The Late Bloomer (9 page)

“There are faster and taller goalies out there,” Dad has told me more than once. “But no one works harder than you do, Kenny.”

And after several years of monkish dedication—during which I choose hockey over girls, drinking, goofing off and all the other social activities most of my peers engage in—all my hard work starts to pay off when I am invited to train at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. I get on a plane for the first time in my life. None of my brothers has ever flown; my father has only flown once.
I knew I was better than them!

There I play against the young ice studs who will go on to become National Hockey League all-stars: Jeremy Roenick, Mike Modano, Steve Heinze, Tony Amonte. At sixteen I'm ranked the top goalie my age in the country, meaning that I have a legitimate shot at making it to the big leagues, or at least earning a Division I scholarship, even though I have absolutely no career aspirations other than stopping pucks with my body, which, much to my chagrin, does not look nearly as impressive as the goaltending feats it can perform.

I am a junior in high school; yet, I can't stop thinking about how my sixth-grade health teacher warned us to expect biological changes over the next few years. Soon, she lectured, our childlike bodies would
transform into adult figures. “All of you will start thinking a lot more about sex,” she said, eliciting a chorus of giggles. She said that boys, bubbling with testosterone, would go girl-crazy; ovulatory and estrogen-infused, girls would go boy-crazy.

Whatever. Those health class lectures seem like trailers for movies that promise epics but turn out to be turkeys.

I have shaved only once, and that was just to see what it felt like, because I couldn't see any stubble, at least not without a magnifying glass. I have never had a wet dream, and while I have recently shot up to five feet eleven inches, I have spaghetti-thin arms and a belly that jiggles and a waist that won't harden no matter how many sit-ups I do or how many meals I skip.

I'm pushing 180 pounds, which would be fine if I had more muscle, which is denser (thus heavier per square inch) than fat. I learn this sad fact at a junior Olympic tryout in Colorado Springs in the summer of 1986. The first day of camp, the coaches line us up in a gym and ask the players to strip down to our underwear. It's time for the official weigh-in, they announce.

I have been dreading this moment, running five miles a day at the high school track and skipping breakfast and dinner for the past month. I weighed 185 pounds on June 1 and wanted to slim down to 175 by the time I left for the Olympic Training Center on July 6, under the reasonable logic that they aren't going to pick a fat goalie for the Olympic team.

Two days before the tryout camp I step on my mother's scale in the bathroom. With all the nervousness of a roulette spinner, I cringe as the dial stops at the 181-pound mark.
What? I've hardly eaten for weeks. That's brutal!

When my plane lands in Colorado Springs a couple of days later, I'm light-headed from starvation. In the last forty-eight hours I've ingested two cans of OJ, three pieces of toast (no butter), several glasses of water, one bite of American Airlines quiche surprise and a Coke.
Jenny gave me an apple at the Buffalo airport, but I didn't even eat that.

Standing amid a pale sea of shirtless hockey prospects in their boxers and briefs, I gaze jealously at chiseled pecs that slapshots have shaped into rock-solid breastplates. Muscular thighs sturdy as tree stumps. Washboard abs. Adonis shoulders forming the wide top of V-shaped upper bodies tapering down to narrow waists. And there I stand, self-conscious, my boobies almost as big as my girlfriend's and that . . . that fucking
belly
hanging over the waist of my shorts like a fleshy Quebec tourist's on a Florida beach.

I contract my stomach muscles and suck in the gut, practically turning blue from holding my breath. I'm waiting for my turn to step on the scale, but about thirty guys are ahead of me. Most of them want to weigh as much as possible, to look big, strong and tough on the stat sheet, which is pored over by pro scouts. So many of the players were eating plateloads of bread and spaghetti and fatty desserts at lunch. A few guys had even planned on wearing ankle weights, an idea that they had to abort when the coaches made us take off our clothes.

My pal Jeff, a goalie from Minnesota, is standing in front of me. When he turns around, I cross my arms in front of my body. He stares me up, then down.

“Hey, Bakes,” he says, “you on the doughnut diet or something?”

I tip the scale at 179 pounds.

Off the ice, being timed in the forty-yard dash and the push-up competitions, I feel sluggish and fat. But on the ice, my body hidden under thirty pounds of leather leg pads, a chest protector, arm pads and a goalie mask, I am lightning fast, letting in fewer goals than any other goalie. I make the cut. The last day of camp, the coaches call me into a training room. If I had any fingernails left, I would be chewing them. They hand me a Team U.S.A. folder and tell me congratulations. I am a member of the sixteen-year-old United States national hockey team.

