The Late Bloomer (20 page)

I've come to view the act of sexual intercourse sort of as a game of Hit the Gopher, a carnival game in which you hold a padded hammer and smash a mechanical gopher every time he pokes his head out of one of the five or six holes in a wood console. Likewise, bad thoughts—about my impotence, about the pressure and awkwardness I feel about sex—are gophers that I strike down with a dose of denial and repression and Zen-like meditative breathing. During hockey games, I would combat negative thoughts with positive ones. Similarly, I employ a complementary, yin-yang combat plan with my insecure sexual conscience:

As soon the evening news ends and the stage manager clears the set, I hang up on Claudia, clean off my desk and immediately jog up Connecticut Avenue to her apartment, where she has left the front door unlocked. I find her in her bedroom. As promised, Monster's got ropes.

Unlike most of our sexual encounters, though, this time Claudia wants to tie
me
up. She gives me a riot cop's shove onto her bed.

“You said fifteen minutes,” she says. “It's been half an hour, boy. You've been very bad, Kenny.”

Either she really is mad at me, or she's a great actress. It's hard to tell with Claudia.

She tells me to lie on my back. That's a no-no—that is, if she expects to have sex. I never lie on my back when we attempt to do it, because what little blood usually fills my penis just seems to fall back into my body instead of filling the tissue. When you're suffering from erectile dysfunction, lovemaking becomes more of an exercise in manipulating gravity than a lustful act of passion.

“Don't move,” she grunts, wrapping the twine around my wrists and looping it around the bedpost. She folds a bandana and ties it around my face. “I'm going to rape you.”

Just relax. My problem is that I think too much about sex. I've lost all concept of the inner game of sex. I have to stop my mind from getting in the way of my body. Zen Ken.

Claudia tries everything in her playbook—along with nearly every part of her anatomy—in an effort to get me hard enough to stick me inside of her and get off.

Nothing works.

The ensuing verbal lashing she inflicts on me hurts more than the twine burning the skin on my wrists:

“You're fucked up.” . . . “It's like your wires are crossed or something.” . . . “Aren't you attracted to me?” . . . “Seek help.”. . . “Maybe you are gay.”

I do need help.

I want to wield wood, but all I can muster is the physiological equivalent of a wilted flower. And the more erotic the situation, the less hard my dick seems to get.

She curls into the fetal position and starts sobbing.

“Why can't you have sex with me like I'm a normal person?” she whines like a little girl whose Betty Crocker bakery set has just broken.

“I wish I knew,” I sigh. “I wish I knew.”

We lay beside each other in silence, staring at the ceiling. Suicide crosses my mind. “There
must
be something wrong with you physically,” she says.

But I've just run a marathon. I was a Division I hockey goalie. I run twenty miles a week. I lift weights at the gym. The last thing I'm about to consider is being physically ill. Plus, I went to the DC Public Library last week and read up on impotence. One medical book said the most common causes of impotence were high blood pressure, diabetes, poor circulation—old-guy ailments. In fact, it said that men over age sixty are most likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction. I'm twenty-two fucking years old!

“It can't be physical,” I reply, sounding a lot like Larry Baker did when he would refuse to see a doctor even when a kidney stone had prevented him from peeing for four straight days. Like father, like son.

But wait! I did read that perhaps as many as twenty percent of cases of erectile dysfunction are caused by psychological problems, such as stress, anxiety or insecurity of some kind. That's it!

I'm feeling obligated to offer Claudia an explanation, especially now that she's groaning on and on about how my sexual inadequacy is probably all her fault.

I blurt, “It's my dad's fault.”

“What does your dad have to do with your dick?” she scoffs.

“Really. No kidding. I really think my father has made me feel so bad about having sex that I am afraid to do it. I must have a mental block or something. I mean, my dad used to tell me shit like ‘Girls are evil' and ‘Women will fuck up your life' and all this other crap. It must have fucked me up somewhere along the way. I don't know why else I
would be like this.” I don't say the
I
word; I'm not ready to admit I'm impotent.

