Life is full of the before and after of things: before and after you begin to walk, start school, and mingle with the opposite sex.

It’s hard to remember what life was like before. How was it before you had children, for example? Most parents can describe it, but kiddies make some memories seem like they happened to someone else.

This brings me to those days before I and my friends made actual, palpable physical contact with young women, other than walking into them by accident.

Life was simpler without thinking about girls.

It didn’t make a difference how you looked or who looked at you. One grudgingly talked to girls but not with the joy you had conversing about baseball with Ron, Steve, or Uncle Sam.

You didn’t play ball with young ladies and got the creeps when they were fond of you—something in their saucer-eyed, admiring gaze.

Yes, some fellows teased girls to show interest. Perhaps they were testing what they could get away with, trying to see where their boundaries were and what mischief was possible. Hardly a reckoning with romance or a lesson in lust.

Anatomical curiosity was present but didn’t require attention to body parts beneath undergarments. Or maybe it did, as in, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

The kid who got the most playground notice from the Jamieson School first-graders enjoyed flipping back one of his upper eyelids (turning it inside out). At the same time, he crossed his eyes, thus provoking an occasional howl from a squeamish classmate.

He would put on the show for free if you were his friend and flip the second eyelid, too. Others were charged a nickel.

Today, he’d be running for President.

At home, there were only occasional allusions made to throbbing physical attraction. Take the viewing of the Miss America Pagent on TV, an event not to be missed by my father or Uncle Manny.

When a curvy contestant sashayed across the stage in her bathing suit, my dad’s raised voice blurted, “Holy Criminy, hung to the gills!” in a half-humorous hoot never created at any other time.

The otherwise refined man wasn’t talking about fishing. Few use the same reference to a woman’s bosom today.

In fifth grade, my eyes were drawn to a girl’s legs. One girl in particular. What was this about? I asked myself. My little mind found it illogical.

Those female underpinnings no longer appeared as a simple necessity designed to keep the girls moving forward and avoid a significant reduction in height.

My new attention to a distaff body part was involuntary and alarming. It was the first sign my body was taking possession of my brain. Adult women know about this masculine flaw, but as a kid, I had no idea.

At about the same time, some females invited classmates to boy-girl parties. Spin-the-bottle was a highlight, although the darkened room the chosen couple entered — the one who had done the spinning and the opposite-sexed person at whom the bottle pointed — was an innocent place.

The girl with the beautiful legs, who would soon be my girlfriend, asked me a question in the dimly lit cell we inhabited for a few minutes:

“Gerry, did you know the most beautiful girl in the world is deaf?”

Ever the straight man, I could only answer “No.”

“What did you say?”

In other words, attractive legs and clever.

I never heard my folks talk about sex, but on occasion, a question would be answered in an informative way. Watching The Untouchables TV series with my father, I heard the word prostitution about one of the illegal businesses the Capone gangsters operated in Chicago.

When I asked Dad what the word meant, he said, “It’s when a woman sells her body.”

My head buzzed.

For what?

To whom?

At the grocery?

What aisle is that?

I knew he would say no more, so I refrained from asking.

By the end of sixth grade, I was hip-deep in the latency period. Freud labeled this as the time before puberty when your sexual preoccupations go to sleep.

Although Sigmund’s thoughts on the subject are not current gospel, I recall losing interest for a while. I submit as evidence a party to which I was supposed to accompany a charming lass named Heidi, about whom I forgot while riding bikes with my friend Jerry.

An hour after the get-together started, I awakened to my faux pas.

I apologized to the poor girl, realizing it would be best not to tell her what caused me to lose track of time, my desire to be with her, and my obligation.

Whatever earthly urge bubbled down below was sublimated into alternative activities and interests. Perhaps they fueled my school work or athletic endeavors.

One of my friends displayed more interest in lunch than ladies. Neil pasted a magazine picture of a hamburger, fries, and a coke on his bedroom ceiling, so it was the first thing he saw every morning. A few years later, Marilyn Monroe took its place, I imagine.

By age 16, I was slightly jealous of the two friends who had started going out with girls. The guys had no appeal distinguishing them from the rest of us, which puzzled me.

Their relative success, however, did reinforce my esteem for the illustrious Sigmund Freud,  who must have been as stunned as I was when he asked, “What do women want?”