—

My goaltending achievements—rather than my feats of denial—earn me my first press, a feature story in an August 1987 newspaper article that runs just before the start of my senior year of high school.

The Bee
prints with the story a photo of me posing in my pads and gloves with my official red, white and blue Team U.S.A. hockey jersey and a headline declaring, “Stopping the shot everyday occurrence for local youth.” It praises me as a local boy poised to move on to bigger and better things. It certainly isn't Pulitzer material, but the reporter does a pretty good job at summing up my hockey career:

Division I hockey, the Olympics and the National Hockey League are all in the realm of possibilities for one local youth.

Kenneth Baker recently came back from the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado where he participated in the Select-17 camp, comprised of the best 17-year-old hockey players in the country. Of eight goalies at the camp, Baker was rated third and was told the competition was so close he could have easily been chosen as the top goalie in the country.

At the age of 16, Baker attended the Select-16 camp in which he played against Quebec. It was the first United States gold medal hockey win since the 1980 Olympics. . . . At the age of 12, he played on the 13–14 year-old team. At 5-0 and 135–140 pounds, he was a large goalie.

During his first game for the traveling team, Baker remembers playing his present coach Kris Hicks' team. Baker's team lost 8-2 but it was during that game he realized he wanted to play for Hicks.

“I got a call from this guy wanting to know if I had open tryouts,” Hicks said, referring to Baker's father, Larry. “When he came to tryouts I saw this little fat kid come out on the ice. I had two goalies from the year before trying out. But Baker was the best kid
on the ice. He had the best reflexes of all the goalies. He didn't know anything about playing goalie, but he had the best reflexes.”

As a member of the Niagara Scenic Junior A Hockey Club based in West Seneca, Baker will have the opportunity to travel to Chicago, Detroit and Canada to play other athletes of his caliber.

Baker's immediate goal is to play for a Division I college. After that, he has thought about both the Olympics and the National Hockey League. Under NCAA rules, five Division I schools can transport Baker to their campus to encourage him to attend that school and receive an athletic scholarship.

All college correspondences Baker has received are alphabetized and put in a black box. If the correspondence is too large for the black box it is placed in a cardboard box. Baker, who will be a senior at Frontier High School, has been contacted by about 30 of the 41 Division I schools. The schools include Wisconsin, Brown University and Notre Dame.

Baker appears to have the world at his hands. However, he does not see himself as a great hockey player but instead looks at what he needs to do to improve. Next year, when the college decision is made and the NHL draft rolls around, Baker may obtain his goals.

“When he was eight, Kenny asked me how to become famous,” Larry said. “I told him to take something he was good at and become the best at it. He had just started playing hockey and said, ‘Well, I'm going to become a famous hockey player.'”

Reading this story now, some thirteen years later, I notice the omissions more than the accolades. The article doesn't mention that I have virtually no social life outside of hockey, that I have never attended a school dance and that I spend a fair amount of my free time doing hundreds of sit-ups in my bedroom, poking at my flabby stomach with disgust afterward. The reporter mentions that I don't consider myself a great hockey player, but she doesn't know—because I don't tell her—that I have such a low regard for my talents because I am a
teenage perfectionist who mentally abuses himself
(You suck! . . . Piece of shit! . . . You could have stopped that shot. Get your ass in gear!)
for several days after letting in a bad goal or making a knucklehead play.

She doesn't know that when I was eleven, I decided one day that what I really wanted to do was be a professional figure skater. My mother had taken me to see an ice show, one of those Christmastime ice ballets in which spotlights illuminate princes lifting princesses above a dreamy mist of dry ice. I was mesmerized by the grace and beauty of the figure skaters. Afterward I told my mother how much more graceful these skaters were than hockey players. She suggested I sign up for figure skating. “I bet it will make you a better hockey player,” she encouraged.

Back home, Mom told Dad that I wanted a pair of figure skates and might start taking lessons. Dad wasn't so keen on the idea of seeing one of his sons carving figure eights into the ice. He probably could taste the bile at the mere thought of his son wearing a pair of spandex pants, a silk blouse and rouge smeared on his cheeks. Dad came up to my room and poked his head through the crack in the door. “Figure skating is for pussies,” he said sternly. “If you do that, everyone will think you are light in your loafers.” I never took a single figure-skating lesson.

