The Late Bloomer (11 page)

A hundred or so students are filing into Olin Hall for the first day of Psychology 101. It's an unusually sweltering ninety degrees for an early September afternoon in central New York State. Students sit on the window ledges of Gothic-style residential halls and on the steps of the campus's dozen or so other sandstone monstrosities. I'm told they're academic halls. Sunbathers—I take note of the bikini-clad girls sprawled on blankets—lie in the grassy campus quadrangle, soaking up the rays and scoping guys through their hundred-dollar sunglasses.

In psych class, students are dressed more formally. This being the elite, private Colgate University, many of the girls wear designer-label tops and mid-thigh-length skirts covering the kind of sexy legs and backsides I've only seen in John Hughes movies. Likewise, most of the guys dress affluently cool, a campus uniform of either Dockers pants or pleated khaki shorts. Many of the guys wear Oxford-style shirts, unbuttoned at the top. They all look so
adult.

Back home, in Buffalo, where I have to explain to my hockey pals (many of whom are attending community college or pumping gas or some other equivalent) that Colgate is not a toothpaste, I saw maybe a dozen or so girls in school whom I thought were as pretty as Jenny, and maybe two who even came close to TV-caliber beautiful. As I'm opening my spanking-new spiral notebook and fishing for my
ballpoint pen, however, a gaggle of girls strut past me. The first one prancing down the aisle is petite with porcelain skin and brown hair. The next one, considerably taller, at least five foot nine, has long, tanned legs that glisten as if polished with Turtle Wax. Her long, black, shampoo-commercial hair bounces a dance of seduction along the top of her leather backpack. Then comes the Madonna blonde, who is laughing while telling a story that I can't hear over the classroom's hum of conversation. The blonde is barely covered in a tight, low-cut top. As they settle into their seats a few rows in front of me, I can't stop thinking that these are the kind of girls I've only seen in magazines and movies. These girls are
women.

Most everyone is a freshman, including me, the pale dude with straight, sandy-brown hair parted down the middle—feathered bangs on the top, and mid-neck-length down the back. (A drunk girl at a party will soon inform me that my hairstyle is known as “hockey hair”—I had never heard that expression). Adding to my stylistic mishmash is a pair of acid-washed jeans and a white golf shirt with three buttons at the top, each of which I've fastened, thinking it is scholarly to do so. My mom probably bought the 50-percent polyester weave on a Blue Light Special a few weeks before I left for school, along with a pair of preppy “pleather” boat shoes and a few fresh tightie-whities and tube socks. “You're going to a preppy school so you'll have to dress preppy,” Mom told me, a guy to whom clothing's purpose has mostly been to keep warm, not to make a fashion statement. She means well, but maybe if Mom, or anyone I knew for that matter, had ever stepped onto the grounds of an upper-crust college she would have been able to warn me that the bright white tube socks (with blue and red stripes) she bought aren't supposed to be worn with the boat shoes. I learned this yesterday upon seeing a parade of guys with naked feet in real-leather boat shoes lounging at the dining hall. I took the socks off and stuffed them in my backpack before finishing dinner.

Here in psych class, the trio of beautiful girls is casting an
estrogenic spell on me that, even with my general sexual anxiety about being with women, and my increasing indifference about having sex at all, absolutely mesmerizes me. Just then, the professor stands at the bottom of the auditorium-style classroom and, clutching a fat black marker, flicks on the overhead projector. The class quiets down.

Naturally the professor starts at the beginning, the dawn of the discipline of psychology. He begins with a description of a German scientist named Wilhelm Wundt, “the father of modern psychology.” The prof explains that if it were not for Wundt's (pronounced
Voont's
) historic studies on the machinations of the human psyche, there probably would be no Freud, no Jung, no psychobabbling self-help gurus selling books by the millions.

In the mid-1800s, the professor says from the podium, apparently from rote memorization, Wundt started teaching students how to study their conscious experience through a thought process he called “introspection.” The prof then points out that this notion of introspection might have been groundbreaking in the horse-and-buggy days, but the idea of a person solving his own psychological puzzle by merely practicing introspection is considered an archaic notion.

