Love in the Time of Puberty

When I was in the ninth grade, two of my classmates got into a shoving-then-wrestling fight. Surprising because we were in a classroom at the time. In a Catholic high school. Right before Religion class. After one of the school’s Sisters of No Mercy broke up the fight, I realized an important insight about my pugnacious peers: they were the victims of puberty.

I’ve thoroughly researched this topic. “Puberty” comes from the Urbano-American pubes, or short, curly, wiry hairs like those that grow above the nether regions of a pubescent boy’s upper lip. Soon-to-be sexually armed and dangerous youngsters are flooded with hormones (pronounced “whore moans”). Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (its actual name) cranks boys’ testosterone and girls’ estrogen factories into overdrive. “Testosterone” sounds like a Mafia movie character to me. Guido Testosterone. (Also known as Mr. T.) Mr. T has a violence code that he promotes to all of his young protégés: “Be a man. Don’t take no crap offa nobody.” No wonder teen boys feel teste all the time. Girls are another story entirely: between boys and girls there’s a vas deferens. For girls, pubescence is a period that begins with the onset of ministration.

I noticed most pubertarian changes when I was thirteen, in eighth grade, when I began to see girls in a thrilling new light. In both boys and girls, chemicals stimulate what Freud termed the “lambada” such that boys and girls become crazed to start making hormonious music together.

Which brings me to our eighth-grade dances. It was the spring of 1971, and the fad in young women’s fashion was hot pants. The dances were not school functions, so girls whose blue plaid uniform skirts hid their knees at school were now revealing giddying expanses of naked thigh flesh. Innocent little Angelina Costatexas in a lime-green hot pants suit. Not-quite-so-innocent Sherry Coffee once arrived at a dance, then removed the skirt of her two-piece ensemble to reveal a hot-pants bodysuit. Talk about lambada stimulation! I got to slow-dance with Sherry after her idiot boyfriend broke up with her. She held me so tight I could feel the outline of her aurora borealises. Maybe she was just using me to provoke an ex’s jealousy, but my body chemistry didn’t even care.

Then there was Amelie Scintilliano. She brought older boys to the dances and spent most of the time on the couch. But she was no couch potato. More like a hot potato. In those days, we thought kissing was “oral sex,” but obviously our reasoning was fellatious. Amelie was the most sexually powerful girl in our class, and though I can’t confidently comment on her character, for me she had the almost irresistible allure of a bad girl. My own reputation was as a Goody Two-Shoes, a teacher’s pet. I was sometimes called “Holy Bill.” Which is why at recess one spring day, Amelie Scintilliano angled over my way and began actually talking to me. Amelie wanted to attend an upcoming rock concert scheduled for midday of a weekday in conflict with the school day. She assured me that she had already talked to the school principal, Sister Agitaytus, who said it was OK, that we could leave school for the concert. Later I would realize that I should’ve inquired about the tone of Sister Agitaytus’s voice when she said, “Sure, [if you don’t give a damn about your education or your imperiled soul], you can do whatever you want. Go to the concert.” But at the time, the proximity of Amelie—her svelte but curvy body, the perfume of her long straight dark hair, and the directness of her dark-eyed gaze charmed me, mesmerized me, narcotized my brain. I agreed to go—and that assent began my descent into the downfalls of adulthood. And I don’t regret it, not one little bit.

I set out to explain the complex, life-altering maelstrom of puberty and see now that I’ve mainly just talked about my own sexual fantasies and my easy manipulation at the hands, eyes, and other body parts of women much more confident, more mature, and more powerful than I. I meant to talk about how my class misbehaved so badly that our lay teacher quit before Christmas, how she was replaced by an ex-Marine, how Leonard Velveeta brought a whoopee cushion to class, blew it up, and pretended to cut the cheese, how this elicited a “Sounds like you’ve got enough gas to get to Poughkeepsie” response from the ex-Marine, and how Lotta Tomboy, a girl whose pituitary couldn’t decide which hormones to release, laughed when I sat on a tack that someone—perhaps she—had placed on the seat of my desk.

But, honestly, who can remember such trivia when it’s set against the memory of the intoxication of Sherry and the scintillation of Amelie?

Ah, puberty! Good times. Good times.