Furthermore, the newspaper reporter doesn't know that ever since my father left, I—not my dad—have taken care of my little brother, whose anxiety has been so acute lately that he, at ten years old, still pees his bed. The article also doesn't mention that, a few months before the interview, my dad suffered another one of his bouts of depression after yet another kidney-stone attack. These are the family secrets that don't make it into that newspaper puff piece, the dirty little truths that scare me, that motivate me, but that I don't dare tell anyone about, lest I reveal my weaknesses and vulnerability and risk not becoming famous.

I want people to think I have “the world at my hands,” because my dad has taught me that showing anything but confidence and
machismo and invincibility is unmanly. Dad tells me that I should envision myself as Tom Barrasso (the Sabres' hotshot young goalie) and then play as if I am him.

“If you want to be the best, you have to think, act, walk, talk, eat, piss,
shit
, like the best,” my dad says.

“What if I'm not feeling like the best?” I ask.

“Fake it,” he says. “If you believe it, you can achieve it.”

A year and a half after Tonya died in the train accident, I meet her older sister, Jenny, at a party Kyle throws in the half of a backyard behind our duplex. Jenny resembles Tonya only in her cute, brunette looks. Jenny doesn't drink or smoke pot. She also doesn't have a boyfriend who may tackle me for making out with her. Four months into our relationship, I still haven't told Jenny that I had been with Tonya. It's, well, a little too weird. It doesn't occur to me that maybe I am partially attracted to Jenny because she is a way of finding a sense of closure with her dead sister. I just think she is cute.

Although I have virtually taken a vow of celibacy and not touched another girl since the Tonya affair, I change my mind when I meet Jenny, because (a) Jenny seems too mature and sweet to screw me over, and (b) no matter how anxious I am about the whole idea of sex, I still want to put that magical squirt function of mine to its intended use.

I may not be boiling with carnal desire, but—thanks to that commercial for that Toronto hotel—at least Jenny and I have agreed upon a location and a date for what Jenny has taken to calling “The Gift.” She is giving something to me; I don't have to do anything. It kind of takes the pressure off.

The day after Jenny's epiphany, I call the Sutton Place and reserve a room with Jenny's dad's Visa number. I lower my voice to sound older. I reserve a room with king-size bed, reasoning that we will be spending a lot of time on it.

The next four months are spent preparing—logistically and mentally—for my inaugural romp.
Damn, it will feel good to get this over with.

There's just one teensy-weensy little problem, though. Despite Dr. Dirty's best efforts, I'm still not clear on the biomechanics of how a guy actually goes about inserting his penis into a vagina. I mean, it isn't as if anyone has ever sat me down and showed me how to do it. Sure, I've seen porno magazines, but you can watch someone snow-blow the driveway and still have no clue how to do it yourself. Those mandatory health classes—with their sterile descriptions of birds and bees and ejaculations and menstrual periods—weren't very helpful, either. And my parental sex education has consisted of my dad calling me at home soon after I began seeing Jenny and initiating the following conversation:

“You like this girl, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

(Uncomfortable pause.)

“Well, make sure you put a rubber on it.”

Predictably, Dad's Archie Bunker School of Sexual Education hasn't brought me any closer to solving the whole penis-into-vagina insertion mystery.
Do I spread her legs? Will I need that jelly stuff? Or does she do that herself? How fast do I move? What if the condom slips off? And how do you put a rubber on, anyway? How will I know when—and if—she comes? Will she squirt all over me or something?
I have to figure these things out, but I'm sure as hell not about to humiliate myself by asking anyone.

I've got time. I have from January until April eighteenth—my birthday—to prepare for the nerve-wracking event.

—

My friend Garrett is not a hockey player, which means we can have actual conversations, not just the kind of tits-and-asses gabfests most of my hockey pals prefer. Yet, even Garrett, a sensitive folk singer whom I thought was as monastic in his musical pursuits as I am with hockey, almost chokes on his Coke when I tell him my secret. It's a couple of weeks before Jenny and I are supposed to go to Toronto for my birthday gift. I haven't told anyone about our plans for sex, and I think that Garrett may be able to impart some wisdom (he is a year older than me). We're sitting in the mall food court when I break the news to Garrett.

“You've
never
done it?” Garrett says. “But . . . but you told me you and Jenny screwed all the time.”