The lecture doesn't strike me as particularly relevant to my life. Psychology is for crazy people who don't know how to solve their own problems, to think them through logically, to endure their own mental anguish until they erase it with the power of positive thinking.

This opinion, of course, disregards my reality.

I spent much of my childhood obsessed with hockey and avoiding girls because I had to keep order and control over things while my family spun out of control. Beneath my veneer of confidence, though, I believe I am an unathletic fraud who hardly deserves a hockey scholarship, let alone to be the object of college townie idol-worship.

Ever since that failed night of sex in Toronto earlier this year, I have not even mentioned the word
sex
to Jenny because I am so embarrassed, so paralyzed by performance anxiety, that I'd rather be celibate forever than ever have my dick betray me like that again. A few weeks
after we returned to Buffalo from our trip, Jenny and I finally did have sex—in her bedroom while her parents were at work—in a less pressured environment. In fact, we eventually did it maybe a half dozen times, each time a little more enjoyable and less nerve-racking than the previous one. Still, it was always Jenny who initiated. Now that I had lost the stigma of virginity, I felt relieved and content that it was over.

“You don't have to wait for me to jump your bones,” Jenny soon told me in that instructive kindergarten-teacher voice of hers. “A girl likes to be mauled sometimes.”

Yet, I never rip off her clothes like in the movies. Mostly, my penis doesn't seem to want to rise to the occasion so spontaneously. It usually takes my hand, or hers, or her mouth—and an investment of several minutes—to get me ready. Even then, sometimes my penis doesn't get hard and I try to brush it off by joking, “He's sleeping,” when I'm actually beating myself up inside as if I had let in a puck that was shot from a hundred feet away. Sex is not that important to me, anyway. I don't think of my penis on a daily, even a weekly, basis (except when it fails me, at which time I can't stop thinking about why it won't work). Plus, I simply don't feel as if some unstoppable biochemical force were propelling me into a skirt-chasing frenzy. Sure, those three girls sitting below me in psych class are gorgeous. I can see them. I find them attractive. But the last thing I am going to do is go and talk to them. I'm too intimidated, too afraid that my dick will not do what I want it to. Furthermore, I don't much feel like getting naked in front of girls right now. I need to get into better shape, become more manly-looking. Now it's
really
starting to bother me that, even as a supposedly hotshot college hockey player and Olympic team prospect, I don't carry any more muscle tissue on my frame than I did before I started growing pubic hair, which came in almost two years after other friends my age. Despite my insecurities, I will
not
let them infect my on-ice activity. As always, the rink is a sanctuary—a reality unto itself where I rise above my petty little insecurities.

So, then, why am I taking psychology? It's just a class that most freshmen take. I signed up, so here I sit. I haven't yet realized that classes—like books—often find you.

I scribble the gist of what the prof is saying into my notebook, rushing to finish before he moves on to the next topic. I am far too slow of a scribbler and far too preoccupied in my own thoughts, however, to fully grasp the point he is making. I'm too busy trying not to look like a fool. I'm afraid the professor, or maybe those pretty girls in the front, will see me for who I really am: a boy from Buffalo who is getting a $20,000-a-year scholarship to attend a prestigious liberal-arts college because he can stop pucks—not because he is particularly smart.

I fully realize that some students may (rightfully) look at me as undeserving, a dumb jock, a cliché. Many of them come from elite prep schools that I've never heard of—Exeter, Choate, Andover and Deerfield. I saw them driving their Saab convertibles and hand-me-down Volvos and drop-top Euro-racers into the parking lot this morning. Their parents are stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, bankers, millionaires.

Me? I graduated from a suburban public high school outside of Buffalo, New York, with barely a B average. Last summer, I bagged groceries at Super Duper for $3.35 an hour (and that's before subtracting my food-worker's union initiation fees). My car? I don't even own a bike anymore, let alone a car, although in my junior year I will finally save enough money from my lawn-mowing summer job to buy a car: a 1978 Ford Granada with a beige vinyl top and a hole in the driver's-side floor.

