The Late Bloomer (17 page)

I frantically jerk myself.

My heart is racing.

I keep jerking.

Panic!

I jerk harder.

It's no use. The condom sags over my limp organ like a Ziploc bag around a Ball Park frank. Hoping I can revive my boner, I try forcing my penis into her vagina, but it crumples like an accordion.

“What's wrong?” she asks, peering down at my flaccidity.

“Aw, just this stupid thing—it's all fucked up,” I say, ripping off the condom and standing up. “I'll be right back.”

Cool immediately hops onto her and they fall to the floor. I slide on my jeans and head for the bathroom.

You ask me to enter / But then you make me crawl
 . . .

I sit on the toilet, looking at my 21-year-old self in the mirror, disgusted, my hands trembling. My face is sallow. Bags the size of Samsonites sag below my eyes.
You ugly fucker. Sad, ugly, pathetic freak.

Through the wall, I hear the music stop and their bodies slapping against each other. Her moaning; his grunting. They're dancing a
biological ballet that I neither can perform nor can understand. I feel less than human; I am a pseudo male.

I start yanking at my hair until the pain draws out tears. I pick up a ceramic soap dish and chuck it at the pathetic image in the mirror. Grabbing an angular shard of glass from the tile, I press it against my wrist. But I can't slice my own skin, can't put myself out of this misery.
You don't even have the guts to kill yourself.

—

Spring has brought life to the oak and willow trees and lured students out of their winter hibernation. I take walks alone around the village of Hamilton, appreciating the bucolic beauty of central New York State in springtime: mooing cows, cottonball puffs of clouds floating above the greening hills and valleys, rivers rushing with the melted remnants of the winter snowpack. Up on campus, the mood is hopeful, as the Class of '92 graduation is just a month away. While the frat boys sit on couches on their porches and girls don skirts and cutoff shorts and tank tops that give the frat boys eye candy, I mostly walk alone and ponder.

I try not to think about that night with Annie and Cool. After they finished sex, I came out of the bathroom and Annie offered herself to me.

“Nah,” I replied. “I'm too drunk.”

“That's okay,” she said. “So am I.”

It's all in my head, I tell myself. Maybe I am a sexophobe. As I take long walks in the Upstate New York countryside, I think that maybe all my madness will soon pass. I think about how I actually have a lot to be proud of, mainly that I will walk away from here with an eighty-thousand-dollar bachelor's degree that, thanks to ice hockey, cost me nothing. While here, I became a better student, a more learned person. Now I know there is more to life than hockey. But even knowing this is not enough to lift the cloud of mourning that I can't shake, for as much as this time of my life is supposed to be about a new beginning,
I'm painfully aware that it marks an end that had begun about a month ago at Starr Rink.

We had just lost to Yale, ending our season. I sat at my stall in the silent locker room that had become my second home over the last four years. Like a death row inmate in his final moments, I went through a familiar postgame ritual. Only this time it was different.

I leaned my Sher-Wood goalie stick against the cinderblock wall, lifted my mask off my head, peeled my white Colgate hockey jersey from my body and wiggled out of my sweaty chest protector. As I had since I was eight years old, I undid the leather straps on my leg pads, stepped out of my bulky maroon padded pants and unlaced my skates. The sweet smell of wet leather. My pale skin coated with a slick layer of sweat. My gray athletic department T-shirt so sweat-soaked I could have just been swimming.

Now crying, I hung my skates on two metal hooks screwed into my locker, glanced above at the plastic nameplate—
BAKER
#2—and the tears streamed down my cheeks. At age twenty-one, when most athletes are just starting to reach their prime, I had just retired.

When I wake again, the first thing I hear is the hissing. It sounds like a tire being inflated and deflated every five seconds. Or maybe it's a ventilator forcing oxygen into my lifeless lungs because I'm paralyzed. For all I know, my neurosurgeon may have severed one of the dozens of delicate veins and arteries crisscrossing the base of my brain, perhaps causing a stroke or bleeding or damaging the part of my brain that controls speech and language. And maybe the part that regulates my breathing.

I don't know. Whatever happened—seeing that I am, presumably, alive—the operation must be over. But I am groggy, too exhausted from five hours of anesthetized surgery to wonder whether Dr. Shahinian, my brain mechanic, actually got the tumor out, to even open my eyes a twitching slit, to talk, to move my arms, which someone—a nurse?—has aligned beside me corpselike on the sterile-white hospital blanket. An IV and a few other tubes pierce my right wrist and forearm. All I can think is,
Where the hell am I?
I can't moan, can't even move a single muscle. Then everything goes black.

