CHAPTER III

Females

Scot was one of the more popular guys in his high school.  He preferred to label it “a second tier popularity.”  He believed he had no chance with that handful of girls who were the dance queens or on the varsity cheerleading squad even though several or his cousins had been Homecoming, Prom or Ball queens.  First tier girls, including several of his cousins, preferred the sports stars, the movie star look-a-likes or the sons of rich fathers.  So he spared himself the embarrassment of being rejected by one of them.  The reserve cheerleaders were his level, he concluded.
Scot didn’t consider himself to be particularly handsome.  His brownish blond hair was cut in the common short flat top style.  He had hazel eyes which seemed to have some allure for the opposite sex.  Other than that, he considered himself to be just an average guy.  However, several girls expressed an interest in him in various ways.  Usually a female friend of the interested girl would call him or corner him at school or some school event such as a football or basketball game and ask him what he thought of the friend.
“Do you think she’s cute?” was the common opener.
Others just seemed to appear at the places Scot frequented.
A fertile hunting range for female companions was the girls who felt it was humiliating not to have a steady boyfriend and were not that particular about who the boyfriend was.  They boldly stalked anyone they considered to be a possible candidate for their open boyfriend position, as if it were the local merchant trying to hire a new worker.  Another plus for Scot was that he had transferred to the municipal high school from his rural elementary school.  He was fresh meat.  The girls at his level fiercely competed with each other, and the conquest of a new arrival elevated their status.  He was new and untried.  His weaknesses and flaws had yet to be revealed.  The flaws and weaknesses of the local boys were common knowledge.  Any character improvements didn’t help because there always was someone around to recall past deficiencies and unwise acts or decisions.
          Scot wasn’t sure how many tiers there were.  There was a tier of non-daters.  There were tiers between the secondary tier and the non-dater tier.  The stratification seemed to mirror Hindu social levels.  Scot knew his place, his tier, and was resigned to being there.
Scot did have a dream girl in the first tier.  She was Cathy Lombardozzi.  She had long, thick, black hair, olive skin and a beautiful face, or at least what he could see of it behind the cascades of hair.  She also had a perfect body shape as far a Scot could determine.  The 1950s clothing styles were thick, bulky and concealing.  What a girl looked like was about 75% imagination.
Cathy closely resembled Annette Finicello, one of the Mouseketeers on the Disney show that aired on TV every week night.  Annette was the dream girl of most normal American teenage boys.
Cathy wasn’t dating anyone, as far as Scot knew.  She always had a bunch of other girls around her.  A point in Scot’s favor was that he was an upperclassman, one year ahead of Cathy.  That probably was not enough to compensate for the tier separation.
The forbidden tier was not the only obstacle Scot faced.  His grandmother had warned him against dating Italian girls.  Grandma never gave any specific reason.  The town had a large Italian population.  It was large enough to support a Catholic elementary school.  Catholics were misguided people according to grandma.  There was something wrong with the way they interpreted the Bible, she said.  They worshipped idols for one thing.   They had statues in their churches.  At the high school level, they were forced to mix with non-Italians and non-Catholics at the only high school in town.  All the Italian mothers Scot had seen were short and chubby.  How did they produce such beautiful, well-shaped daughters, he wondered?  Would his goddess Cathy become a short, chubby woman when she reached 35?  
           The unwritten rules of high school relationships and the process of elimination matched Scot with a pretty, perky, blond, reserve cheerleader named Susan.  Scot didn’t have any life guidelines, let alone ambitions, to tell him where else to go, so he submitted to the secondary tier siren calls. He still could not recall where, or when, they met.  He could not recall how they began dating, or even where they went on their first date.  He settled on the premise that a group of students had gone somewhere.  The others left one by one until Scot and Susan became a couple by default, or design.
        “Was it planned?  Was is destiny?” he wondered later.
“Do we have any control over our lives?” he mused to himself.  “Is it futile to make plans?  Are the females a conniving sex, far advanced in the arts of manipulation and control?   Did they form into hunting packs and surround and box in the selected prey until it was rendered helpless and forced to surrender?”
