The End of the World as We Know It (21 page)

My mother turned on me and said vehemently, “Just make
sure you like the girls better than the boys!” What could she have meant, except that she knew, she had been there and she had seen?

I was a little whore. I was a whore and I fucked grown men, I let grown men fuck me. What else could she have meant?

She called me Robbietydabobity the big fat hen. It was her term of endearment for me. Hen. I never understood, when I thought of it later, how she had come up with that, what she meant by it.

When I was ten, I watched a friend of my brother's masturbate, sitting on the edge of one of the ancient rock pools, down where the creek runs into the river. He pulled down his bathing suit, he made his penis hard and big—it was the first time I'd ever seen a penis except my own—and then he masturbated until white come shot all over his brown stomach. He told us the word for it.

I was electrified, at the size of his penis, at the pleasure it gave him, at the expressions on the faces of the three other boys who were watching. He was not embarrassed. He was teaching us the way to a grownup pleasure, and he took pride in his ability to demonstrate. He had a lean, smooth brown body, and there was stiff brown hair on his head and under his arms and around his penis.

It was high summer, late afternoon. The heat and the light just sat on you; not a breath, as my grandmother used to say, making a particular gesture with her hand as though slowly batting away a fly, not a
breath
. The back-to-school cicadas were singing in the limp willows.

I sat and watched while the other boys practiced what they
had learned. I saw the looks on their faces. I was too little, I was ten, a child in a grownup world.

Watching my brother's friend, I wanted to know what it would be like to be so handsome, to live in such a beautiful fourteen-year-old body, pure and untouched by time, by sadness or disappointment, untouched, and to be able to give myself such an infinite pleasure.

Once, in Rome, I had my hair cut and bought a maroon knit shirt and one of those bags called
borsa
Italian men carry, thinking it would make me dark and romantic like the Italians. I thought, I'd rather be blind and a beggar than be an ugly man in Rome.

My father never talked about sex. We never saw him naked. My mother would come in and go to the bathroom while we were in the bathtub; we never watched, but we heard her, pulling down her girdle, the quick shush, the sharp smell, peeing, the straightening of the garters that were attached to the girdle to hold up her stockings, straightening her dress, checking her hair, her lipstick, casual. But not my father. He peed out the back door, in the dark, even in the winter. We knew nothing about sex, except what we learned reading the dirty parts of
Lady Chatterly's Lover
in secret.

My father had the longest testicles I've ever seen. When he came out of the bath, they hung down below his boxer shorts. We never, ever saw our parents naked. My mother used to say there was nothing disgusting about the human body, but we were never naked.

So watching the brazen, unashamed behavior of my brother's friend was magical. The next morning, lying in my summer bed,
with my thumb and forefinger, I pulled on my penis for half an hour, my bare, bald, tiny child's penis, until I felt the rush of pleasure, and found my eyes squeezing shut the way my brother's friend's had.

I was tired of being a child. I was tired of pretending to be innocent, of pretending to be funny and winsome and smart and endearing.

Somebody once told me that I was the only child she had ever known who always turned the conversation away from myself, to ask how others were, what they'd been doing, complimenting them on some part of the way they looked. It was because I didn't want to talk about myself. It was because I had no self to talk about, because I didn't want to be asked any questions, out of fear that any question would lead to
the
question and the answer would be yes and everything would be ruined and something terrible would begin to happen.

I didn't want to be a child, to stand in that relation to the world in which I was continually vulnerable to attack, no matter how much I pretended to be fine. No matter how much I said it before I changed the topic. I didn't want to be winning. I didn't want to look the way I looked. The way I looked was so different from the way I felt, from what I knew to be inside me. I had the soul of Mahler and the body of Mozart. I didn't want to be me.

I wanted stiff wavy hair and stomach muscles and a long lean torso. I wanted to be a boy who was strong and untouched and able to give myself pleasure, and to dream of the day when the prize and the flowered cock would be mine, like in
Lady Chat-terly
. I didn't have a good body until I was in my late thirties,
after I got out of the mental hospital, and even then it seemed less beautiful, less prone to pleasure than the body of my brother's friend by the river, his hand around his dick, his eyes dark with sensation.

