Many of high school companions were uncertain and highly imaginative about sexual matters. For instance, there were many arguments and bets made about where babies came out.  Many of us held to the theory that it came out of a woman’s belly button, that burst open on delivery day expelling the baby. The button was then sterilized and taped or sewn back together by doctors or midwives — that was why, in the movies, women assisting at births always called for buckets of hot water.
    That theory was particularly believable because my mother was shocked when women in the movies exposed their belly button.  It was wrong, she said, because that’s where babies were attached when they were born.
    Those were the days before sex was perfected.  (That didn’t happened until the late 1960s — in a workshop at Berkeley.) Since sex was still in its early, primitive stages, it’s not surprising that we were equally ignorant about the science behind conception.

    The basic matter of sex, whether a girl "put out"  was the major focus of our thoughts and conversations. Smoking was an almost certain sign.  If a girl smoked, she was being rebellious and was likely to be liberal in sexual matters.  Unfortunately, few of the Catholic girls we knew smoked.
    Dillworth, our expert on commercial sex, held that girls got muscular legs by screwing.  A girl with muscular legs was either an avid bicyclist or a whore.
       In high school my interest in girls was intense. I  was aroused looking at partly clothed female bodies.
  The local newspaper regularly printed pictures of well-endowed females in swim suits or shorts and tight fitting sweaters. 
    I was denied the front section of the paper where all the war news was printed. My mother believed it would be too upsetting for a young boy.
    Being denied a look at the war news was not that much of a concern to me. I was happy with the back sections.  That’s where Ernie Pyle and the girly photos were.  I cut the pictures out along with sizzling photos from the magazine ads so I could commit the sin of lust at my leisure.
       I hid the photos behind a large picture of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall of my room. I saved so many that the back bulged.
    One day my mother came in my room to dust and search. She bumped the Virgin’s picture and the erotic clippings exploded from the back of portrait and cascaded down the wall onto the floor.
    My mother was horrified.  She gave me a few hard slaps, forbade me to see a movie or listen to the radio for a month and insisted that I make an Act of Contrition aloud immediately and go to confession as soon as possible.
    "We didn’t teach you immoral things like this," she observed.
    True enough.  Wickedness came naturally to me. The devil had me in his power.

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