Attempting Normal (16 page)

We argue about it all the time. The arguments become horrible and full of anger and pain. She wants it to be fun, exciting, a new life, a family. I am buzzkilling her very real and reasonable wants and it breaks my heart. We’ve been going to couples counseling to get me in the baby zone. To figure out what my fear is and overcome it. I love kids, I get along with kids, they seem to like me. What has been holding me back? People who have babies tell me I will know a love that is beyond anything I can imagine, and a joy that is indescribable. Love and joy? That sounds horrifying. I have no way of knowing whether I can handle either of those. I’m much better with need and fear. They are what ground me.

I still need someone in my life to make me feel like things will be okay.

All day every day I go back and forth. I drift into a fantasy of the amazing life I’d have with a baby, immersed in the all-consuming but rewarding work of raising a child. Then moments later, for no good reason, I see the exact same scenario as being a hell on earth with no way out, full of drama, heartache, and pain. This is the cycle that spins daily in my head.

Then there’s the weekly cycle: Every week she brings up the fact that she wants a baby, a new house, and an engagement ring. That’s the panic trifecta for me. I usually spiral into a diplomatic but evasive argument about the struggle I’m having making the decision on at least two of the topics at hand. That gets her angry because she doesn’t understand why she is with a man who isn’t excited about doing those things with her. I make my case: I’m old, twice divorced, and emotionally retarded. She cries. I get mad that we are having the discussion again and try to bolster my defense with the fact that we are “working on it” in therapy.

The other night the argument began when we were in bed. Bedtime is the worst time to start an argument because all the drama unfolds while you are wearing your underwear. Being angry in your underwear is a hard thing to pull off. We had reached the moment that pitches me over the edge into rage. I found myself standing beside my bed in boxers screaming with embarrassing intensity, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you!”

And I stomped out of the room and down the hall and stood in the living room for a few seconds. Then I walked back down the hall, back into the bedroom, and sat on the bed still fuming.

She said, “Breathe, breathe, breathe.”

I had a tantrum. I am a child.

I took a deep breath. Then another. Then I started weeping.

“It’s okay to be sad. You’re going to be okay,” she said, touching my shoulder.

“I love you. I’m sorry,” I said, whimpering.

“I love you too,” she said, comforting me, sternly. “But I’m not going to hang around forever.”

  13  

I don’t like porn. I use it occasionally but I don’t like it. It is disturbing how pornified this culture has become and how integrated it is in our lives. It’s almost hard to avoid it. I think that some computers actually have porn on them when you buy them. You boot it up and bam, there are two people fucking on your desktop.

I saw porn way too young. It permanently twisted my mind up about what was expected out of me sexually. I can clearly remember my first photographic porn image. It was a woman sucking a cock, holding it, cum coming out of her mouth and down the shaft, all over her hands, her face angled up at a guy with a Van Dyke facial hair configuration, his eyes closed and mouth gaping. That picture seared itself into my brain more than any piece of art I’d seen or anything from life itself, for that matter, for years. It didn’t begin to fade until I put more porn in my brain.

If I were a fifteen-year-old boy living in this culture today I would never leave my room. My head would explode from masturbating
so much. I would have worn my cock to a nub. When I was a kid it was hard to find porn. We didn’t have the Internet. You had to know the guy with the weird brother or the dad that had a stash and that was usually soft-core stuff. Or you had to find that one page of a hard-core mag under a bridge somewhere with your friends. All of you looking at first confused but then suddenly enlightened, fighting over who gets to take it home first.

“I feel funny in my pants. I’m taking it first.”

Then you’d all go back every day under that bridge for a month to see if the rest of the magazine magically appeared, as if there were porn trolls out distributing loose pages of hard-core fucking in the middle of the night. Little hordes of warty slobbering grunting half-demons.

“We must put out more filth for the children. They must learn somewhere. I’ll get the bridge. You guys get the gas station bathrooms and behind the dumpsters.”

I realize now that there really were porn trolls. They were people who would go jerk off in strange locations because they had nowhere else to go. They needed a secret place. The forgotten pages were memorials to the marginalized life of the sexual deviant, the man who had to masturbate outdoors, under bridges.

I know this to be true because of something I saw in Boston when I was in college. I was walking across the highway bridge just outside Kenmore Square. The bridge comes off Beacon Street and spans a runoff ditch of some kind. There are actually two bridges, one for each direction. It was late morning and I was hungover. I was on one of the bridges, looking down into the dirty water and the underpass of the other bridge, when I saw two sets of legs hanging over a ledge. One set of legs was human and had pants around its ankles and the other set of legs was inflatable and dangling. It was like a dirty cartoon. I watched for a few seconds before both sets of appendages disappeared up into the dark side of the underpass. Some guy, out of what necessity or what
desire I don’t know, was fucking a blowup doll under a bridge in the middle of the day. I didn’t know what to do with that. I certainly thought it was a ballsy way to spend the morning.

I have nothing morally against porn but it is dangerous to let in your head, for a few reasons. Even though I didn’t understand how it actually worked, I was completely obsessed with sex from about age ten. All I could think about was naked women all the time. Any women. Naked. Good. The first time I masturbated was an accident. I stuck my cock into the water running out of the bath faucet and it changed my life. It took me a while to stop fucking water and move to my hand but the transition was made and it became and remains a regular activity.