“You really think that's why?” she asks, rolling to face me. “You sure it's not me?”

“Positive,” I say, running my fingers through her hair.

Lying naked beside Claudia, I start rhapsodizing a fully intellectualized explanation for my inability to achieve and maintain a normal erection. I devise what could be called the Unified Theory of Penile Anxiety (UTOPA), which, instead of confronting any physical causes of my illness, I will use to solve the riddle of my sexual angst for the next five years. The UTOPA equation looks something like this:

I
(impotence) =
D
(Dad's misogynist propaganda) +
N
(my nervous inexperience) +
S
(my “special” manliness)

It make sense when you think about it. Hey, at least she has stopped crying. At least I'm starting to figure out my problem.

Nevertheless, a few weeks later, even my clever mathematical justifications can't keep Claudia from dumping me. Although I am convinced otherwise, she claims it's not because of our sex life, not because of me and my neuroses. Rather, she says, it's about her being too young to “settle down.” She needs to “play the field” and “see what else is out there.”

I don't even bother to put up a fight. I don't deserve a smart and beautiful woman like her anyway. I really can't blame her. After all, I'm an insignificant player in the evolutionary mating game. With scores of able-bodied young men out there lacking complications stemming from afflictions such as I=D+N+S who are just waiting to replace me, she
should
dump me.
I
would.

Alhough I feel completely deserving, it doesn't make my mental state any more stable or me any less obsessed about my emasculinity.

In an effort to try and forget, I go running. Every day after work I jog along the Potomac River. If I'm feeling weak or jittery or if my nipples start aching, I ignore it
like a man.
I force myself to run.

I run across the Arlington Memorial Bridge into Virginia, veering over to Roosevelt Island, a refuge of wetlands and dirt paths where I can just be alone, by the river. I run along the shady trails, beside the geese, running to forget and running to find peace, to solve the riddle that has become my existence.

Emerging from a stand of trees, I jog upon the gray granite slabs of the island's Teddy Roosevelt Memorial.

I stop. Catching my breath, I read Roosevelt's words etched into a towering vertical slab of rock:

MANHOOD

A MAN'S USEFULNESS

DEPENDS UPON HIS LIVING UP TO

HIS IDEALS

IN SO FAR AS HE CAN

IT IS HARD TO FAIL. BUT IT IS WORSE

NEVER TO HAVE TRIED TO SUCCEED

ALL DARING & COURAGE

ALL IRON ENDURANCE OF MISFORTUNE

MAKE FOR A FINER & NOBLER TYPE OF

*MANHOOD*

ONLY THOSE ARE FIT TO LIVE

WHO DO NOT FEAR TO DIE

AND NONE ARE FIT TO DIE

WHO HAVE SHRUNK FROM THE

JOY OF LIFE

AND THE

DUTY OF LIFE

As I run back across the bridge to the District, I see in the distance the stark white obelisk that is the Washington Monument, and I start crying harder than a year ago, when I had hung up my ice skates for the last time, ending the only true joyful display of manhood I have ever known. Through my tear-blurred eyes I stare at the erect Monument piercing the afternoon sky in the distance. My first thought is that the phallic symbol is just another reminder of my impotence, my male inadequacy. I shake out the bad thought and instead think about Roosevelt's words.
I will be better for all this misfortune. It will make me a better man.

I run faster.

Finer and nobler. Finer and nobler. Finer and nobler.
That's it. All this pain and confusion is making me finer and nobler. My failure, in the end, you see, will make me a better, stronger man.

I run back up along the Potomac, past the Watergate, into Rock Creek Park. The running doesn't stop for many more years to come. Looking back, I wish I could have run straight to the Georgetown Medical Center. I wish I could have realized I was running an unwinnable race against a biological opponent whose insidious power was widening the chasm between me and my sexuality, my manhood and the rest of the hormonally healthy world. But I didn't.

Instead, I just kept running.