So I would think of my brother's friend and his pleasure, and the thought gave me pleasure, and I would masturbate in bed, terrified of being caught. I didn't know what would happen if I got caught, but I liked the secrecy of it, the fact that it had to do only with me and what gave me this thrill of pleasure, this sense, for a moment, of no longer being a child.

It was the only moment I wasn't faking. It was the only moment I didn't have to be something for somebody else. It was the moment I could have any body I imagined. I stopped thinking. It was the quiet, intense moment in which I could see, with absolute clarity, without thought, the handsome body of my brother's friend, leaning back on one muscled arm, the water spilling over his hand, the come shooting over his brown stomach, his tan line, his bathing suit floating in the water, his nipples erect and dark. I could feel the awe on the older boys' faces as they learned the mystery; they could see the mystery in the rush of blood to his cheeks, the high red pulse of his cheekbones.

Afterward, my father never touched me, unless he shook my hand. Except once, later. He never held me or kissed me or tousled my hair. He never took my hand as we walked up the steep steps to the church where he stood against a stained glass window and sang in his high sweet tenor voice the ancient hymns of the Episcopal Church, holding the hymnbook in his long hands, his summer seersucker perfectly wrinkled, his face a masterpiece of calm, no matter how hungover he was. And he must have
been. He could hold his liquor, then, but there was season after season when they all drank too much. It was what they did.

One day, when I was masturbating, I noticed a small deposit of something white beneath the thin skin. For days, I hoped it would go away. I squeezed and squeezed it, trying to make it disappear. It didn't.

I knew, finally, that I was going to die, that something had happened in that bed with my father eight years before that would kill me. And I knew that I could kill others. I knew that whatever disease I had gave my touch the power to make others sicken and die. It was sex. The terror of sex. It came to me all of a sudden.

The white spot on my penis broke up into many similar, smaller ones. Sometimes I would squeeze and a tiny amount of white wax, like a worm, would come out. Sometimes I would squeeze so hard and uselessly and repeatedly that a boil would develop, a boil that eventually erupted in blood and pus. Disease made tangible, blood in my fingers. And I began to come.

I dreamed I reached into my pants and pulled out my testicles. They were white and mottled. They were pitted like a sponge.

I dreamed I took a spoon and dug long white worms out of my knees. I dreamed these things again and again. They terrified me until I felt nauseated.

And still, I would masturbate six or seven or eight times a day, in any room of the house, at any moment when I knew I would be alone. And most times, the masturbation would be followed by a sharp searing pain, a pain that made my penis feel as though it were on fire, as though a hot wire had been inserted down through the middle, a pain that was so intense it would make
sweat come out all over my forehead. Sometimes, if I could make my penis hard again right away, it would pass in ten minutes. At other times, it would last half an hour or more. Sometimes I was late for dinner, lying sick with sweat and pain on the bathroom floor.

It was part of my disease; it was a symptom of the thing that was killing me, this sexual thing that had come into my body through my father's touch. It was in the pain. It was in the white spots, small hard clots that dotted my penis. It was in my mother's accusation when I was five. It was in the way I had faked a childhood.

But I couldn't, I wouldn't stop. I was both victim and victimizer. I was possessed. My greatest pleasure, my one private pleasure, was also death.

At first, I was terrified of dying. Then I found that all I wanted was death, to end it, to keep myself from spreading the infectious toxins that ran in my veins. It was a poison that would find its way through me into the body, the bloodstream of any other living person. I was thirteen years old, and all I thought about was death. I believed my touch could kill, that every touch put another person in danger.

Of course, there is a certain gladness in being young. There is an exhilaration in watching your body change, in leaving the helplessness of childhood behind. There is the pleasure of friendships that have nothing to do with your parents, the brilliance of even the earliest ideas about the world, about the mind, the art of conversation, and none of this was lost on me, even though I did not turn lean and strong, I did not turn beautiful; I was instead skinny and awkward with bad posture and a weak chin.

