Walt Darling and THE TALK

there's no time for innocence

Jun 27, 2023

Each chapter of the Walt Darling saga can be read independently of all the others, like a mystery-of-the-week serial, so you don’t need to have read any of the prior entries to enjoy this one. But, if you reach the end, and find yourself wanting more, here are the earlier chapters:

< Introduction | The Almost First Kiss | The New Game | The Rollercoaster of Oops | The Talk >

Maybe seventh grade, maybe sixth, maybe fourth, maybe fifth, I sat on my parents’ many pillowed couch and with my mom watched an episode of a family sitcom about a robot daughter who whispered in the ears of the adults the definition of “doing it.” When the show ended, my mom looked at me and said, “well, if that little girl knows about sex, I guess you’re old enough for ‘the talk.’”

I nodded as she explained the mechanics of baby making and advised me to wait until I was married before connecting the necessary parts and failing that, to wear a condom, and that no matter what, she would always love me and I could tell her anything.

I said, “yeah, I know, mom.”

What I didn’t tell her was all the mixed up ideas about sex I’d already picked up and spread amongst friends at camp and the school cafeteria. Already, in elementary school, it was me repeating dirty jokes with punchlines none of us understood. I believed that flipping the middle finger meant “penis.” I had a friend whose little brother swore he could make his penis grow by singing it a secret song. No way! But maybe? In junior high, I thought every girl had a place on her body that you could touch that would turn her on and that the trick was learning where that magic button was located because it was different on every girl. (The boy who told me about the magic button swore that for most girls, it was behind their ears).

At the end of “the talk,” my mom also warned me to protect my heart. She said that, “you can fall in love with anybody if you’re not careful.”

Why would she say that? All I wanted was a kiss.

Now I had to worry about falling in love with the wrong person?

(If only I hadn’t licked Erica’s cheek in front of everyone!)

Around eighth grade, my friend David (yes, also a Boy Scout) stole his parents’ car and ran away with his girlfriend. David was the boy who pickpocketed candy to impress the Scoutmaster’s son, but would later return to the convenience store to pay and apologize. He didn’t need to be reminded to mow the lawn or take out the trash. He made good grades and excelled at sports. A week after leaving, Oklahoma highway patrol found David and his girlfriend sleeping in the reported-missing car outside a McDonalds. On the floorboard on the passenger side, they found a pile of empty dollar-menu-sized french fry boxes - David’s favorite food and all he ate the week they were away.

When they brought him home, crying, he told his mom that he had prayed and prayed and prayed for a girlfriend and so when he finally got one and she asked him to help her escape from her home, David believed it was all part of God’s mysterious plan, and like Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain, when he snuck out with his parents’ car keys, yes, he knew was doing something wrong, but if God didn’t want him to run away, then why did He answer his prayer?

David’s mom told him that maybe someone besides God answered.

When my mom told me that story I was floored. Now, of course, that’s the lesson of one of my favorite poems, but back then, young me had never considered the possibility that one’s prayers could be heard by anyone but God. What was I supposed to do with that idea?!?! How should I pray? How should I live?

And why would she say that? All I wanted was a kiss!

Now I had to worry about who might answer my prayers?!

(If only I hadn’t licked Erica’s cheek in front of everyone!)

Don’t let me mislead you! It’s not like my prayers were those of a saint. Every night before bed, I would clasp my hands and close my eyes and silently ask for a bigger dick. I would pray to find porn. Which is crazy to me now! You remember our own awkward sex talk and how vehemently I plead with you to avoid it! But in sixth grade and the start of seventh, I occasionally spent my weekend nights in a sleeping bag in the living room of my friend Jeff’s house. After Jeff’s parents went to sleep, he would toggle between Cinemax Late Night and American Ninja Warrior. My parents didn’t have cable TV. I thought Jeff was the luckiest boy in the world. Those Late Night movies? Non-stop boobies. Big ones. Little ones. Perfectly round to rocket shaped. Whether the movie was an espionage thriller or a cop drama or a ski school set comedy, breasts would flash across the screen every five minutes. Jeff would swallow and squirm and flip the channel every four minutes and fifty-five seconds - paranoid his parents would walk past on their way to the kitchen to get a late night glass of water. So, all I ever caught was the quickest of glimpses into the wonderful world of mammary miscellany. But I never turned down an invitation to sleep over at Jeff’s house.