Television journalism often emphasizes image and bravado over substance and context. It is a profession staffed largely by a team of energetic young men and women running around on adrenaline highs behind the scenes, producing words and images narrated by talking heads. Print journalism is about interviewing people one-on-one, in private or over the phone, then returning to your keyboard and writing a story in relative solitude. Television is visceral; print is cerebral. It takes less than a year at ABC for me to conclude that I'm not a TV guy.

Eight months into my job at ABC, I apply to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in order to become a print guy. Although I never quite attain his level of journalistic testoster-mania, I have impressed Sam Donaldson enough to convince him to write me a letter of recommendation (Ken is a smart, hard-working “journalist . . .”). It must have helped, as in the spring of 1993, I am accepted into perhaps the most respected journalism program in the world. From now on, I have decided, I will measure my personal success by my journalistic achievements in the newsroom, not my athletic or sexual ones.

Although I kept telling myself that the reason I miss Claudia is
because I love her so much, and I believe that I always will, it helps that I am getting away from her. In our last conversation, I asked her under what conditions she would take me back. “When you get your head screwed on straight,” she told me. That hasn't happened yet, though.

Upon my arrival at Columbia, I vow to stop thinking about my inept ways with women, to make a new start, to carve out my place in the journalism world by getting a master's degree from this respected school. A six-class course load—plus my job doing research for a
New York Times
reporter—provides me a convenient excuse for not having a social life. A few weeks into the program, my academic adviser informs me that I have to decide soon what my master's project is going to be. The only restriction, he says, is that it be a work of long-form journalism focused on a single subject.

While walking through the student center one afternoon, I see tacked on a bulletin board a flyer from an after-school youth program called Ice Hockey in Harlem; it says the program is seeking dedicated volunteer teachers and coaches for the upcoming season. There's an informational meeting next week. Not only do I immediately plan to attend, but I'm relieved because I think I might have found the subject of my master's project.

I have been living in Manhattan alone in a dank studio apartment on the extreme Upper West Side for about a month. My sunlight-deprived box of residential isolation has all of two windows, both of which have a latticework of thick metal bars over them, offering an already uninspiring view of a six-foot-wide alley. The place is so small I can practically touch all four walls while lying on my mattress, which, when plopped onto the floor, covers three quarters of the entire floorspace. I'm not complaining, though. I've slept in worse places (our duplex on Harwood Avenue comes to mind); plus, hey, rent is only six hundred bucks a month, which is all I can afford on my student loan.

As rough as I think I have it, however, at least I'm not a kid living in a Harlem tenement. I may even be a role model for such
underprivileged kids. I'm excited about the prospect of helping inner-city kids learn hockey. The sport got me out of Buffalo; who's to say it won't get one of them out of East Harlem? Besides, in the process maybe I'll boost my self-esteem and stop feeling so fucking sorry for myself. I doubt that Teddy Roosevelt held self-pity parties.

In addition to my Fly Over Country–bred curiosity, maybe part of what attracts me to journalism—not to mention to Ice Hockey in Harlem—is that it will require me to turn my gaze to other people. I can probe them, question them, alleviate the pressure on me. I needn't sit around and worry about my pathetic gender insecurities and dysfunctional sexual practices. After all, journalism involves documenting the lives of
other
people—not the lives of the documentarian himself.

Besides, introspection, the center of a so-called thinking life, has kept me from living life. While the unexamined life is indeed a life not worth living, I think I have gone overboard. Self-examination has blocked me from being “autonomic,” Claudia's word for the kind of guys she had always dated (and is now back to dating) before stumbling upon my unique version of guyhood. Like a lot of the words she used, I had to look up its definition:

autonomic
—
occurring involuntarily, automatically; of or controlled by the autonomic nervous system.

autonomic nervous system
—
the part of the nervous system that is responsible for control and regulation of the involuntary bodily functions.

Then I started realizing what she meant.

“Do you think something's wrong with my autonomic nervous system,” I asked Claudia, a trained scientist. “I may have a nervous-system condition?”

