The Late Bloomer (4 page)

Adding psychological insult to economic injury, despite nearly twenty seasons of trying, the Buffalo Bills, the Incredible Shrinking City's crown cultural jewel, still have not won the Super Bowl. Lately some of the city's own loyal inhabitants, who long ago dubbed Buffalo “The City of Good Neighbors,” have started calling it “The Mistake on the Lake.”

Clearly, things are getting grim. It's as if people suddenly have started realizing it isn't a good thing for “down south” to mean Pennsylvania; that keeping their snow tires on until May isn't exactly ideal; that when they want to put down residents of another city to make themselves feel better, after thinking long and hard for a less desirable locale, they can only come up with Cleveland or Rochester.

My hometown of Hamburg (population 52,000) sits about ten miles downwind of Buffalo's brick smokestacks, which line the Lake Erie shoreline like sentinels guarding the city against warm weather. Hamburg is situated on the glacial flatlands that ring all of the Great Lakes. Hamburg is greener and generally more pleasant (in the summer, at least) than the decaying core city ten miles to the north.
The town marks the beginning of Buffalo's southern suburbs. Roadside welcome signs proclaim it “The Gateway to the South Towns,” but, really, it is a middle-class sprawl of fast-food joints, strip malls, chain retailers and cloned housing subdivisions where the dread of another harsh winter lingers like a barrel of benzene buried below Love Canal (the famously polluted neighborhood near Niagara Falls from which my town is also downwind).

Although it's a more family-friendly place to live (murders are extremely rare) than Buffalo, and it has a lot of trees (in the summer, at least), the town of Hamburg isn't exactly home to the country's best and brightest. That's a nice way of saying my town has its fair share of racist steelworkers and trailer-trash mamas still young enough to use Clearasil.

Hamburg can be the kind of place where one day you'll see a skinny sophomore sitting in trig class cracking her gum and twisting her hair, all girlie-like and stuff; then, maybe a year later, you see the same girl at the grocery store with a drooling baby on her shoulder, purchasing two-for-ninety-nine-cents hot dogs and a stick of beef jerky with food stamps. “I'd rather die than live like that,” Jenny grouses.

I really can't blame her.

—

Jenny is my first love, and I find her obsessive desire to leave Buffalo one of her most attractive traits, mostly because, in that respect, I grow into total agreement with her. To make ourselves feel better about our geographic hardship, we will talk about how we are better than the underachieving losers around us, that we are destined for a greatness that is impossible to achieve in a city where an unspectacular NFL team is the most cherished cultural institution. Maybe we put down everyone around us just to build ourselves up. But my reasoning is that if it motivates us to move on to bigger, better, brighter places, then it's worth all the cynicism.

According to my master plan, I will enter the National Hockey League upon graduation. I have been a member of the U.S. Olympic hockey team development program since age fourteen. Every summer I fly out to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, where clipboard-clutching Team USA officials evaluate my skills. The nation's top players fire pucks at me at 100 mph; coaches videotape my on-ice moves and, later, study them in slow motion. Being invited to train at the center, the officials tell me, means I have a legitimate shot at making the 1992 Olympic ice hockey team, which has been my dream ever since I sat in the living room with Dad on a Saturday night in February 1980 and I saw my country defeat the Russians on its way to winning the gold medal.

Announcer:
Do you believe in miracles?

Me:
I believe!

The players on that team—Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, Mike Ramsey—were regular guys from regular northern towns with regular dads.
I could be them.

—

Some adolescent boys may receive their most influential sex education from teachers or doctors; a few may even learn about sex from their parents. But I'd bet most men-in-the-making learn from sex-ed. sources more like mine: movies, television, friends, porno magazines and rock stars. In fact, the first woman I ever see fully naked is Vanessa Williams in an issue of
Penthouse
that one of my brothers brought home one afternoon in 1984.

Among my earliest sexual influences is a perverted musician from Buffalo named “Dr. Dirty.” His real name is John Valby. But that's too vanilla of a name for a performer whose parodies of American pop and folk songs make “Weird Al” Yankovich look like a Christian rock star.

I am first exposed to Dr. Dirty's hallowed discography at age
twelve, while playing on a hockey team composed of potty-mouthed thirteen- and fourteen-year-old guys obsessed with sex and hockey—in that order.

