I said nothing about all the cool Matchbox cars my sixth-grade classmates and I would sleep directly over. I wanted to tell someone about it, but already understood that, if I revealed what I had discovered, somehow a Donnie, Lonnie, Gary, or Billy would label me a big baby for liking toy cars over the real ones that they swore they drove around all the time when their parents weren’t home.
My teacher said, “Now, no horseplay tonight, boys. Y’all stretch out your sleeping bags in here and go to sleep. Mr. Whalen will be walking y’all up early-early-early. ‘What Does Sherman Know?’ is a long and tiring day. I made some special treats for tomorrow in the freezer, so don’t go around snooping.”
“Goodnight, Ms. Whalen,” we said in unison. I have no idea what happened to her husband, but I heard the back door squeak open while our teacher warned us against cutting fool all night.
She turned off the lights. We made no noise. Then Stonewall Harrell giggled. He’d commandeered the flashlight at some point after I got birthed. Stonewall said, “I know what a woman’s nookie looks and feels like for real. It ain’t like what he told us.”
I don’t want to say that my organic-farming, ex-corporate-lawyering parents sheltered me. But I’d never come across this “nookie” term. I knew poontang, beaver, snatch, trim, twat, quim, muff, quif, box, cooter, and meat wallet, but not nookie.
Lonnie and Donnie said, “No you don’t,” and then there was a bunch of uh-huhs and don’t neithers.
“I can prove it,” Stonewall said. “Y’all cover me. I’m going into the bathroom.”
I didn’t mean to say nookie out loud, but I did just to get a feel for it. It’s not the kind of word, I knew, that I could use daily, like when I said something about a box or beaver.
“Stonewall better not come back in here dragging along Ms. Whalen,” Donnie said.
He didn’t. No, Stonewall returned with a gigantic blue jar of women’s nighttime facial cream. He said, “What I’m about to show y’all is something my cousin taught me last year. Now, everyone slop some of this stuff on your wiener, and then come stick your wiener in my armpit.” He slung off his T-shirt and got down on his knees. “You got to close your eyes, though, for it to work best.”
I’m not sure what happened after that. This isn’t one of those “selective memory” occasions. I’m not being judgmental for what those Munson and Harrell children did the night before “What Does Sherman Know?” but I didn’t join in — perhaps because I thought a joke was being played on me. I got up from the floor and grabbed the flashlight. I went to the bookcase and opened up the dictionary to find everything marked out by black Magic Marker. It’s like an entire language disappeared, page after page. I turned to the Gs to see if maybe they’d left “God” there, but they hadn’t. I turned to the Js, for Jesus, but it was marked out, too. I picked up the dictionary — this was one of those Thorndike-Barnhart red hardbacks, probably stolen from our classroom at Calloustown Elementary — and went out the front door with it. I walked without paying attention, as if on automatic pilot — which they say General William Tecumseh Sherman mastered above all else — and skirted the briars and next-door pit bull successfully. No noises emanated from the den at this point. I opened the door to beneath the house and found Mr. Whalen seated cross-legged, surrounded by his Matchbox car collection. He had a drop light hanging from a floor joist, and he didn’t turn his head.
“You want to play a little game I like to call ‘What Does Henry Ford Know?’” he asked me. “You want to play a little game I like to call ‘What Does Detroit Got that We Don’t?’”
I should’ve jumped, but I didn’t. I should’ve either said yes or no instead of pointing to the floorboards above me and whispering, “They’re fucking each other’s armpits upstairs with your wife’s Noxzema.”
Mr. Whalen said, “Now, not everyone likes a tattletale, Luke. I do, though, so you came to the right place.” He handed me his plastic cup, told me to take a drink if I wished — I did, only to learn that he partook of Pepsi and George Dickel, a combination I’d had before — and got up from the cement floor without grunting. He whispered, “Unfortunately, your teacher threw away all the boxes to these cars. They’d be worth a lot more money if I still had the boxes. Don’t forget that, Luke. Sometimes a box is more valuable than what goes inside it.”
Years later I would realize that he still worked on his sex lesson. I said, “Yes, sir.”
“What’re you doing with that dictionary?” he asked me quietly. I shrugged. He leaned in closer and said, “I blacked out every word in there except for ‘desperation.’ Go ahead. Turn to page 275. I keep waiting for Monetta to open the thing up. Maybe she already knows all the words inside.”
I drank more from his cup, not thinking.
Mr. Whalen kept a stepladder in his crawlspace, of course. I took a theater appreciation class in college my freshman year and learned three things: If there was a pistol on the set, it would be fired at the end of the first act; if there was a telephone on the bedside, it would ring, usually not on cue. I learned, too, that most drama majors were obnoxious and insecure, and that if they didn’t make it in a summer rep group they’d go off to law school, eventually get disenchanted should they have any sense whatsoever, then finally give it all up in order to farm berries, sing campfire songs spontaneously, and teach their children most of the euphemisms for female genitalia.
So I wasn’t surprised or shocked when my sixth-grade teacher’s drunken husband said to me, “Let’s stand this alu minum ladder up right under the hole where I’m going to eventually build a spiral staircase.” He kicked it open, then tested the floor for balance. Ben Whalen held his index finger to his mouth for me to be quiet, then took his plastic cup of booze from me.
Here’s the scariest segment out of the most freakish night in my life up until this time: Mr. Whalen offered no pantomime hand gestures à la high school ROTC members obsessed with semaphore. He looked at me once, didn’t smile, and we simultaneously climbed up both sides of the stepladder — he on the “Do Not Use for Steps” side, and me on the traditional silver treads — like Olympic-caliber synchronized swimmers, or champion ax men at a logging competition in the Pacific Northwest, or adjacent geysers at a national park. Ben Whalen put his plastic cup in his mouth, we placed our palms up to the makeshift hatch, and shoved hard so mightily and fast that not one Munson or Harrell child had time to react. Listen, these guys never exactly reacted quickly most days — thus all the bruises during baseball season — but you’d think that an eruption of floor below a cheap throw rug might cause four prone Harrells getting faux-screwed in the armpits by Noxzema-slathered Munsons to yelp, run, or fight before their discoverers underwent sensory-based deductions, which could only end, later on, in blackmail situations.
“What the hell you boys doing?” Mr. Whalen yelled out, even before the circle of floor tipped over entirely against the useless bookcase. He emerged into his living space, took two or three determined steps, and flipped the light switch. By the time I came out of the hole all of my sleepover comrades rushed to find their pajama bottoms and hide both erections and tainted, compromised armpits. There would be talk of my being “born again,” within the next six months, and — like an iconic unseemly act performed in public by a celebrity — by the time I left Calloustown for good it seemed as though everyone aged twelve to forty had been present and witnessed the occasion. “What the hell you boys doing to each other?”
Before anyone could answer — and I’ll admit that I started laughing uncontrollably, which is why I don’t play poker — our sixth-grade teacher flew into her own, now corrupted, den. She got that look on her face that meant “I’m calling your daddy,” and without raising her voice much said, “Get your clothes back on, boys.” She reached down to the floor, picked up her fouled jar of night cream, and said, “Where’d y’all get this?”