“No,” she said. “I'm just saying you're impotent.”

After having Claudia, mid-breakup, turn the impotence mirror back on me, I decided to start spending a lot of my free time away from ABC at the grimy DC Public Library, reading up on impotence alongside the homeless guys snoozing between the air-conditioned rows of books. There, I hoped, I might find out what the fuck was preventing Private Dick from standing at attention.

I didn't know much about impotence. For example, until I educated myself on the subject, I didn't know that emotional or psychological factors (presumably, the cause of my affliction) account for less than twenty percent of impotence cases. I didn't know that in another twenty percent or so of the cases there is a neurological, vascular or hormonal problem to blame. I'd rather not hear or read anything about “erectile dysfunction,” as the literature called it. It wasn't like I
never
got erections; it was just that it seemed like every other time I tried, my dick didn't cooperate. But while my erectability was impaired, my innate, preprogrammed, Darwinian knowledge that I inhabit this planet in order to have sex haunted me. How fucking frustrating! Imagine being hungry, famished, and someone places a slice of pizza in front of you. Now imagine your hands handcuffed and your mouth gagged, unable to eat the pizza, and that's, basically, how I felt about sex: tortured.

Even reading about it hasn't helped. Only vigorous masturbation gets a rise out of me—and even that process is as slow as leavening bread.

This is why now, even as a twenty-three-year-old grad school student, I am bitter about the concept of introspection, which apparently has only made me more impotent; while allowing me to devise intellectual equations (I=D+N+S), it has created more problems than it has solved.

Exhibit A: A phone conversation the other day with Fred from DC, who called and invited me to join him next weekend (paid for by him) on a golf trip to Palm Springs, California. I politely declined, telling him I was swamped with writing assignments, but neglecting
to tell him I'M NOT A HOMOSEXUAL. An asexual, maybe, but I am not gay. Gays have a sex drive; I don't even have that.

—

I commit myself to try and do for Harlem's young hockey players what my dad has been trying to do to me my whole life: turn boys into men.

Armed with an idealistic, do-gooder spirit (and, of course, my self-denial), I attend the program's first teachers' meeting at a building in Central Park, where Ice Hockey in Harlem's practices and games are held on an outdoor rink.

“Don't feel as though you're obligated to be involved simply because you're here,” says Debbie, the program's sassy twenty-nine-year-old volunteer coordinator. “This is not for everyone. I gotta be honest with you. Many of the kids will have behavior problems. You should think hard about whether you want to make the commitment.”

Debbie says that each kid is required to attend a class, taught by volunteers like us, at an East Harlem public school once a week. The kids take classes such as Hockey Math and Hockey Geography, in which they learn about these school subjects in the context of hockey. (Example:
Wayne Gretzky plays for the Los Angeles Kings. In what state is Los Angeles located?
) The oldest kids must also enroll in IHIH's Community Service class, she says; Debbie hopes one of us will volunteer to teach a new communications class for the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. “If a kid skips class during the week,” Debbie explains, “he won't be allowed to play hockey on the weekends.”

As Debbie, who is white, gives us the straight dope, I look around the room at the other volunteers, noticing that only two of them are black (the rest of us are white). That's too bad, I think, because nearly all the kids are black or Hispanic.

Debbie goes around the room and asks each of us to introduce ourselves. I learn that the two black men are Ron, a thirty-two-year-old former Army infantryman who grew up in Harlem, and Myron Kellogg, a
New York Times
executive. Both have volunteered to teach
the Community Service class. Being a journalist-in-the-making, I offer to teach the new Communications class.

Then Ron, a muscular six feet tall, stands and addresses the group in his staccato drill-sergeant cadence. He suggests we run our classes “like a little boot camp.” “Many of these boys don't have fathers in their lives and are hungry for male attention,” he says. “They need someone to tell them what to do, where to go, how to do it, because many of them don't get it from home.”

