The Late Bloomer (3 page)

My face, my lips. Drew's face, her lips. I'm not even a foot from her; I can smell her sweet perfume.

What do I do if Drew likes me? What if she invites me back to her house? What if we start kissing, touching each other, tearing off each other's clothes? What then? Will my dick get hard, or will it—as usual—dangle lifelessly between my legs? Now, that would be a fucking disaster. I would rather never try to have sex with Drew Barrymore than to try and then fail to have sex
with Drew Barrymore because I couldn't get it up. Now what, Eleanor, Mark and David?

“Drew, it-it-it was great seeing you,” I stutter.

Seventy degrees? It's gotta be at least a hundred on this patio.

“Um, thanks for inviting me,” I say with a quiver. “But, uh, I really gotta be going now. Maybe I'll see you around again later.”

“Uh, sure, no problem. Sorry you have to leave so soon, but . . .”

“Me too.”

“. . . thanks for coming, Ken. It was really nice to see you.”

At the curb, I hand the valet guy my ticket. Sweat blotches circle the armpits of my shirt. I wipe streaks of sweat from my forehead as I hustle into my car. I am light-headed and sick to my flabby fucking tits and stomach.

As I am about to pull away, Kelly opens the door and plops down beside me.

“Why you leaving?” he asks. “Drew was so into you. Are you fucking crazy?”

The answer—although I don't yet know it and just think I am psychosexually inept—lies somewhere between yes and no.

Kelly gets in and I steer us back to our Brentwood apartment, barreling down the passing lane on Sunset Boulevard—past the hardbody models on the billboards, past the hookers advertising their product in high heels, past the black-clad Gen-X'ers waiting in line outside of the Viper Room, past Drew's office.

My chest feels tight and sore, perhaps from the jagged crack that has just split my heart in two.

And, suddenly, I feel sixteen again.

I'm snuggling in bed with my girlfriend, enjoying the hockey game, when the commercial pops on:
Got the Buffalo blahs? Come visit Toronto's glamorous Sutton Place hotel for a romantic getaway weekend!

It's nose-hair-freezing cold outside. And, as usual, our furnace is on the fritz. It's a night in western New York State in winter, when the shadows grow long at two in the afternoon and when my dad chisels ice off the windshield of our rusted, American-make jalopy and grumbles, “It's colder than a Siberian nun's tit out here.”

I don't know where that might fit on the Fahrenheit or Celsius scales, but I do know that Jenny's runny nose feels cold to the touch tonight, even though she and I lie fully clothed under at least two blankets, one of which is electric. On January nights like these, with relentless bands of “lake effect” snow blanketing the frosted tundra, the television doesn't only provide entertainment, it's a heat source.

As the commercial continues, Jenny's brown eyes crack wide open like walnuts and her ears perk like Spock's. Her dark, thick hash of eyebrows curve downward like crawling caterpillars, and her pale, freckled face contorts so much I think she either has been startled by the cheesy commercial or her acid-washed jeans are clinging too tightly to her nineteen-year-old body.

My girlfriend fixes a laser stare at the screen, listening to the
British-accented announcer tout the hotel's
deluxe accommodations
and
breathtaking views of the Toronto skyline.
This voice-over montage, set to mellifluous Muzak right out of a Holiday Inn elevator, is accompanied by shots of a happy couple prancing hand in hand through the hotel's opulent lobby, flirting beside candlelight, toasting glasses while submerged in a bubble bath.
All this . . . for just $89.99 a night!

The commercial—which, by the way, is only getting in the way of my hockey game—finally ends, and Ted Darling, the sonorous “Voice of the Buffalo Sabres,” bellows his play-by-play commentary from my black-and-white's tiny speaker.

Jenny, however, is no longer interested in watching the boxing match disguised as an ice hockey game. Instead she wants to play tongue hockey, heretofore the only game we play when cuddling under the blankets. So Jenny pulls my head toward her lips. A minute later she comes up for air and makes an announcement: “Let's have sex.”

“Right now?” I ask. “Right here?”

“No, silly.”

She points at the flickering TV and adds, “We should go to Toronto and stay in that nice hotel for your birthday.”

As huge a piece of news as this is, I still have trouble processing what has just transpired in my frigid bedroom. So let me get this straight: For the first time in our four-month relationship, my normally nunnish girlfriend is actually suggesting—no, she's practically
demanding
—that we have sex. In a foreign city! At a world-class hotel where champagne-sipping white people take bubble baths!

Jenny rips the stack of blankets off her body and, clutching each of my shoulders, emphasizes her every syllable as if I am one of Jerry's kids.

“We—are—going—to—have—SEX,” she romper-rooms me.

