A recurring character on the long-running children’s TV series Romper Room was Mr. Do-Bee, an oversized bumblebee who taught children proper deportment and who always started his sentence with Do Bee, as in “Do Bee good boys and girls for your parents!” There was also a Mr. Don’t Bee to show children exactly what they should not do.
In front of my television on my nap mat, I would gaze at the Romper Room hostesses–Miss Rosemary and Miss Beverly–holding the Magic Mirror while chanting, Romper, bomper, stomper, boo. Tell me, tell me, tell me do... until I drifted off to sleep.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the house, a cheerful song called “The Birds and the Bees” played like an early childhood theme song. With its catchy lyrics, Jewel Akens’s song reached Number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 list in 1965.
Let me tell you about the birds and the bees
And the flowers and the trees
And the moon up above
And a thing called ‘Love’
-From the song “The Birds and the Bees” by Jewel Akens
At ten, I am walking early one morning on a wooded trail at a KOA campground in Texarkana, Texas, when I spot a honeycomb in the bark of a tree. I flick it with my finger. Nothing happens. I should let it be, but instead I flick it a little harder. Moments later, bees cover my body from head to toe–dozens, maybe hundreds of them. In a panic, I strip off my T-shirt and cutoff jeans and run like there’s no tomorrow for a pond about a hundred feet away. I throw myself in, but the water is only about three feet deep, so I bend my knees and submerge my head as my feet sink into the gooey mud.
When I re-emerge, the bees are gone. Only now do I realize that I am naked. I cast my eyes about. At first, I don’t notice her. But then I spin my head around and, across the pond, stands a girl with bronzed skin and shoulder-length brown hair holding onto a bamboo fishing pole. Our eyes lock and I can see from her blank expression that she is as uncertain as I am. In silence, she lifts the line out of the water, turns and walks away.
Later that afternoon, I am lying on a towel spread on the hot cement next to a small pool when the warm sun disappears. There had not been a cloud in the sky. I lift an eyelid and see the shadow of a body standing over me.
I think it’s my pesky sister. “Go away,” I say, reclosing my eyes.
“I’m sorry. I –”
The soft Latin accent startles me and I shoot up. As my eyes adjust, I see the soft, tanned skin on her crossed arms, then the rainbow colored butterflies on her bikini, and then her deep, dark brown eyes. “Oh, no,” I scramble to collect my thoughts. “I’m sorry. I thought…I thought you were my little sister.”
“I think this is yours.” She places the leather wristband in the palm of my hand. “You must have…well, you must have dropped it. I found it by the pond.”
“Thank you,” I blush.
She turns to walk away, but then spins around. I see that same uncertainty I’d seen before. She finally says, “Did you make it yourself?”
“No, well, I had some help. My grandma, she does a lot of this kind of stuff.”
“It’s very nice.” Dimples appear when she smiles.
“Carmen!” a voice in the distance echoes.
“That’s for you?” I ask.
She glances over her shoulder before turning her attention back to me. “That’s my mom. I have to get back.” A slight hesitation again, and then she says, “I was wondering…there’s an outdoor movie tonight…would you want to join me?”
“Yeah, sure.” My voice cracks a little. “That would be great.”
I don’t tell my dad or my sister where I’m going. When they ask, I reply defensively, “I’m just going out.” As I exit the camper, I hand-comb my hair, pushing the bangs out of my eyes. What am I doing? Who is this girl and why haven’t I been able to stop thinking about her?
A small crowd has gathered by a big screen set up just outside the pool area. At first, I don’t see her and then I feel a tap on my shoulder and the butterflies start racing in my stomach.
“Hi.” I smile.
“Hi.” She smiles back, and then takes my hand. Never before has a girl held my hand, except when I played childhood games like Ring Around the Rosie and London Bridge is Falling Down. “I have a blanket over here.”
I ask her what movie is playing and she tells me Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I sense that her thoughts are distracted and then she throws me a curve ball. “What was it like?”
I am momentarily lost and tilt my head. “What was what like?”