          Susan became the object of Scot’s explorations into the world of the opposite sex.  It was a mysterious world for which he was ill prepared.  Although Scot had four sisters, all other girls were from a different, mysterious species in his mind.  He, like most teenage boys, put them on a pedestal.  He sometimes wondered if one of  his sisters was on some other guy’s pedestal.  That guy was in for a big surprise.  Only after extensive dating or marriage did it finally dawn on Scot and guys like him that those imaginary princesses were just like their sisters after all.
Scot had an additional handicap when it came to relations with the opposite sex.  Besides the usual parental reluctance to discuss sex, Scot’s father had abdicated all parental guidance and discipline duties.  He lost all faith in his abilities in that area soon after the dogs and the Out House incident.  In fact, he developed an almost psychotic fear to raising boys.  He wanted to have nothing but daughters from then on.  Somehow, he succeeded in that goal.  He had four daughters in a row.  It was as if he thought two girls would compensate for each poorly raised boy.  He spoiled the girls horribly.  Scot and his brother were sure normal girls were nothing like the princesses they and their father thought they were.  The brothers were doomed to learn all about sex through the trial and error method.
The sister experience had been traumatic and soured Scot on females for several years.   It was during those years that he read voraciously and learned most of what influenced his life's goals.
The arrival of the first sister upset the smooth running routine that had been established in the household.  Her arrival was akin to Armageddon in the minds of the brothers.  She got 90% of the attention from the parents, it seemed, especially their father.  From there on, it only got worse.
What the brothers imagined was a horrible experience when the sister arrived paled next to the reality.  Not only did she command most of the attention of the parents, but she chiseled into the toy allotment.  But the worst was yet to come.
One day, Bertha began talking.  And she never stopped, it seemed to her brothers.  She had an opinion about everything.  Worst of all, she considered herself to be the family moral police.  At first she observed the antics of her brothers and periodically asserted "Dad's not going to approve of that."
"How do you know?  Besides, he'll never find out," the brothers declared.
"Oh yes he will," she always responded.
"Why don't we drop her off at another home?" Mark suggested one day.  "We'll pick one where the new parents won't know where she came from and wouldn't know where to return her when they found out what a nuisance she is."
"We'll leave her with a really large family that won't realize there's an extra mouth at the table," Scot added relishing his brother's idea.  Then he thought of a flaw in the plan.  "There would need to be a much quieter mouth for her to go unnoticed."
With the absence of parental control or guidance, the two brothers had to plan their own day's activities.  "Why don't we hide in Wallace's cornfield and throw tomatoes at cars driving by?"  Mark proposed during one planning session.
"Tomatoes ain't ripe enough yet," declared Scot.  "What about eggs?  We can gather them late in the afternoon, hide them by the big oak tree, then when it gets dark, we can go over there and start throwing em."I
"Dad's not going to like that plan for two reasons," said a voice from behind them, startling both boys.  They twisted around in unison to confirm that their baby sister had been lurking behind them.
"Dad warned you many times about throwing things at other people," she scolded them.  "Also, he doesn't want his eggs to be wasted.  He likes eggs for breakfast."
"Well, we don't like eggs!" said Scot defensively, as if this was an issue to be settled democratically.
"Go play with your dolls and leave us alone," Mark commanded in a high voice that lost any intended threatening tone.
From that time on, the brothers carefully sought secret hideaways to plot their plans.
Meanwhile, Bertha promoted herself from their father's moral spokesman to righteous arbiter of the universe.  She expected the Pope to call her any day for advice.  She wasn't sure who the Pope was, but her little Italian playmates claimed the Pope had the final say on moral matters and most other issues as well.
Still, visitors made over Bertha calling her "adorable, cute and so precocious."  After extensive consideration, the brothers concluded that "precocious" had to mean "evil."
