How Susan Became a B-Girl
And The Lessons I Learned From Sex Education Class
Sex Education: Call it Biology, and you can teach it just fine. And why not? It’s science stuff school kids ought to know about like why it’s important to have a heart, where do you go when you sleep, and why you have no choice but to use the bathroom.
But call it Sex Ed, and you’ve got a hurricane-of-the-century crisis, at least down South where I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. More than once I’ve watched a school board fend off upset mothers and opportunistic politicians while patronizing old women in pants suits who take a break from campaigning for tidy yards and dog parks to vent their displeasure at a board’s moral conservatism or immoral excesses.
No wonder my science teacher Mrs. Coker chose to introduce The Subject to us without fanfare, springing it on us like an ambush on a jungle trail. One moment we were 13-year-olds sitting in our desks wondering if we’d ever grow up and escape the drudgery of public education and the next thing she was standing at the blackboard appraising us until we had no choice but to stare back at her. “Class we’re going to see a film. You’re young adults now, and I want you to act like young women and men.”
My antenna told me that this wasn’t going to be a film about the manufacture of steel or how we won WWII and kicked everybody’s ass. The large roll of film on the reel of the film projector meant there was enough screen time coming to eat up the class period. Thank ya,’ Jesus.
A kid named Willard, the class nerd, assembled and raised the portable screen with as if he were hoisting a sail on a moving boat as Mrs. Coker informed us that this was a “public health film” on “moral degradation caused by reckless behavior.” The “moral degradation” part sounded promising although I doubt half the class could define those words, not the guys anyway. My friends couldn’t.
The lights were lowered; the projector began its clicking and clacking and splotches of film flashed on the screen until the title appeared: Susan’s Tragedy.
The story of Susan’s troubles opened with the star, who looked like she was 25 years old and not the high school senior she was supposed to be, talking to her friends in the hallway of Washington High School.
The film was made in the 1950s evident Susan’s formal school attire. Socks always dated films for me. Guys in the “rock around the clock” era were not embarrassed to wear white socks. The girls wore bobby socks rolled down to the ankles. During the hippie era when I was in school, no one wore white socks unless you were role-playing.
Susan wore a knee-length skirt which had the flexibility of a carpet remnant. Her boyfriend Larry’s varsity sweater completed her ensemble. Susan cradled her books with both arms across her breasts, which prevented me and my pubescent brethren from analyzing her situation in that department.
Susan’s road to ruin began the night she stayed out too late with Larry after a school dance.
So much action was left out that it was difficult to connect the whys and wherefores of Susan’s story, so a narrator helped us with ambiguous commentary. For example, we were treated to a scene of Susan and Larry locked in a passionate embrace in the front seat of Larry’s car. “The back seat is the door to a life of ruin,” the narrator said although the lovers were clearly in the front seat.
This must have been a crucial scene because Mrs. Coker’s disembodied voice floated into the room from the dark: “This is how trouble begins.”
Even Susan sensed her moral jeopardy because we heard her say between her compressed lips: “Stop Larry…I have to study…I’m not that kind of girl.”
“Larry was impassioned.” The narrator’s terse style brought his commentary in sharp bulletins. “Inflamed with desire, Susan succumbed.”
Although Chuckie Trotter told me during our post-film analysis that he noticed Larry’s car rocking on its springs, I missed that, but my friends agreed that Larry “got lucky.”
“He definitely grabbed her boob,” Chuckie said.
“She succumbed, too,” I added.
For reasons never made clear, Larry soon abandoned Susan for one of her more virtuous friends whose name I have forgotten because my friends and I agreed that we would have kept up “relations” with the less virtuous Susan.
Anyway, Larry dumped Susan. Or, as the narrator explained in one of his bulletins: “Larry was through with her.” Already? I wondered. Like one of those bees that stings you once time and then dies?
Lesson: Be loyal if your girlfriend succumbs. Don’t be like Larry.
Susan, already guilt-ridden from losing her virginal integrity, now endured the pangs of romantical devastation. She took a few days off from school, another surprise to me since you couldn’t get out of school in those days unless you broke your arm so bad the jagged ends of the bones were sticking through the skin.
Upon her return to school, Susan’s emotional situation worsened when she discovered that everyone was aware of her fall from grace.
“People talk,” the narrator interrupted.