“Yeah, well, I lied.” It feels good to finally tell someone the truth. “Dude, how can you hold back?” Garrett asks. “I can't go a day without wanting to do it with my girlfriend.” He's shaking his head, incredulous. “You must jerk off a lot, huh?”

“Not really.”

“Get outta here.” Noticing my dead-serious expression, he quickly adds, “Seriously?”

“Swear to God. We do some stuff, you know, but sex just isn't the most important thing to me right now.”

“Wow. Hats off, dude. You're a better man than me. I could never hold back like that. You're going to have a lot of fun, man.”

This conversation does nothing to boost my sexual self-esteem; neither does the entire popular culture around me that seems to be based on sex. The bottom line is that I'm a high school junior; I have a penis (over seven inches long, thank you; I measured it with a ruler one night in my room while on the phone with Jenny); virtually everything in the culture I see around me suggests I should be having
sex. For example,
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
is, basically, about high school students having sex. Even Patrick “Johnny Castle” Swayze and Jennifer “Baby” Grey “dirty dance” and, afterward, have passionate sex.

The problem is that, unlike seemingly every other human on the planet, I don't feel an overwhelmingly hormonal urge to have sex. It just seems like having sex is what a young man is supposed to do in order to become a real man; it is what the culture has informed me is a talisman of masculine power. But I have a very poor sexual appetite. I'm what an expert in such things would call a sexual anorexic, if there is such a thing.

Luckily my friend Paul has been having sex for several years (or so he claims), and, being well-versed in everything there is to know about girls, he serves as my coitus coach. Paul is a drummer in the high school band. In practice rooms, while tuning drums, we talk sex.

One afternoon Paul initiates a highly informative, sexually frank discussion as we sit in the percussion pit before band rehearsal.

“Before you do anything, man, you have to fabric fuck her,” Paul instructs, air-humping like Michael Jackson in the “Thriller” video.

I tell him I don't know what a quote-unquote fabric fuck is. “Like this,” he says, gluing his pelvis to a kettle drum and humping. “You fuck her through the fabric of your pants.”

A few days later Jenny calls me at home from her dorm room. Her voice is quavering. She obviously is crying.

“I don't know if we are doing the right thing,” she says, sniffling. “I don't know if we are ready for this.”

“We don't have to do anything.”

“I know. I'm just worried that, after we do it, things will change between us. I don't want our relationship to only be about sex.”

“We only have to do it once. That's it. I don't even care about that. Whatever you want to do is fine.”

She calms down and, before hanging up, says she loves me, and I assure her that I feel the same way.

—

April eighteenth comes quicker than expected. Hockey season is over; my junior year of high school is nearly complete. With no hockey until the summer league starts, I have little to do but work and obsess over losing my virginity.

My birthday arrives. I call in sick to my boss at Super Duper, the grocery store where I behead lettuce. I tell Dad I'm spending the night at Paul's house; no need to make the old man worry that I'm going to knock up a girl and ruin my life. This will be a secret trip.

For my birthday Paul has given me a twelve-pack of ribbed, lubricated Trojans. “The ribbed ones'll make her moan,” he says, placing the box in my hand. “Trust me.”

Saturday morning comes, a day before my birthday. I stuff the Trojans, a pair of jeans, an extra pair of tighty-whities, a couple of T-shirts and a heavy jacket (hey, we're going to Canada!) into my backpack. Jenny picks me up in the late morning, grinning from ear to ear. Two large leather bags are hidden under a blanket in the hatchback area of her mom's Ford Escort.

“What's up with two suitcases? We're only gonna be gone for a night.”

“You'll see,” she says.

It's a two-hour trip up the Queen Elizabeth Parkway from Buffalo to Toronto, and the whole boring ride up, all Jenny wants to talk about is The Gift.

“Guess what?” she says as we whiz down the freeway at a hundred kilometers an hour.

“What?”

“I'm at day five in my cycle. It's almost impossible for me to get pregnant tonight.” She's gripping the wheel like she's riding a roller coaster. “I'm
so
psyched about that.”

“Yep,” I say, glumly, ambivalently staring out the window. I'm
thinking that this trip may not be what I want. I recline the seat back and shut my eyes.

“What's wrong?” she asks.

“Just tired,” I mumble.

She tries to cheer me up by telling me how we were going to wait till midnight, when I turn seventeen, before hopping into bed and “doing it.” Naked even. “Don't worry about anything,” she adds. “Just relax and let nature take over.”

I am sick of talking about it, and, truth be told, I can't relax. I just want to get it over with.

