The Geek

The characters in this story are real. The events are fictional. I wrote it so my faithful reader and critic, S.E., would know something of my background.

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When I was in High School, I was labeled as being a Geek. In 1954 that word had a completely different meaning than it does today. There was no such thing as personal computers. The Internet and e-mail were not even in our vocabulary yet. We didn’t have electronic anything except a black and white TV. No, Geeks in my youth were guys who were academically gifted but socially impaired. I wore horn-rimmed glasses, carried at least four pens in my shirt pocket, wore white socks and knew how to use a slide rule. I never had enough nerve to ask a girl out on a date. I didn’t have a car or any real spending money anyway. I had a paper route but nearly every nickel l I earned went into my model railroad in the basement.

What I knew about girls and sex would fit in a thimble and still have room for your thumb. In our school, if a girl got pregnant, she was considered to be from a lower class of society and she would disappear from school and would never be seen again by any of us. Pornography simply didn’t exist in our town. Once I saw an “eight pager”, a small stapled collection of comic strips showing all sorts of sex by comic characters. The girlie magazines in the cigar store in the train station only had women in bathing suits and nothing less.

My friends and I were basically terrified of girls. We thought they considered sex as a horrible duty a woman had to perform. If an unmarried woman had sex, she was a whore. We knew where babies came from and had a vague idea of how things got started. The movies we saw had married couples sleeping in twin beds with a night stand between them. In the early 1950s a movie came out, “The Moon Is Blue” which had a scandalous scene showing a pregnant woman. She was fully clothed, mind you, but she was pregnant. The movie could not be shown in our town but since the drive-in theater was outside the jurisdiction of the city forces for the common good, we got to see it. Oh, we went to dances where we stood in a knot in one corner of the gym, not asking a girl to dance because 1. We didn’t know how and 2. We were terrified of rejection.

Imagine then, if you will, the effect Miss B___ had on us naïve boys. She was an instructor at the local liberal arts college. Our school system had received a grant to offer a class in advanced English composition for those seniors who intended to go to college. Miss B___ came over every day from the college and taught this class during the last period of the day. I most definitely intended to go to the state university so I signed up for the class.

All the teachers in our high school were older people, in their forties and fifties. Miss B___ was probably in her early twenties. She was a tall woman, rather slender and wore very nondescript clothing. She showed up in plain cotton dresses and occasionally a blouse and skirt but never slacks. It was obvious to us super intelligent geeks that she was single because she didn’t have a wedding ring and we all called her Miss. (We were so good at deduction.) I can say with some assurance that all of the guys in the class had countless wet dreams and licentious thoughts about this woman. When we jacked off in the privacy of our bathrooms or bedrooms at home, we were dreaming about movie actresses, and now a certain English teacher..

The jocks and cheerleaders in the class signed up because it was an easy course and if you got a C, you could skip a semester of freshman English in college. But I took the material seriously and worked very hard on my essays and other assignments. It became very clear to my razor sharp mind that I was the best and brightest in the class. I sat in the front row and hung on each of Miss B___’s words. I could tell that she liked me best. (God, how could someone be so stupid as I was?)

One day, towards the end of the school year when everyone was goofing off, knowing that they would graduate no matter what they did in class, (except me, of course), Miss B___ came into the class looking very tired. When class was over and everyone bolted for the door, I hung back. I walked up to her, stuffed full of self-importance, and said,

“Miss B___, you look a little tired. Are you OK?”

“Well David, she answered, I am a little worn out. This running back and forth from the campus to this school is beginning to get to me. I have a ton of essays from my college classes to grade along with all the work from this class. Everything has to be done by next Monday. I’ve been staying up late trying to get it all done.”

“Well, gosh, I said, is there anything I can do to help?”

She looked at me for the first time in a different way. It was almost as though I were a peer, a real adult talking to another. For a moment I thought I had gone too far, spoken in too familiar a fashion. Then she pulled a large sheaf of composition books out of her book bag.

“All of these essays were written by freshmen English students at the college. They all have to be marked up for grammar and spelling and then for content and style. It’s going to take me most of the weekend to do them and I still have all of the work from this class.”

