Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (7 page)

Although I’m a Michigander (honest, that is the right word), I rarely ventured into Detroit—even by the ‘70s, we white-flight-suburbanites considered it a dangerous trek, and that was before it became a semi-abandoned wasteland. Funny how the U.S. of A. will dump cities it’s done with, just like it’ll do with struggling citizens. This is as good a reason as any to reject the concept of karma—bad luck should not be treated as a character flaw.

Whenever I
was
taken into Detroit as a kid, it was irregularly by my dad for Tigers baseball games, sometimes just him and me and sometimes with my cousin/idol, Wally. I never liked baseball—STEE-RIKE ONE!—but to please my father, who’d been an in-the-papers high school jock and was by then a celebrated high school coach, I threw myself into gathering players’ autographs and acquiring complete sets of Topps (and Donruss...and Fleer...) baseball cards every season. Sports? I didn’t get it. Collecting? I got it—in fact, I usually got one to keep and one to trade.

At games, my blond (See? He really was better than me in every way.) cousin and I would buy programs and then linger wherever we spotted players from either team gathering near the wall. If they were close enough, even if they were busy warming up, we could lean over and call down to them from the stands and get them to saunter over and sign. For me, it was kind of like a training-wheels way to learn about cruising dudes.

There must be a
special kind of pride that an adult male athlete feels when a little boy wants his autograph. It has to be different than it is for movie stars and rockers—after all, those people are famous for excelling in or at least nimbly navigating the frivolous
arts
, whereas an athlete is like some kind of super developed male in the eyes of a boy. They are like perfect examples of manhood, which of course boys are hoping they’ll blossom into: muscular, lean, fast, nimble. This applies to all boys, even the ones (like me) who are also thinking, in a confused way, how cool it would be not only to
be
those guys, but to be bare-ass naked
with
those guys. Having that latter urge didn’t in any way erase the former; it just complicated things.

I had a second cousin in professional baseball. He wasn’t around much (I barely remember ever meeting him) and he didn’t play for the Tigers, but whenever one of the teams he was on or, later, was employed by, swung through Detroit, my dad would try to hook us up with special access of some kind. I only remember this happening once, but it was a doozy—a locker-room tour.

“You ever seen a grown man naked?” Peter Graves asked in
Airplane!
—well, I was about to.

After the game, not feeling
any
loyalty to the home team, I was taken into the California Angels’ locker room for introductions and autographs. Keep in mind I was probably eight. I still remember how it looked, or rather, I have remembered it over and over so many times that it exists in my mind vividly, if perhaps in a weirdly stylized copy of the original. I swear everything I saw looked like one of those cheap ‘70s Fotomat photos, faded orange at the edges.

Maybe the details are swirling away from me like so much shampoo, soap, and ball sweat down a drain. But here is what I think I saw:

What I remember seeing upon entering the swelteringly hot lair were huge black dicks, huge pink asses, huge brown ‘staches, and blindingly white towels, all emerging from a dark, steamy haze and set off against dull gray tiles. I was taken around to several guys (I think maybe the ones who my host—my second-cousin—thought might not be total assholes about it), who varied from nice at best to inoffensively detached at worst. No jerks. Looking at an old team roster, I recall meeting Don Aase, Al Fitzmorris, Nolan Ryan, and Carney Lansford, among several others. Or is it that their names are etched into my brain from all the card collecting? I know I met Ryan; he was one of the more interesting sigs on my many programs, which I later sold, along with my baseball cards, for a couple of hundred bucks when I was in college.

Another guy I also remember meeting was Lyman Bostock. He looked like Richard Pryor as he signed, bare nekkid, for me. Definitely the only time a celebrity signed for me in the raw. I remember him as being a bit remote—but wouldn’t you be in that awkward situation? His penis was dangling before my face like a hypnotist’s pocket watch.

Or was he just distracted because the Angels had lost that game?

Then I was taken away, with only a vague understanding that memories of this visit would somehow be very
useful
to me in the future.

This wasn’t the only time my father’s involvement in sports had an unintended impact on me. Not only did I witness more boys showering than Jerry Sandusky, I also got to spend part of one summer embedded in my dad’s football training camp. And it was impure heaven.

As I said, my dad was a celebrated high school coach. But he was more than that—he had been a star athlete as a youth, often reported on for his excellence alongside his cousin, the man who would later get me into that locker room. They were physically dark (my dad) and light (his cousin), personally dark (his cousin) and light (my dad) mirror images of one another—both handsome, wholesome, and handy with a ball of any kind. They attended the same college together, and by virtue of their similar names—my dad is Marv, his cousin is Merv…blame Merv’s parents, who my grandma told me semi-stole the name she’d been planning to use when their kid was born six days earlier than hers—were often called “Ma and Me” in the papers.

When the time came, it was Merv who was drafted into the Majors, even though a misprint originally had my dad thinking it was his lucky day.

With no career in pro sports ahead of him, my dad had become a teacher, which meant relative stability, ridiculously low pay, and a chance to coach sports while making teenagers aware of history against their will. He did this at Flint Southwestern, a high school that was getting blacker even as Michael Jackson was getting whiter. I mention this because tagging along with my dad to his school on the weekends as he ran errands related to coaching became like a documentary about the first interaction between civilization and uncontacted people, with myself being the uncontacted person and Flint Southwestern representing the real world, where black people existed, unlike my hometown, through which to my knowledge black people didn’t so much as drive.