At Niagara Falls, halfway to Toronto, I start biting my fingernails. By the time we pull to the valet curb at Sutton Place, I have gnawed them to the skin and they're bleeding.

Jenny checks us in at the front desk as I sit in one of the lobby's pseudo-antique chairs, watching tourists and businessmen bustling back and forth from the entrance to the elevator bank. The hotel sure doesn't look as glamorous as it did on the commercial. The floor is covered with fake marble tile and none of the workers speak with the kind of elegant British accent of the commercial announcer. Muzak oozes out of tiny speakers on the wall.

Jenny returns with the key and, holding hands like newlyweds, we ride the elevator to the sixth floor. Keeping with the hotel's less-than-luxurious accommodations, I separate the curtains and take in an entirely unimpressive view of a back alley. At least the bathroom comes stocked with free soap, shampoo and, as an elated Jenny notes, two terry-cloth bathrobes just like the ones that couple wore in the commercial.

I immediately collapse onto the king-size mattress. It's not even noon, but I'm feeling so tense about this whole virginity-ending ritual that I have exhausted myself. “Take a nap, big boy,” Jenny says, petting my head. “You're going to need all the energy you can.” If she's nervous about what's about to happen, she doesn't show it.

When I wake two hours later, Jenny is splayed beside me in her panties and a T-shirt, her button nose rattling with snores. Scanning her ivory-smooth legs, it occurs to me that this whole wait-till-midnight thing is silly.
I should just start kissing her, pull off her underwear, slap on a condom and get the damn thing over with.

I don't even feel like having sex.

This is what I have been waiting for, the chance to experience that mysterious activity I've only seen done in my brothers' hard-core porno mags and heard about from Dr. Dirty. Something is definitely wrong. But I have to go through with this. What do I do when I don't feel like playing hockey but my team is relying on my goaltending? I grin and bear it.
This is what you've been waiting for, dude. Just relax and wait for tonight.

I wait, but I definitely don't relax. Antsy, I shake her awake.

Jenny has made an eight-o'clock dinner reservation at a “romantic” restaurant on the waterfront, but after strolling through the downtown area we skip dinner and head straight back to the hotel. I'm so nervous that as we walk back, I suggest—more accurately, I mumble—that we cancel our sex plans for another night. “It's such a beautiful night!” Jenny exclaims. She hasn't heard me, and I don't repeat myself.

In the hotel room Jenny takes charge. “Let's take a bath,” she says, kicking off her sandals. “Wait here.” She takes all her clothes off and steps into the bathroom. Before closing the door, she quips, “But stay here.”

A few minutes later she shouts through the door, “Okay, you can come in!”

I creak open the door and peek inside the darkened room.

“Ta-da!” she says, soaking seductively in the tub amid a pillow of cumulus soap bubbles. Two scented candles flicker on the counter next to a portable radio humming with classical music. I take off my clothes and squeeze into the tiny tub made for two—dwarfs, that is—displacing about a gallon of water onto the floor.

“Ow-eee!” I squeal. “Fuckin' A, Jenny. Why's it so boiling?”

“Hot water kills sperm. You know, the Chinese have been using hot water for birth control for centuries. You can never be too safe.”

Maybe, I think, but you
can
overplan things.

By the time I have suitably soaked my testicles, it is almost midnight, and my much-ballyhooed birthday. We wrap ourselves in the hotel robes and head toward the bed. This whole do-this-do-that charade is making me feel more like a car on an assembly line than a guy on the romantic date of his life. I just want to get it over with.

Jenny carries the radio from the bathroom and sets it on the nightstand as I disrobe and sit naked on the edge of the bed as Jenny reaches into her top-secret bag and yanks out a handful of rubbers the way a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, tossing them into a lazy pile on the king-size mattress.
This is really happening.

Jenny—“I made a mix tape”—slides a cassette tape into the radio and presses Play. Just as she lets her robe drop to the floor and straddles me, the lead singer of Foreigner croons:

Feels like the first time

Like it never will again
 . . .

After rolling around the mattress for a few minutes, our lips locked, our naked bodies glued, Jenny gropes for one of the dozen or so rubbers on the mattress. She bites open the aluminum packaging and spits it out. I can feel her dripping wetness on my thigh.

Holding the condom in her right hand, with the free hand she grabs my penis . . . but it's limp. So she sucks on it. . . . When that doesn't work, she rubs it up and down . . . jerking it harder with every pump . . . but it still won't rise.