In a blink, or what seems like a second but just as easily could have been several unconscious hours, I separate my crusty eyelids and see the blurry images of two people standing silently at my bedside; they're solemn and rigid, much like myself as I stood beside my grandmother's casket. At least I'm not dead. An oxygen mask is cupped over my mouth like a barnacle, enlivening me with oxygen. My nostrils are stuffed with cotton; I can only suck
the mask's dry air through my mouth, being careful not to choke on the fluid—mucus, blood?—that's oozing down the back of my throat.

A minute later, the bedside images sharpen into a more defined haze: blond hair, a young woman; dark hair, a short man. I squint into focus, and I recognize them: my girlfriend and my friend Sean, who is wiping tears from his eyes and gently stroking the back of my limp right hand, careful not to touch the IV needle stuck into one of my veins. I curl my fingers around his forefinger, and I hold on.

But what's that noise? That hissing that won't stop? It sounds like it's coming from around my legs. I slide my hand under the blanket and can feel something wrapped around my thighs. It's hollow, the texture of those plastic floaties my mom made me wear around my three-year-old arms while swimming. Inflatable pants? What the . . . ? No one told me about these. I wiggle my toes and bend my knees a smidgen. Okay, good; I can move. At least it's not a breathing machine, at least I'm not paralyzed.

All I can do now is stare at the ceiling and wait for the discomfort to subside. God, I hope that I not only will survive but that, once I recover from this postoperative trauma, I also will be able to live as a fully functioning man who someday will be capable of excelling in sports, dating women, having sex, fathering children—all the things that a chestnut-size tumor at the base of my brain has prevented me from enjoying for nearly all of my adult life. I'm trying to think positive, but I can't help but ponder the hormonal assault that I most certainly will suffer—again—should Dr. Shahinian have failed to excise the tumorous demon that has been pumping the female hormone prolactin into every cell of my body for longer than any male should ever have to endure.

As I count the steady bleeps of my heart monitor, I can't help but remember the demise that preceded my date with a brain surgeon and how I once wanted to die rather than live another womanized day masquerading as a normal man.

But I don't want to think about this now. I just want to breathe. I just want the pain to go away. I just want everything to go black.

A week after college graduation, I pack up all my possessions in three boxes and a suitcase and drive my matchbox-size Ford Festiva back to where it all started, Buffalo. Back to sixteen pizza-and-sub shops per square mile. Back to blizzards in March. Back to Friday-night bowling in smoky alleys. Back to my brothers—two (Kyle and Keith) are bong-carrying Deadheads, one (Kevin) is in the Ozarks studying to be a Pentecostal preacher, and poor little Kris, who is in high school and living with Dad, with whom I will be living too.

Dad and his Bulgarian wife—whom we call “Green Card”—have moved everyone into a new three-bedroom duplex. But space is tight; four people already live in the vinyl-sided eyesore. There's one bedroom for Green Card and Dad, whom I recently have taken to affectionately calling “L.B.” (for Larry Baker) because “Dad” seems a tad too little-kiddy for a mature college grad such as myself; there's a room for Green Card's two-hundred-pound teenage daughter; and one for Kris, who immediately volunteers to move into the basement, thus making space for me. At first, I think Kris is just being a good little bro, but I soon learn there are forces propelling him to live underground.

I may have a room to crash in (at least until I get a real job), but the household's family dynamics are as dysfunctional as ever:

• Kris hates Green Card.
  
• Green Card hates Kris.
  
• Green Card's daughter—let's call her “Olga”—hates her mom, but she desperately wants Dad and Kris to like her.
  
• Nevertheless, Kris can't stand Olga because she eats all of his coveted high-schooler junk food, especially his Doritos, and Dad can't stand Olga because she is so fat and complains that—between his monthly government check and Green Card's paltry teacher's salary—he can't afford to feed the Old World monstrosity.
  

With their thick Eastern European accents, Olga and her mom call Dad
Leeery
and say things like “I veel be goingz to zee store,
Leeery.
” I'm actually impressed with their grasp of the language, but their immigrant English aggravates L.B., who's not the most politically correct guy in the world, seeing as though he still calls blacks “niggers,” Asians “chinks” and Latinos “spics.” Dad also complains about the omnipresent garlic stench that their Balkan cooking has brought to the duplex. The ever-annoyed diabetic calls his stocky stepdaughter “Mount Olga” and tries not to talk to his third wife enough to need to call her anything. You'd think that after three wives he would have learned something about how to achieve a state of normal, healthy husbandry.

And you'd think that Loverboy Larry, someone who spent years harping on me about how evil women can be, would have exercised better judgment before marrying a woman who barely spoke English and who wanted passage into America more than the loving glance of a bankrupt Buffalonian.
I've listened to this guy's bullshit all these years? Where did it get me? NOWHERE.