I definitely received mixed-race messages about black people—we didn’t live anywhere near them, my dad taught them on a daily basis and would come home and express tidbits of their culture in ways that were affectionate and that would now be considered a little insensitive (but his pimp walk could silence even the most earnest African-American Studies major), and my grandparents talked about them as fondly as one might talk about the Kanamits right after figuring out, “It’s a cookbook!”

I’d heard the N-word, though not from my mom or dad. But I’d heard it. Often. White people who pretend racism doesn’t exist often don’t want to admit it because they’ve been so surrounded by it, silently, that it puts them on the defense. But I was a kid and didn’t really get it. I saw the funny little stick figure with N S E W on the compass in my dad’s car and wondered, since the N was the head, if that was what an N-word was. Since I didn’t know, I asked. Out loud. At a baseball game. Packed with what white racists would have called a bunch of N-words.

I asked it of the two young girls who were sitting with me. They collapsed into nervous laughter and looked around to make sure no one had heard. They didn’t tell me the answer to my question, but I figured it out and I hated having been duped into thinking it was normal to say that word. It made me the most racially aware tween in Flushing, Michigan. I mean, who
were
these honkies to talk like this?

Maybe because I had no idea if anything else I’d heard was offensive, I was nervously fascinated by black people, especially my dad’s baseball and football players, who were apparently 15 or 16 years old but who registered as adult men to me since I was several important years younger. Because of this curiosity, when my dad announced that he was taking his players to a weeks-long football training camp upstate and said I could come, I said yes and invited my cousin Wally. I’m sure both my dad and Wally were shocked I wanted to be anywhere near football, but I
didn’t
.

The camp was like a much more fleshed out version of my locker-room fantasia.

We arrived to beautiful weather on the Olivet campus and were promptly ensconced in a dorm vacated by college kids for the summer. The set-up was ideal for Wally and me because while the players trotted off to practice, smacking each other on the ass (it’s almost like I was scripting the whole thing), they would always leave their keys on top of the light fixtures right outside their rooms. We would boldly hoist each other up, take the keys and let ourselves into the guys’ temporary inner sanctums, where we could easily find what every teen jock had in his possession in the days before the Internet made porn free and turned girls into willing participants in anal sex—titty mags.

These horny boys had stacks of well-thumbed periodicals with names like
Oui
(we thought it was pronounced “Ooooo-weee!”) and
Swank
and
Club
, exotic titles for magazines filled with more hairy beavers than lived in all of the U.P. We would do nothing more than ogle them, laugh at the stupidity of the high schoolers, and then depart. I would of course stare down the used jockstraps in the rooms, which seemed to be calling my name in faint, yet deeply masculine, voices, but we otherwise left their personal belongings unmolested. Unfortunately, I was left unmolested as well. It’s a radical thing to admit and in no way am I condoning or making light of pedophilia, but when I was a kid I fantasized about being forced to have sex by an older man. That way, I couldn’t be blamed for initiating it—I would get all the perks of being gay without having to wear the scarlet “G.” Lutherans don’t practice honor killings. (I checked.)

My cousin and I talked about sex a lot—but we never jacked off while reading the magazines. At least, I didn’t. Maybe his bathroom breaks were more productive than previously presumed, but I just got hard and thought about what it would be like to have to kiss someone, and tried to picture how, as fat as I was, I could ever hope to develop the required thrusting muscles if I hoped to engage in intercourse. This is probably why I spent my youth thinking I was a bottom—less work.

The odd thing is that while we spent time assessing women’s butts and boobs and unpacking imagery such as a black woman in slave attire orally servicing her white master’s wife (oh,
Hustler
), we spent far more time reading every written word in the magazines. We really did love
Playboy
for the articles. It made us feel just as worldly to read Thomas Pynchon interviews as it did to see naked ladies. We admired Nagel’s illustrations, we laughed at “Chester the Molester,” and we spent long hours figuring out which
Penthouse Forum
stories might have been fake. (Clue: If it began with, “I know this is crazy, but it really happened…” it’s probably because it didn’t.) Reading pornographic literature is at least as horrible for kids as seeing pornographic images. The images were open to interpretation, but the words spelled out dark “truths” about gender and about male sexuality. Rape was just another flavor of orgasm in the titty mag of the ‘70s—porn was almost as retrograde as
General Hospital
, and unlike soaps, porn actually presented itself as being progressive, as a shrugging off of old, restrictive, meaningless standards, when it was really just about making rednecks see Jesus when their wives stopped helping them see Him.

It may be taboo or at the very least disturbing to think of two baby-faced, less-than-teenagers looking at hardcore porn magazines and, in my case, thinking about losing my virginity to high school jocks who were simultaneously almost twice my age and yet still minors, but all I can say is that we were naturally curious, Wally was a daredevil (he lived to almost be caught) and I daredevil-adjacent, and I don’t think it fucked us up in the head much.

Other than my now being a sex addict with a Peter Pan complex and his now being a fan of Sarah Palin. (Who can blame him…those jugs!)

Already completely testosteroned up by the porn, the guys at football camp acted out in a myriad of ways aside from brutalizing each other on the practice field. For example, they held a talent show during which the players minced around to disco songs and both mooned and—as my dad said—“starred” each other. I of course missed the show—I was too busy stealing looks at pictures of naked people in the guys’ rooms instead of looking at their actual naked bodies in person.