I once asked my mother when my face had changed, how I had come to look so sad. We were sitting in front of the liquor store, waiting for my father.

She looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You decided,” she said. “You decided to be sad.” I was twelve.

My hair did not bristle with stiffness, the way a man's hair should. It was a nondescript brown, not deep, not rich, not romantic. It was straight and fine, and lay against my head like a girl's. Everybody said I had a brilliant mind, and this, I suppose was to compensate me for the indelible pain and the homely face and weak body.

But it didn't. I knew what a man was; I knew I wanted to be one. And I knew I wanted to die because of the pain and the infection and because my body would never in any way resemble the body I wanted for myself. I had seen it once, down by the river. I wanted it to be mine forever. Instead, there was only an adoration of a self I was never going to be, and a loathing for the self I was.

I couldn't stand the casual touch of strangers or the affectionate touch of friends, the arm across the shoulder, the pat on the back. My father and his friends used to put their arms across each other's shoulders, when they were being photographed. It was terrible. I was afraid for them, for the strangers and the friends, and every touch was the touch of my father in the dark.

I didn't like my face. I didn't like my voice. I didn't like being the kid in gym class who couldn't climb to the top of the rope.

In swimming, when we swam naked on Saturday mornings at the Military Institute, under the instruction of cadets who lifted weights and had shoulders and stomach muscles and arms
and thighs and the slim waists of boys, I was mortified. I would never be one of them, with sharply handsome cadet faces and crisp lines where the sideburns were shaved razor-sharp.

The lights from the high windows glittered on the infinite tiny waves of boys splashing, the deep turquoise aquatic dream of water, so clean and cold, the men and the boys swam without embarrassment and called, their shouts echoing in the high steel-raftered ceiling into which the platform we jumped off of rose fifteen feet, and I jumped with them, unafraid, I did these things and I was not afraid. In the showers, I turned away in shame. In the whole Athenian dream of what it was to be men together and strong and handsome, I was the one thing that did not belong. I was the one thing that would never belong anywhere.

I imagined there was a button buried in my thigh. I imagined a button I could push and cease to be, cease to be in such a way that I would never have been at all. There would be no funeral, no gravestone, no memory of me. I imagined a thousand times pushing this button and the world and its wonders and its joys and its compassion would vanish into invisibility.

I didn't want people's grief and tears. I didn't want to be missed. I wanted to have never been on the beautiful round whirling extravagantly peopled planet.

I broke my arm, falling off a horse named Thunder, going over a two-foot jump. There was a cast up to my shoulder. My father decided he was going to bathe me, and he made me undress while my brother watched and made me sit naked on the edge of the bathtub, while he rubbed soap over my body, under my arms, lifting my cast, hurting my arm, rubbing soap over
my penis, while my eyes stared at the porcelain of the tub and I didn't move a muscle. Then he rinsed me off with a wet washrag, and toweled me dry. It was the last, the only other time he touched me.

A boy named Roy lived across the creek from us, with his grandparents and his aunt and uncle and his retarded other uncle. I was never sure where his parents were. He was sixteen, with jet-black hair and white skin and an open country face. My sister adored him. One of her favorite games was to get me to help her turn over her swing set, so we could stand at the edge of the creek and call for Roy until he came over and set it back up for her. He was good at it. He looked like the kind of boy who would get to be a man who would be good with tools, who would be covered with grease from fixing other people's things.

They were a kind, simple, warm family. I liked being with them. The aunt made the best biscuits in the world, dripping with country butter. They had an outhouse. They ate their big meal in the middle of the day, roasts and chickens and ham and four vegetables served at their round table next to the wood-stove. I spent the night there sometimes. I would often eat with them and go home telling all about the biscuits, which drove my mother crazy, since she was famous for making great biscuits. She asked the aunt how she made them. She said she made them out of a box of Bisquick, while my mother made hers from scratch, so my mother bought some Bisquick and followed the instructions on the box. They still weren't as good. It turned out, after several trips by my mother across the creek, after she made Mary make her some to taste, it turned out it was the butter.