Things I Didn’t Get

The experience of growing up inexperienced

I spent my childhood in Loudonville, Ohio. Population: 3,000.

Here’s how small that is: there was one girl in my friend group who was Catholic, and we all made fun of her. How odd it was, we all decided, to be Catholic. They went to church on Saturdays? Okayyy weirdos.

Loudonville is a sleepy little place where, for better or worse, people get bored. It’s pretty, though, and has earned itself the nickname “The Canoe Capital of Ohio.” Someone must’ve realized the original, “Where Alcoholism was Invented,” wasn’t drawing many visitors.

We lived three miles out of town, in the middle of rolling farmland. Growing up in the boonies made for a creative childhood, even if it did give me the world’s worst porn name—your first pet plus the street you grew up on. No one is searching OnlyFans for Bandit Township Road 457.

I spent most of my time reading joke books, memorizing Trivial Pursuit cards, and nursing an endless list of crushes. The famous: Corey Haim, George Michael, Jim McMahon. The closer-to-home, equally unattainable: John, Doug, Jerry.

I dreamed of holding hands, kissing, and getting hickeys. Instead, I knew only that water boils at 212°F and that cannibals don’t eat clowns. They taste funny.

I had hormones and curiosity and sick kicks to attract the fellas (see below). I couldn’t wait to get to at least first base with someone, but the tiny pitching mounds under my shirt had nobody lined up to bat. Wait, is that right?

Hell yeah that’s a matching Swatch

Thankfully, what I also had were friends who lived in town. Who had cable. Who knew stuff. At least I could gain some secondhand experience, even if it meant having to pull out my very best acting skills.

In fifth grade, the 40-ish girls in my grade were called to the library for a presentation. (The boys were sent outside for an extra recess because of course they were.) We crowded into a few rows of chairs set up in haphazard lines, all facing the screen they’d pulled down to show us a film about menstruation.

After it was over, the teachers showed us a few products—pads and tampons—then asked if there were any questions. I raised my hand, confident that none of us knew anything. That we were all in this together.

“What’s the string for?” I asked.

From the row in front of me, a world-weary young face whipped around. “To pull it out with!” my classmate Beth sneered, punctuating it with a simple and devastating: “DUH.”

Decades later, rarely a month goes by when I don’t hear that little DUH while (men, go play outside!) dealing with my lady business. How could I have been so busy throwing rocks at frogs and somersaulting across the front yard to have completely ignored tampon mechanics? The shame.

A few years later, I was on my usual after-school walk downtown with some friends to buy candy before our junior-high cheerleading practice.

One of them, Katie, stopped us under an aggressively blooming tree, looking up in wonder. “Wow,” she marveled. “Don’t these flowers smell exactly like c*m?”* (Weirdly, I love to cuss but cannot bring myself to type that word.)

Don’t those WHAT smell like WHAT? “Totallllly,” I agreed, dizzy with ignorance. I had been nowhere near the stuff, not counting my own conception.

How she knew that boggles me. (Amazingly, though, she nailed it.) To be so experienced, even your nose isn’t a virgin? And here all I could think about was getting some tight new Laffy Taffy material to impress the group with. How was I going to deftly pivot the conversation away from sex trees to a killer joke about why the pony went to the doctor? (He was a little hoarse?) There went my whole act.

My final naive experience of note took place when I was 16 and back in Loudonville on a visit, having moved to Kansas City the year before.

I sat on one of my good friends’ beds with her, catching up. I’d missed Jessica’s outspokenness. She dazzled me with her zaniness and her larger-than-life stories. I hadn’t yet found my people in KC, and Jessica was my people.

Googly-eyed, she waxed on about her experiences with her first boyfriend as I sat transfixed, my own romantic dreams as yet unfulfilled. She ended the play-by-play with a sentence that I still remember word for word, all these years later.

“It’s like,” she said, looking up at the ceiling to gather her thoughts. “Sometimes we make love, sometimes we have sex, and…” she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Sometimes we just fuck. You know?”

I nodded slowly, pulling out the “do I EVER”-est expression in my repertoire. At the time, I had kissed one, maybe two people. There hadn’t been any dry—and certainly no wet—humping up to that point.

I was gobsmacked. Not only did Jessica know stuff, she knew methods! And there were…three of them?! And here I thought I knew every science fact. Thanks for nothing, you Trivial Pursuit assholes.

Now, I know some things. Pulled a few strings. Been to a couple of bases, I think.¹

But the best stuff I know came from all that inexperience. While I was busy not getting busy, I accidentally internalized all that Laffy Taffy material and made a nice little career out of it.

I’d like to see someone make a career out of knowing the difference between making love, having sex, and just…you-know-what-ing! If there is, don’t tell me.

1. Second, for sure.