FRESH YARN presents: Humping U... by Kristin Newman

FRESH YARN presents:

Humping U
By Kristin Newman

I never liked getting help with my homework. I don't know whether it stemmed from being an only child who spent a lot of time figuring out things on my own, or whether it was due to the great luck of realizing early that I was born smarter than everyone else. But I would rather get it wrong a hundred times before finally finding the right answer than get it right the first time with instruction. And so, while many people learned about sex in one fell swoop via an awkward yet well-informed lecture, I chose the slightly less efficient route of piecing together Everything I Know About Sex over about twenty-five years, relying on nothing but my keen observation of the world around me. Which turned out to be kind of like teaching yourself how to sail by walking across a desert.

Early Education, Years 0 - 6

The journey started with Jason, who was my best friend in the zero-to-six portion of my life. He lived next door in a house that I was not allowed to enter due to an eclectic array of Jason's relatives, none of whom were his actual parents, purportedly raising him in between shotgunning Coors Lights and filing for disability. Jason had a toothbrush at my house, which my dad made him use before driving us to nursery school, and a weight problem that my mom tried to counterbalance with baggies of carrots and celery that she handed him as we headed off.

One day, Jason's happy home was visited by a new family member -- Jason's cousin, a worldly eight-year-old number made over by her large-haired mother to look like a tiny transvestite. ("It's never too early for body glitter!") Jason and I thought she and her multi-colored eye shadow were beautiful, and one day, in the midst of an afternoon mud-pie making session, Jason delivered some news:

"We humped."

I put a final acorn "chocolate chip" on my mudpie and looked up. "You what?" I asked. "We humped," Jason repeated. "You know what humping is, right?" "Yeah," I scoffed. "But tell me what you think it is."

So he told me. And he was pretty much right, it turns out, save a couple of details. For one, Jason told me that a man and a woman must "hump" for EXACTLY two minutes if they wanted a baby. This misunderstanding, I suspect, came from overhearing a complaint from a female family member regarding the duration of an inadequate humping she had participated in, but this is just conjecture based on, well, subsequent experience. Anyway, Jason gave me the scoop, and while it turned out, mercifully, that the humping that he and his cousin had participated in had been of the fully-clothed, play-acting variety, the cat was now out of the bag.

So, that was it! Now I knew it all! Anyone, related or not, could put some things in some other things for two minutes, and then babies were born. But, it turned out my education was not over.

Secondary School, Years 7-13

The next few years brought a patchwork of new and exciting pieces to my ever-expanding quilt of humping knowledge. One would think that the dry-humping cousins would be the most upsetting piece of the story, but that would not be true. My grandfather's testicles burst into the picture in the late seventies via an accidental sighting as they poked out of his far-too-short Dolfin shorts. No sooner had I shaken off this experience than I walked into a conversation about how my other grandfather, post-prostate surgery, had had a pump installed in his very own set of gray, shriveled fellas so that he and Grams could hump well into their eighties. So, okay, two new pieces of information: pubic hair turns gray, and some people like this humping business so much that they want to do it with each other forever.

Now I had to know more. Jason's description of things, and the sight of what I would be humping if I did hump into my golden years, made me think I had not gotten the whole picture. So, being the intellectual giant that I believe I previously mentioned I was, I turned to literature for a more thorough understanding.

First, I went to my aunt and uncle's copy of Joy of Sex, which I hid in their bathroom so that I could study the pencil-drawn renderings of exuberant, undergroomed humpers. This shed some light on what must be so fun about this whole thing -- it was like gymnastics! Floor routines, but for couples! I loved Mary Lou Retton! Encouraged, I did some further research, and came upon a new twist on the old theme: the discovery of page 354 in Flowers in the Attic, which did the public service of teaching nine-year-olds that incest is actually super hot. (So Jason was right!) I rounded out my readings with a much passed around, dog-eared copy of Judy Blume's Forever, which covered more traditional acts of love like naming a boyfriend's penis. It was while pitching ideas for what my friends and I would, once we were out of fourth grade, name OUR boyfriends' penises, (the current Duran Duran craze led to lots of Nicks, Johns and Simons) that my Girl Scout camp counselor decided both Forever and I should maybe be sent on home.

"Show me the rule against reading!" I shouted as they called my parents. "My mom was right when she said the Girl Scouts are a paramilitary organization!" I yelled for good measure.

So I had learned the mechanics: I knew what went where, and how you could do it rightside up or upside down or in a hammock or with a couple of friends or, if you had spent your blossoming years locked in an attic, with a sibling. The point being that by the time my parents, in hour eight of a road trip, turned down the Crystal Gayle, adjusted their visor mirrors so they could make eye contact with me, and asked, "Kristin, do you have any questions about, you know, sex?" I was informed enough to snort "No," and go back to quietly fantasizing about getting fingered by John Stamos.

And they dropped it! I had figured it out myself, and, having convinced them of this, we all peacefully existed in this place of non-communication for a few happy years. And then one day I walked into their bedroom without knocking, and discovered that the mechanics of this humping business was not even close to the whole story.

