Kick Me (5 page)

And suddenly, all I wanted to do in the entire world was to kiss her. My brain spun as I tried to think of ways to get her re-interested. I acted goofy, trying to make her laugh. I stared at her with what I thought was a kiss-inducing face. I even tried to get her back outside and into the tent with me. But when her dad came in and asked us if we wanted him to take our tent down and she said flatly, “Yeah, we’re not using it anymore,” I knew I had blown my chance. Patty Collins would not be kissing me anytime soon.

That night, I had the most vividly erotic dream I’ve ever had in my life. I was dressed as a bee and was standing around in some crappy-looking beehive set from a grade-school play. Patty, also dressed as a bee, was lowered down from the sky. She smiled at me, then backed her stinger into my stomach and dragged me away as I had what I now believe was my very first orgasm. What the symbolism of this image was or why it resulted in such a strong physical reaction, I have no idea. All I know is that I woke up feeling light-headed and giddy. I was now completely in love with Patty Collins and desperate to get back inside that tent with her.

But I never did. She and I only saw each other at school after that, and our interaction consisted solely of saying hello. Whatever romantic feelings Patty might have had for me had died in that tent made of blankets on her driveway one tragic summer morning when I decided it would be cute to be coy.

Over the next few years, as my male classmates were spending their days trying to become proficient at tetherball and playing the drum solo from “Wipe Out” on the edges of their desks, I was busy developing crushes on girls.

It’s hard to say why we have crushes on anybody at that age. It’s not like we’re that in touch with who’s beautiful and who’s not, or who would make a good girlfriend or boyfriend. Many times our crushes are simply based on people’s hair or their nose or the way they dress or if they’re nice to you. In the third grade I had a big crush on Teresa Andrews, and in her case, I liked her because she was smart. She always seemed to get answers right and was usually the first one in the class to raise her hand. Maybe it was her confidence that attracted me, or maybe it was simply that she was the only girl I knew who wore glasses. I would spend hours of class time drawing pictures of her in the back of my notebook. Once our teacher, Miss Patton, caught me not paying attention during class as I was adding yet another artist’s rendering of Teresa to my already stalkerlike notebook gallery. Fortunately, Miss Patton found my lovelorn doodlings to be heartwarming, and so she simply gave me a sympathetic smile, closed my notebook, and told me to pay attention. Even Miss Patton could see what a good couple Teresa and I would make, I figured. And by the middle of the school year, I decided that it was time to make my move.

I didn’t know Teresa very well, even though she rode the same school bus that I did. I never had the nerve to talk to her because I was always too shy to talk to girls I had crushes on. Instead, I would try to figure out ways to get them to notice me. With Teresa, I knew I could impress her by showing her how smart I was. There was just one problem—I wasn’t that smart. My grades always hovered around the letter
C,
and I knew it would be hard to win her over by reciting the alphabet or stammering my way through times tables I hadn’t yet committed to memory. And so I knew I would have to default to the only means available to me to grab her attention . . .

I would try to make her laugh.

It had worked before with several other girls over the past couple of years. It wasn’t that they would hear one of my supposedly funny comments and fall in love with me, but it at least opened up the lines of communication and gave me hope that one day I might get them to the point where they would drag me into a tent and try to kiss me. And so it was decided—this was the strategy I would use on Teresa.

The next day, I got my chance. We were studying science and Miss Patton broke us off into pairs to work on our reports. As luck would have it, she paired me with Teresa. I wasn’t sure if Miss Patton had done it because of my crush or if the Fates had simply been on my side that day, but I was grateful and vowed not to squander this opportunity.

“What do you want to do our report about?” she asked me. I stared into her glasses and found myself unable to think.

“I don’t know,” I said, a bit too politely. “Whatever you want to do, Teresa.”

She gave me a strange look that seemed to say “Thanks for all the help, jackass” and leaned back in her chair to think. I watched her furrow her brow as she pondered our report, and I tried to imagine what our children would look like. I envisioned her and me holding hands as we strolled along on the college campus where she would be a professor and where I would not be a professor. I saw us out camping, as she kissed me in a tent and I let her. Our life together was unrolling before my eyes, and the mere thought of it made me all the more desperate to crack my first joke and break the ice between us. However, the academic mood was proving to be an obstacle.

“Let’s look through a science book and see if we get any ideas,” she said as she stood up, talking more to herself than to me.

“Great idea, Teresa” was my enthusiastic reply, even though she was halfway across the room by the time I said it.