It's around Christmas time as we sit on wood benches in the locker room lacing up our skates for practice. Quiet Riot, or some other hair-metal band, blares from the team's suitcase-size radio. (A decade from now, it will be chic for kids to own tiny radios, but at the moment a radio isn't cool unless it's the size of a small car and has more switches, levers and buttons than the cockpit of the Space Shuttle.) It's a few minutes before practice. Just as my teammates and I are ready to strap on our helmets and head for the ice, a player walks over to the mammoth tune box and ejects the tape. The guys begin yelling at the player to
put that fucking tape back in.

The object of their scorn slips in another cassette and presses play.

At first, we think that the dweeb has put on sissified Christmas carols, since all we hear is a piano playing the melody of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” But then a male, off-key lounge singer bellows:

Santa's whore is comin' to town!

Dr. Ruth Westheimer might be at her peak of popularity, but my teammates instantly decide they prefer Dr. Dirty.

As high school graduation nears, I have grown increasingly concerned that if I don't clean my pipes
pronto
the guys may start questioning my adherence to the unwritten code of sexual behavior. Yeah, I spent the summer before my sophomore year making out with Sophie, a French foreign-exchange student who was living with a family down the street. I am going out with Jenny, but since I'm not Mr. Horny like most of the other guys, I am just as homophobically afraid of being a “faggot” as I am of being called one.

The source of my anxiety is that I simply can't understand why most of my friends use metaphors like exploding rockets and boiling pots to describe the urge they feel to have sex. The pressure to have sex
is more of an external force (mostly fraternal and peer pressure) than an internal one bubbling from my loins. I don't sit around all day dreaming of naked girls undressing me. My friends talk about masturbation as if it's as much a part of their daily life as brushing their teeth. Tommy, Geoff, Mike and Rich brag about getting laid as if they had just found the cure for cancer. It such
a big deal.

I may not be a sex maniac, but at least I am a romantic.

As corny as it sounds, Jenny and I can identify with the characters John Cougar Mellencamp sings about in “Jack and Diane.” In fact, whenever that acoustic tune comes on the radio, we crank up the volume on her Ford's stereo and belt out car karaoke:
Little ditty, 'bout Jack and Diane . . . Two American kids growin' up in the heartland . . . Changes comin' around soon will make them women and men.

Although we are in love, we still aren't having sex. “If we can love each other without having sex, then we will know we really are in love,” Jenny has explained, usually as we lie in bed naked. My mind tells me that I have to get this sex thing over with, but my groin agrees with her. I really don't need to have sex. So I never pressure her. Instead, I assure her I am content with the occasional rub and a tug—for the time being, at least. “We've got a lifetime,” I say. “I'm not in any rush.”

The truth is (and I would never tell my hockey pals this) that it just isn't that difficult for me to abstain. First of all, Jenny's concerns in many ways only reinforce what my dad has been telling me for years about girls: “Don't knock one up. They'll ruin your life.” That makes Jenny not only a celibate option but a safe one. The last thing I want to do is fuck up my life by creating Kenny Junior. And neither of us want—nor can pay for—Jenny to get an abortion if she got pregnant.

I feel like I should have sex only because everyone else my age seems to be making such a big deal out of it. My Hamlet-esque quandary—to do it, or not to do it—only grows more and more vexing as, one by one, my buddies proclaim their “pipe-cleaning.”

Guys on my hockey team have said they have dumped girls because
they wouldn't go all the way. One fellow has even boasted that he kicked a girl out of his car one night because she wouldn't swallow. Most of them are probably lying in the way adolescent boys do about sex, but I don't know this. Since I believe them, it seems like all of my friends are having sex, my older brothers are having sex and hardly a TV show or movie appears without people having sex. Message: Everyone is having sex. And so should I.

To ward off any of my friends calling me a homo, I emit as much machismo as possible. I wear my baseball cap backwards. I listen to hard-rock music, like Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams and ZZ Top. I wear the coolest acid- and stone-washed jeans my mom can afford and don the white high-top Converse sneakers with the red, fat laces untied at the top. I preemptively combat their calling my masculinity into question by concocting fictional sexual encounters, plagiarizing material from what I can cobble together from my older brothers and stories I've been hearing older guys tell in the locker room since I was ten years old. Now, or so my fledgling male ego rationalizes, all I need to do is turn my creative tales into equally titillating nonfiction.

Yet, behind all my bravado is the truth: My saccharine sex life, sadly, could appear uncensored on
The Facts of Life.
Jenny and I may make out on her parents' couch for several hours into the night, until my lips are sore and my testicles ache, but, still, we never have sex. It doesn't matter if my thirty-two-inch-waist jockey shorts lay crumpled around my ankles, she grabs my groping hand and breathlessly says, “No, not yet, Kenny.”