Susan seemed to be no better informed about the opposite sex. She had no siblings as a reference point.  Many, if not most, parents rued discussing sex.  They postponed it, or waited for the child to come to them for advice on the matter.  It’s a time in life that sociologists have labeled “independence.” Nature tells the youth to break away from the ways of the parents.  In case the environment has changed, the youngsters will be looking for alternative ways of life.  Those who choose correctly will adapt and survive.  The others will suffer, or even die off.
          Adolescence, Scot concluded, is the first years of a 10-15 year period where Mother Nature subscribes to Charles Darwin’s first law: “Preservation and perpetuation of the species.”  Testosterone inundates the teenage male’s body.  Oxygen is diverted to the reproductive system first.  The brain competes for any remnants of the gas.  It’s not a period when the wisest decisions are, or can be, made.  Mistakes are abundant.
Maybe Susan wasn’t really that beautiful. Maybe she was less sexy than the image formed by the oxygen-deprived brain.  The proto-brain, the lizard brain, that now controlled his body wasn’t about to quibble over the minor issues.  The gut feeling, the intuition, the hunches sang out in a thunderous, harmonious chorus with a singular message:  Explore!  Explore!  Explore!
What is beauty after all?  Beauty is the possession of all of the most common features.  Whoever has the most common nose, mouth, ears, eyes, face, head size and proportions is considered to be a ravishing beauty, an exceptional person, when that person is, when all is said and one, just the most common.
In addition, we do not look out at the world.  Just as the sun appears to rotate around the earth and to be a fraction of the size of the earth, the exact opposite is true in both cases.  Images we “see” are billions of photons striking an object, changing their wave lengths according to the “color” of that part of the object, then bouncing off in every direction.  Some of the altered photons pass through the iris of the eye and strike a membrane in the brain.  The membrane reassembles those photons as if it were completing thousands of puzzles per second.  The result for perfect eyes is an exact replica of the original object altered somewhat for conditions such as distance.  The brain makes thousands of changes, such as inverting the image, before the image is passed on to the cognitive and other sections of the brain.  A teenager with hormones firing like Fourth of July pyrotechnics can see whatever he wants to see.  
            Susan had everything a testosterone gorged teenage male mind could want.  She also came with several bonuses.  Lunch was a daily horse race since the high school provided no food services.  When the noon bell rang, hundreds of hungry students poured out into the streets and made a mad dash to the limited neighborhood food providers.  Those with some dignity refused to join in the daily dash and subjected themselves to more distinguished, but time consuming, trips to the farther reaches of the town.  Many were able to go home to eat lunch.
            Susan, unlike Scot, participated in nearly every extracurricular activity the school offered to females.  One of those activities was the school band.  Scot couldn’t remember which instrument she played.  The important part about the band was that rehearsal was held during the last morning period.  Since time was needed to care for and store some of the instruments, band class ended ten minutes earlier than other classes.  Susan was able to leave immediately, go to the nearest restaurant and save a table.  Several people dined with her from time to time, but one chair always was reserved for Scot.
            Dating for Scot, and most other rural guys, usually involved drive-in movie theaters.  Most dates were planned to end in fondling opportunities.  Summers and parts of Spring and Fall were easy to plan.  Winter was more of a challenge.  Parents’ homes were a last resort.  The result was fewer dates during the Winter.
            As a consequence, Scot saw a lot of bad movies at the local drive-in theaters.  In spite of speakers that crackled louder than the dialogue they transmitted, the drive-ins prospered.  There must have been an urgent need for fondling in that community, because the drive-ins frequently sold out even though technical difficulties were a frequent, but tolerated, complement to the films.  Horns honked on those occasions in case the projector operator had fallen asleep at the reel.  The impatient horns represented that tiny fraction of the patrons who were there primarily to watch a movie.  The protesting horns were more annoying than the blank screen for most drive-in patrons.