I saw my opportunity and jumped in with trembling knees.

“Maybe I could do the grammar and spelling for you and then all you would have to correct is the content.”

She looked at me for a second.

“You know, you probably could do as good a job at that as I could. Maybe I could pay you, say 25 cents each. Could you have them done by Sunday afternoon? That way, I could have them done by Monday morning.”

“Oh gosh, you don’t have to pay me. I’d be glad to do it. I don’t have anything else to do this weekend. Sure, I’ll do it.”

I was so excited I nearly peed in my pants. An adult teacher actually asked me to do some of her work! I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

I took the pile of compositions along with my books, dumped them in the basket of my bicycle and headed home. I dashed up to my room and slammed the door. I plunged into the work, skipping supper, ignoring the angry shouts from my parents and snide comments from my sister. I toiled into the night on Friday. After a short and fitful sleep, I spent nearly all of Saturday correcting the horrible spelling and atrocious grammar of the college freshmen. My superiority complex soared to new heights. I was only eighteen and I was smarter than the college kids. On top of that, their teacher asked me to correct their pitiful compositions.!

I could not escape Sunday school and church or the family dinner afterwards. So after that I called Miss B___ on the phone to tell her that the compositions were done. But to my dismay, she did not answer the phone. Being the resourceful lad that I was, I looked up her name in the phone book and found “J. B___”, 312 Parkway Drive. It had to be her, I told myself.

I jumped on my bicycle and headed out. I found the house. I knew her car, a 1941 pea green Hudson two door, in the driveway. I was flushed with pride. I stood up straight on her doorstep and rang the bell. I tried desperately to control my labored breathing.

Miss B__ came to the door and took away what little breath I had left. She was wearing a tight white short sleeve sweater and pink shorts. I suddenly realized that she had breasts! They weren’t huge but they hung on her chest like…..the only thought that came to my overloaded brain was the water balloons we used to throw at each other on a hot summer day.

“Oh, David, it’s you.”

“I finished the compositions, Miss B___.” I managed to mumble.

I tried to hand them to her but she backed away and said,

“Oh, please come in. I need to pay you. You have no idea what a relief this is to have them corrected.”

“No, no, you don’t have to pay me. I was glad to do it. It didn’t take long at all,” I lied.

“Well then, come in for a minute. Would you like a Coke?”

“A Coke would be fine, ” I said as I gained a little confidence. The house was very sparsely furnished. A small couch, a seedy looking easy chair, a radio, some old bookcases filled with famous authors and few pictures on the walls made up the total décor. Miss B___ brought me a bottle of soda and had a bottle beer for herself. I was shocked! An English teacher drinking beer, on a Sunday? I tried to hide my surprise and sat in the old chair. She sat on the couch and crossed her legs. I stared like I had never seen a woman before, dressed this way. She smiled at me. I think she knew that I was very nervous. She glanced through a couple of the essays which I had marked up with red pencil.

“You do good work, David. This is going to be a big help to have this all done. So tell me, David, have you picked out a major for college?”

“Oh, I stammered, I guess maybe I’ll try engineering or chemistry or something. I don’t know.”

I was so tongue tied, I could hardly get the words out. I was blatantly staring at her boobs and her legs. I could not maintain eye contact. I gulped my Coke. The carbonation caused me to choke and cough.

“You better slow down, David,” she laughed and smiled at my discomfort.

“Tell me something. Do you have a girl friend?”

This question so shocked me that I snorted Coke out of my nose! I was so embarrassed.

“No, I……that is….well I never…..” was all I could say.

She didn’t laugh at me this time. She handed me a napkin to wipe my face.

“David, come over here and sit next to me. I think we need to have a little chat.”

Like an obedient lap dog I got up and walked over to the couch and sat next to her, barely breathing.

“David, she said, you are a very smart guy. I could tell that from the very first day I had you in class. You are a very fast learner and by now, you must have figured out that you are the best student in the class. But when it comes to social skills, especially dealing with girls, you are still in grade school. You’re not bad looking but you are so shy and inept when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex, I fear that you are going to enter college a complete neophyte. Doesn’t that scare you just a little?”