For a school that often appears in my dreams, I can barely remember Harrold Junior High School now. It was an old school even when I went to it. Red brick outside, and lots of dark wood inside. When I have one of those archetypal dreams of having forgotten to prepare for a math test, it’s usually at Harrold’s that it happens. Academics were not the first priority at Harrold’s. I don’t even remember if the school had a library. As I recall, most of the staff’s energy rather went into child control

Lunch at Harrold’s was always slightly nauseating. The cafeteria had a low ceiling, a wide ramp leading down from the hallway and a steamy close smell of over-cooked vegetables and disintegrating meat. Not surprisingly the food was barely edible and the only consolation was they didn’t give you much of it--a junior-sized hamburger, a square of pizza three inches on a side, or four canned ravioli each no bigger than a quarter in pastel pink tomato sauce. Then we’d get a desert, Jell-O with shaved carrots in it. We could have apples if we wanted them, but they were always the much despised red delicious type, soft and mealy without being tasty. Because the food was so lousy most of the kids ate scads of candy, which you could buy between classes. I still love Mallow Cups and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

For some reason we had a lot of study halls at Harrold’s. No one studied of course. We were sent to a big auditorium and basically we sat there and gossiped. A few of us would do things like catch flies and then pull a long thread from our socks and tie to the fly’s leg and let it go. Then the fly would painfully drone around the auditorium very slowly trailing a 14 inch thread.

Most of the faculty at Harrold were graduates of third rate schools like Slippery Rock and Indiana State, the kind of people who when they were in high school made all C’s and were now determined to get back at the world because of it--usually with cruelty to anyone so foolish as to be younger and smaller. Our gym coach and for one year my home room teacher, Nick Chopish, came to us from from Muskingum College by way of the U.S. Army. He was a stupid man and brutish to boot. Then as today I doodled a lot in my notebooks. In fact I carried one notebook just for drawings. They were silly things mostly--a drawing of a black lightbulb which, as the caption, explained, made the whole room dark when you when you switched it on, a six-shot remote control device (actually a revolver) for (permanently) turning off the TV, a cut-away drawing of a spaceship showing lockers for the spacesuits, bunkbeds, food storage, dining area and bridge.

Because my drawings were well done (and often witty) and other kids would gather around my desk to look at them. Naturally that made a man like Chopich suspicious and one day he just walked back to my desk and seized my notebook. I’m sure he thought it was full of cocks and balls or naked women things which he would have some justification to punish me for. But I didn’t do porn. Mostly they were Rube Goldberg mechanical inventions, jet planes, tanks or spaceships. I was furious that he took it away and I demanded he give it back, which he did, reluctantly. But he got his revenge.

One day we were in gym class playing kickball Chopich warned us to keep the ball on the ground. Good advice. But in the heat of the game the first time I got my foot on the ball I kicked it right into the face of a younger kid. Chopich told me that I would pay for that at the end of gym class. The punishment was vindictive and probably illegal. He had the entire class (like 40 kids) line up in two parallel rows. Then I had to put my hands on my head and run backwards down the row while everyone got a free shot with their open palms on my ass. They really swung. They didn’t just hit my ass either. They hit me in the back, on my thighs, in my kidneys. I was in tears when it was over. Another reason I hated school (and the stupid and brutal Nick Chopich).

I was already a student at Harrold Junior High before I learned the facts of life. One day during a study hall in the auditorium one of the more socially advanced girls came up to me with a list of questions and a twinkle in her eye. The deal was she would ask the seemingly innocuous questions ("What’s your favorite position for watching TV") and I would write down the answers ("in an easy chair)". Then she’d read me a new list of questions, all of which were full of sexual innuendo ("When you do it with a girl, where do you usually do it at?"), while I read back the answers from the first list ("in an easy chair").

The problem was for the girl, when I read back my list of answers, I didn’t act as if I thought my answers were now hilariously funny. At first she was puzzled. Then it dawned on her: "You do know the facts of life, don’t you?"

"The facts of life?" I said. "Sure. . . I guess."

