David Shields: The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

At birth, body fat is 12 percent of body weight, increases to 25 percent at 6 months, and 30 percent at 1 year. At age 6, it’s back down to 12 percent again, then it rises until the onset of puberty. Postpuberty, the rise continues in girls, while in boys there’s a slight decline.

During high school, girls’ bone development is 2 years ahead of boys. Young girls surpass boys in height and weight, and they frequently remain taller until boys enter the adolescent growth spurt that accompanies pubescence. Maximum skeletal development occurs at 16 for most girls and 19 for boys; dating between classmates in high school is by definition a hormonal mismatch and a farce.

“At seventeen, you tend to go in for unhappy love affairs,” said Françoise Sagan, who should know.

In males, the sexual urge peaks during their late teens or early twenties, but not until a decade later does it peak in females.

“I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, / or that youth would sleep out the rest; / for there is nothing in the between / but getting wenches / with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting”—so saith the Shepherd in The Winter’s Tale.

Between ages 15 and 24, men are three times more likely to die than women, mostly by reckless behavior or violence—e.g., murder, suicide, car accidents, war.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, Scottie, “For premature adventure one pays an atrocious price. As I told you once, every boy who drank at eighteen or nineteen is now safe in his grave.”

Hoop dream (iii):

My father was the manager of a semi-pro basketball team called the Brooklyn Eagles, which consisted of Harry Glatzer; his brother, Nat, who played for Thomas Jefferson—where they both went to high school—“but,” according to my father, “went nowhere following graduation” Max “Puzzy” Posnack, at the time the captain of St. John’s; Allie Schuckman, also a star at St. John’s; Max “Kappy” Kaplan, from St. John’s as well; Artie Jackson, a black player who displayed “dazzling accuracy from all over the floor” and Isador “Midge” Serota, who “filled his days playing pickup basketball.” The Eagles were to be paid $100 under the table (since many of the players were college athletes) to provide the opposition for a Christmas Day game at Yale.

There is, I’m sure, much mythmaking in my father’s version of the story (and all his stories); the last time he told me this story, he told it with the same, implausibly perfect details he always does: as he and the seven players drove from Brooklyn to New Haven, “a slight snowfall came down at about four or five o’clock P.M., making driving a little tricky, but Kappy was a good driver. Somewhere, about twenty-five or thirty miles from New Haven, the light snowfall turned heavier, making driving a little dangerous. We were making slow but steady progress toward our goal, the Yale basketball court.

“All of a sudden, we felt a bump against the front fender. A body rolled up over the fender and off the car onto the roadway. We’d hit a man. We stopped the car, raced to a nearby farmhouse, and called the local sheriff, who showed up in about fifteen minutes and started asking Kappy if he’d been drinking or driving too fast, especially under these hazardous conditions. One look at the body by the sheriff and he said, ‘It’s that old Polack, the town drunk. He probably never saw you.’

“We were watching the time. We had to be in New Haven by six-thirty. The sheriff told us about a farmer who lived nearby and did commercial driving. By this time—five-thirty or so—we had to skip dinner, hire the farmer-driver for twenty dollars, and get to the game. Kappy’s car was impounded as evidence and would have to be kept in the town of Wilton, where we hit the man. We piled into the big limousine and got to the gym about seven, cold and hungry. The Yale people, who thought they’d been stood up, were furious with us.

“We changed into our uniforms, had a brief warm-up, and the first quarter ended with the Yalies leading by twenty points; the half ended with Yale up about thirty. At halftime, Allie and the team gulped down sandwiches and sodas. Hardly the recommended diet for players engaged in a clash with finely trained athletes—rested and ready for the game against those ‘tough guys’ from Brooklyn. Puzzy gave the team a pep talk at halftime and the second half was a different story.

“Puzzy, Allie, and Artie began hitting their shots. The game ended in a tie. We played two overtimes and lost by a basket. The Yale captain thanked us and paid me the hundred dollars, twenty of which immediately went to the farmer-driver to drive us back to the bus station in Wilton. We got on board the bus around midnight and arrived back in New York at about six A.M. The players made a dash for the Automat (now defunct; you placed nickels in food slots, and out came the food, from main dishes to dessert). I distributed what was left: each player got a few bucks. I took nothing. We had enough for subway fare—five cents back to Brooklyn—and the game was history. It soon became a neighborhood legend.

“A month later, Kappy went back to Wilton for the inquest. He was declared innocent. We never played another game.”

The olfactory system—the sense of smell—bypasses all the brain’s thinking processes and directs its information exclusively toward the regions that control sex and aggression. In order to mate with a female hamster, male hamsters must have this system functioning. Male mice need it in order to respond to female fertility signals, and female pigs need it to be aroused by boars. In humans, scent no longer dominates sexual response; scent is nowhere near as significant for us as it is for the rest of the animal kingdom.

Sight is much the most important human sense; appearance is what attracts us. “Gentlemen prefer blondes,” but lionesses prefer dark brunettes, which are believed to have higher testosterone levels and potentially better genes.

Humans and many other species find voices attractive. In humans, deep, husky voices—considered sexually attractive by both sexes—are also correlated with high testosterone levels and therefore potentially high sex drive and good genes.

Fear and terror, not shared pleasant experiences, are more likely to result in mutual attraction. The release of stress hormones activates the brain’s neurochemical systems that promote attachment bonds. In a famous experiment, an attractive woman interviewed young men on a swaying rope bridge 200 feet above a river, and also on the ground. Midway through the interview, she gave them her phone number. Over 60 percent of the men she interviewed on the rope bridge called her back; only 30 percent of the men on the ground did so.

I was 17, as was my girlfriend, Carla, and neither of us was sexually experienced. Rain fell like needles, but Carla’s parents’ cabin’s back porch, sheltered by a lean-to roof and enclosed by a tight green net, kept us dry. I wanted to sleep outside, catch cold. I wanted to share disease and shudder. Carla wanted to brush her teeth. She liked the smell of bathrooms, mirrors, warm toilet seats. Toothbrush and towel in hand, she pushed open the screen door and sought linoleum.

I unfolded the sleeping bags and unrolled them on the wooden floor, fluffing up our backpacks, tucking them into the mouths of the sleeping bags. I pushed the bench out of the way into the corner of the porch. I rearranged things and waited.

“Everything’s wet out here,” Carla said when she emerged. “Let’s sleep inside.”

“No,” I said. “The rain’ll stop soon.”