The first time I saw the mechanics of intercourse illustrated was actually in the aisle of a B. Dalton Bookseller in the Winrock Center mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up. I must’ve been eleven or twelve. I was in the humor section looking through
The History of Underground Comics
. There was a panel done by Spain Rodriguez of two people fucking in outer space as if they were part of the galaxy, a constellation. It was there I saw how the penis went into the vagina. I also saw it in R. Crumb’s panels. I now knew how it all fit together. The feeling of looking at that for the first time, the body rush, the flow of blood to both heads, the exploding virgin brain figuring out one of the few known keys to the universe, can never be recaptured. Masturbation now had visual definition and structure. It was one of the best moments of my life. I guess it’s a bit telling that I almost came in my pants in what was basically the joke book section of a bookstore, but I didn’t. I went and jerked off in the mall bathroom instead. I had no choice in that moment. I guess if you hold on to that innocent, youthful combination of overwhelming desire and unstoppable need for release, there is no reason you wouldn’t find yourself under a bridge fucking a doll.

Seeing my first porn movie was devastating in terms of the
damage it did to my brain. I have a love-hate relationship with porn. As I said, I use it. I obviously like it. I know it isn’t good for my brain, my life, my relationships, or my sexual sensitivity but I watch it because it’s a drug that is free and the only paraphernalia I need to get high is already hanging off of my body, an arm’s length away at all times.

I saw a few great seventies porns when I was in my early teens. In this order:
Deep Throat, The Opening of Misty Beethoven
, and
The Rites of Uranus
. The first two I saw were on Betamax video. My parents had borrowed them from a couple that they were friendly with. The woman of that couple was stunning and now I knew she was also nasty. My fourteen-year-old brain ran with that and calloused my paraphernalia. The fact that my mother told me that my parents had porn and where they got it and that it was hidden somewhere in the house is certainly dubious in its appropriateness, but boundaries are for normal families. My family functioned as a singular emotionally amoebic unit, all of us in search of primordial union.

The Rites of Uranus
really set a bad table of expectations for me. I must’ve been about fifteen. My friends and I all got drunk and took our fake IDs to this porno theater. I don’t remember what the movie was about but I do know a guy showed up in a town on a bus, met a girl, and they ended up in bed fucking. She had a tattoo of the devil on her stomach, with her vagina and pubic hair forming his mouth and beard. She kept shouting, “Fuck me, fuck the devil! Fuck me, fuck the devil!”

It’s rough to be a virgin and have a vagina be the mouth of Satan in your mind before you have even dealt with a real one. In retrospect, I’m not sure it’s not a fitting metaphor for some vaginas. You can lose your house and all your money to a really hungry one.

Outside of blowing my mind and turning me into a masturbating fiend, the pornos were a template in my brain of how sex was
done. I hadn’t done it yet but I knew what was expected. I was supposed to have a huge, hard cock that could fuck for what seemed like hours, then I came somewhere outside of the vagina onto a woman’s body. I thought this was how all guys were, hard at the drop of a dime and able to fuck forever if necessary. It was all I knew at the time and what I struggle with today. It’s typical of how I’ve developed my sense of self. I have had to cobble it together on my own because my parents never cut me loose, because of their own fears and needs, but they never guided me in any way, either. They just sort of let me flounder to figure it out on my own. Which is its own kind of freedom, but your sources may be suspect.

I brought all my porn-derived sexual wisdom to my first few sexual encounters but my dick never made it out of my pants. It just did what it had to do all by itself without me even touching it. Just by grinding into the crotch of a girl. I never saw this in porn so I was pretty sure I was screwed up somehow, and I became incredibly scared I would never fuck in earnest.

As it turns out, coming in my pants would be a lot less stressful than actual sex.

The first few times I had actual sex, the experience was trying and messy. I imagine that’s somewhat par for the real-world course but the course I was on was the porno course and I was failing. I lost my virginity when I was seventeen to a waitress at the restaurant I was working at. The place was right across from the University of New Mexico and all the waitresses were in college or older. The owner was a manic Jewish blow monkey named Eddie, from Brooklyn. Eddie was obsessed with the fact that I was a virgin, a fact I’d revealed over a few lines of coke. He then secretly offered all the waitresses money to deflower me. There was a bounty on my virginity, although I didn’t know this till after the fact.

The woman who took the bait (I don’t know if she was ever paid) was named Cheryl. She was twenty-seven or so, slightly heavy, hippieish but very cool and charming. She had a similar personality to Diane Keaton in
Annie Hall
. She came up to me during a morning shift and said, “Come over this afternoon at four-thirty and bring champagne.” So I had all day to freak out. Most guys would have been thrilled but I was filled with panic. All I had in my head was porn. I had a performance anxiety monster that lived within me and grabbed my balls from the inside every time I came close to having actual sex.

I got to her place at four-thirty sharp. She got undressed and we went right to it. It was unruly. She had big, never-been-disciplined hippie-girl boobs and a massive mound of hair on her pussy. That was normal back then. Now you never see that. Then if you saw a shaved pussy you would’ve thought it had cancer. So, once I got it up and in it was over in about twelve seconds. Probably not an unusual event but I immediately started beating myself up in front of her. She was supportive but there was no way she could’ve spun it into a victory. I left, apologies abounding. Which would be the title of a memoir I could write about all of my sexual exploits, at least all of them before I met my first real girlfriend when I was nineteen.