My Criminal Memoir, Part Four. Female Sexual Behaviour. Louis Shalako.

"Yes, Louis. I am a good Catholic..."

Louis Shalako

Female sexual behaviour. Why I hated one teacher more than any other has always been a good question. In later years, I liked my high school teachers, at least to some degree. I might have even admired my college instructors.

We weren’t kids anymore. We were adults, certainly in college we were there because we wanted to be, and not because someone had dragged us to school by the ear or the collar or whatever.

It is also true that I quit school at about fifteen and a half years old, and there was nothing, nothing, this side of heaven or hell, that could ever make me go back…

We have to understand the time and the place. The Catholic school board had to follow provincial directives. They brought in proficiency testing for mathematics and English skills. Somehow it turned out that I was reading at a first-year university level, which is not bad for a grade six student. Truth was, that was the top of the scale. It did not go any higher. The people who designed such tests never even considered the possibility that even a grade eight kid might achieve such scores, and the math skills were all right as well—this is the benefit of actually reading the book, and of course doing the homework, no matter how much kids hate homework.

So, what they did, was to take a handful of Grade Six and Seven students, and scatter us among a couple of Grade Eight classes for math and English. And this, of course, is where the bullies enter the picture. To be called a ‘browner’, or ‘teacher’s pet’, and to be regularly assaulted, by small groups of males, whether in the school yard or on the way to and from school, may in some small way help in explaining my sort of difficult attitude towards certain teachers. All of whom (the bullies, I mean), were bigger, stronger, had more experience, and operated in groups because a bully is just a coward that is bigger than you—just one more important lesson on the journey that is life. And they do like an audience, don't they.

While I do owe some debt of gratitude to my tormentors, who if nothing else taught me not only to fight, or how to fight, but the value of doing so. Because not to fight was to be destroyed in some way. Not to fight was to join them, and to become their punching bag, and to never have a day’s peace for the rest of your life.

When four of the worst offenders borrowed daddy’s car one night, when one of their older brothers bought them some beer, when some other friendly neighbourhood character sold them a bag of grass and a few hits of acid, when the four of them died in an almost predictable flaming car wreck, I will admit that I thought it served them right.

As for the teacher, that may be another story. The school board, in their usual heavy-handed but also totally incompetent fashion, had little choice but to provide some rudiments of ‘sex education’, mandated by the province, and the results were also pretty predictable.

I once brought Miss Hillman, our grade seven teacher, to tears with a question I asked in front of the class. In fact, she ran crying from the room, down the hall to the principal’s office, and oddly enough, she went on to marry our Principal, Mr. G. Boucher. So, in some sense I was the one that brought them together.

It was a good question, too.

I asked what business a 47 year-old virgin, never married and presumably a good Catholic, had in teaching sex education.

"What are your qualifactions."

Not very tactful, one must admit. I had also asked teacher Joe Abela, about sexual intercourse.

“Sir. There is some suggestion that the sexual act can be pleasurable. Any truth to these rumours, sir.”

“Ah, yes, Louis. Ah, yes, I think I can safely say, that there is some pleasure involved.”

Of course sex education was a joke—a Catholic school board was surely going to skip over contraception, and masturbation, and abortion, and any number of things. Of course I’d read the book—The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, where the reader can find a fairly clinical description of the act of sexual intercourse, at least among primates. I had read The Happy Hooker, by Xaviera Hollander, for fuck’s sakes, and of course Dr. David Ruben’s, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask. This was a big best-seller of the time, and of course my mother was an inveterate bookworm, and my old man probably read them too.

Why not? I sure did.

When your teacher tells you, “The penis is placed in the vagina and sperm is released,” you aren’t telling kids anything they don’t already know. No, we were supposed to be innocents. All you had to do, was to listen to the talk in the schoolyard, and you would have known better than that, ladies and gentlemen…

You’re just making fools of yourselves at that point, and I have always despised stupidity. I despise anyone who wastes my time, ladies and gentlemen. That one is deeply ingrained in my nature, whatever the hell that means.

But. It was the sort of thing you really can’t say to your teacher, or even your parents, for that matter.

This little bit of background may go some way in explaining what happened next…

It’s not as bad as you may be thinking, in fact, it is worse.

Funny thing is, I have never been ashamed of it.

I ain’t all that proud of it, either, but it does kind of make for a good little story.

***

Down in the basement, in the back of my father’s workshop, there was a small chest of drawers, and in that chest there was a book.

A small, hardcover book, with a fabric spine and the rest of it was covered in thin zinc. On the cover, it said, Female Sexual Behaviour. Opening the book, the inside was cut out—just like in a spy movie. The outer rim of the pages were glued together. Inside this hollow cavity was a little clip for a battery. There was a capacitor and an induction coil, basically just wire wrapped around a piece of metal, which was there more to hold the shape as much as anything. Attached was a thin strip of spring steel, with a magnet on one end. On the inside of the front cover was a small steel plate. When the book was closed, the magnet was stuck to the plate, and the circuit was dead. When you opened the book, the magnet lifted up, and up, until the tension on the spring overcame the attraction of the magnet. Fine wires led from the battery, one to a metal frame or plate glued onto the back cover of the book. The other wire led to that stainless-steel clip and magnet thing.

