When I was in fourth grade, I met a couple of my friends in the library. Walking up to the table, they were quietly giggling like something funny had just happened.

Steve tapped Rod on the arm, looked at me and said, “Hey Zilligen, put your stuff down.” Rod and Steve were old friends of my mine all the way back to kindergarten.

“Go to the dictionary and look up ‘intercourse'”, he said. And they both giggled again.

I was a little skeptical but looking at the dictionary displayed in the center of the library I think I was safe from them pulling anything on me. I dropped my books on the table and made my way to dictionary’s podium. Rod and Steve leaned over the backs of their chairs as they watched me flipped the massive book’s pages.

I always hated the idea of using the dictionary to spell words. If you don’t know how to spell the word, how were you supposed to look it up?

‘Intercourse’ was pretty straight forward but I didn’t understand why Rod and Steve were so interested in this word. As I flipped through the ‘I’s – careful not to rip the dictionary’s thin paper – I found inch worm, “those are cool”, I thought. Instructible appeared, still carefully turning the large pages. Interject – oops, too far… Intercentral and the facing page read intercrystalline.

Running my finger down the page, intercompare, intercomparison, intercondenser, interconfessional, interconnect, darn, bottom of the page. Next column  – intercounty, intercouple, ah – ‘intercourse’. My finger followed to the definition:

“the sexual activity in which the male’s penis enters the female’s vagina.”

My eyes got big and then I heard the snickers and muffled laughs from Rod and Steve. They knew I had found the definition from my expression. The librarian at her desk shot Rod and Steve a pair of knitted eyebrows to ‘hush’ them – so she didn’t see my round cheeks turning red with embarrassment. I quickly flipped a hundred pages on top of the dirty word (that would be ‘penis’. I wasn’t sure about ‘vagina’ but I had a pretty good idea that was a dirty word too.) Then I joined the librarian in keeping Rod and Steve quiet.

And that is how I found out about sex. Well, as much as I would get until my education continued our first sex ed class in 5th grade. That was not including the dirty pictures Randy Paluca showed me one day in his basement.

A couple of years later, as a sixth grader, I was in the back seat of my Aunt Elaine’s car when she stopped at her Arlington Heights apartment on a cold March day. She had forgotten something and just needed to run in to get it. She left Dave and me, and possibly Lee – I don’t remember – in her car with the radio on. And that is when I first heard “Chevy Van”.

With the rhythmic strumming of a twelve-string acoustic guitar and fuzzy Hammond keyboard  I remember Sammy Johns singing:

‘Cause like a princess she was layin’ there
Moonlight dancin’ off her hair
She woke up and took me by the hand
We made love in my Chevy van
And that’s all right with me

It was the first time I remember hearing ‘made love’ and understanding it as sex in a song. It was such a sexual song with “like a princess she was layin’ there”, “the moonlight dancin’ off her hair” and the Chevy Van driver ‘being taken by the hand’.

Our family had the first minivan ever made, a VW bus. It was a practical vehicle to haul 5 growing kids. Our Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray had a VW Camper which was similar but the back of the bus had a stove, table and cabinets. Volkswagen made practical vehicles.

The Chevy Van in this song wasn’t practical. It was bigger than our VW Bus. A VW Bus was built for passengers. A Chevy Van was for the driver. There were no windows in a Chevy Van because a Chevy Van was about privacy (outside of a small circular tinted window in the back). No one knew what happened in the back of a Chevy Van – but now Sammy Johns had given me some new ideas.

If the Volkswagen Bus was practical, the Chevy Van or the conversion van was any but. As the muscle cars got tamed via the EPA’s horsepower-robbing emission standards, gearheads turned to customizing their vans to show off their creativity. In the early seventies, it was about adding wall to ceiling carpeting in your van. But as the seventies continue the vans continued to convert to more outlandish customizations – and conversion vans were born.

But before the craziness of the conversion vans, just the wall-to-wall carpeting and privacy was enough for a young man. Add a young princess you have hip sex pit that awakened urges in millions of young men – which is what Chevy Van did, and I was one of them. OK, I was a little ahead of myself – without a driver’s license or a girl but the pieces were starting to fall into place.

‘Chevy Van’ had the perfect balance of erotica and wholesomeness. While it was years before I would have sex, the open carefree encounter offered in ‘Chevy Van’ was quite alluring to a boy walking the bridge to manhood.

It also had the ‘cool’ that I was just beginning to understand. Cool is an attribute that both sexes wanted. Mostly masculine, Cool embodies independence and leadership with a hint of narcissism. Cool is social, popular, wanted. Sex is cool. The Chevy Van driver was cool. I pictured him with long hair and a beard, a guitar leaning against the front seat. It was my first encounter on how a guy would “get a girl”.

Obviously cool is a matter of perspective. In sixth grade, I was just forming that perspective. This was years before Fonzy’s thumbs up and his drawn-out “Aaaaa!” Cool was not yet in my daily vocabulary. While Fonzy defined Cool for late 70’s tv audiences on ‘Happy Days’, everyone has their own definition of what cool is. As ‘Happy Days’ popularity waned, ‘The Fonz’ became a parody of cool. Of course, shark jumping stripped away Fonz’s coolest, but his sex appeal kept him in the game. From the view of the loser in the eternal battle to procreate, sex would always make the winner in that primal evolutionary struggle – cool.