Teresa returned with a large book titled
Science and You.
She sat down and opened it. I moved my chair next to hers so that we could read the book together. She didn’t look at me as I leaned my head in beside hers to read along, and I found myself waxing poetic over her concentration skills, as if her ability to read without being distracted was yet another good reason to dedicate my life to her. Teresa had the book open to a chart that showed man’s ascension from ape to human. There were about eight apes in various stages of development, going from the hunched-over primitive ape-man up to the fully erect
Homo sapiens.
The fourth ape was a semihunched half ape–half woman whom the illustrator had decided to endow with hairy sagging breasts. Being a third grader, I immediately found this funny but instead of just laughing and pointing at the breasts like one of my less erudite peers might have, I decided that Teresa could only be won over by a more sophisticated quip. My opportunity had arrived. Science and comedy had merged. I thought hard and after a couple of seconds, I realized I had a real zinger, sure to melt Teresa’s brainy heart.

I looked around to make sure the coast was clear, leaned in to Teresa, pointed to the picture of the ape-woman, and whispered in an amused tone, “Teresa, look, it’s Miss Patton.”

Whereupon Teresa immediately raised her hand and blurted out loudly, “Miss Patton, Paul said you look like the ape in this book.”

My jaw dropped. As quickly as that, I was thrust into the spotlight. Miss Patton came over and looked at the picture, as did several other kids. You’d think that out of a roomful of third graders, somebody would see the picture of a hairy, saggy-breasted ape and deem my comment funny. But whether they were afraid to because Miss Patton was standing there or because they had suddenly all become sophisticated connoisseurs of highbrow comedy, nobody laughed. Instead, they all looked at me with a mix of contempt and disbelief. And Miss Patton, my onetime ally in the world of romance, was highly insulted. She told me that my remark was insensitive and immature and then made me go sit in the corner for an hour.

Teresa Andrews never gave me the time of day after that, although she had never given me the time of day before that, either. But I couldn’t get over what a tattletale she was. And I was now completely confused as to what my relationship with women was going to be in the future. Was I destined to be the dope in the tent who felt compelled to push away the things that he wanted in life? Or would I be the clueless buffoon, pointing at pictures of apewomen with no idea when he was going too far in his search for love and acceptance?

Or would I just be the guy who overanalyzes everything and makes a big deal out of a stupid mistake? Sitting in the corner that day, listening to my peers living their lives behind me while I counted holes in the cinder block, I knew that only time would tell.

But I had a feeling the answer wasn’t going to be good.

OUT OF THE CLOSET

S
eek and ye shall find” is a quote that I believe comes from the Bible. I’m not quite sure, though, since thankfully I haven’t had to go to church or Sunday school in about twenty-five years. For all I know it could have been a line of Spock’s from the “Trouble with Tribbles” episode of
Star Trek.
But seeking and finding were two things that I did quite well as a kid.

One of the things I used to constantly seek was my yearly stash of Christmas presents. Or at least I did once I found out there was no Santa Claus.

On Christmas Eve, when I was seven, as my mom and I made a last-minute trip to the mall to buy a copy of
The Naked Ape
for my radical cousin Leslie, my mother had finally cracked under the pressure of having to lie to her only child about the jolly fat man for all these years. Doing so violated every ethic she had ever learned in church, and she resented having to do it simply because as a parent she had been ordered by society to march in lockstep with the wishes of the corporate world. Whenever a gift-getting holiday would roll around in which unearned gains were supposedly delivered by a mystical third party, I always forced her to tell me more and more about these Santa Claus and Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy people. I think that deep in my heart I never really believed that these enigmatic, science-defying figures existed, but since all my friends seemed to be so into them, I wanted desperately to believe, too. As we drove around the mall parking lot looking for a space while Christmas music played on the car radio, I guess I finally pushed my mother too hard for a concrete answer.

“There really
is
a Santa Claus, isn’t there?” I asked her point-blank.

She was silent for several moments, and then she deflated. Looking almost as if she was going to cry, she simply averted her eyes, shook her head, and uttered an embarrassed “no.” It was the answer I’d been expecting, having recently deduced the impossibility of the physics of Santa’s single night of worldwide gift distribution after watching a movie about clocks and time in my second-grade class. But still, I made a grand show of my mortification, dropping my jaw and making the standard “I can’t believe you would do this to me” face that kids become so adept at pulling out in any circumstance in which they are denied some impulsive whim. I even forced myself to start crying, asking tearfully, “Then who eats the cookies and milk I put out on Christmas Eve?” My mother confirmed what I had always suspected and yet didn’t want to believe—it was my father. In a colossal act of grief management, I decided to seek revenge. I ended up mixing a devil’s brew of spices, cooking oils, vinegars, and spit in order to teach my lie-mongering father a lesson about deceiving his only son. However, as I mixed the vile-smelling cocktail in the kitchen sink while my mother watched, amused and somehow relishing my plan, as if she had wanted to get back at my father for all the years of lying he had forced her into, something happened. I was suddenly overcome with a strange mixture of disgust, grief, nostalgia, and love for my father. The image of my dad bringing out presents that he and my mother had taken the time to research, buy, and wrap was too much for me to take. He was only trying to be a good dad, I thought. I just couldn’t reward his earnestness with a poisoned glass of swill. And so I ended up dumping the nauseating liquid down the drain, pouring my father a fresh glass of milk and putting it out next to a plate of just opened store-bought cookies. And when I unwrapped my presents the next morning, I pretended to be excited that Santa had arrived during the night, even though my mother threw looks at my father that showed they both knew I no longer believed but was somehow trying to squeeze one more year out of the Santa lie.