“Skinning dipping. I’ve never done it.”
My face flushes. “You thought….it wasn’t what you think. It was the bees.”
“The bees?”
I read the confusion in her eyes so I explain, “They were all over me. I upset their nest in the tree, and I ran into the water to get away from them.”
“Oh.” Disappointment washes over her, as if she had hoped for a better story than a bee attack. Then, out of the blue, she leans over and her lips touch mine and, it is only a brief moment, but her lips are soft and warm and moist. Suddenly I can’t breathe.
She pulls away, and I read the concern in her eyes. My eyes are watering and perspiration drips down my forehead. Then alarms go off in my head as I search through my pockets and find nothing but small change and realize that I left my rescue inhaler back in the camper. “I’ve got,” I take a deep breath, “to go.”
I’m living in a town called Normal, in Central Illinois, in a suite consisting of six rooms near the top of the South Tower of one of the tallest dorms in the world. It is the fall semester of 1983, and in three weeks, two days and five hours, I’ll be twenty-one. While I should be looking to this day with a sense of party-till-I-puke liberation, I am instead dreading it with absurdist, angst-ridden, Woody Allen hide-under-the-covers misery. The dorm’s houses are named after the first ten Secretaries of State. I’m on Van Buren and, as the last virgin in my suite, I feel like I am the Omega man walking shirtless in a sexual apocalypse, a V branded onto my chest as a mark of my undesired state of purity.
All I want is to turn back the clock. Buy a little extra time. I ponder all those missed opportunities that started when I was ten–when Carmen kissed me and I misread an anxiety attack as asthma. Or the time with Lisa, when I had my hand under her sweater, or the time with Michelle, in the closet at the New Year’s Eve party, when we touched each other through the denim of our jeans. If only circumstances had been different, I might have finally ridded myself of my virginity.
Truth be told, I’d never even come close. I had rounded second once but I’m pretty certain I’d never touched third and know that I’d never gotten to that point in the Meatloaf song where the woman cries out, Stop right there! That point, before she will let him touch home base, when she wants to know one thing: Do you love me? Will you love me forever?
The other truth is that the thought of doing it, well, it scares the hell out of me. More than the Salisbury steak served up in the cafeteria. More than the Intermediate Microeconomic Theory exam coming up in two weeks. More than this tower swaying in the whipping prairie winds.
Less than a month before my twenty-first birthday, I’m wearing a black-and-yellow striped soccer shirt, which I’ve paired with black sweatpants, and a black waistband that serves as a holster for a metal cap gun. On my head, I wear a sweatband out of which sprouts a pair of pipe cleaners topped with round, yellow Styrofoam balls. My dorm neighbor, Jackson, is dressed just like me. We are headed out to a costume party dressed as The Killer Bees (from the SNL skit that John Belushi made famous in the ‘70s).
A crescent moon beams down on that cool, clear Saturday two nights before Halloween. Along with us is Jackson’s roommate Big Mac, whose long, wispy dark hair is pulled back into a topknot (he’s the Samurai Swordsman, another Belushi SNL character). Also with us is Marcus, whose costume is a sport coat over a cardigan. His naturally blond, coiled hair is picked into a white-man Afro. When asked who he’s dressed as, he responds, “I’m Art Garfunkel.” The sound of silence appropriately follows.
That’s where my memory of that night ends, lost in an alcohol-induced haze. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow, against all odds, I find myself, still in Killer Bee costume, in a girl’s dorm room, back at the South Tower, just a few floors below my own. I don’t know her name, how I came to meet her, or how much verbal foreplay led to me being here lip-locked on a rock-hard sofa bed. She has a body shape that I suppose would be considered voluptuous or Rubenesque and a naturally pretty face that is somewhat obscured by long, thick raven hair, stiff and sticky from hairspray that serves as a magnet for my antennae.
When she reaches over and flips off the light switch, I’m almost certain, even before we shed our costumes, that it’s going to happen. My mind swirls and my heart races as the perspiration beads on my hands and neck but, as I fumble to undress her, something hits me like a punch to the gut.
