconclusively.
I wondered
if I had used the wrong diagnostic term.
Finally, JoEllen had raised her head from the desk, got up and crossed the room to get some tissue. After blotting around her eyes, she smiled weakly but courageously — what a magnificent young woman she was becoming! — and meekly inquired, “Will you write me a lot?”
“Sure,” I said with warm certainty, eager to prove that there was an intact bone of decency somewhere in my body. “Every week. As soon as we get settled maybe you can come visit!”
It was a lame offer and she knew it, but she nodded her head vigorously, grinned sweetly and rushed over to hug me. For about fifteen minutes I’d say we were as close to heaven as we ever got, leaning there against the desk in a fierce embrace, kissing now and then, no longer speaking. Our urgent, final intimacy was broken by a brief squeal of brakes and the insistent blaring of a car horn out in the school’s nearly empty parking lot, visible through the office window. Carolyn had arrived to pick me up, surely not an errand she was enjoying, and she wasn’t about to walk in and look for me when the horn would suffice. It was just as well. My farewell to JoEllen was not a scene that I wanted Carolyn walking into.
As JoEllen and I untangled I looked at her sheepishly and shrugged my shoulders. “Call me tonight?” she asked softly.
I nodded, said “Bye,” and walked off, leaving her virtually alone in the whole school.
I did call her, but I don’t remember what we said. I couldn’t talk for long because our house was in an uproar of dislocation. My father was being a totally officious jerk, his head dangerously swelled over the miraculous acceptance of his application to UC-Berkeley, “the finest public institution of higher education in the world,” he kept saying for the entire family’s edification. Later I would learn that his unexpected appointment was the result of a suicide in Cal’s sociology department. They desperately needed someone to help complete a federally-funded poverty study. Despite his thin, moth-eaten vitae, my father was the only candidate with anything near the right research background.
But if my father was happy, Carolyn was on the edge of ecstasy. The way things were working out, she and Cody were inheriting the whole house, while Mom, Dad and I were entrusting our future to the largesse of the University in far-away California. Despite complaining of nausea from the miracle of my nephew-to-be piecing himself together inside her, Carolyn was the most helpful and industrious I had ever seen her. She couldn’t wait for us to get out.
Shocked and numb as I was over the pace of change, I was in harmony with her. Georgia already seemed like history to me. California, as I vaguely pictured it, was the land of no limits or frustrations, where every rebellion or indulgence was allowed. I was devilishly curious about it. My mom pursed her lips tensely through the whole ordeal of leaving, methodically saying her good-byes to neighbors, neatly wrapping up the loose ends that the rest of us were too frantic to remember. That California would liberate her more than anyone was a possibility that occurred to none of us at the time.
TO
REALLY appreciate California, I think you have to come from the
South. You couldn’t come here from any other region and experience
quite so profound a cultural shift. Nor could you stay for years and
retain so much of your root identity for contrast. Your typical
Midwestern expatriate is likely to tell you that he came to
California from “oh, nowhere really,” or from “it doesn’t
matter.” Within a few years he indeed forgets his shallow
wheatfield roots and becomes innately, inconspicuously Californian.
Not so for the California Southerner, who will be able to tell you to his dying day every blessed detail of the crooked corner of the county he came from, back there in North Carolina or Georgia or God-forbid Alabama — and who lived just down the street, and where their folks wuz from. The road map of back-home is stamped like an indelible tattoo on the consciousness of Southerners, forever in the view of their inner eye.
To this day, I still experience occasional shocks when the crusty earth of my upbringing is fractured anew by the impudent thrust of California Reality. What I mean is: bearded women in the grocery store; noisy protests by mobs in wheelchairs; winsome mocha-colored children playing in the park, children whose parents over on the bench are not merely black and white, but West African and French-Canadian; those kinds of things.
I’m cooler about these shocks nowadays. At most I might raise an eyebrow or chuckle sardonically. But my first two years in California occasioned countless lapses into open-mouthed bewilderment. On the very first day that Mom, Dad, and I pulled into Berkeley on a mid-summer day, we got slowed down behind a classic old Volvo driven by a woman with closely-cropped, multi-hued hair, and sporting one eye-catching bumpersticker which mysteriously announced
WILD
WOMYN
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT!
A few weeks later when I had gained a sympathetic pal at Berkeley High, I had this message deconstructed for me, and I marveled at how succinctly it revealed the zeitgeist of the town in just a few words. Back where I came from, bumperstickers mostly conveyed the retorts of rednecks to decent society, like:
GAS GRASS OR ASS
NOBODY RIDES FREE
In this fathomless cultural chasm between the Southeast and Far West lay the rocky proving grounds of my encroaching manhood.
Would that I had known, on the aforementioned dusky-golden evening of our arrival in the West, just how soon my manhood would be summoned! When I think back to the dating ban that was still ostensibly in effect when our reduced family trundled into town, I still get a big kick out of it. Because I didn’t exactly break that ban before my senior year of high school. It’s just that my sexual initiation lurched into high gear and plowed right through it without my folks ever knowing. And what’s more, they arranged the whole shebang!
Of course, they thought they were only hiring a gardener. In another incredible turn of luck for my father, our family ended up with the suicided professor’s house — an enchanting if smallish stone-facade cottage perched about halfway up in the Berkeley hills, on one of the narrow European-style streets that charmingly wind this way and that. (I loved that house and tried to buy it from the University when I came into my first real money about ten years later. But like People’s Park, they wouldn’t let it go for hell or a hoedown.)