But I couldn’t. Santa was dead. Rest in peace, you goddamn, fat-assed liar.

After that, whenever my parents would leave me alone in the house in the month of December, I would turn into a junior McCloud and scour my parents’ bedroom for the gifts that I knew I was going to get anyway, albeit sometime in the not-near-enough future. One year, when I found a particularly good batch of toys my parents had successfully figured out I wanted, I spent the next several weeks pulling out the not-yet-wrapped presents from the back of my mother’s closet whenever she left the house. I would carefully extract the toys from their packages and then play with them nervously, one ear focused on the door in our family room, listening for my parents’ return. It wasn’t particularly fun playing with these illegal toys but the thrill of doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing made it feel dirty and exciting.

However, my skulduggery skills proved to be far superior to my judgment skills. On Christmas Eve, when my father asked me what presents I thought I was going to get that year, I put on a big act of divining and ended up naming every single present in my mother’s closet in excruciating detail, including an exact description of an obscure knock-off version of a G.I. Joe scuba outfit made for a low-rent action figure transparently named “Army Jack.” My mother and father exchanged disappointed looks with each other as I made matters worse by pretending to have no idea what they were upset about.

“What? What’s the matter? Why are you guys looking at each other like that?” I said, performing one of the most unconvincing portrayals of an innocent person ever perpetrated on stage or screen. My guilt was complete when, the next morning, I got up only to find my presents lying under the Christmas tree unwrapped, and my mother sitting on the couch drinking a cup of tea, saying disappointedly, “What’s the point of wrapping them? You already know what they are anyway.”

After that, I vowed never to seek out my Christmas presents again. However, within weeks, the lure of the backs of my parents’ closets proved too strong to resist and I returned to my prying ways, justifying my snooping by reassuring myself that I wasn’t looking for presents—I was just being nosy. I couldn’t help it. It was just too tempting. Our house always seemed to offer up a never-ending wealth of poorly hidden treasures. My mother was a bit of a pack rat, a trait that I have inherited from her in spades. I am loath to throw out even the most disposable of items, for fear that some day in the near future, I will (a) find myself in need of an old
Time
magazine even though its contents are much more conveniently archived on the Internet, (b) figure out a way to refill and repair that old disposable “Makin’ Bacon” lighter I found several years ago, or (c) mourn the nostalgic boost I’d miss if I threw away that stack of completely out-of-focus photos of my backyard taken for insurance purposes. No, mother and son Feig would save everything, and I was always stumbling upon bizarre items from my past in our closets.

My mom had saved the first book I ever wrote, an obtuse little tome titled “BananaLand” that I penned in the first grade and then tried to bind into a book using construction paper and a stapler. Unfortunately, I laid it out completely backward, so that it had to be read from back to front like the Torah. I found my old handprint plaques from preschool, uncomfortable little craft items made out of plaster and spray-painted gold. I found my mother’s old mortarboard from her high school graduation, and, when no one was home, I would parade around the house wearing it and carrying a rolled-up comic book that served as my diploma from the College for Gifted Goofballs. It always made me happy that my mom saved everything I ever did, because there’s nothing more terrifying to me than people throwing out your past while you’re still alive. After you’re dead, I guess they can just toss everything on the scrap heap, but I know I don’t want to be an old man who sits around saying, “You should have seen me when I was a kid. Man, was I good-lookin’.” With photographic evidence available, I could quickly be brought back to my senses despite the onslaught of my aged delusion.