When it released, the circuit was closed, and that spring-loaded contact hit a plate, over and over and over again until some sort of equilibrium was restored and it would lift off again of its own accord.

The result was maybe ten thousand volts, but also only about one ten thousandth of an amp, when coursing up through your fingertips, your hands, all the way up to the shoulders.

As one can imagine, once I’d found a battery and put it in there, the first thing I did was to open the book and try that thing out…

The only way I can describe the sensation is that it is a lot like a whole bunch of sledgehammers pounding right up through both arms, from the inside out if that makes any sense.

And like any kid, of course I had very little choice but to try that out on my brother, my sister, all of my friends, their brothers and sisters…everyone who ever opened the book screamed and threw it, and one learns to duck, to run, but holy crap. That book worked very well.

It strikes me that somebody gave my old man that book. Some of his friends chipped in and bought it for him. A stag party, a bunch of young men drinking beer, swapping crude jokes and slapping him on the shoulder.

Oh, and presenting him with that book, after a short and suitable speech by whoever was going to be the best man at the wedding—and there’s that rather provocative title, and it’s only natural that a young fellow looking marriage square in the eye, would have little option but to open that book and have a look—right.

That’s the way I have it figured, it’s as good an explanation as any.

***

As for my own little revenge, I have to admit it was pretty fucking diabolical, ladies and gentlemen.

You see, it went a little something like this…

I took the book to school one day, and resisted the temptation to try that out on a couple of buddies. No. I had bigger fish to fry.

It was afternoon, Miss Hillman was up at the front of the room, blathering on about some fucking shit book. Phoebe was the story of an underage girl, having premarital sex, and who got pregnant, and of course the teacher is reading this aloud, all part of our anti-sexual indoctrination which passed for sex education in the Catholic system.

I took out the book, head down, and I pretended to read. Looking up and around, I caught the eye of the guy to my left. I showed him the title and of course he was interested. Maybe even impressed. I let the top of the book show over the top of my desk once or twice, still pretending to read in class—which I was known for. What do you expect, when school is so unbelievably boring, possibly even irrelevant ladies and gentlemen.

I turned the other way, and showed the title to a girl in the row to the right.

Right on cue, she giggled and put her hand over her mouth. Turning back, probably with a sly grin, a quick glance up at the teacher, I pretended to read some more.

When the bell rang for afternoon recess, I armed that fucking thing with a nice, fresh battery—I slipped that into the desk, dropped the top closed, and went outside with the rest of the class.

***

"All right, people. Chapter Nine in the math book--and no bullshit."

After recess, we all come trooping back into the classroom. The lid of my desk is flipped up. Pens, pencils, textbooks and exercise books are scattered all around my desk. And there’s that fucking book, Female Sexual Behaviour, it was open, laying face-down on the floor. I scooped all that shit back up, put it away. I sat down, all prepared to face whatever shit was about the hit the fan.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes, Mr. Burger, a grade six teacher from down the hall, poked his nose in the door, taking a quick and sweeping glance across all of us. I wouldn’t say he paid any particular attention to me, but to do that to me, would be to acknowledge me. I was probably the one guy he didn't look at.

He told us to do whatever—exercises for chapter nine of the math book or whatever.

“I’m leaving the door open, I’m just down the hall, and you will be quiet.” He gave us his trade-marked glare and stalked off down the hall.

I suppose we all kind of looked at each other—and the clock.

For the most part, people just shrugged, not having the slightest clue of what was going on, and with a collective sigh, I reckon we all opened up the math book and had a bash at Chapter Nine

It was no more than a few days later, a Thursday night. My mother was going out, she was in the bathroom, where as you know, women spend an inordinate amount of time, and when they come out the place smells like hair spray, soap, steam in the air, whatever.

Anyhow, there was a knock at the door and I went to answer it.

To my shock, it was Miss Hillman.

She and my mother were going roller skating. I had no choice but to let her in, and to tell my mother that she was there, sitting, in fact, in the armchair in front of the television set.

We didn’t have much to say to one another. I headed for the bedroom and whatever book I was reading, but a message had been sent—and received.

What is really bizarre, is that I never heard another word about it.

One can only speculate as to what they found to talk about, on their ladies night out…

They had no idea of what to do about me, in fact, neither of my parents ever mentioned it.

None of my teachers, the principal, no one said one fucking word about it.

Perhaps that was for the best.

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromSmashwords.

See his art on Artpal.

Louis has a free audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, available from Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.