Not these guys, I thought. Yet the facts suggested otherwise.

To their credit, those pioneers on the route to consequential sexual contact introduced me to the fact that success is often a matter of showing up and saying something. They’d asked girls on dates; sometimes, a female said yes.

The lesson was simple. You get to first base occasionally, even if you swing at a baseball with your eyes closed.

Taking the initiative was all you needed if you were male and the other Y-chromosome types were holding back. Much later, I was told most of the girls were waiting by the phone, as desperate for a date as we were terrified of calling.

Of course, the alternatives for the most insecure males were begging and pleading, but one still required enough courage to get within whimpering distance of the selected damsel.

Where could you be with a girl in private? Not at home, where curious parents and evil siblings might spy on you. My friend Alan didn’t want anybody to see the three-ring circus he lived in, at least not someone he hoped to impress.

Even so, he arranged for his date to be dropped off at his house one Saturday. As they prepared to leave for a movie, Alan’s father asked, “Where are you two going?”

“We’re going to a show.”

“Why are you going to a show? You’ve got a show right here!”

One of my regular compatriots at  Mather High School would bring the daily Chicago Sun-Times to the lunch table. Soon enough, we were all drawn to the part of the paper advertising movies, theater, and especially the burlesque shows of South State Street.

The Rialto Theater’s ad acted like a magnet because it reported there would be:

MIDNIGHT SHAMBLES EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT. BRING THE LADIES!

Substituting for the possibility of fondling an agreeable female, we spent many lunches pondering what midnight shambles involved. The group discussed it so often that, for convenience, we made it into the acronym MSBTL.

Since none of us were old enough to attend, my buddies had no alternative but to think about it and talk about it.

Suffice it to say, had the Rialto Theater somehow charged our group for the time we spent fantasizing about naked, shambling women, it would have generated more money than it derived from box office receipts.

The premarital sex thing remained mysterious to most of us, impenetrable in every sense, and immoral since it was the early ’60s, a time still in thrall to the culture of the ’50s. The sexual revolution hadn’t quite begun.

At the same time, the topic was mystical and quasi-religious, the kind of subject spoken of by hooded shamans in hushed voices while incense burned. Quite different than today, in other words.

The actual idea of intercourse suggested lots of moving parts you didn’t yet know how to move or where to move them, like the tabs and slots I wasn’t adept at working with when I tried to follow the directions for assembling model airplanes:

Insert tab A into Slot B.

What?

Carnal knowledge also demanded technical skill in dark places without the miner’s helmet I was inclined to wear to improve my chances. Notes and diagrams might have been helpful, but without the light, well…

Why didn’t a girl’s body come with instructions written on the package, like a box of aspirin? Luminous lettering and diagrams would have been a welcome addition.

Many of us were in the dark, literally and figuratively, lacking the required touch — deft and sure — that was far more challenging to acquire than the ability to hit a line drive to right field or throw a curve ball. Nor was sexual mastery a talent you could perfect on a public baseball diamond.

All the while, a ten-foot-tall sasquatch-like entity named INSECURITY, who had a chair at our Mather High School lunch table, instilled whispered self-doubts into whoever sat beside him:

Aw, jeez, why did you say that?

Does your hair look OK?

Are you sure your fly is zipped?

How did we survive all this? The way most other young men do. The procreative urge and a little courage find a way to carry the day.

We are all the descendants of people who had sex.

I have told you, friend, the last bit of information in confidence: the bit about actually “doing it.”

Your forbearance would be most appreciated because I’m sure my adult daughters still don’t want to think about their parents having sex.

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The top image is Hawaiian Boy and Girl, a 1928 mural by Arman Manookian. Next comes a photo of Kids by Guilherme Moreira.

The Untouchables Cast, 1960, follows from left: Nicholas Georgiade, Paul Picerni, Robert Stack, and Abel Fernandez.

City Lou, Sonoma, CA: Hamburger, Fries, and a Coke is the following image, photographed by Missvain. Sarah Stierch (CC BY 4.0)

An Indian Air Force Model Airplane, photographed by Nikolaevna Romanov, is the succeeding offering.

Finally, the author of the bottom poster of the Follies Bergere is Pal. All the images come from Wikipedia Commons.