            Susan was a year behind Scot in school, but her guardian seemed not to be worried that her young impressionable granddaughter might get into trouble.  The community was near the Ohio River on the frontier of Appalachia, so most residents came from lower income families that live from hand to mouth.  The sooner their daughters got married, the sooner they had more discretionary, or more often, necessary funds for other necessities.
            It was the first date that they were entirely alone.  Usually Susan insisted that at least one other couple accompany them.  It might have been a condition her grandmother imposed for her to go on a date.  She denied it when Scot challenged her motives.
            The evening was cool, so snuggling began immediately as the parade of previews marched across the screen interspersed with loud, colorful promotions for the snack bar.  It was uncanny how the speakers seemed to work flawlessly when the snack bar commercials were running.  It was more uncanny how much less inviting the food looked when you purchased it.
            Scot had his right arm around Susan’s shoulder.  She leaned her head on his shoulder for a minute then began talking rather aimlessly as if she were a little uneasy.
            Scot kissed her gently to shut her up.  His left hand touched, then rested on her small waist.
          “The movie’s beginning,” she announced, as if Scot might not discover that on his own.
The screen brightened and the camera zoomed in on a group of people with strong Southern accents standing near a highway.  One had binoculars through which he scanned north along the smoothly paved road.  A couple cars approached.  He zoomed in on the license plates then turned away.  Then another car came into view.  He zoomed in on the license plate.  His body tensed in excitement.  He zoomed in and out a couple times.  “It’s from New York,” he announced gleefully.  A man standing beside him waved to another man standing on higher ground about a hundred yards away.  He in turn waved to another group of men positioned about a half mile down the road. They quickly placed a sign on the road announcing that it was closed, and directed traffic off to a detour West.  The men ran behind some bushes and sinister smiles crept across their faces revealing great joy and decades of dental neglect.  They watched the car slow, then obediently take the direction instructed by the sign.
Then the screen burst with color, and loud music wealthy with drums, poured out of the speakers.  The movie producer’s logos streamed across, up and down and in circles around the screen.  Scrolling script reminded infrequent movie watchers just who the producers were. Preliminary credits listed the stars’ names for those idolizers who want to see the actor or actress and could care less about the theme or content of the film.
Scot shifted a little and moved his left hand higher on the taut stomach.  Daily cheerleading practice had removed any surplus fat that might have accumulated during those years before and during puberty.  The change was like the American landscape where the flat plains of Nebraska turned into the rolling hills and protruding mountains of Colorado.  The left breast, still a rolling hill, nevertheless obstructed the upward movement.  Susan put an end to the Westward adventure when she gently, but firmly, removed the pioneering hand.
This was not going to be a cakewalk.  The girls had initiated Scot’s previous experiences with sex, his first kiss, his first, failed sex attempt.  That was contrary to what adults always had said about these encounters.  Scot was confused.  Were those other girls rare exceptions?  Were they all of the exceptions? How would he proceed from here?  He really wasn’t comfortable discussing the subject with his parents or friends.  Older boys seemed to have nothing else on their minds, but he could not imagine making arrangements to discuss the subject with any of them.  They would just mock him.  They seemed unable to keep secret the intimate moments with their girlfriends.  Their first opportunity to relate their Friday and Saturday night sexual adventures usually was at church on Sunday morning.  If God disapproved, He would have put the Sabbath on Friday.  Of course the details of the date might had become more risqué given time for an active young mind to embellish the real event.
Scot decided that the only person with whom he could discuss the subject was Susan.  How to approach it?  How had his previous encounters developed?  The first was when he was 11 years old.  There was a wooded area not far from his parent’s house where the children of the neighborhood often gathered to play jungle games or Cowboys and Indians.  It followed a stream that came out of the ground during normal weather.  When it rained, water flowed down from the surrounding hills and turned the stream into a river.  The stream flowed several miles.  The uncertain bank heights made it inhospitable for habitation. Consequently, no one built a home within hundreds of yards of the stream.  Trees, bushes and weeds were able to grow freely.  There were locust and wild cherry trees that served no valuable purpose for the children.  Then there were large oak and hickory trees that they could climb.   They could construct rudimentary tree houses on the long thick branches of the oak trees that often stretched away from the trunk parallel to the ground for several yards.