I’d like to say I was above the hormonal trappings of the typical teenage boy but I wasn’t. I pictured the girl in Chevy Van with long blonde hair. Her face was probably a face I had seen in one of my dad’s Playboy or OUI magazines I found in the garage at our gray house. She had a light colored, low cut, thin shirt with a narrow vest over it. Her well-worn cutoffs had the pockets hanging out front atop her long tan legs. Her thin leather bandanna did a poor job keeping her long blonde hair out of her face. And that’s when the moonlight dances off her hair.

As a blooming adolescent, I had no idea how complicated sex was. The first step was making sure everything work. Erections were no problem – except the lack of control.  That would get fixed in time but with age then the opposite problem. Masturbation, though a few years away, was a no-brainer. The real problem was finding the girl.

I was always very shy and being fat did not help my self-esteem. When I lost the weight in eighth grade you would think it would have boosted my confidence with girls but it didn’t. In high school, I only had one girlfriend but in college, I learned girls were not another species and made my first girl friends (as opposed to girlfriends).

I had friends that were girls in high school but I was never at the same level as they were in college. I always put them above me. If a girl was nice to me, I’d start thinking she ‘liked’ liked me.  I remember when I worked at Frank’s Nursery and Crafts, there was an attractive woman (‘woman’ because she must have been at least 21 years old) named Sharon that ran the Crafts Department.

I had come into work after purchasing Bob Seger’s album “Against the Wind”. I was always very proud of my album purchases and I would show them off to anyone that would listen. That particular evening, she was one of the managers scheduled to close the store. Sharon came into the office and saw the Bob Seger album and in her best Marilyn Monroe, she said, “boy, I’d sure love to listen to this.”

I turned red and replied, “Sure.”

And in the following weeks, whenever I asked her if she was done with the album, she would thank me again for letting her listen to it and flashed her eyelashes to me. The album loan turned permanent when I re-bought Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” a few weeks so I could avoid confronting her.

I had learned a couple valuable lessons. Beautiful people live by different rules than us – ‘us’ being the non-beautiful people. Years later a friend of mine from work, Glenn Becker, and I, would come up with the “Beautiful People Theory”. The basic premise was that Attractive People had an easier life. They were more popular, more desirable, and didn’t have to try as hard to get the things they wanted in life – like Bob Seger albums.

Glenn and I realized The Beautiful People Theory worked on many levels. Some people took full advantage of their looks. Some people let other people’s looks take control of them – as in my case. Some people would have to fight against their advantage. ‘The smart beautiful women’, or guy, that would have fight not to be dismissed because of their attractiveness. This was more of a problem for women than men. We realized the most dangerous women were the smart attractive ones that would take advantage of their sexual wiles. And of course, it was a two-way street – the stupid guys that would let them.

Sex is a huge motivator in life. Such a motivator can be a beast that challenges who we really are. Philosophers struggle with the nature of sex – is it the animal instincts of mating or the highest level of bonding. I believe the answer is it is both. Which led me to the conclusion that sex is about compromise.

Sex is what separates friendship from marriage – emotionally, not legally. It is what separates and yet binds the sexes. It is what transverses the gulf between the sexes. How many comedians do their entire show on the differences between men and women? Yet it is often the beginning core of marriage.

There are two sides to sex – the instinctual/animalistic side and the love/bonding side. I believe these two sides are inseparable. The first side is about pleasure, gratification, release, dominance, submission and compatibility. The second side is about intimacy, giving, comfort, equality, exploration, satisfaction and love. One is short-term, the other is long term – I’m talking about the relationship, not the actual act.

As we begin to turn into young adults and our hormones are kicking in, our interest in sex increases. We start looking at people we want to have sex with – based on just their looks. This is the beginning of the Beautiful People Theory. Boys start doing stupid things for attractive girls. Girls return the favor for attractive boys but they have to be more subdued because, due to social protocols, they are not supposed to take the initiative. (I’m glad to see this trend changing in our culture.)

But as animal instincts grow the sex drive becomes more hyper. Boy and girls do more stupid things and take bigger risks. At the same time, the mind continues to expand and mature and the other side of sex begins to push back. For me, it was about bonding, a long-term relationship, a marriage. So when that view of the relationship faded so did that side of sex – leaving just the animal instincts. So for me, without the lure of a long-term relationship, the picture would continue to fade further and a breakup would ensue.

My specific girlfriends have their own songs and Desi her own. While sex was always a ‘goal’ it was also a test of compatibility. I would like to said I had ‘matured’ beyond my animal instincts but that was certainly not true. I think Desi would agree it was a source of our worse fights and I would take the blame for those. On the other side, it a binding part of our marriage.

But forty years earlier sex was just a concept for a twelve-year-old thinking dirty thoughts to a lusty song. This twelve-year-old was riding shotgun with Sammy John as we drove down through town until we found her. I stood behind them as they continued down the road. After the first chorus, Sammy pulled the van under a tree and it was instantly night time. I moved so Sammy and the hitchhiker could spread out in the back of his Chevy Van. I watched as they laid down and started kissing. And just as Sammy made his move to second base…

“Sorry about that.”

Aunt Elaine announced as she opened the door to the car. She snapped me out of the van and away from Sammy and his princess getting busy. Aunt Elaine never saw the red face of this twelve-year-old in her backseat. And if she did catch some of that tint, she certainly would never know why.

And in the weeks, months and years that followed, it would be me taking the princess to the back of my Chevy Van. And I would let the song finish with just me and my princess – as the moonlight danced til it faded to sleep.