Jeffry Kent had a problem. He was the only boy in the tenth grade-make that the only boy in school, or the western hemisphere, or the galaxy!-who didn't know about sex. And he knew it. He knew it day, and he knew it night. Ignorance haunted him like the monster haunted Dr. Frankenstein. Ignorance climbed up his legs like a great hairy tarantula that could sting at any time. It could sting anytime anyone else got an inkling that Jeffry knew nothing about sex.
He could have ended this hassle simply by asking his friends Milman or Pearlstein, quietly, discreetly, one or the other in private, to fill him in on the facts. But he didn't want to get laughed off the planet.
So Jeffry had to face the sting of occasional taunts and tests.
Like in English class, with Mrs. Green, the world's oldest teacher. She had wrinkled facial flesh that hung down to the floor. Jeffry sat in the first row on the right, fourth seat back. Across from Jeff sat Reggie Hunter, and behind Reggie, Dirk Maris. They would talk back and forth almost non-stop for the entire forty-five minutes of class, while Jeffry sat working diligently on the prepositional phrase. Mrs. Green was stone deaf, or so it seemed, and never noticed their conversations that often caused titters from students seated clear across the room.
From these conversations it was apparent that Reggie and Dirk were great lovers of literature, and had read myriad works. Perhaps Mrs. Green would have encouraged their literary critiques, had she heard them, Jeffry thought.
"You read The Harrad Experiment?" Reggie has asked Dirk during class one day.
"No. Any good?" Dirk asked, stretching his six-foot-three inches of gangly adolescence so that his feet angled across the aisle and came to rest underneath Jeffry's chair.
"Un-fucking-believable. Sixty-nine and everything."
Dirk began to breathe heavily, and Jeffry couldn't help releasing a chuckle. Looking back he would have suffered less embarrassment had he released a fart.
"What're you guffawing about?" Dirk immediately attacked.
"Hell of a guy, Jeffry thought. He pretended he didn't hear the question. He'd heard about The Harrad Experiment, all right. Hadn't read it maybe, but heard about it. College kids getting credit for screwing, or something like that. Sure he'd heard about the book. And that was why he'd laughed. After all, he may not have known anything about sex, but he wasn't stupid. Everyone knew about The Harrad Experiment.
"Little bastard's laughing at me," Dirk said.
"Geezus, does he have to shout it out, Jeffry thought. He knew he was in trouble. Couldn't that old bag up front hear? But Mrs. Green was absorbed in a book, a Silhouette romance novel, it appeared, while she assumed the class was hard at work on pages 36-40 of Warriner's.
"Thinks he knows everything, doesn't he," the demon-in-student's-clothes continued. He turned now to poor Jeffry. "Bet you don't. You probably don't even know what sixty-nine is." Jeff buried his head in his book. Go away, he thought. Go away.
"Well, what does it mean?"
To Jeffry it seemed as if the entire class (including Mrs. Green, who put down her romance, the title of which suddenly appeared to Jeffry as Sixty-Nine Steps to Heaven), rose as one, and began to chant, "What does it mean? What does it mean?" He shook the cobwebs of prepositional phrase diagrams from his brain and looked around. A few heads around the class were surreptitiously looking his way, but Mrs. Green was still buried in her novel, Cytheria's Summer.
"What does it mean?" Dirk insisted. Despite the awkwardness that was an inevitable by product of a series of growth-spurts, Dirk had been kept on the basketball team as what the coach called a "project." Jeffry wished he were Project Apollo, and that he'd been launched into orbit. Oh God, you s.o.b., at least stop shouting. Were more heads now looking his way? Cindy Lawler and Mary Rita Canard? He had to ignore this guy. It was the only way out. But he couldn't. Besides, maybe he could bluff his way out and shut the moron up. He took a deep breath and said to himself, I'll bite.
"Shhh!" Jeffry said. Wrong opener. Dirk looked pissed. He lifted the metal bookrack under Jeffry's desk, elevating the entire seat several inches, and with it, Jeffry. Dirk may have been awkward, but compared to five-foot-six inch, one-thirty pound Jeffry, he could have been Arnold Schwartzenegger.
"What the hell does it mean, know it all?"
Jeffry cleared his throat. Reggie's ears perked up like a cocker spaniel who hears his master at the door. The fool was going to speak!
"I know what it is," said the fool. If he was lucky, Dirk would let it drop there, or at least lower his feet and let Jeffry drop.
"So, what is it?"
"Well... er... ugh... ummm... ah..."
"Well?"
"I've... err... heard... umm... ah...."
"Well," Dirk and Reggie chorused. Jeffry was sure the whole class was watching by now.
"I've... er... heard two versions." There, it was out. He brushed his forehead with his palm and it came back damp.
"Two versions!" Reggie was delighted. "Well?"
Which one should he choose?
"The first is... is... six inches up, and nine months to go," he blurted in one blast of fetid air.
"Six inches up?" Dirk repeated.
"Nine months to go?" Reggie squealed.
"Well, there's another version," Jeffry cried. Heads were bobbing up and down everywhere in the classroom, it seemed to him. He was sure Terri Davis and Sid Dickson were listening in, at the very least. God, why hadn't he called and asked Dr. Ruth the other night?
"Well, it's a double blow job."
Jeffry's desk hit the floor with a thud. He could see his words hanging in the air in calligraphic lettering.
Mrs. Green looked up. "Jeffry," she said sternly.
Oh Lord, take me now, he thought. The entire class was now, definitely, unquestionably gazing straight at Jeffry, as if he were wearing a plastic penis on his nose.
"Yes Mrs. Green?" Call the hangman. Strap him in the chair. Was there a razor blade in the knapsack underneath his desk? At that moment, he would have swallowed a hand grenade.
"Did I get your grammar homework from last night?" the teacher asked.
"No, Mrs. Green. I'll turn it in now."
"No problem, so long as you have it. I'll take it after class." She returned to her planbook, having evidently discarded the novel, while Jeffry was busily explaining the birds and bees. The classroom was quiet once more. He was saved. God, I'll never doubt you again, he apostrophized.
"What's a double blow job?" Dirk said, and Jeffry's desk was suddenly back in the air again. "I'll bet you don't even know."
Later, on the way out of class, Dirk sidled up to his partner in persecution.
"Did you ever hear of that first one before?" he asked Reggie.
"No, did you?"
"No...."
"Damn, six inches up and nine months to go. Do you think he was right about that?"
Gary Wiener's story, "A February of Underwear," appeared in the Summer '88 issue of SOTT. "Six Inches Up" is an excerpt from his work-in-progress, Sex: A Novel.
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