It was in this wooded area that Scot took a walk one Fall day at Hazel’s suggestion.  Hazel was a plain, spindly girl with auburn, unkempt hair and an abundance of freckles.  She kept her hair cut short, unlike most of her female classmates.  Scot preferred the longer hair, a taste most of his fellow males seemed to share based on how they described new girls they met.  Scot’s mother told him Hazel should not be considered as a potential girlfriend because “they’re poor.”
For some reason, a mother’s admonitions become decrees.  Scot figured it was nature’s way of passing on learned experiences.  Fred postulated that it formed our first, and all too often, only, moral code.
Hazel was an infrequent playmate as far as Scot was concerned.   He assumed they were going to climb a tree, throw rocks, throw crude spears or visit the old blockhouse.  The blockhouse wasn’t there, as far as Scot knew, even though that wooded area was called Blockhouse Hollow.  No one knew where the namesake originated.  There was a collapsed brick cellar on a rise in the hollow, but the old folks claimed that was not the Blockhouse.  It was just some pioneer’s poor choice for a cabin location.
The Blockhouse, according to a local wise man known as Mr. Norris, was a large house/fortress.  It was a common frontier structure.  It was constructed of huge logs.  It had two levels.  The upper level cantilevered over the lower level on all four sides.  There were holes in the floor of the overlapping sections of the second story.  If Indians or other hostile visitors arrived, the occupants could shoot down, pour boiling water or dump hot coals on anyone at the doors, or near the building.  According to legend, this particular blockhouse was destroyed when some Indians loaded a wagon with wood and straw, set it afire and pushed it down an incline into the blockhouse.  The entire building burned down.  No one knew or even guessed what happened to the occupants of the building.
“Let’s go visit the Blockhouse,” was a common ploy to play on new kids or visitors who were too uppity or naive.  If the visitor was too snobbish, he was told to stay at the sight while the rest of the kids went to get Mr. Norris to give them a tour of the fabled site. Then they abandoned the visitor, sometimes for several hours.  If the gullible guest still was there when the sun set, it was a complete victory for the pranksters.
Scot and his brother were notorious for the tricks they played on other youngsters.  Many families didn’t allow their children to go into the areas near the home of the two brothers.  They lacked discipline.  Even when their antics were witnessed by adults, their father refused to correct them.  He seldom was home to get the whole story or administer immediate punishment.  All disciplinary action was the preserve of their mother.  She was overwhelmed by the frequency, and novelty, of trouble the two youngsters could get into.
“Let’s try to spear a frog,” Scot suggested, as they passed a tree where several of the crude weapons leaned.  He already was bored.  ‘Why did he agree to play in the woods with a girl?’ he asked himself.  How boring.  They can’t do anything that’s fun. Girls probably couldn’t even throw a spear.  Their spears, made of wild cherry tree branches, had no flint heads. They had points crudely sharpened by dull penknives.  The weapons were no danger to anything except the eyes of playmates.  Scot still had a scar from a spear that penetrated this left forearm, broke and left a three inch sliver of wood embedded in and hanging from the skin.  He pulled out the spear head.  There was almost no bleeding.  He resumed playing.  It took a long time to heal and left a large scar.  He had read that some warriors cut their skin and filled the cut with mud to create scars and an impression of toughness and fierceness.  Scot planned to wave his scar in the face of anyone who threatened him.
“I don’t like doing that,” Hazel responded.  “Let’s go over and sit under those trees.” She gestured toward a dense clump of wild cherry trees growing on a small plateau.
Scot wanted to do something that would expend some of his excessive energy.  He could think of nothing more boring than sitting under a grove of trees, especially without a picnic basket, but decided to accede to her wishes.  She led him to a small clearing in the grove, took off her skirt and turned it into a blanket that she spread out on the ground. She had a shiny silk slip underneath decorated with small, embroidered flowers.  The image of that slip and those small flowers, for some reason, remained embedded in his memory.