The key thing about the marital relations to which I was exposed was that they occurred AFTER my parents had decided to call off their actual marriage. Which explains why I thought that if I barged into my mother's room early in the morning she would be alone, doing something that I wouldn't so very, very much mind seeing, like, say, skinning babies. Instead, I found she and my father enthusiastically trying to work out their differences, or ignore their differences, or wrap their legs around their differences... in any case, it was much, much worse than the baby skinning scenario. A few minutes after I hastily shut the door, walked a few laps around the house, and tried to figure out if the whole thing was good or bad news, my dad walked into my room in his worn-through, knee-length nightdress (how could she have resisted?) smiled sheepishly, and managed:

"At least we weren't fighting."

But, alas, this heartwarming truce was not to last. And so, at thirteen, a new lesson was learned: humping can't save a marriage. My mom and dad were now single, which lead to perhaps the only thing more upsetting than walking in on your parents humping: walking in on only one of your parents humping someone who is not your parent.

Undergraduate Work, Years 15-18

My mom and I started dating at the same time. She had married my dad, her first real love, a few days after her twentieth birthday, and he had been her one and only for the next eighteen years. So when I was fifteen and she was thirty-eight, we each went on our first dates.

"Who the hell is going to go out with her?" my best friend, Tasha, and I wondered about my petite, pretty, charismatic and successful mother, who when she wasn't working hundred hour weeks as a corporate attorney was skiing, scuba diving, and preparing gourmet meals. "I feel so bad. I hope she's not jealous when I start having lots of dates and she doesn't," I added, dipping another Oreo into peanut butter and shoving it into my pudgy, acne-speckled face. "Kill me if I'm trying to find a guy when I'm in my thirties."

Surprisingly, my mom did okay. Like, Sex and the City okay. She even had cute, objectifying nicknames for the guys she dated: Donut Man (he introduced himself by buying her a donut), Cape Man (he came to their first and only date unironically wearing a cape), Nervous Breakdown in the Caracas Airport Man (self-explanatory.) And then, one day, came a man who didn't have a nickname, and that's when we knew she was in love. Unfortunately, his real name sounded like a nickname -- Sachi -- and, after a couple of years of bliss, he would irreparably break her heart, leading to a cute post-mortem nickname: "Promiser of Everything and Deliverer of Nothing."

My mother met Sachi when she was working for a few weeks at a law firm in Mexico City. He was a Hungarian-born, Harvard-educated, Mexican businessman, and their romance was of the jet-in-for-the-weekend-bearing-pearls-and-roses variety. (But don't worry about the other single girl in our household. I was having plenty of my own epic romances of the wine-coolers-under-lifeguard-tower-six-while-getting-felt-up-by-someone's-out-of-town-cousin variety.)

The first time I met Sachi, however, was long before he Delivered Nothing, and was, in fact, right in the middle of him Delivering Everything to my mother in the comfort of our living room. Luckily, my mother intercepted me somewhere in between naked Sachi and the front door, and, pulling on a robe, whisked me into my bedroom so that Prince Nothing Deliverer could pull one on, too. After everyone got properly introduced ("Yeah, hi, why don't we shake hands after your shower, huh?") my mom delivered the most important lesson from Humping U, the piece that, as I navigate the wildly dreaded waters of finding a man in my thirties, continues to flummox me:

"Dating in your thirties is different than it is in high school. It's kind of all or nothing. Grownups don't just hold hands."

She then talked to me about how while she would be actively exploring her every sexual impulse for the first time in her life, I should be actively ignoring mine until I was well into adulthood or at least out of the house. "But I am sorry this happened, sweetie," my mom said sheepishly. "Next time, call." Then she went back to the man whose non-nicknamed name would eventually become the nickname that the women in my family use to this day to describe other Promisers of Everything and Deliverers of Nothing: they're Sachis.

One rainy Sunday, not long after Sachi left, my mother and I sat through our twenty-third viewing of Dirty Dancing. At the end of what was, and maybe still is, my all time favorite losing it scene in American cinema, when a still-large-nosed Jennifer Gray asks a shirtless Patrick Swayze to "dance with her," which boy oh boy does he ever do and how, I turned to my wildly depressed, afghan-wrapped mother and sighed, "Well, it doesn't get any better than that." She then gave me advice which I'm sure she hoped would save me years of heartache looking for what she had just lost:

"Kristin, it doesn't get that good."

Graduate Degree, Still Pending

So, this mishmash of education adds up to one real question: What is it exactly that grownups are supposed to do? Despite two and a half decades of humping research, I maybe don't know any more than I did under the tree with Jason and the mudpies. So, as the education process continues, I hold hands with some, I don't just hold hands with others, and I wait for Patrick Swayze, stubbornly refusing to believe my mother's homework help that it doesn't get that good. I mean, my grandma found someone she still wanted to hump at eighty, right?