I can't contract the throat muscles necessary for locution. Cotton mouth has disabled me.

Jenny's caterpillars furrow. “So what do you think?” she asks.

What do I
think?
It's January 1987, I've never had sex with
anything other than my right hand, I'm a dude, and my seventeenth birthday won't arrive until April eighteenth, which—duh—is over four months away.
I should have gotten this over with a long time ago!
is what I think. Everyone, it seems, is having sex but me. It is time.

But I don't say this to her. I don't want to pressure Jenny, nor am I prepared to drop my long johns and do “it” right now, on the spot, upon her command like a ball-chasing Labrador retriever. I may be a virgin, but, well . . . I'm a
nervous
virgin. That means I first must get some ducks in a row: (a) Since I have never bought a condom, I will have to embarrass myself in front of the druggist and buy some Trojans, and (b) having never done it, I don't really know how to perform sexual intercourse. It's not like anyone has ever told me: “Okay, Kenny, you stick your thing into here, then move like so . . .”

I don't dare show Jenny my sexual insecurity, though. I fear she may change her mind and decide not to do it, which could mean yet another year or two of being a virgin, and I cannot enter college without having had sex. That's unheard-of!

Our upcoming Canadian sexpedition is not only going to be about losing my virginity. No way, man. Sexual intercourse, that biological feat of penile performance, will—with an official testosterone stamp of approval—mark my entry into manhood.

Suddenly my room doesn't seem so cold anymore; actually, I already feel a little more manly.

The irony isn't lost on me later that night when, after Jenny has fallen asleep, I watch a player fire a wrist shot past a goalie's outstretched arm, which prompts Ted Darling to verbally ejaculate: “He shoots, he scooooores!”

—

I've always envied how girls can instantly know they have become—biologically, at least—young women, while for boys sexual maturation, I think, is much more mysterious. At the onset of puberty, most girls have breasts and have begun menstruating; consequently most of them
are able to deduce that they have reached sexual maturity: You know, they can have sex and get pregnant. We boys, however, don't receive such clear and present signs that our bodies have become capable of sexual reproduction.

My physical development was more gradual, mysterious and thus, I believe, more anxiety-inducing. Around age thirteen, I noticed that pubic hair had started growing in strange places. Then my voice began deepening, which was preceded by a girlish squealing before anything sounding remotely manly vibrated from my vocal cords. My body lost some of the baby fat it had been carrying around. And then one night, perhaps a year or two after these manly changes began, I ejaculated for the first time, scaring and amusing me at the same time. I took this to mean that my gun had been loaded, and now I could truly begin obsessing about firing my weapon (and, as my friends, my brothers and my father had led me to believe, it would be a
war
).

I can only assume that fueling this obsession—with the high school neighbor-girl who likes to lay out in her bikini, with the cheerleaders and the girls on the school soccer team, with every girl in that J. Geils Band “Centerfold” video on MTV—was a sharp rise in the amount of testosterone, which starts coursing through the veins of most boys before they turn fifteen.

Testosterone, according to my health teacher, is the hormone that, chemically, most makes a man a man. Doctors call it “the big T,” because it does all the big male stuff: It grows hair, builds muscle, produces testes and penises, deepens voices and stimulates the kind of aggressive behavior that inspires perhaps nine out of ten high school cafeteria brawls. In addition to turning males into grunting fools on occasion, it woos women and turns boys into men. Last but certainly not least, the big T also allows males to have erections.

Ever since I possessed enough pelvic coordination to spell my name in the snow, I have been awaiting sex—the Big Kahuna of teenage-boy life. I have already done the other guy things that are expected of me:

Machismo:
I
never
cry in public; when provoked, I have punched kids in their snotty little faces; and, perhaps most evidentiary, I am a hockey player.

Not-gayness:
I have called non-macho guys “fags” (mostly so my friends won't think I'm gay); I talk about how much I love “tits” and “asses” and “pussies” and, when other guys brag about what they want to do with these body parts, I pitch in with my own immature chest-thumping.

Stoicism:
I rarely show pain or weakness of any kind. Like the commercials say,
No pain, no gain. Never let them see you sweat. Just do it!

Despite my impressive list of gender-proving accomplishments, I'm fully aware that I have not crossed into manhood, because I haven't proven sexual ability. When I do this, though, I will definitely become a man. I'm fully aware that this manhood-proving business, Buffalo style, is pretty absurd stuff. History teachers have taught me about feminism—universal suffrage, Susan B. Anthony, the ERA. Plus, I grew up watching
The Phil Donahue Show
with my mom. Even so, that doesn't make it any easier for me to rise above its stupidity.

