I was more animal than human in those days, infused with instinct, hormones, the insatiable appetites (physical and sexual) of a growing teenage boy. Need gave way to urgency as sex became the primary and primal motivation, the driving wind. Not one of the adults in the room--placated now with a variety of sweet and savory items off the service menu, a vulgar cigar, the television tuned to Dancing with the Stars--could remember the depth of the fever that consumed me. Childhood's exploitation of the naivete and sentimentality of their disinterested elders is a small portion of the knot of memes that disfigure our ideas of both youth and sexuality. Every notion we have surrounding so called "innocence" is symptomatic of a cultural negation of the very natural urges inherent in sex. "Nasty" is an adjective that explores this ambivalence, the disgust and actual nausea on the one pole contrasting with simultaneous sweaty palms, palpitations, and a surging ossification in the groin on the other.
Thought attempts to describe this phenomena, but does so clumsily allowing layers of mythos and sentiment to muddy the water and justify pandemic guilt and various legal and illegal punishments for groups or individuals who reside beyond the pale. Disoriented by the secrecy of sexuality, we learn the proper etiquette of lying. And if the script calls for altar boys, then we will gladly wear the pure white robe, walking in frustration behind a hobbled priest: teeth yellowed from copious amounts of anxious coffee and nervous tea, the wise blue eyes now smeared with the Vaseline of cataracts, and his trembling hands lifting the chalice gingerly into the radiant day.
The silver is luminous.
The priest is luminous...he has not had so much as a sexual thought since 1957.
Meanwhile my compatriot and I are convincing in our costumes, convincing because the loose robe disguises the erections that come and go with such fickle unpredictability. "I am a good boy," I tell myself, even if occasionally I will jerk off into the urinal in the church's basement biggest and most forgotten lavatory. I am clean. I am studious. Open my denim clad 3-ring binder and inside your eyes would widen with the size, the thorny detail of a vein-popping, semen-leaking cock I had been drawing in study hall. Without that curiosity, I am a milquetoast mama's boy, easily dismissed, easily forgotten. I am struck dumb.
Even if, as I have heard, the second language is some kind of universal tongue that all can access, I don't like doubt and I am disconcerted by the sordid vocabulary that is left for me with which to discuss sex. This is ironic because I believe language evolved out of the sexual instinct where sounds entangle around action, emotion and urgency as to require exceptional attunement and faceted communication.
It is a theory, a metaphor, a myth. The irony exists that as these grunts and groans gave way to phonemes (that bred with one another and fed on each other's dead carcasses to multiply and facilitate this complex and nuanced vocabulary), language outgrew its necessity; the memetic mind, enthralled with symbolic thinking, created both journalism and literature, both rumor and libel at the expense of the clarity of instinct. In the world before words there is a feeling that will come to be called hunger. There is a sensation that will come to be called desire.
These basic functions of body need and expression persist, well-oiled pistons in the engine of individual lives, in the engine of the culture. But it is said that more civilized times work harder to obscure the inner workings of the clock. Presumably, the mechanism itself is boring and better understood as metaphor rather than fact. The simply explained urges of a (now articulate) animal become topics of medical speculation and moral debate. From here, it is a long way back--obscure, difficult to trace--to the symphony of coos and screams that pass for conversation in the sack.