Just a few months ago, I had hoped that I—fresh off the collegiate ivy—would, at minimum, weasel my way into an entry-level journalism job in New York or Washington and live the 9-to-5 yuppie lifestyle, free of the pressure of hockey, free of my sexually inexperienced
self-consciousness, free from Dad's expectations that I make him proud. Instead, I have landed smack in the middle of this
Brady Bunch
gone bad, constantly hoping that I will get that newsdesk assistant job at the ABC News bureau in Washington, DC, where I had interviewed during spring break rather than road-tripping to Florida to drink beer and ogle breasts with my Colgate buddies.

Day after day, I pray for the ABC News bureau chief to call and transform me into a bonafide, college-educated workingman. But the call never comes.

“Kenny,” Dad begins one night during a particularly bombastic episode of
Crossfire
where Pat Buchanan and Michael Kingsley are, per the usual theatrics, debating some absurdly sensationalized, politically polarizing issue.

“Why don't you try out for one of those minor-pro teams that keep sending you letters?” he says. “I bet you could make it.”

Oh, no. Here he goes again. . . .

I know he means well, but for months I've had to listen to him pestering me about how I should not have quit hockey, how I am as good as any goalie in the NHL, how I easily could get back in shape and try out for an East Coast Hockey League team, toiling three notches below the big leagues. Yes, a few teams, such as the Raleigh Ice Caps and the Nashville Knights, have contacted me, having gotten my name from a list of just-graduated goalies—certainly not from seeing my less-than-illustrious play last season.

I'm not sure I would play even if the Buffalo Sabres wanted me. Frankly, I'm sick of the mental grind, sick of feeling like I have to prove myself every time I take to the ice, sick of the pressure from teammates, coaches, fans, L.B. and, most of all, myself. I am sick of constantly fighting—
fight, fight, fight!
—to keep my body in shape: the weight-lifting that only keeps me from getting flabbier, the (useless) sit-ups, the sprints that most goalies never do but that I must to keep my legs strong. Most of all, I am sick of being immersed in a macho jock culture when I feel neither macho nor much like a jock.

—

Late at night, as Dad lies in his nightly Valium-induced coma to escape the pain of the dying nerves in his arms and legs (and, recently, his neck), I channel surf into the wee hours until my index finger cramps, passing over the soft-core porn on cable (why would I want to be reminded of what I cannot do?) and occasionally stopping at the ads promoting 1-900 numbers for phone sex with voluptuous women in bikinis talking into the phone. Judging by the cheesy guys pictured from the shoulders up talking on the phone, this T&A idiocy apparently is targeted at lonely, unemployed young men who are up late at night for lack of a warm body awaiting them in bed and who have nothing productive to wake up for in the morning—a demographic of which I am clearly a member. But I find those female bodies about as erotic as a hockey puck.
Come to think of it, when's the last time I even masturbated, let alone ejaculated in the presence of a woman?

I click the remote and happen upon the “Abs of Steel” infomercial, featuring mannequinlike men with six-pack abs that make my abdominals look like abs of oatmeal. TV is not the place to look for inspiration.

One day, while walking around downtown Hamburg, pondering the meaning of it all, I stop outside the U.S. Army recruiting office. When I was a hotshot senior high school hockey recruit, uniformed coaches from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point practically begged me to enlist at West Point. They guaranteed me admission; they promised me a starting slot. I turned down the offer, though, because, after graduating from the academy, I would have to serve at least five years in the Army, which was unacceptable to me. I planned on playing in the NHL right out of college, not commanding troops. Now look at me: I am out of college, unemployed and retired from hockey. That recruiting poster in the window—
It's not just a job, it's an adventure!
—looks quite appealing at the moment.

I'm greeted inside by a Sgt. So-and-so, a stocky guy with a buzz
cut and the stiffest-looking green shirt and pleated pants I've ever seen. He reminds me of that professional wrestler Sgt. Slaughter who I've been watching on late-night episodes of the World Wrestling Federation. When Sarge hears that I'm a Colgate grad, and a hockey player to boot, his eyes light up.

“You ever wanna fly choppers?” he patters like a tommy gun. “We could get a guy such as yourself into officers training school right-quick.”

Sarge then leads me back to his office and sits me down in front of a TV screen. “This could be you,” he says, pressing Play on the VCR.

On pops a video of strapping young men in tight shorts and
ARMY
T-shirts running through an obstacle course, doing sit-ups, manning the controls of a Huey helicopter. Heretofore, my knowledge of the Army consists of nonstop CNN coverage of the Persian Gulf War, and what I've seen of Bill Murray in the movie
Stripes.
And now, I suppose, this Army video.

“Being a hockey player, I'd imagine you like to kick a little ass every now and then,” Sarge says when the video ends with an aerial shot of a helicopter firing a missile into a tank or something hard-core like that.