And while I feel certain that most every Colgate student has read the great works of American literature, I prefer
The Hockey News, Hockey Digest
, as well as hockey instruction manuals and the occasional issue of
Mad
magazine. Although Dad reads the newspapers and Mom reads
People
magazine and mystery novels, our family spends more time watching the boob tube. Which is why I can summarize, with frightening accuracy, entire episodes of
Happy Days, The Flintstones
and
The Brady Bunch
, and I can recite nearly every line from the movie
Stripes.
Yet, the only novel I can remember reading from start to finish is Ernest Hemingway's
Old Man and the Sea
(only because it was really short and about fishing). I've read a few nonfiction books, such as the former Montreal Canadiens goalie Dick Irvin's memoir,
In the Crease
, and
A Season on the Brink
, John Feinstein's journalistic account of spending the 1985–86 season with the Indiana State University basketball team. I have read a smattering of self-help books, my favorite being
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
But more robust, literary-caliber books intimidate me. The classics are for pointy heads, the pimply kids in the Gifted and Talented program in my high school, whom my friends and I dubbed the “Gay and Talented.” When my ninth-grade English teacher assigned
The Odyssey
, I stopped just a few pages into it out of stultifying boredom; then I bought the Cliff's notes. When it came time for the multiple-choice test on that phonebook-fat book, I made sure I sat next to the smartest girl in the class and copied her multiple-choice answers, being sure to write an incorrect answer every ten or so, just to make it believable to Mr. Tutuska, who, having had my older brothers in his class, knew I was about as scholarly as the bartender pouring fifty-cent drafts down the street at Callahan's.

My college admission isn't a total sham. Besides expecting me to uphold the Red Raiders' fighting tradition, the university has placed one major condition on it. Due to an application essay in which I repeatedly misspelled
believe
, misused commas and semicolons and showed a tendency to repeatedly split my infinitives, the school makes me take a remedial writing class my freshman year—a course populated with football players, basketball players, hockey players, affirmative-action kids and turban-topped engineering majors from India. I like writing—heck, I've been pouring my thoughts and feelings into a diary since I was eleven—but the admissions officer tells me that my prose is “technically weak.” I take his assessment to mean that, technically, I
suck. I will spend most of my college career avoiding classes that require me to write a lot of academic papers; I end up majoring in geology, partly because I am genuinely interested in earth science, but mostly because the geology department doesn't make me write many essays about rocks.

Considering my lackluster credentials, not to mention my social and fashion faux pas, it's no surprise that Wilhelm Wundt's historic contribution to the field of psychology went unappreciated by me that first day of psych. True appreciation won't come for another twelve years, when, while rummaging through my closet, I find a notebook stuffed into the bottom of a cardboard box marked “college stuff.” Handwritten on its red cardboard cover is “1988–89”—the diary of my first year of college.

I sit on my living room carpet, thumbing through the yellow pages, and stop at the entry for January 1, 1989, a couple weeks after the end of my first, 2.4–GPA semester at Colgate:

I sleep with a bear. A cute little stuffed bear named Rudy. Every night I lie down with this little guy. He gives me that extra security that I need on cold lonely nights (and warm ones too!). Ya know, it's not cool for a guy to sleep with a bear, but it's cute for a perfectly mature woman. I've always wondered why this was.

Heck, a few hormones here and there and men really aren't that different than women. I wish it were cool for me to sleep with a bear. And, ya know, I bet most guys feel the same way.

I can't stop rereading one sentence:
Heck, a few hormones here and there and men really aren't that different than women.
This, I realize many painful years later, is evidence that, indeed, man cannot solve his mental puzzles by introspection alone. Evidence that suggests why I ended up with a D+ in Psychology 101. Evidence of an inability to be aware of a growing gender ambiguity building inside of me. Most freshman guys don't want anything to do with stuffed bears, especially ones that their high school girlfriends gave them as a going-away present. While I cower into college as a bear-hugging Joe Sensitive,
most other guys are too busy getting drunk, pledging fraternities and, most enthusiastically, trying to get laid. I doubt any of them are sitting around pondering the unfairness of society not approving of adult males sleeping with stuffed animals. What the
fuck
is wrong with me?