by: Ephraim Chamberlain

Sex, like all forms of communication, is messy and imprecise. It is perhaps even more confusing than speech, because it is composed almost entirely of jabs and incomprehensible grunts; imagine a really animated cave person who is trying to explain to you the significance of his favorite rock. You get that he really likes the rock, it is not exactly clear why.

Which raises the following question: what exactly is it conveying? Some people claim that it is an expression of love; sex should be about making love. If that is true, then I am in real trouble, because I have a hard enough time making a sandwich.

Some say that the communicative nature of sex comes from its symbolism. My gut reaction is to think that is rubbish. It's hard for me, the product of a clumsy one-night stand that took place in a broom closet in a Roman hotel between a famous American basketball legend and an Ethiopian Airlines stewardess, to find much symbolism in sex. According to my now deceased father's close friends, I was able to guesstimate that my mother was the 11,214th woman my father had slept with. Then again, she was the 37th Ethiopian woman he had slept with, so I suppose that does make her kind of special.

And then, there was that affair I once had with this affluent Dutch woman, who felt compelled to buy me things and sleep with me to protest the injustices suffered by people in developing nations as a result of colonialism and neo-colonialism. She said she was so mortified when she learned about Surinam in a high school class that she didn't sleep for three years. The act of love was her revolution, and her body and self-sacrifice its manifesto.

While I am sure that hungry, illiterate kids in Ogaden would have preferred that she shell out a portion of her multimillion-dollar trust fund for a year's worth of grain or to build a school, I like to think that my personal satisfaction was educating and liberating for her. The affair eventually ended after I learned that she apparently had an enormous amount of guilt, so much so that she had enlisted almost all of my African male friends to help her work things through. I lost faith in the cause.

Maybe, the truth of the matter is that sex actually tells us more about ourselves. One of my best friends growing up was this fellow Ethiopian kid named Mesfin. We went to grade school together here in the States in the late seventies. At ten years old, we had just transitioned from thinking that girls were icky to wondering if Rog's foxy new girl from an episode of "What's Happening" would hang with some bad-ass, righteous cats like us. Mesfin even went so far as to track the actress down and write her a letter. He enclosed a picture of himself wearing a fedora, boa and a three-dollar moustache and goatee set we bought from a local novelty store. At the time, I thought the "DYN-O-MITE!" T-shirt he was wearing in the picture made him look a bit immature. Mesfin, a budding Marxist at the time, claimed that comment reflected the fact that I had been brainwashed by capitalism to hate the poor, symbolized most poignantly by our main man J.J. Evans from "Good Times." I just thought he would look more like the eighteen year old he claimed to be in the letter if he wore his corduroy suit, plaid shirt and green polyester bow tie. But, that is neither here nor there.

She eventually sent us back a beautiful, autographed head shot, and we both fell madly in love with...well, whatever her name was. Our infatuation turned to lust, and fueled our budding obsession with learning all there was to know about sex. We enlisted the aid of the most knowledgeable kid on the subject, a Lithuanian classmate named Radjan who, for fifty cents, would let the fellas in class sneak a peak at a copy of the December 1977 issue of Playboy. Radjan agreed to let us see it for free because we knew about his "dirty little secret" (he had this weird habit of peeing into jars and keeping the jars in his locker; there might have been some connection between that behavior and the fact that he was constantly sniffing White-Out). We thought we knew what we were in for, but the whole "hair down there" thing mortified and utterly confused us.

Mesfin was especially taken aback. He went so far as to ask his father, an obvious sign of desperation. His father told him that he would tell Mesfin about it when he reached eighteen. Still bewildered, yet mollified by what his father told him, Mesfin refused to discuss sex with the fellas until he had that talk with his father. Unfortunately, his father ran off with a concert violinist when Mesfin was sixteen, and the conversation never happened. The shock of his father's desertion and the fact that three of our high school buddies contracted Chlamydia squelched any desire on Mesfin's part to learn about the topic.

The summer between our third and fourth years of college, Mesfin finally let me tell him about sex. He became so obsessed with what I told him that he took a year off after college to study tantric sexual techniques at a Costa Rican ashram with this narcoleptic yogi whose main claim to fame was that he could lift various heavy items with his privates. Mesfin, now a urologist living in Milwaukee, is on his third marriage, this time to a Nigerian adult film star. His second marriage was to the Dutch woman I discussed earlier.

I haven't slept with my current girlfriend, yet. What does that say about us? Perhaps it is a function of the doubts and confusion I have about what having sex with her will mean. I have had several girlfriends before, but as I edge past my mid-thirties, I realize that time is running out and every relationship is meaningful..as is every aspect of a relationship, including communication and understanding. But, since my most successful relationship was this two-week fling I had with an Peruvian woman who didn't speak English while I was on a post-graduation backpacking trip through South America, who knows.

I am also plagued by countless questions. What if she is not a virgin? Am I figuratively sleeping with everyone she has slept with? What did she take away from those experiences, and why should I have to share them with her? Should I wait until I am sure that I am in love with her before having sex with her? Is the pleasure derived from sex a prerequisite to falling in love? Does sex complete love or is it reflection of it? And, perhaps most importantly, what would my wife think?