“Uh, actually . . .” I stammer.

“. . . and I bet you know what it takes to be a winner,” he continues.

At this point, I decide to just shut up and let him vomit his cock-swinging spiel.

“You ever fire a gun?”

I have to think hard about that one. “Yeah, uh, one time I went deer-hunting with my hockey coach. But that was a while ago.”

“Doesn't matter,” he says. “We can teach you how to fire weapons, how to fly helos, you name it and we can teach it to you. You're a smart guy, pilot material, and you're obviously athletic. You, my friend, are a dream officer candidate.”

Of all the bullshit that comes spewing out of Sarge's mouth for the next five minutes, the one thing that stands out is the part about the
military pay scale. If you've got a bachelor's degree, it actually ain't so bad. As an officer, I could make a decent living, pay off my couple thousand in credit card debt I racked up last semester after my scholarship money ran out, and still be able to tuck some away in savings for a house and college for my kids so they don't have to live in ratty duplexes and athletically whore themselves to a university athletic department. Join the Army, and maybe I won't end up broke and pensionless, like L.B. All I'd have to do is get the
cojones
to kill other people for a living. It only takes a few seconds of consideration for me to conclude that I don't have the balls to stomach that, no matter how great the financial rewards. I never even liked to participate in bench clearing brawls on the ice, let alone hand-to-hand combat. Leave violence for other guys. I'm simply not wired for battle. Nature may arm some men with warmongering testosterone, but I feel as if God gave me a low supply: Despite the sexual slump I'm in, I don't mind being a pacifist.

Sarge hands me a propaganda folder, and once out on the sidewalk I toss it in the garbage can and head home to do . . . well, I don't really have anything to do. Except, that is, to feel sorry for my sorry ass.

Considering my general malaise, dwindling self esteem and vocational desperation, the last thing I feel like enduring is L.B.'s Buchanan-like grilling of me while I'm just trying to relax in front of CNN. But that is what I get, anyway.

He means well, but, vintage L.B., he won't shut up.

“I think you should play at least
one
season of pro, Kenny. You've worked so hard all your life. You should at least get paid to play, then quit knowing you gave it your best shot. Then you know that all the hard work you've put in over the years has been worth the effort.”

“I would do exactly that, Dad,” I snap. “If I actually still
wanted
to play hockey. If you haven't noticed, I'm trying to move on with my life.”

“I was only making a suggestion,” he says, chuckling as Michael Kingsley, the liberal
Crossfire
host, takes a blow from the right. “And,
by the way,” he adds with his eyes on the tube, “you don't
have
to move on. You've got a lot of unfinished business to take care of with hockey. You have your whole life ahead of you. If I were your age, I wouldn't be in such a hurry to get a real job when you could be getting paid to play hockey.”

“I know, I know,” I say, annoyed. “Believe me, I wish I wanted to play hockey, but it's just time to let it go and start a new career. There's more to life than hockey, you know. I have a degree and stuff.”

Like Buchanan, who's ranting now, L.B. feels he must win every argument. Not this time; not this one, he won't.

“Don't worry, L.B.,” I quip. “I know I'll get a job, something in journalism.”

“Like what?”

“Like that ABC job. Man, I'll even sharpen pencils at
The Buffalo News.
I don't know. I'll do anything to get my foot in the door.”

A few days later, unfortunately, I land the Anything job: installing drainage pipe (a.k.a. “digging ditches”) for the town of Hamburg's Highway Department.

—

A week before I'm to start my ditch-digging job, which I only got because my mom is the assistant to the Highway Department superintendent, I call Jenny, who's now living in Los Angeles, where she always dreamed of moving after college and has been going to grad school for the last two years. I haven't spoken to her in several months; and I haven't seen her in over a year. Before I move on to the next stage in my life, before I really start honing in on a potential wife and finding the romantic love I desperately want, I need to find out if Jenny and I will ever get back together. Moreover, I need to conduct a test of my temperamental genitals, because, you see, I've made a preliminary self-diagnosis: My inability to achieve and maintain hard erections, as well as my fear and loathing of women in general, are a product of my not yet being “over” Jenny. In other words, I think I still love her and
posit that I can't have sex with anyone else until I figure out where my emotions stand with her.

Our conversation, pathetically, goes like this:

“Hi . . . Jenny?”

“Ummm . . . yeah, this is Jenny.”

“It's Ken.”

(Stone-cold telephonic silence.)

“Ohmigod!”

“Long time no hear, huh?” I say, all cheery. “How've you been?”

“Oh, just real crazy-busy lately, you know, with school and work and—”

“Me too.”

I know Dad can't afford this long-distance call. So I get right to the point. “I have some free time before I start my new job, and I thought it might be nice to come and visit you.”