She was shunned because, as the narrator informed us, Susan was “considered a ‘bad girl’ and no longer chaste.” I’m reluctant to admit how many years I thought the narrator said “chased,” and assumed guys and girls desiring Susan’s friendship no longer “chased” her around in the hope of befriending her. Chaste, I know now, referred to purity. The narrator could have been more specific here. Anyone could make this mistake. Now, these many years later, I always think of poor Susan when I see or hear the word “chaste.”
Lesson: I know what “chaste” means. I am still waiting for an opportunity to use the word in conversation.
There followed now a scene of girls talking and turning their backs on poor Susan whenever she approached, much like I imagined the reindeer treated Rudolph before he heroically saved Christmas. There were scenes of guys huddled in the hallway who turned to whistle when Susan passed. Some of them shook their hands like they were shaking water off them.
Mrs. Coker was moved to comment: “Everyone in school knew.” Here she paused dramatically. “Everyone!”
Not me, I thought. What exactly did they know?
Susan’s best friend Edith encountered her at her locker between classes and confessed that she was reluctant to be seen with the class “bad girl.”
Susan did not need this news at this fragile moment in her emotional life.
I felt sorry for Susan, and even then I knew I would never treat a woman that way.
Lesson: Only jerks talk about the women in their lives.
Susan fled the school (literally and with her books bound to her chest) and seems to have missed some more schooling considering the number of times her mother appeared at her locked bedroom door with a plate of sandwiches only to be turned away, making it a point to look at the camera with her own sad face.
“Soon,” the narrator announced. “Susan found new friends.”
Good for her, I thought. How she found new friends was another mystery. They just showed up at her door, chewing gum and looking discontented whenever they exchanged words with Susan’s nonplussed parents. Her new friends were all guys with greasy hair and girls wearing too much make-up.
Susan soon appeared on the arm of a greasy looking character named Lance, an older youth who the narrator informed us had dropped out of high school to work in a motorcycle repair shop. His motorcycle screeched like the sound of ripping a tin sheet in half whenever he peeled away from or arrived for one of his scenes.
I can see this now as a literary device heralding his departure or arrival in a scene, obviously effective since I remember it still.
Lesson: Literary characters should have a “calling card” in a story just like those television characters in sitcoms who get applause and laughter from the audience when they arrive or depart the stage. “Hey!’ or “Norm!”
Lance called her “Susie,” a degradation of her name which may also have been a literary device.
Perched on the back of Lance’s motorcycle, Susan locked her arms around his – jacketed waist while he raced the engine in front of her school friends who huddled nearby exchanging unkind commentary or Susan’s powerless parents who huddled in each other’s arms on the porch appearing deeply troubled.
Susan also chewed gum with her mouth open and smoked cigarettes, further visual proof of her moral degradation.
Lesson: Girls who smoke and chew their gum in an unladylike manner also engage in acts of moral degradation. Watch for these signs.
At this point in Susie’s story, she was staying out late a lot with Lance. His riderless motorcycle could be seen parked in the same secluded spot where she had recently surrendered her womanly virtue, and we were left to wonder where Susan and Lance had got off to.
Lesson: Motorcycles are not conducive to acts of moral degradation. Drive a car if you want to sin.
Susie was well down the road to ruin, apparently enjoying a lot of late nights with Lance who began taking her to all the sleazy night clubs in town.
Bar owner: “Say what gives? Are you two old enough to be here?”
Lance: “We’re 21 daddio.”
Lesson: You can get into sleazy bars if you lie with confidence. They will let you right in. Fortune favors the bold as they say.
Despite her tender years, Susie grew very popular at these establishments and with Lance’s encouragement got a job at “Jake’s Beer Box” as a hostess. Now here is where Susie’s degradation took a mysterious turn.
Her job required her to sidle up to the male patrons and engage them in banter like “Where’re you from handsome?” or “I’m feeling lonely. Can I sit in your lap?” which would inevitably end up with patrons buying her drinks. It seemed like an easy job to have in my mind. Talk to customers and get free drinks. What could be wrong with that?
Eventually, Lance, in a jealous rage, called her a “B-Girl” and tore off into the night, his motorcycle screaming and screeching. Me and my friends cheered like we did at the movies, but Mrs. Coker restored order. “Silence please.”