“Sit down,” she invited, patting the makeshift blanket with the flat of her hand as if she were training a dog.
Scot tried not to touch the partially exposed girl, but the small, makeshift blanket made that impossible.  Hazel leaned up against him with her small, nascent right breast touching his upper left arm.  He pulled away to give her more room, but the breast stuck to him like a leech attached to a fresh blood source.
“I noticed that you fidget in your seat quite a bit at school,” she said, out of the blue. “Are you getting erections?”
Although Hazel was in Scot’s class, she was nearly a year older than he was.  Due to the strict age cut off rules, Scot was the youngest student in his class.  Hazel was among the oldest.  He was born at the end of November.  She was born at the beginning of January.
“Would you like to put your thing inside me?” she asked casually as if she were inviting him to share a sandwich.
Scot was speechless for what seemed to be an eternity.  Did he hear correctly?  Was that a rhetorical question or an invitation?  The caution instilled by his Presbyterian rearing kicked in.  The excessive caution would haunt him throughout his adolescent years.  On occasion, the caution saved him, but on the whole, it was a millstone around his neck.   “Give the child to us until he is seven, and he’ll be ours forever more,” the old legend goes.  “Ours” usually referred to some priestly or witchcraft group.  There were a hundred voices in his head each giving him different, often conflicting, advice.  Most told him she was asking a hypothetical question out of curiosity about the opposite sex.  Maybe she was taking a survey.  Other voices said no, she actually wants you to do it.  The later group was gaining ascendency as more and more blood was diverted from the brain to lower parts of the body.
         “Look how she is rubbing herself against you?” the minority voices said.  “She definitely wants to try it to see how it feels.”
“No!” said the majority voices.  “Girls never want to have sex.”  It’s only when they want to have babies that they agree to do it, his Bible-thumping spinster aunt had warned him.  He was a few years too young to have a child.  Better find out if she wants to have a baby, he concluded.
“Do you want to have a baby?” he blurted out, in a nearly inaudible voice.
Hazel was visibly taken aback.  The breast detached itself from his arm.
“I don’t want to have a baby!” she shot back.  “Besides, it’s the wrong time of the month.  I can’t get pregnant this time of the month.”
“Wrong time of the month?”  What was she talking about?  Most of Scot’s knowledge about these things came from other boys.  His parents never had a detailed talk with him about such matters, nor with his siblings as far as he knew.  What little they had said was in the form of criticism of someone else’s sexual misadventures.  Decades later, Scot would discover that his parents had a little secret, and the subject was very sensitive.
The ice was broken as was any semblance of romantic mood.  Lust now was the loudest voice remaining to guide his actions since the breast-arm disengagement signaled that the carnal opportunity was in danger of being lost.  It drowned out all other voices.  Primitive animal instincts had overpowered and shut down the cognitive sector of his brain.  Logic had been expelled from the thought processes.
“So!  You want to have sex just for the fun of it.”
“Yes,” she said curtly with just the slightest hint of irritation.
Had his aunt lied to him about the sexual desires of females?  If so, what other lies had she told him about relationships?  What lies had they told him about everything?
Scot reached down to the embroidered hem of her slip and slowly drew the garment up toward her waist.  He still expected to be admonished at any second and chastised for trying to do such a filthy thing.
The breast reattached to his arm.  The silk skirt had slipped up further mysteriously exposing most of her ivory white legs.  The rest of the initiatives were left to him.  He raised the slip up to the white panties.  When the elastic of the panties came into view, his hand slipped under it and eagerly, awkwardly, began tugging the garment down.  As it became evident that he needed help, she rejoined the cause.  She raised her hips so the panties could slide over them, and her knees, one by one, bent toward her chest reducing the distance necessary to slide them off her body.  Now he was 99% sure she intended to go through with the forbidden act.  The one admonition his mother had said repeatedly was never to have sex until you are married.  That warning appeared and disappeared in his mind like a blinking neon sign over the entrance of a drug store.  However, the beast instincts quickly overpowered the logical warnings.  The flashes of the soft white legs penetrated deeper into the brain blocking all other brain functions.  Her legs stretched momentarily then relaxed and spread slightly apart revealing her vagina and a thin patch of auburn hair that was sprouting in response to the  commands of nascent puberty.  “Why is that little patch of hair there?” Scot thought for a split second.  Then that curiosity slipped away.