“I don’t have a condom,” I meekly confess, a passion-killer if ever there was one, and I’m beyond certain that the night is over, that I am destined for life in a monastery.
“It’s okay,” she whispers soothingly in my ear, and then she leans over and puts her lips to mine. Thoughts wash through the spin cycle of my brain. What does “okay” mean? I should know, right? I do know. Or do I? Should I seek clarification? I struggle with the clasp of her bra, until she reaches behind and releases it herself, unlocking it with benign ease. Safely, I slide into second base.
I’m breathless and my heart pounds as my hands touch down on the outer edge of her white satin panties. I pause, waiting for a signal from the third base coach. It doesn’t come and I take that as my cue to proceed. But I can’t seem to get her panties off. Once again, she comes to my rescue, assisting me in sliding them past her knees and over her feet. She lays there naked, waiting for me, as patient as I am anxious, and then I see him in my head. It’s Mr. Don’t Bee, and he’s waving a disapproving stinger.
“You’re shaking,” she says as I look down at her. How humiliating. What now, I think? But she takes over like a pro, guiding me with her hand to the right spot. Apparently, this is a mystery dance only for me. Once I finally touch home, I close my eyes and I have the strange comforting sensation of swimming in warm tapioca pudding. Now I’m at ease, relieved to have finally conquered the sexual summit but, just as I relax, I feel it coming. My eyes shoot open wide as panic sets in because I am not sure what I’m supposed to do and what she’d meant by “okay.” Suddenly, re-aware that my stiff soldier is without shield, I pull out just before the premature explosion.
Something I’ve built up in my head for so long is over almost before it has begun and I find that I can’t look her in the eye. When I pick the remnants of my bee costume off the floor, I am not necessarily regretful but confused and maybe a little bit ashamed because it ended so fast and meant so much – and so little. She never cried, Stop right there! like in the song, but if she had, I wouldn’t have been able to tell her what she wanted to hear.
When I awake, I am in my own bed surrounded by five of my suitemates, their eyes peering down at me like vultures over a carcass.
“Did you do it?” Jackson nudges.
“Come on,” Marcus urges, “spill it!”
At first, I brush them away. “Leave me alone,” I beg, but they are impervious to my plea as they hover over me in resolute solidarity.
Finally, I relent, cracking a timid smile, and they all jump on top of me as if I had just hit a walk-off home run. That base that had eluded me for so long…I had reached it now like all of them. I had finally crossed that last rite of passage from boyhood into manhood. I close my eyes and let my muscles relax and my head clear and for a moment it feels like I am floating as a sense of relief washes over me.
I think back to that song I heard when I was four, the one that first told me about the birds and the bees. Most don’t take that quite as literally as I did, and that is probably how it should be. Soon I will have to have The Talk with my son, who is now ten, as I was when I upset that nest of bees. Where do I begin? Where do I end? I look at him now and I see so much of myself in him. He is shy and a little awkward. I know anything I tell him will not come close to answering the questions that fill his head. I also know that one day he will find out for himself that the answers I give him will only lead to more questions.
I’d forgotten the rest of the lyrics but I looked them up and they go like this:
Let me tell ya ’bout the stars in the sky
And a girl and a guy
And the way they could kiss
On a night like this
When I look into your big brown eyes
It’s so very plain to see
That it’s time you learned about the facts of life
Starting from A to Z
If only it were that simple.
An attorney and award-winning journalist, Randy Richardson was a founding member and first president of the Chicago Writers Association. His essays have been published in the anthologies Chicken Soup for the Father and Son Soul, Humor for a Boomer’s Heart, The Big Book of Christmas Joy, and Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year, as well as in numerous print and online journals and magazines. His second novel, Cheeseland, came from Eckhartz Press in 2012. Eckhartz is publishing an all-new edition of his first novel, The Wrigleyville Murder Mystery, Lost in the Ivy, in the spring of 2014.