In fact, I didn’t have a clue. I’d never even heard the phrase before. Which was surprising, given that I’d done a lot of reading which alluded to sexual relations. But I simply hadn’t yet put it all together yet. Once I read one of mom’s novels which mentioned that the man and the woman had "gone to bed together." That seemed to happen a lot in books and it was always disappointing to me. The man and woman would be so passionate with each other and then instead of doing anything about it suddenly they’d climb into bed (and so I imagined) go to sleep ("How lame is that?" I remember thinking.)

Still, there were lots of clues lying about, if one had eyes to see them. I remember when my mother was pregnant with Jim she helpfully explained one day that the new baby was in her tummy. Well, that seemed reasonable enough to me. It was more in fact than I really wanted to know. But, being the practical-minded kid, it suddenly occurred to me, "Where does the baby come out¾ front or back?"

My mother looked astonished. "Why the front, of course," she said. "You thought babies came out the bum?"

Well, given what little I knew at the time, that certainly seemed as reasonable to me as any other place. Besides wasn’t everything down there really small? How were you ever going to get a baby out?

My big revelation finally came one winter evening when I was about 12 and dad took me with him to go to a soda shop/magazine store on Clay Avenue in Jeannette and buy magazines. They had a big floor to ceiling rack of them on the wall on the left beside the cash register. Dad bought about five magazines that night¾mostly his usual deer or pheasant hunting and fishing magazines. He must have been feeling a little less inhibited that day too (or there were no more deer or bass magazines that he hadn’t already read) because he also bought a men’s magazine, something he didn’t normally do.

I don’t remember the magazine’s name but I’ll never forget the cover. It showed a tanned and muscular white hunter, in a short sleeved khaki shirt, swinging boldly on a vine across a river full of vicious crocodiles, carrying an unconscious white woman with a generous bosom, while savages on the river bank hurled spears at them.

But what really caught my interest was a story inside entitled "Your Ten Key Sexual Worries." As I worked my way through the list none of them really applied to me (or frankly made much sense). Then I came to worry number seven. It was a question from a man who said he was unusually well-endowed while his bride-to-be was rather petite. Given their size differences, the letter writer worried, maybe he wouldn’t be able to consummate the relationship without hurting his wife?

Not to worry, the magazine editors reassured: "The female organ is highly elastic and invariably capable of accommodating the male organ of larger than usual dimensions."

I think I must have read that half a dozen times, not believing what I was reading. My dad was oblivious. He was propped up against the headboard, reading about deer hunting while here I was having the revelation of my young life about guys with male organs of "larger than usual dimensions." Just the thought of it made my head spin. How could my parents do that? Why would my dad want to stick his penis there? And even if he did, why on earth would mom ever let him? Just thinking about it made me gag (I gagged a lot in those days). Yet I knew the information was more than hot--it was pure nuclear. I had to tell my friends. At the same time, I didn’t want dad wondering what had happened to his magazine. So slipping out of bed, I retreated to my room where I used a razor to cut out the pages of the article, close to the spine where they wouldn’t be noticed. Just to be sure my dad didn’t see the title of the article in the table of contents and wonder what happened to it, I casually obliterated the page number.

Normally I would have hidden the information in my room but given the way my mother periodically went though ever book and drawer my bedroom wasn’t near safe enough. So the next day I carefully wrapped the pages in plastic and hid them under a rock on the hill behind the house. Then I called Tom Patrick and told him I had a big secret he needed to know--"you're not gonig to believe it when I tell you."

Tom came over my house in 20 minutes. I told him in the front yard. He was just as surprised as I had been but he said, once he thought about it a bit, it all made perfect sense. He too had been picking up clues for years but hadn’t put them together either. Now, he knew, he said, why when he once barged into his parents’ bedroom without knocking his father was standing there naked beside the bed.

So now we knew the facts of life. Unfortunately we didn’t know them too well. Years later Tom told me he came away from our conversation thinking that a man made a woman pregnant by urinating into her vagina. "Every time I’d take a pee," he said, "I’d think of all the wasted babies I was flushing down the toilet."http://paullall.blogspot.com/2005/04/author-sort-of-learns-facts-of-life.html