In the steeply ascending backyard was a stunning profusion of drought-resistant flora that Mrs. Chedderly, the pince-nez’d octogenarian next door, said was the former inhabitant’s “pride and joy.” Dad’s vanity and obsessive desire to fit in led him to hire a gardener to tend to it, just like Mrs. Chedderly said he should. For better or worse, he hired her gardener: the guileless, river-haired Anna.
I first saw Anna from the rear in the backyard, bending over to inspect a huge but shriveled cactus. From my vantage point behind the dirty kitchen window I couldn’t quite tell what I was seeing. Anna’s butt-length, lightly tangled tresses almost covered her deep green sweatshirt, and one of her bare legs was hidden in the profusion of unidentifiable plant life up there on the hill. If I were of a more fanciful bent, I could claim that she simply arose from the vegetable kingdom right then and there, but this is not one of those therapeutic fairy tales. This is supposed to be a truthful accounting of my troubled past.
Within a minute I had discerned that the form out there was female, youthful, and by itself. Being almost seventeen, I was naturally curious to investigate. We had been moved in for about three days; my folks were having lunch with some very important people on campus, and I was enjoying the unprecedented feeling of being absolutely on my own in a new land. I could as easily say a whole new world, the way things felt so utterly different from Georgia. What I was spying on reinforced the delicious alienation. Back in Atlanta, young women in canvas shorts and flowing cascades of hair generally did not materialize in your back yard.
I walked out the open back door, hands jammed in the front pockets of my jeans, and called out coolly, “Hello up there!”
The young woman jerked clumsily, almost losing her balance before righting herself against the trunk of the oversized plant she’d been inspecting. She leaned against it gingerly while peering down at me. Then she spoke plainly, factually:
“I’ll have to dig this one out completely. It’s got some rot at the base.”
“Oh,” I replied, somewhat confused. “Okay by me.” We both stood in our places for a few awkward moments before the woman — I was sizing her up to be in her early twenties — smiled and took the role of an adult in our exchange:
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. My name is Anna. I was working on Mrs. Chedderley’s garden and she said you might be . . . needing me?”
“Oh, I replied uncertainly. I guess.” Then I shrugged my shoulders and added, “I’m Randall. I’m here with my folks. I mean, they’re not here right now. We just moved here. From Georgia.” I felt my face flushing red; I wasn’t sure whether what I had just said made any sense.
“Really?” Anna called out as she turned her back, then twisted her way out of all the foliage above me and started to step down the hillside, holding a spade in one hand. “My folks are from North Carolina, but I was born in Colorado.” By this time Anna had made her way down to the stone porch where I was standing, and I was amazed to see that she was barefoot. Things certainly were casual out here!
“So you’ve been around,” I said lamely, abruptly raising my eyes to hers. I realized I shouldn’t be looking her over so obviously.
“Yeah, I guess so,” she replied, laughing uncertainly. Then she stared at me blankly for a moment and blurted out, “I hope your folks will let me take care of things back here. I don’t even care if they pay. But it would be nice.”
“Well,” I said uncertainly, “I’m sure they’ll . . .” Actually I didn’t know what to say, because I wasn’t at all sure of what they would do. Then I recalled a bit of conversation between my father and Mrs. Chedderly, and everything fell into place.
“Oh, wait a minute! Mrs. Chedderly told Dad he should definitely keep on the gardener. Said you were the hardest-working young lady she’d ever seen.”
“That’s nice,” Anna remarked emotionlessly, bending over to tap dirt off the spade against the low stone wall framing the back side of the porch. When she turned back toward me she looked conspiratorially from side to side, then leaned close and whispered in my ear. “I’m surprised Mrs. Chedderly remembers me from one day to the next. You know what?”
“No,” I whispered back. “What?”
“Sometimes she pays me twice for the same week!” Now Anna’s face was very close to me. I was struck by the broadness of all her features — eyes wide apart, wide mouth, nobly long nose, all combining in a handsome way, but not a particularly feminine way. My mind rapidly made the connection: Carolina . . . Cherokee, although her hair wasn’t completely straight or coal-black like the Indian women I remembered from our summer visits to tacky Gatlinburg in Tennessee. I was about to ask about her bloodline when she continued:
“But it’s all right. She can afford it, with those two sons of hers practically running the Bank of America. Anyway, I give half of the extra money to the Free Clinic.”
“The free what?” I said, abruptly diverted from my concern about her heritage.
Anna sat down on the top of the stone wall and inelegantly crossed one leg on top of the other to peer at the bottom of one foot. “The Free Clinic is where you can go to see a doctor if you don’t have any money. I volunteer there sometimes because I’ve always been so grateful they told me I didn’t have herpes.”
“What?” I exclaimed, more ignorant than surprised. I wasn’t very familiar with the word and I thought she was talking about some kind of snakes that women might have, or. . . what?
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Anna laughed, covering her mouth with one hand. “I didn’t . . . oh boy, sometimes I just don’t think!” Then she pounded one side of her head with the palm of her hand. “That’s dumb ol’ Anna for you! Just blurt out everything in public, why doncha?”