Jenny fears that sexual intercourse will turn what she believes is our “special” relationship into nothing more than the kind of hedonistic humping that everyone else is doing. She thinks most relationships are about using, not loving, each other. Although I wouldn't admit this to my friends, I agree with Jenny, and even though I can't wait to get the having-sex thing over with, I really don't mind keeping it in my pants.

And the reason why I am not unzipping my pants enthusiastically to end my dry run is that if I have learned anything, it's that reproducing, if not planned, can make for one big unhappy family of parents and children—in my case, two incompatible parents and, at times, four male monsters.

“Kevin, uh, Keith, Kyle, uh . . . K-K-K-Kenny! Come in here, will ya?”

Penciling in newspaper crossword puzzles while sunken in her musty La-Z-Boy recliner, Gramma often will run through each of my brothers' names before finally calling me to the living room to seek my help on a particularly troubling puzzle query.

I am the fourth of the five Baker children—all boys—and for no apparent reason other than my parents,
L
arry and
M
arcia (go figure), like the eleventh letter of the alphabet, they have given each of us names starting with K. As a youngster, I learned that our overabundant Ks confuse my mother's mom. Gramma is a caring woman who bakes me cornbread and makes fat omelets packed with slabs of Velveeta in her iron skillet, but she has been borderline senile and hunchbacked for as long as I've known her. Unable to keep us “rascals” straight, Gramma ends up hiding a cheat sheet next to her chair, stuffed in her eyeglass case. An investigative journalist in the making, one day I find a piece of notebook paper, on which what appears to be her attempt at listing us Baker boys in the correct birth order:

Kevin
✓

Keith
✓

Kyle
✓

Kenny
✓

Kris
✓

Kevin, the oldest of the Baker boys, is the inaugural draftee into Dad's manhood military. Unfortunately—for Kevin and Dad—Kevin isn't a good soldier. Kevin butts heads with Dad over his hard-ass parenting methods. In the summertime, I often watch Dad play catch with his eldest son till dusk, coaching him on his baseball technique. How to pitch a curveball, a sinker, a knuckleball. How to field a pop fly. How to pick off a guy on first base. How to steal second.

Dad sometimes teaches with great patience. I feel then like we are one of those happy TV families where the dad is a kindhearted, unconditionally loving gentleman and the sons are compliant and respectful. Just as often, though, Dad's coaching sessions degenerate into a shouting match between two hardheads.

One time Kevin, who was twelve, complained that his throwing arm was getting sore.

“Let's take a break, Dad,” Kevin whined.

Dad has always hated whiners. He rocketed the ball even harder into Kevin's glove, punctuating his bullet by saying, “I've been working my ass off all day, and I'm not tired.”

Kevin dropped his mitt down and stomped toward the house. Dad chased after Kevin, shouting into his face, “Quitter!”

Kevin—surprise, surprise—soon goes AWOL from my father's army and drops out of organized sports altogether. He decides he instead wants to be the lead guitarist in a rock band. Ted Nugent, not Ted Williams, becomes his idol.

Kevin takes me and Kyle to a Kiss concert at the dry-ice-shrouded Buffalo Memorial Auditorium. As Gene Simmons is spitting blood onto the audience, I sneak a glimpse of Kevin puffing on a joint and handing it back to a girl sitting in the row in front of us.
Holy . . . shit! That is so illegal.
“If you breathe in deep,” he shouts to me over the music, “you can catch a contact buzz.” I am nine years old.

Kevin has spent his teens growing things—his hair, midway down his back, and a forest of marijuana plants in his basement closet under a heat lamp, just as he read about it in
High Times.
Dad never finds the plants or the magazines. Kevin is lucky: Dad probably would cut his balls off if he ever knew that his son was growing the best copycat Colombian in western New York right below his bedroom.

Keith, who is christened Dad's favorite until he follows in what Dad calls Kevin's “druggie footsteps” in his early teens and starts having sex, smoking pot, dropping acid and skipping school, ends up officially on Dad's so-called shit list the year he quits baseball.

Kyle, a year older than me, possesses a personality 180 degrees opposite of mine. Despite being a year apart, we have very different relationships with our father.

Dad has never been Mr. Affection with any of us. We never got a good-night peck on the cheek (that was Mom's job). Out of our hundreds of childhood photos, never is Dad pictured hugging or kissing any of us. In fact, the most intimate photo is from when I am three, standing shirtless on the beach holding a fishing pole after having just caught a fish. Dad is resting his arm on me, his wrist awkwardly curled around my upper arm as if he's hugging Pig Pen.