Even though my dad was the “if you don’t use it for twentyfour hours it goes in the trash” sort of guy, it was actually his few saved items that offered the greatest treasure-hunting finds. When I was seven, I would frequently sneak nervously into his den, a room that sounds much more ostentatious than it actually was. It was the smallest room in our already small house, a place where he could balance his store’s accounting books in peace. He had a tiny desk in there, a small countertop, and shelves along one wall that Mr. Lufthauser from down the street had built for him. Into the middle of it all my dad had crammed in a large reclining chair, where he’d spend his days off trying to catch up on politics and end up open-mouthed and drooling after falling asleep two minutes into an attempted reading of the Sunday
Detroit News.
But it was the closet next to his chair that was the gateway to adventure every time I was brave enough to venture inside it. It had sliding aluminum doors that had been painted orange to match the rest of the burnt umber and dark-paneled room. I always remember the forbidden thrill of putting my hands on that cold door and slowly sliding it to the side as it rumbled with a metallic shudder. Even though I knew nobody was home, I’d get completely paranoid and have to run out into the living room several times to convince myself that the rumbling door noise hadn’t masked the sound of my dad’s station wagon pulling into our driveway. Then, on hands and knees, I’d slowly work my way into the piles of old brown paper grocery bags in which my dad had stored all the selected items from his past.

On most occasions I’d only get far enough in to find old homemovie equipment and bags of forgotten sweaters and shoes. Once I came across an old tool kit sitting under some of the bags. The beat-up metal case contained ancient power and hand tools that even Ethan Allen would have rejected as being too clunky and antiquated. I took out an old drill and something that looked like a pointy egg beater and started to pretend they were deadly weapons that only I had the power to control. After a few minutes, I became convinced that my dad had memorized the exact way the tools had been laid into the box and spent the next half hour in a panic, trying to rearrange them back inside the case so that their disruption could pass the scrutiny of my father’s probing eyes. Looking back, I’m sure my father hadn’t thought about those tools in years and wouldn’t have known I had disturbed them if I had put a note inside the box that read “I swear I didn’t touch your tools.” But, like any good intrigue worth its salt, paranoia was an essential part of espionage.

And, unfortunately, the one time I erased paranoia from the equation was the time I almost got my family into big trouble.

One day when I was eight, while scavenging in my father’s closet, I made a strange and exciting discovery after making it all the way to the very back and bottom bag. I had dreamed of going in this far for a year now but had never had the nerve. However, having earlier that day won the first and only game of tetherball I would ever win in my life (because I had challenged a right-handed kid whose right arm was in a cast—a kid I
still
almost ended up losing to), I found the courage to boldly go where I hadn’t gone before. What I ended up finding as I dug into the decaying bag was my father’s stash of memorabilia he had collected during his time as a GI in Europe during World War II. My dad would occasionally tell me stories about how his division had landed at Normandy, albeit on the day
after
D Day, but I found this to be quite impressive and always told my friends that my father was a war hero. And now I found myself quite excited that I was finally getting some tangible proof. I opened the musty-smelling grocery bag and looked inside. On top were some old army clothes, including a shirt that had my dad’s name written over the breast pocket. Sticking up along the side of the bag was a green handle. I pulled it out carefully and found that it was a folding army shovel. I was impressed that these were things that actually belonged to my father during World War II. But since he sold both old army clothes and folding shovels in his store, I realized that I’d have to dig deeper in the bag if I wanted to find something really good. I pulled out an old boot and another pair of green army pants. And then I uncovered two items that blew my eight-year-old mind.

I reached in and pulled out a long, sleek-looking dagger in a sheath. I stared at the knife in disbelief. It didn’t look like something an American soldier would carry. Knowing nothing about military history, I deduced from the old war movies I had seen my dad watching on TV that this was a knife that had belonged to somebody important and scary in the war. I slid the dagger out of its sheath. The blade was about a foot long and thin and looked practically new. I lightly touched the edge and realized it was sharp enough to cut me if I so much as put my fingers on it with any sort of additional pressure. The handle was covered with a thin layer of leather and between the blade and the handle was a medallion with a strange-looking eagle on it. I was immediately in awe and terrified of the dagger. I slowly swung it around, trying to act in a way that I thought someone with a knife like this might act during a war. But I was soon struck with an image of me accidentally dropping the knife and cutting my leg off. And so I quickly put the knife back in its sheath, carefully set it aside, and looked back into the bag.

I saw something brightly colored and pulled it out. It looked like a red bedsheet that had been folded up. Confused, I started to unfold it slowly, remembering exactly how I was doing it so that when I refolded it, it would tell no tales. After a few unfolds, I saw a large patch of white sewn onto it. Another unfold revealed part of a black symbol stitched onto the white area. One more unfold and I realized that it was a flag. What I didn’t know at the time was that it was a Nazi flag. Another unfold revealed a large black swastika in the center of the white circle. My eight-year-old brain was enthralled. I remembered seeing flags just like this in those war movies my dad had watched, the movies that I didn’t pay much attention to except when bombs were exploding and guys were flying through the air. All I could think was, Wow, this is something my dad brought back from World War II. Beyond that, I had no idea what the flag or the strange symbol that looked like four sevens in a circle stood for. The only thing I knew for sure was that, compared with the old shoes and Christmas presents I was used to finding in our closets, I had just found something very, very cool.