Scot was not aware of foreplay, so he climbed on top of her and fumbled around looking for the insertion location.  Unable to find it, two more hands joined in the search.  Frustration set in.  The erection began relaxing as both tried more frantically to complete the coupling.  The erection that always was there when it wasn’t wanted, wasn’t there for  just a few minutes when it was needed.  There would be no penetration that day.
“Scottie . . Scottie . ..SCOTTIE!” a voiced was saying.  “Are you alright?  You acted as if you were in a trance.”
Scot’s daydreaming faded as his mind returned to the present.  Susan was looking into his eyes with concern on her face.  She had  been hiding her head to avoid seeing the ghastly images on the screen while Scot was lost deep in his daydreaming reminiscences.  Scot suddenly realized that she was holding his hand against her breast.  It was a firm breast, almost perfectly symmetrical.  Of course, the molding was due in part to her bra.  Someday, Scot now felt certain, he would feel and even see the real thing.
Meanwhile, on the theater screen, peoples’ limbs were being hacked off, and blood was spouting effusively in every direction and covered the ground like a carpet.  One victim after another slipped into shock, nature’s merciful, final sedative.  All pain stopped, but the heart kept pumping blood in a futile attempt to repair the damaged parts of the body.  The shock stopped other vital functions and the victim soon expired.  It‘s just a film, Scot told himself.  Still, the sight was revolting to him.  Someone imagined this.  Could someone actually do it?  It’s done all the time in wars, according to the history books Scot had read.  Crusaders and other warriors fighting with swords specialized in the tactic.  Stab where the major arteries were located.  Were any of them appalled by their acts?   Did some actually enjoy hacking other people apart?   There were stories of U.S. frontier soldiers bayonetting helpless, pregnant Indian women.  Apparently soldiers can be dehumanized to the point that they can dehumanize their victims and kill them with no remorse.  The movie screen depictions were more vivid than most readers could imagine.
Susan experienced even greater revulsion and refused to face the screen.  Had Susan taken things farther than she wanted to get Scot’s attention or as a diversion from the disgusting movie?  Either way, it worked in Scot’s favor.  The relationship had advanced to the breast fondling stage.  Where would it go next?  Did  Susan have the sexual urges Hazel had, or was Hazel unique? Was Hazel the girl who goes bad and ends up starring in a pornographic movie or fully exposed on the pages of an adult magazine?  Is she the one girl in the class who would become a prostitute or call-girl?
Scot decided later that Susan mistook his reminiscences about Hazel as pouting over her rejection of his advances.  She must have decided she cared enough about him to compromise her dating guidelines.
His mind drifted back to Hazel.  He wondered what happened to her?  He spent the six months following the aborted incident in the woods dreading the day he would see a group of girls gesturing in his direction and snickering about his sexual inadequacy.  Boys told everything about their sexual escapades, especially the unusual ones.  Surely, girls were twice as bad.  Scot had many sleepless nights imagining that the girls in his school would shun him for the rest of his life.  They would tell all of their friends who would tell all of their friends until the whole world knew that he was sexually incompetent.  He vowed to himself that he would never try sex again until he got married--if that ever happened.
Hazel had not reappeared in school the following year.  No one noticed.  She had not spread rumors about Scot’s sexual ineptitude.  His opinion of her became elevated.  He missed her.  Thanks to her, he was the most “sexually” experienced male in his Junior High School.  Sure, only Scot and Hazel knew it, but he could feel superior to his classmates in that respect at least.