The only time I've ever heard of Dad changing a diaper was when he had to baby-sit me and Kyle, who was about two years old. As the family legend goes, my mother was away for a day and Dad was watching us. Shit started leaking from Kyle's diaper as he butt-bounced down the carpeted stairs from the second floor to the living room. Dad had to change Kyle's diaper and wipe up the mess, probably for the first time in his married life. He shouted at Kyle so much that day that, according to both my mom and dad, Kyle did not talk to my dad for about the next five years.

As pre-kindergartners, although Kyle is the sweetest kid on the block, he is as clumsy, shy and introverted as I am active, friendly and outgoing. Kyle loves animals. He enjoys catching tadpoles and
watching them grow into frogs, and likes trapping turtles. He's got a gentle touch with nature; I'd rather play with a ball.

Growing up, the single greatest thing Kyle and I have in common is our white-blond hair. When I'm four, Kyle, carrying his perpetual hangdog expression, mopes around the neighborhood so quietly that I feel obligated to speak on behalf of the Baker boy most everyone assumes is a deaf-mute.

“Would you like some soup?” our neighbor, Mrs. Parker, asks Kyle one day during a visit. He gives his usual response to strangers' inquiries: He sucks his thumb and stares down at his untied sneakers.

Usually, older brothers protect their younger brothers. Standing a little over half his height, though, it is I who looks out for my older brother, mostly because I hate it when people think he's retarded. “Kyle doesn't like soup,” I protectively tell Mrs. Parker. “He likes cheese sandwiches.” Mimicking what I had heard Mom explain to other adults, I add, “He's just shy.”

My mother tries like hell to turn Kyle into a walking, talking human being like the rest of his extroverted brothers. And Dad? He shows love the only way he really knows how: He makes Kyle play sports.

First up, baseball. Bigger than the other kids, Kyle initially can slug the ball over the outfield fence and throw harder than anyone. But by the time he turns twelve—when other kids get quicker and more competitive—Kyle, who had earned the nickname “gentle giant,” lags behind and soon quits.

The same thing happens with hockey. After I begin playing at age eight, Dad signs up Kyle for the beginners' clinic. While I whiz around the rink, skating and stickhandling circles around opponents, Kyle glides along the boards, ankles bent inward, simply struggling not to crack his tailbone when he crashes to the ice like a sack of bricks. Dad probably thinks that lavishing me with praise will motivate Kyle to get better. It doesn't. Kyle quits after just one season.

Kyle stays inside most of the time, reading sci-fi novels, watching
Star Trek
and sketching apocalyptic cartoons in his sketchbook. He's an earnest, well-behaved kid; yet, soon Dad all but stops paying attention to Kyle.

While playing in the side yard one afternoon, I overhear my parents arguing in the kitchen.

“Larry,” Mom whispers, “just because he doesn't like sports doesn't mean he's gay. He has different interests than the other kids. He needs your support. Did you ever think that maybe he's alone up there right now because you're not with him?”

The argument ends like most of theirs: Dad lets out a condescending grunt and storms out of the house and peels out of the driveway, leaving behind a fresh scent of burnt rubber and my mother crying at the kitchen table.

Mom signs Kyle up for private art lessons, which gives him an expressive outlet but further alienates him from my dad, who, of course, says, “Art is for homos.”

The less attention he gives Kyle, the more Kris, the baby of the family, and I receive. It's not exactly a shock that by age fifteen Kyle becomes a stoner (following in the freak footsteps of elders Kevin and Keith) and wants nothing to do with Dad and everything to do with enjoying the feel-good escapism of Mary Jane and Jerry Garcia's jams. A week after Kyle graduates from high school, he leaves Buffalo to travel with the Grateful Dead for a summer. Dad calls him a “loser.”

Dad constantly reminds me that, at any time, I, too—with enough stupidity—can end up on his shit list. Whenever I do something remotely bad, like stay out past my nine-o'clock curfew or get a D in math or skip hockey or baseball practice, my father makes sure to remind me that the minute I start misbehaving—or “fucking up”—he will write me off as well.

Dad doesn't so much as say it, but I realize there are several things I can do to lose my father's respect. I can quit hockey, do drugs or—
and I surmise this is the worst thing because it hits so close to home for him—knock up a girl.