Eventually, Jeff and I drifted apart. He made new friends in band, who crowded the table at lunch with instrument talk. I didn’t play an instrument. I did drama.

One time, sitting in the hallway outside of the drama room with two girls whose names I don’t remember, one of them looked at me and said something I have never forgot. She said, “Walt, you look evil.”

I asked what she meant. Something about my eyes. I bet she said it carelessly, didn’t really mean anything by it, maybe even was trying to say she thought I was handsome - friends’ moms and teachers usually told me I looked like Superman, like Christopher Reeves - but her words haunted me for many years.

“Walt, you look evil.”

Did I? Why would she say that? All I wanted was a kiss.

Now I had to worry about whether I was a good person?

(If only I hadn’t licked Erica’s cheek in front of everyone!)

You know what I was really good at in Junior High? Talking on the phone. Benjamin’s mom would drop us off at the mall and I would boldly ask for phone numbers until a girl gave us hers and for weeks later I could talk for hours, yelling at my mom to hang up when she picked up the phone in the kitchen and started pressing buttons, before she came into my room to tell me she needed to use the phone and I had to say goodbye. I could talk long into the night, I could say whatever, it didn’t matter.

But you have to be careful!

Sometimes people say things they don’t mean. Sometimes they don’t even know they don’t mean what they say! Like at the end of my favorite Dostoevsky novel, when the pompous professor philosopher, Stepan Verkhovensky, says, “I’ve been lying all my life and only now realized it.” Like in eighth grade, when I stood on the stage for the (looking back, kind of questionable) “slave for a day” student government fundraiser and when asked by the emcee if I had any special skills, smiled my most dashing grin and winked and said, “My special skills are inappropriate to share at school.” This I said, hoping the swagger hid the fear that no one would bid on me; hoping maybe Maeve Marie, the hottest girl in seventh grade, sitting in the middle of the auditorium with her friends, would buy me for the day.

Maeve Marie whose house I biked past to visit my friend Benjamin, even though it was five blocks out of my way, because I hoped she might be checking the mail as I pedaled past. I would have biked ten blocks, twenty, or more, for a chance to see her and wave, if only for the quickest of moments. Maeve’s pretty was brain-stopping, stutter-inducing, hand-shaking, mesmerism. Prettier than movie stars. While Beavis and Butthead held Pamela Anderson and Salma Hayek as the epitome of beautiful, Maeve Marie easily bested them both. Maeve Marie casually beamed jaw dropping, eyeball popping, tongue-wagging attractive magnetism.

Back then, I believed in magic. I would hold my breath and on Benjamin’s driveway I would write Maeve’s name in chalk and my name over the top and then smear the letters together, making a big chalky cloud before I allowed myself to breathe again.

At the auction in the auditorium, Maeve bid on her boyfriend, ninth grade Brad, the quarterback with the side-spike and biceps bigger than my calfs. My former seventh grade English teacher bought me to grade her papers.

Teachers loved me. I did all the readings and spoke up in class. I didn’t raise my hand to speak. I teased the teacher and the teacher teased me. In my ninth grade yearbook, you can find me voted “class clown.” So, it wasn’t cruel when after I bragged about my first hunting trip on Benjamin’s granddad’s property, where we shot at turtles in their stock pond, where I grazed one’s head, so it swam quickly back and forth like in a fairground game, as I let loose round after round, before on its fifth lap I finally exploded its little turtle head, and felt proud and expected my classmate’s to react like Benjamin and his father, with whoops and applause, but before I could share my plans to make a turtle shell rattle, my seventh grade English teacher interjected and said, “Sit down, turtle killer.”

It wasn’t cruel. It was just the playful interaction that teachers had with their favorite students. She had no idea that she’d given me a nickname and a dismissive phrase for the class to utilize for the rest of the year whenever I spoke too much.

Still.