The movie was too disgusting to watch.  Scot remembered his vow of chastity and decided that the fondling had gone as far as he was ready to go at this time.  Susan seemed ready, if not eager, to take the sexual exploration to the next stage.  Scot froze in fear of the humiliation that could result from sexual misadventures.
“This movie is revolting,” he said committing to a course of action that was a course on non-action.  I thought it would be about an insane asylum and the inmates doing hilarious things.  “Let’s go to Isalys for a milkshake.”
Susan was caught completely off guard.  Apparently her sex advisors had told her that men were no different than animals when it comes to sex.  Any time, any where was their guideline.  Was she being rejected by a sex maniac, even if he still was in the budding stages?
Their relationship changed that evening.  The roles reversed.  Susan became the sex initiator.  At every opportunity, she did something sexually provocative.  She began wearing shorter skirts and left more of her blouse unbuttoned.  When they were alone in the car, here skirt kept slipping up and more and more of her legs became exposed.  It seemed accidental, but accidents don’t occur routinely as the slipping skirt did.
Then the Poodle Skirt found its way into Susan’s wardrobe.  It wrapped around the thighs and legs down to just below the knees and was held together by a large pin.  Her pin magically came loose every time they were in the car on a date.  By the time they had driven a couple miles, everything was exposed up to and including glimpses of her black panties.  Scot’s driving became more erratic than a Saturday night drunk trying to find his way home.
Scot was both defensive and tempted by the alluring gestures of this nubile young lady throwing herself at him.  Now that he felt he could have her any time he wanted, he was less inclined to believe he might be passing up a golden opportunity.  He also began realizing that even very attractive young women want most what they can’t have.   The more attractive they are, the more they can’t bear rejection and will compromise their values, even if that involves a relationship with a lower-tiered person.   Armed with this knowledge, perhaps he could promote himself to a higher tier.  Perhaps he could qualify for a varsity cheerleader.
Scot stored these bits of insights in his repertoire of information for dealing with the opposite sex.  He came to believe that the female half of the human race has an entire library of “How To” books for dealing with the male half of the human race, and the male half is completely ignorant of the existence of that library.  It’s the “Eve Effect.”  Gaelic  legend claims life thousands of years ago was matriarchal and relatively tranquil.  Women ruled the tribes.  Children were well-behaved.   Men were tolerated, allowed to visit, especially if they had a freshly-killed deer or rabbit, but had to leave after a couple days of visiting.   They had to leave because they tended to be lazy and burdensome.  One night, one of the women, in a moment of weakness, passed on a tiny bit of super secret knowledge to a man who was residing with her.   She informed him that men were crucial to producing children.  Since there was a nine month interval between sex and birth, no man had made the connection.  The Christian version of this story is known as Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.  The “knowledge” revealed varies in the Christian version.  This bit of information gave men power over women.  If  women wanted to fulfill their most basic instinct, reproduction of children, they now had to accommodate the men.  With this knowledge, men were able to take control of the family groups, and impose patriarchal values on them.
The patriarchal values such as war, greed, gluttony, selfishness and self-destruction now dominated the instinct for perpetuation of the society.  Half of society had a powerful “nesting” instinct and wanted to continue it.  The other half was willing to destroy it, even if it meant destroying themselves.  Thus emerged a new dangerous phase in the delicate balance between survival and self-destruction that continues today.
A few days later, Scot read a review of the movie they had abandoned.  The story involved citizens of a Southern town whose ancestors had been victims of a brutal slaughter by Northern soldiers during the Civil War.  The town’s citizens had been seething over the savage event for nearly 1 and 1/2 centuries.  They needed closure.  They needed revenge.  They watched for cars with Yankee license plates, detoured them into their trap, and carried out their brutal revenge against people who probably were totally innocent.   They might even have been from Confederate families that migrated north.  Justice seems to be a strong instinct, Scot thought to himself.  Justice seems to have a lot of conflicting definitions.