Oh boy, Levi . . . you really shoulda kept your Levi's on
Thursday September 04 2008
That morning, the night after, he lay on the pillow, thinking: "By God, that was good." Why? Because, roughly 17-ish, that's the way he's programmed to think. At that age, boys are in a condition of almost permanent tumescence. You could build the bridge over the River Kwai with the male parts of a class of 17-year-old boys. It could bear the weight of an armoured train laden with tanks, and wouldn't buckle a millimetre.
Better still, if someone blew it up, it would take merely a glimpse of some granny-knicker elastic for the bridge to rise again to its former glory. That's it: God's great practical joke on the male sex -- except no one's laughing.
Anyway, last April (give or take) the hero of the opening sentence had found himself in bed with a young woman. Now, having sex is what the 17-year -old male body is all about. A boy of that age is as intended for sexual intercourse as an eagle is for soaring and a fish is for swimming. Mind you, it is usually intercourse in the most technical sense of the word. Not love, nor affection, nor sensitivity, nor mutual regard, nor compassion nor teenage tenderness.
It is all about finally A) finding a compliant female -- under 50 is useful, but not obligatory, and with a pulse is often preferable (terms and conditions do not apply); and B) completing the act almost instantly.
The 17-year-old boy has certainly heard of the female orgasm, just as he has heard of the giant panda -- he just doesn't think he's ever going to be in bed with one. Never even enters his head.
Now, it is true I have no particular knowledge of the 17-year- old hero of this story (though to be sure, he may be 18, or even 19 -- same difference) and I confess I am generalising -- not on the basis of the 12 months of inviolate boarding-school virginity in which I spent that particular age, but on what others have told me. (Blink, reports the girl dolefully, and it's over. Two minutes later, blink and it's all over again. Hello, here it comes again. Blink! Ah. I really needed that, he grunts. Blink again! Then it's time for him to sleep).
So our hero gets up next morning, feeling pretty pleased with himself, as boys have done since time immemorial, because he's proved to himself what a real man he is. He kisses the girl of the night farewell, and our hero -- Levi, as it happens -- saunters off to class.
And not a single molecule of his brain that April morning warns him that by the first week in September, not merely will the girl be five months pregnant, but also, that her mother will be vice presidential candidate for the United States of America, or that, across the media of the entire world, Sarah Palin is blithely announcing his forthcoming marriage to her daughter. AAARRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Yes, I know that the word "awesome" has become something of a cliché, but this is truly, truly awesome. They don't say "shag" in Alaska, but it's a nice, homely word, for the natural process by which we all came about. So, in the entire history of shagging, was there a sexual deed with the vast, unspeakable, unimaginable, unforeseeable, gargantuan, catastrophic personal consequences for the male involved, as this one is already proving to be for poor Levi?
FIVE months ago, he was a student in Alaska, enjoying a springtime frolic in the hay with a buxom youngster with the improbably appropriate name of Bristol (her parents clearly not knowing what Bristols mean in English English).
Now, he is being outed as the future son-in-law of would-be US Vice-President Palin. By January, he could be the father of the vice-president's first grandchild; and without him moving a single further muscle, or anything else for that matter, and still aged 17-ish, and based on what happened in the course of about 15 seconds one evening in April, he then could become the father of the first grandchild of the first female President of the United States of America. . .
One more time. AAARRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
In which case, his accidentally acquired mother-in-law will not merely be the President of the United States of America, but also Commander in Chief of the US Army, the US Marine Corps, the USAF, and the National Guard, and ultimate controller of the CIA, the National Security Agency and the FBI, and all the various intelligence gathering agencies they control. Chance of a bit of unseen extramarital Monica Lewinsky-type action on the side?
None, Levi. Zilch. Ever. Forget it.
Because if you did, what would the mother-in-law from Hell have in mind for you? To be the very first man to fly alone to Mars? Or to be a Military Policeman on traffic duty in Kabul? Or to be the US consul-general in Fallujah? Oh Levi, Levi: if only you'd kept your darned old Levi's on.
Yes, I know most of us men have all said something on those lines, after we've woken up beside what appears to be John Prescott's mother. But, oh brother, you really do take the bleeding biscuit.
kmyers@independent.ie
- Kevin Myers