As a teenager, though, none of that societal evolution,
vis-à-vis
gender equality, seems to matter much to the guys I know. Most of them hail from families where moms still stay at home and dads work and work and work and watch sports on the TV and mow the lawn on weekends and drink Genny Cream Ale and then maybe go bowling on Friday nights at Leisure Land. Women generally don't rock the boat; men don't exactly encourage them to even climb aboard the boat. In fact, most of our neighbors—the steel-plant workers, the truckers, the bartenders, the cops, the uniformed workers with their names printed in cursive over their breast pockets—cling to traditional gender roles like icicles to a gutter in January.

I live in the easternmost notch of the Great Lakes rust belt, just
south of Buffalo, New York, where there isn't much socially liberal dogma to speak of, especially when it comes to male-female relations.

In my own family life I have only a handful of memories of my dad even kissing my mother on the lips, let alone Romeoing her. Sure, my parents would go out for dinner a couple of times a year, leaving me and my four brothers with a baby-sitter. Then they'd return a few hours later, a few drinks in them, holding hands, and disappear into the bedroom.

I may be intimidated by my pubescent transition into adulthood, especially when it comes to hanging out with sexually experienced kids my own age or listening to my older brother tell me, “You don't know shit until you get laid.”

The ice rink, however, is my sanctuary, a 200-by-85-foot sheet of placid ice enclosed by Gothic-cathedral-strong boards and Plexiglas, where I can escape from the real world, where I can find peace from the pressure of my dad always pushing me to play better, of my brothers driving me to act older than I am, of having to lose my virginity. Behind my goalie mask, I'm whoever I dream myself to be. On the ice, I can transcend my off-ice insecurities about always feeling one step behind everyone else on the sexual maturation chart. I can be a warrior, a hero. The slippery ice, the bulky equipment—they serve as equalizers, allowing me to play as tough as the tough guys, to masquerade as a cocky sonofabitch, even though I am not. I chop the backs of player's legs with my heavy stick. I make lighting-fast glove saves. I send players to their bench shaking their heads at their inability to score on me. It feels good. Someday hockey will be my ticket to a better life, but it already is an escape from the life I know.

—

Because Jenny isn't exactly a sexual dynamo either, I have been able to make it to sixteen without having sex, which, while a burden, is also a relief because I believe it is the most frightening of the teenage rites of passage.

Jenny fears getting pregnant as much—or more—than I do, which is a lot. My father, who often says he probably wouldn't have married my mom if she hadn't gotten pregnant with my oldest brother, Kevin, has always told me that women can “fuck up your life.” Although she is two years older than me, is a college freshman and has already slept with her two previous boyfriends, Jenny says she feels she was more used than loved by those guys. Jenny dreams of marrying a nice guy like me and becoming a clinical psychologist who helps people with their problems. To do this, she reasons, she must have as few problems herself as possible. Pregnancy would be a problem.

Jenny doesn't want to take birth control, because she's absolutely convinced it will only encourage us to have more sex, which she just
knows
will get her pregnant. “You know,” she says, “the pill is only ninety-nine percent effective.”

In adhering to her strict evacuation-from-Buffalo plan, during the week she earns straight As at the local state college and on weekends deep-fries chicken wings and makes subs and bakes pizzas at Molino's. Meanwhile, she despises the pallid, hairsprayed young women with no apparent aspirations beyond mere existence who lurk around town like the bloated, chalk-white corpses in
Night of the Living Dead.
These sorrowful yet plentiful Buffalonians are reminders of her fate should she have the misfortune of getting pregnant.

Jenny constantly is telling me she loves me, but in the next breath she laments living in Buffalo, my hometown, which she views as, basically, a prison with snow drifts and small-mindedness for bars. Driving past dormant smokestacks, abandoned steel mills and rusty railroad tracks overgrown with weeds, she often wonders aloud, “Why would anyone choose to live here? If they know there are warmer, nicer places to live—with jobs, with sun, with actual fun things to do—why don't they move there?”

I love my city, but I really can't blame her. In 1970, the year I was born, the city of Buffalo prospered on the heels of its robust blue-collar
economy. It had 463,000 residents, making it the nation's twenty-eighth largest urban area. By 1990, the city's population had shrunk to 328,000, meaning in my lifetime the city had lost nearly a third of its population. Moreover, the city had physically shrunk, from 41.3 square miles to 40.6. The region eventually would make a comeback, but not when I was growing up.

One of the worst economic blows came in the early 1980s when the region's largest private employer, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, which in its mid-century heyday forged steel for the nation's biggest construction projects, from Manhattan skyscrapers to major bridge projects throughout the East, laid off nearly all of its employees. It now sits by polluted Lake Erie in apocalyptic desertion. Unemployment has surged, to over twenty percent in some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods.