Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (14 page)

He was the pussy whisperer.

My buddy and the rest of us were handed dittoed (we never used the word “Xeroxed” then, because all copied materials came from the school’s single “ditto machine”) booklets called
ME: For Growing Boys
, which had been authored by a nurse named Martha C. DuShaw. (I’ve since learned she was 82 at the time, but she definitely knew her way around a scrotum.)

We tore into the matter-of-fact booklet ahead of Mr. LaBelle’s gently delivered speech about intercourse. I seem to remember slides, but they were pretty clinical and contained only crude illustrations. The book was about as racy as an encyclopedia, ending with a note to parents that encouraged them to help their son “fulfill his sexual role, taking satisfaction in being a boy, and later, a man.” I have since definitely taken satisfaction in both of those roles…it’s also fun to switch back and forth.

The best part of the lecture was when Mr. LaBelle, whom I would characterize as coming from the
Free to Be You and Me
era and therefore pretty frank when called upon to be, opened the floor to questions. There were so many vaginal inquiries it was like a Future Gynecologists of America confab.

Most disturbingly, he warned us that if we ever felt pain in our testicles, we should tell our parents immediately, because a friend of his had a son who experienced “torsion,” when one of your nuts twists around on itself and the blood supply is lost. “He lost his testicle, but he didn’t have to,” I remember him warning. Does anyone really “have to?”

Guess how many days I have gone since then without wondering if any minor ache near my nut sack might be torsion? Guess how terrified I was in college when a super sharp pain there led me to hobble onto the shuttle bus and over to the clinic, where I had to have my swollen testicle woman-handled by a female doctor (I’m unapologetically biased against them now, just like the misogynist
Brady Bunch
boys), only to be tearfully relieved that it was epididymitis, an infection that probably shouldn’t have been such a relief since it was a clear sign I was playing HIV roulette with where I stuck my dick?

The answers to my rhetorical questions are, respectively, about four days, and highly.

But the boys also had lots of questions about penis size and erections and wet dreams, all of which Mr. LaBelle handled—maybe not the best word in this circumstance—well.

I spent the night at my friend’s house, and as we were undressing for bed—we turned our backs always because I was too embarrassed of my big boobs, which had once caused my grandfather to say, “Matt looks like the girl,” when shown a photo of my sister and me in our bathing suits—he said, “Matt…look!”

I turned and he was pointing at his boner, a huge, naughty grin on his face. I’d never seen a naked boner in the flesh before, and even though it was every fifth-grade gay boy’s dream, along with getting ColecoVision, I wasn’t ready. I fled the room and locked myself in the bathroom as my friend tried to coax me out. An hour later, I came out and we never spoke about it. I later wondered if I had passed up the chance for some harmless experimentation, but I simply could not have gone through with it. He grew up straight, to my knowledge, and got married.

As close as we were, he was also one of two people I’ve ever gotten into a fistfight with. The first time, it was with a mentally handicapped kid who was the neighbor of one set of cousins. I had no idea he was special in that way, I just knew he was as annoying as a donkey who needed to be fed. He got physical with me and I gave him a bloody nose. I was so proud. My parents were not. I figured out later why.

But my fifth-grade buddy, after I turned down a chance to inspect his boner up close and personal, let me have it in the bad way out in the field behind Springview, after our usual friendly ribbing had taken a hormone-fueled turn for the worse. Let me tell you, this fight was what I deserved for beating up the mentally challenged kid because I enjoyed that second fight a lot less than the first one.

But I don’t think we held it against each other, that fight. We just...drifted apart, as you do at that age, especially when moving from elementary school to junior high.

Still, I always remembered that friendship. I never forgot our sleepovers, when I would get to experience what it would have been like to be the brother of a star athlete.Though we lost touch, I thought of that guy a lot over the years and did Google him a few times. I didn’t see him anywhere until I saw a posting on the Facebook group dedicated to my high school, from which we both graduated in 1987. At first, the way I read it, I thought his brother had died. I didn’t even remember a brother. Then I read the comments and re-read the initial post and gasped—it wasn’t his imaginary brother who’d died of cancer in his early forties, it was my imaginary brother from the fifth grade who had.

I had been burned before using search engines to randomly snoop out where old friends’ lives had led them—twice when I looked up singers I’d worked with as a teen-mag editor, I discovered they’d died young, one after battling an eating disorder and another in childbirth.

But as sorry I was to learn about my fifth-grade friend’s passing, the disappearance of another friend hit me harder.

Along with Sue and Andrew, probably my closest friend my senior year of high school was Jeff Thomas. Jeff was a tall guy with straighter-than-straight blond hair that hung just above his eyes and, often, a soul patch. The overall effect of his styling—he wore grungy clothes, baggy jeans, psychedelic tees—was that of a latter-day “Shaggy” from
Scooby-Doo.
His little round glasses made him look like John Lennon. I often imagined Andrew and Jeff tearing each other apart over who was the more deserving Lennon acolyte. It was easy, if I tried.

If Andrew’s inability to be gay for me was in some way a turn-on, it was at least as hot to me that Jeff was able to convincingly pretend to be bisexual for me.

Jeff was a Barkey house regular, a reality-tester who lounged on the downstairs sofas in the dark like temptation personified. He was a trickster who took things too far. He sought out weakness in order to test it, and he hurt people’s feelings then became frustrated when they acknowledged it. He would never admit to intending harm, but he did do harm, and that scared him.

He used drugs, something of which I strongly disapproved, but the strongest substance he messed around with was his needling sense of humor. He knew how to push everyone’s buttons and did so often. One way he did this was by seducing all or at least most of the girls in our group, usually via one-night stands. He liked seducing girls with boyfriends, girls who were too young, girls who were too old.

He was altogether too sexual. I remember one of the first things I said to him when we were alone in my car on the way to wherever kids drive in high school was a statement that made it clear I masturbated, and that everyone did. He loved that, because it was real, and it was daring, or what passed for daring in Flushing.

But even though Jeff had a sadistic streak, we were confidantes. A shameless mooch, he persuaded me to drive him to Denny’s almost every night the summer after our graduation to buy him a Strawberry Poundcake and listen to the dizzyingly adult-sounding issues that clouded his life. I think he loved me, and showed it with small gifts: high-end postcards for my collection, outrageous Philip José Farmer paperbacks he felt I should have read by then, and one night while we were parked outside my house in the middle of the night, my first kiss.

It hadn’t come out of nowhere. For much of the summer after we graduated, Jeff and I were physically close, lying side by side while watching movies selected to bolster our opinions of ourselves as rebels, like
My Dinner with Andre
, spooning in the sleeping bag in which he slept in his room. His mom, who’d spent most of August preoccupied with the Harmonic Convergence, had walked in as we cuddled once, and though she didn’t say anything, I can only imagine her confusion considering her son’s young-womanizing.

Jeff and I had talked about kissing, and we had talked about his belief that he was bisexual—“I am for you,” he told me. I wasn’t convinced. He’d once had an adult male roommate (Jeff was kicked out of his house at various times—you’d probably have kicked him out, too) and had gone under the guy’s bed, where he found a dirty dildo and a bunch of gay porn. Jeff found that to be hysterically funny, but maybe because the guy presented himself as totally straight and totally wasn’t.

That night in the car, Jeff grabbed my face and gave me a long, soulful, passionate kiss, then pulled away, a strand of saliva connecting us, and said, “There; now you’ve been kissed.” I will never forget it or regret it, but I also know Jeff delighted in taking virginities of any kind.

He did that, too.

The night before I left for college, I slept over at Jeff’s. His mom was away at some New Age retreat, and Jeff had myself and Rachelle, one of my favorite high school friends, lying on either side of him on the living room floor. Rachelle was bubbly but had a cynical side. She had a pretty torturous relationship with Jeff, and knew him to be jerking her around. I know she thought I was cute (even though I’d told her and a widening circle of people that I was gay by then), and I also know that Jeff, by stroking us, was attempting to get us to have a three-way, which would have been yet another boundary-ignoring sexual adventure under his belt.

A bisexual three-way my first time? I looked him dead in the eye and mouthed, “No way.” I’m sure I spoke for Rachelle as well.

Instead, I got up and walked into the privacy of his bedroom. He came in a minute later and we kissed passionately. He undid his pants and coached me on giving him a blowjob, the first sexual contact I’d ever had—and I was 18 and a half. It wasn’t the best sex ever, but I was good at it, or at least it was good for him. I choked, but the next time I did it—on a visit back from college—I surprised him with an improved technique.

Today, a huge percentage of young people probably don’t consider oral sex to be sex even though the word “sex” is in the phrase. But I did and do. It was hugely important to me, made me feel closer to Jeff, and made me feel like I was entering college with some experience.

Was Jeff really bi? I doubt that. I think he loved me and I loved him and a blowjob isn’t the hardest thing to let someone do to you.

We wrote intense letters when I went to college in Chicago, one of them on a Xerox of a book jacket featuring notorious satyr Errol Flynn, saw each other irregularly when I returned, then lost touch. I kept on my desk forever an awkward homemade cluster of candles from Jeff, lighting it only on special occasions.

Part of my fascination with finding people from my past is the weird concept that even when someone is completely out of your life, time passes for them, they experience other things and other people, they age, they get jobs, they have sex, get married, get divorced, have kids. It’s bizarre to remember that life goes on, with or without you, in the same way time passes for celebrities, whose loves have the same humdrum ups and downs yours have, even if they just so happen to also be punctuated with things like the Oscars or filming a spaghetti western in Italy.

Us…we’re just like stars!

One person I’d really hoped to find as an adult, if only to check up on, was Jeff. He had been unlike anyone I’d ever known or ever dreamed I’d come to know. Jeff had an impish quality that could nimbly sharpen itself into an understanding of how to annoy another person to the point of tears, fisticuffs, or other anti-social behavior. Moody, yes, but when he was happy he was sensitive, extremely smart, wickedly funny, adventurous, creative. I just loved him, and probably
loved
him, too.

We used to call him Cal for some reason, three letters from the word “candle.” The other three are “end.” But when our friendship ended, it wasn’t a break-up, it was a parting of ways—no hearts were broken.

So here I was, in 2007, looking for him on a whim, wondering if I’d even want to find him. I’d heard he’d joined some kind of circus and had a daughter, both of which shocked me and made perfect sense at once.

Jeff’s name is unbelievably common (as were many names in my hometown), so instead of looking for him specifically, I used MySpace and searched for graduates of Flushing High School, class of 1987. I couldn’t believe it when several popped up. The first one blew my mind—it was a picture I couldn’t associate with anyone I’d been to school with. I clicked and it took a minute, but it dawned on me that this strange person, calling himself “Dr. Fuckoffski” and located at the MySpace URL “urineforatreat” was…Jeff.

Jeff’s pictures were bizarre, but they were definitely still Jeff. One, entitled “VROOM VROOM,” showed him on a bike dressed in baby-blue briefs and looking very much like Sting from the first movie version of
Dune
—an altogether possible inspiration for the pose as Jeff was both a fantasy buff and a fan of posing in the buff. There were pictures of him with a circus theme (that circus rumor had been true), and even one of him carrying a baby on his back while wearing a fanciful horned hat (that daughter rumor had been true as well).

Then I read the comments and my heart, which had managed to remain unbroken 20 years earlier, took a hit—the second comment down, from February 18, 2007, read, “SO sorry to hear. Goodbye.” The third was, “goodbye my dear brother i never had. you were the best.” And finally, “miss you allready goat boy- at least you went out having fun...xoxo a”.