Kevin and Keith haven't been the best of role models for me in that department. I have grown up watching my two oldest brothers love 'em and leave 'em—often in the span of one night, without even leaving their basement bedrooms. Their late-night trysts usually involve sneaking a girl into the basement sometime after midnight. As my dad, exhausted by carrying three hundred pounds on his five-foot-eight frame, snores upstairs—their green light that the coast is clear—the two young lovers will tiptoe down the stairs, their steps in such perfect sync that they sound like one person walking.

Though two years younger than Kevin, Keith beats our older brother on the sexual conquest count by a margin of at least five to one. Keith is such a Casanova that Kevin has nicknamed him Fith, which stands for “
F
ucking
I
n
T
he
H
ouse.”

I know my older brothers' sexual scorecard so well because I sometimes gingerly tiptoe downstairs a few minutes after I hear Keith or Kevin, and usually some cute girl, creaking down the wooden staircase to the basement, where I then secretly listen to them through one of their padlocked bedroom doors. When they don't crank up their Van Halen, Aerosmith or Grateful Dead tapes, I can hear the girl groaning and grunting as if she's pumping iron, leaving me wondering just what my brother is doing in there. I have an idea, albeit a vague one.

I grow adept at hiding in the dark, behind an old couch that sits wedged into a corner of the basement, listening surreptitiously to their festivities. Copying a tactic I saw on either
Three's Company
or
The Brady Bunch
, I sometimes place a drinking glass between my ear and the bedroom wall to amplify the noise coming from inside their bedrooms. It works like a charm.

My spying goes undetected for months until one night, thanks to our hyperactive black Labrador, Rocky Balboa, as in the cinematic boxer. Rocky doesn't like closed doors; he yelps and scratches mightily
until you open it and let him in. And whenever Rocky hears what to him sounds like someone in pain or trouble, he faithfully trots over and offers an ambulatory paw and tongue. I know this is a sweet quality, and I usually appreciate his adorable doggie demeanor, but this time I can do without the canine's caring heart.

Freaked out after hearing one of Fith's girlfriends moaning, Rocky won't stop barking and scratching on the bedroom door.

“Shhh, Rocky, shhh,” I whisper from behind the couch. “Quiet, boy. C'mere.”

Damn dog.

Shirtless and sweating, Keith swings open his door and shoos Rocky away with a swift kick to the doggie ribs. The last thing Keith wants is for Rocky to wake Dad. So Keith grips shut Rocky's mouth and kicks him again, right in the doggie ribs.

As Rocky yelps, I huddle red-faced behind the couch, holding my breath, hoping Keith won't give
me
the Rocky treatment. Just then good ol' Rocky gallops over to my shadowy hiding spot and pokes his nose behind the couch and starts licking me. My cheeks now blue, I have no choice but to blow a loud exhale.

Busted.

Keith has what a psychologist might call “anger-management issues.” His angst probably has something to do with the rest of us pointing out that he is the only one of the five Baker boys who has our dad's thick black hair and reddish-brown skin, a genetic remnant of my father's paternal grandmother, who, according to family legend, I am told was a tribal member of the Cherokee Nation. We all—even Keith—have our dad's high cheekbones and straw-straight hair. But while Kevin, Kyle, Kris and myself are blond and pale (thanks to our mom's Irish and Polish/Russian heritage), only Keith has the skin tone and dark hair of our dad. We like to remind Keith of his conspicuously Native American heritage, calling him “Indian Boy,” which only fans the flames of his already flammable temper.

Blame it on our politically incorrect epithets, blame it on years of
his being subjected to our dad's equally volatile temper or blame it on the closed-fist diplomacy of his big brother, Kevin, who has bullied Keith ever since their preschool fights over Tonka toys. Whatever its cause, Keith possesses a temper that, judging from the bestial look in his brown eyes, he is two seconds away from unleashing on me.

“What THE FUCK are you doing?” he says mounding the chest of my T-shirt into his hand. He lifts me off the floor, letting my legs dangle like a rag doll.

“I was just looking for something,” I say, guilty as sin, scared as shit.

“Yeah, right,” he says. “You were spying on me, you fuckin' homo.”

Deeming past experience an accurate indicator of future events, I conclude that Keith plans to box my ears (which entails him simultaneously whacking my ears as if my head were a mosquito), or he is about to hold me in a Hulk Hogan headlock until I either faint or tearfully promise to never spy on him again. (Keith used to take twisted pleasure in lifting me up by the elastic of my underwear, so I started not wearing any, thus thwarting his patented “ball-busters.”)