Why would she say that? There were a lot of girls in that class I had a crush on!

Now I had to worry about whether being dominated by our English teacher had minimized me in their eyes or if they thought I delighted in hurting animals?

C’mon, Teacher! All I wanted was a kiss! Don’t make me out to be a sociopath.

(If only I hadn’t licked Erica’s cheek in front of everyone!)

In the summer between eighth and ninth grade, my younger brother’s Cub Scout Troop cooked out at the State Park on the river. Maeve Marie’s brother was in my brother’s patrol. She was there with her family. She wore a white bikini. I tried not to stare, which was challenging because I had lost my sunglasses in the water earlier in the day.

After burgers and chips, as I was tossing my empty plate in the large trash bin, Maeve Marie caught my wrist.

“Hey,” she said.

I stuttered.

She laughed. “Walk with me,” she said. “I need something from the car.”

I followed her towards the parking lot. Our skin glistened in the sun. She led me along the large boulders ringing the asphalt and then away towards a trail that led into the shade of a forest. I looked across the parking lot at the pavilion from which we’d came and where my brother and Benjamin had expected me to join them in a game of horseshoes after I trashed my plate.

“Come on,” Maeve Marie said, walking ahead.

I rushed after her.

We followed the trail into the trees and down a bank, where it weaved along a small creek that fed into the river. We walked past large stones. Maeve Marie complained about her boyfriend.

“Why do men make promises if they don’t intend to keep them?” she asked. “I bet he’s at the mall with Andrew and that skank, Gina. I like these leaves. Do you know what tree this is?”

I did not know what tree it was. All I knew was that I was walking alone in the woods with the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and she was talking to me.

“I wish I could teach him a lesson,” she said, stopping to lean against one of the larger boulders beside the path.

When she looked me in the eyes and smiled, I felt suspended in air, like one of those tree leaves she admired, swaying in the breeze.

“You know what I want?” she said.

I shook my head, or maybe the wind turned it as I hovered.

Maeve Marie said, “I wish someone would rape me. I want my boyfriend to cry when he sees me with bruises and cuts and a busted lip, and even though he’ll know what happened, he’ll have to ask and I’ll hit him and say ‘you didn’t come to the Cub Scout picnic like you promised you fucking asshole and I got fucking raped’ and he’ll fall on his knees and beg me to forgive him and swear he’ll never leave me alone ever again.”

The skin that rubbed against my flip-flop straps stung as I fell to earth and registered what Maeve Marie was saying.

Why would she say that?

No way she was serious. When she said “rape,” did she maybe mean she wanted me to kiss her? All I wanted was a kiss. But what the fuck did Maeve Marie want?

She squeezed my hand and said, “That’d teach him, right?”

I nodded. I shook my head. I said, “What?”

Maeve Marie turned her back to me. I stared at the white string tied in the perfect bow pressed against the middle of her perfect back. I had never kissed a girl before and now I had to worry if Maeve Marie, the prettiest girl I had ever seen, wanted me to touch her in the woods? I doubted I could untie the knot on her back.

No way could I bruise her!

No way she meant what she said!

(If only I hadn’t licked Erica’s cheek in front of everyone!)

Squirrels rustled the branches above us and a bird chirped and I asked, “Maeve Marie, should we head back?” and this impossible dream of a girl looked ahead at the large stone in front of us and said, “What do you want to do, Walt?” and I stepped away from her beautiful back and said, “Let’s go back.”

Maeve Marie turned around and nodded and walked past me and didn’t say anymore and we followed the trail back along the creek and up the bank and when we stepped out of the trees, she stepped faster than me, so I was still beside the parking lot when she reached the pavilion and waved at her dad and her brother and I wondered what I had lost or what I had saved in the woods and I turned to one of the large stones lining the asphalt and slammed my hand down like Lex Luthor angrily hitting his desk after being thwarted again and that’s why to this day when I make a fist I cannot curl my pinky finger in along with the others.

And son, one last note on the impossible things we say to each other - someday, someone is going to tell you that they love you and you’re going to have to ask yourself: why would they say that and what do they really mean and does it even matter?

Process by Wil Dalton

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