For years, I didn’t know what a B-Girl was, and, being a teenager, I was afraid to ask because my antenna told me that it was not a good thing to be and everyone knew that but me.
Lesson: Beware of girls you don’t know who volunteer how handsome you are and sit in your lap. They may be pretending.
Years later, someone told me that the drinks sold to the drunks were watered down which means that the drunks were paying for a cocktail but were actually getting water which is a kind of fraud.
Lesson: Be careful of girls you meet at bars. They might be B-Girls.
Susie made so many new friends at Jake’s that she did not seem bothered by Lance’s desertion which I considered a good sign that Susie was growing stronger in dealing with the troubles which came her way. She was so good at her job that Mac the bartender whispered to her that she could make more money and more friends too if she would work for his friend, Guido. He flashed his eyebrows up and down to emphasize that a confidential understanding was involved in this opportunity for advancement.
“Susan began a new and sad chapter in her young life,” the narrator said by way of transition.
Susie could next be seen on the telephone in conversation with a strange man, the screen divided into two sides, so they were both visible.
“Is this Susie? Guido tells me you’re a good girl,” the man said into the phone.
Lesson: Always open a conversation with a girl by giving her a compliment. They respond to that.
“I can be a really good girl, if you know what I mean,” Susie said and giggled. Susie was smoking a cigarette and blowing some impressive smoke rings.
Lesson: Girls who have learned to blow smoke rings have learned other things.
A few moments later, Susie is seen running down the sidewalk from her home to a car whose passenger door is already open while her parents huddle in their customary spot on the porch as if battered by the merciless winds of immorality.
“Susan was now a ‘Call Girl’,” the narrator informed us, again without definition of what that entailed although it obviously involved being called on the telephone.
Several scenes followed with Susie on the telephone on one side of the screen and an older man also on the telephone on the other side. The men always had mustaches and a cigarette dangling from their lips which moved up and down while they conversed. Sometimes the ashes would get so long that they dropped off.
Lesson: Men who talk with a cigarette between their lips probably burn little holes in their suit lapels.
One of Susie’s gentleman friends handed her a wad of crumpled bills which she tucked into the hem area of her stocking, revealing several inches of thigh and giving us a flash of a garter belt.
Lesson: Date but don’t marry women who keep cash tucked into the hem of their stockings. Side Note: God threw me a curve in college when some jackass invented pantyhose and women stopped wearing garter belts. I’m still not over this. I would have become an agnostic in college except I was now compelled to admit that there was obviously a cosmic force out there targeting me for disappointment.
We were left to guess what Susie did to warrant this generosity from her new friends since they drove off into the night without explanation. The car would be seen briefly under the flickering neon light of a roadside motel while cicadas buzzed in the trees.
And this is where we left Susie in her career of moral degradation.
“Let’s hope she finds Jesus,” Mrs. Coker’s voice said as the film ended and the loose end began to snap and flap on the whirring reels.
There would be other films of this variety, although the story of Susan’s immoral adventures was my favorite. When I stepped through the threshold of puberty, Susan was my frequent imaginary companion.
Our lesson in sex was finished, and just before dismissing our class for the next period, Mrs. Coker announced: “Venereal Disease cannot be acquired off a toilet seat. Remember that!” This was particularly strange since VD was never mentioned in the film.
Lesson: Wipe down public toilet seats just in case. An ounce of prevention…etc.
“And, you can’t get pregnant that way either,” she said, looking straight at Jenny Sterling who was physically advanced for a 13-year-old girl and supposedly dating a grown man. Every school I ever attended, and we moved a lot, had a girl who was remarkably advanced in that department and rumored to be dating a college boy.
I spent a lot of time trying to tie all of that together too and wondering if Jennifer’s parents ever had reason to huddle on their front porch with sad faces. I’ve even wondered if the girl who starred as Susan ever got anymore acting roles or, if not, did she turn to less savory vocations.
Lesson: Sex is just one big fat mystery. Even now, decades later, I bet I don’t know half the things I ought to know.
© Michael Gigandet
Michael Gigandet is a retired lawyer in Tennessee. His stories have appeared in Bending Genres, Quarencia Press, Great Weather for Media, Palm Sized Press, Syncopation Literary Journal and The Hong Kong Literary Journal. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize this year. His published stories are available here http://michaelgigandet.com.
The Loch Raven Review 