Afterward, I share a cab uptown to Harlem with Ron. I admit that I am nervous about my ability to handle a bunch of black and Hispanic kids not even ten years younger than me.

“Don't worry, man,” he says. “First of all, you're not as different as you think you are. If you just talk your language—not theirs—to them you will be fine, because what you speak is caring.”

The cab turns left at the Apollo Theater and Ron asks the driver to stop in front of his brick apartment building. Before he gets out, he pats my back and says, “You'll be okay. Before they see you as being white, they'll first see you as a man showing them positive attention.”

Two weeks pass. Two weeks of reporting and writing and reading and more reporting and writing. I usually stay up till three or four in the morning writing stories on my computer, late-night talk-radio hosts keeping me company.

After a long day of class at the J-School, I take the bus across town to 104th Street and Lexington Avenue to P.S. 72, in the heart of East Harlem, for my first night of class. The first thing I notice is that every volunteer—except for me—is black or Hispanic. When I ask Debbie what happened to all the volunteers from the meeting, she tells me all the whites have chickened out and quit.

Debbie briefs me on the backgrounds of a few of my twelve students: Tyrone's father died when he was three. Jimmy's mother recently died from a “drug-related” cause, and his father is a former drug dealer living in California. José hasn't been the same since a gang of
kids put a gun to his head last summer. Jonathan, she says, is functionally illiterate.

Her backgrounder, however, does nothing to alleviate my fears that these kids are going to eat my suburban ass for dinner.

Realizing the greatest thing we have in common is hockey, I introduce myself to the class as “a former Division One college hockey player.” Judging by the sudden attention-giving gazes from beneath their backward-turned baseball caps, my introduction seems to get their attention. “Hey, you look like Wayne Gretzky.” . . . “Where's Colgate?” . . . “Did you ever play in Madison Square Garden?”

They don't care about
no
Columbia University. They tell me so with their blank stares and idle chatter. These kids live two miles from the university; yet, most of them have never stepped foot on the campus. Their campuses are the drab brick high-rise housing projects that dominate the East Harlem skyline.

East Harlem—or “Spanish Harlem”—takes up a 2.2-square-mile patch of Manhattan's extreme Upper East Side. Nearly half its residents are on some form of welfare or public assistance; forty percent live below the poverty line; and children who grow up in a home without a father outnumber those who do. Although some of the richest, most famous residents of New York City, and the world, walk their poodles and get pedicures in the shadows of glitzy high-rise apartment buildings just thirty blocks to the south, East Harlem is a landscape dominated by scrappy sidewalk bodegas, garbage-strewn vacant lots and block after block of run-down tenements that make my old “Harwood Hell” look like Trump Tower.

Theirs is a violent world that bears testament to why over ninety percent of violent crimes are committed by males. I hope to do something to teach these boys that there is more to being a man than living by the lead of testosterone and the priority the powerful hormone places on sexual gratification, physical assertiveness and competitiveness. Through my example, they may learn that being more
sensitive isn't tantamount to being less strong. I give them their first writing assignment: to write a paragraph on why they think they are a leader.

Only four of the twelve kids can think of a reason.

—

For New Year's Eve, Claudia comes to visit me in New York. We've been exchanging e-mail for the past several weeks, and we've decided it would be nice to see each other. Neither of us admits it, but I think we want to see if there's still a spark between us. She writes, “I fear that I will never find another guy as sweet, kind and loving as you. You are a special boy with a special ‘problem.' Now you just need to become a man. I love you, Ken.” I reckon it's mostly because of that last line that she hops the bus to New York. I also reckon another reason is that neither of us wants to be alone on New Year's Eve.

We meet on the windy afternoon of December thirty-first at the base of the granite steps of Columbia's library. I haven't seen her in over four months; she is even prettier than in the photo of her I have tacked onto my wall. All of her life, Claudia has been told she could be a model, and seeing the way the soft skin of her chin brushes against her scarf I wonder why someone so beautiful would be attracted to someone as unbeautiful as me.