junkmail for blankets

what you do with it

First, I owe about 30 people an e-mail. I promise I haven't forgotten. Second, here's a new essay in its first draft form. I'll go ahead and WARN you that it contains uneuphemized references to non-public-parts. That is, there is direct, explicit mention of certain body parts throughout the essay, so you know. Also, this piece was written to be read out loud (I recorded a live reading of it, but I can't get easy access to enough server space to post the .mp3), so it loses something on the page. Alas.

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What You Do With It

For a while there, I actually began to believe that being small is no worse than being big. Parents have a way of tricking kids like that. “Oh, honey, I don’t care what your tee-ball coach says—you throw the ball just right”; “Son, I don’t care what your big sister says—if you believe in your heart that you can run fast, that’s all that matters”; “I don’t care what your teacher says . . .”; “I don’t care what your picture looks like . . .”; “I don’t care what that bully did . . . .” Then you hit middle school, and you suspect that “I don’t care” might have been the only true part.

In elementary school, you can afford to be small, a little underdeveloped. For instance, in sixth grade, a kid with a moustache is a freak. In seventh grade, he’s god. Pubic blooming, I don’t care what anyone says, is the measuring stick. “Size doesn’t matter” is the middle school Maginot line.

Erik Maldonado, the Hitler of Shadowlawn Middle School, was the first person ever to call me a “pussy.” Had he been studying WWII history instead of Megadeth lyrics, he might have called me a “Frenchie” instead, might have said, “I don’t care what anyone says, you little pussy, Frenchie pussy—size matters.” He would have been preaching to Le Choir, though; I’d already figured that out.

Angelica Berry was my first real infatuation. Smart, popular, blonde, five-foot-one, six inches taller than me. In exchange for some Jolly Ranchers and a poem I wrote her, Angelica agreed to let me wear her jacket—God, that petite, form-fitting, khaki jacket—for the day. She gave me the jacket at the beginning of first period Biology. I don’t remember the teacher’s name now, and I probably couldn’t have told you his name then; I spent the entire hour thinking about how my skin was touching the places where her skin touched, how her pheromones were talking to mine, saying, I hoped, “I don’t care what anyone says, you’re just the right size for me.” By the time 5th period gym started, my best friend, Angelica’s friends, and Coach Champagne, the gym teacher, had complimented me on my trenchcoat.

Coach Champagne always wore a v-neck sweater, so that a tuft of chest hair popped out above the neckline, a brown pubic eye employed to keep tabs on Erik Maldonado and his band of bushy brothers, who kept breaking in line during tumbling, probably the only gym activity that didn’t require hand-to-hand combat. Not that it was completely free of bodily peril. After five straight turns launching off the mini-tramp and dive-rolling onto the mat, Erik had left a perfectly formed, 5-foot wide swath of hair and neck-grease on the landing spot. If Coach Champange’s tuft of hair noticed, it turned a blind eye. Erik laughed as, for the first time in gym history, people tried cutting backwards in line—there was no way I was letting Erik’s musk invade my and Angelica’s private scent garden. Unfortunately, Coach Champagne’s philosophy of gym class didn’t leave room for pansies with excuses (evidenced the year before when he ordered Ted Olney—whose prosthetic leg unclipped halfway through a dive-roll, sailed across the gym, and exploded against the metal bleachers—to strap it back on and do it again). So I did the dive roll. I tried to avoid landing in Erik’s circle, but it was too big. Me and Angelica and, now, Erik: a pheromone menage a trois. I had to wash that stuff off of me, which required a visit to the gym locker room, which I’d sworn never to step foot in again.

During a gym class at the beginning of the year, I’d had to pee bad, and it was pouring outside, so it was locker room or bust. I’ve come to believe that the same man designs all middle school gym locker rooms, and that either he is a man who had been tricked at some point into believing that size doesn’t matter, or he adheres to the curious philosophy that stalls are for horses and troughs are for boys, the catch being that if you’re not hung like a horse, either you better be willing to hold it, or you better be naive. At this point, I was the latter; I still believed the big lie. I stood in front of the trough and peed. Someone was standing a foot or two to my right. I noticed that someone had stood directly to my left and was now making a commotion with his hands. I knew not to look, but the more I told myself not to, the more I desperately wanted to, the more I felt that I had to. There was some pubescent poison at work, this body tethered to mine by some bad gravity . I shifted my head slightly to the left, and my eyes locked in, both amazed and terrified by a tangled mountain of pubic hair, and by the hand that held the pick that was furiously combing and fluffing it.

I knew, somewhere deep inside my hairless body, that one of these kids was not like the other, that there was a fundamental difference between his private parts and mine, that the line of demarcation was anatomical, forever dividing us into the big and small, the last time the teams would ever be picked; I wouldn’t have cared what anyone said to me after that—I knew that this difference was the only one that mattered, the one that defined me, that would direct the course of my life as precisely as the pick that Erik Maldonado was using to groom his pubes, the first ones I ever saw, the ones that belonged to the guy whose scent was now all over me, copulating with Angelica’s.

Now, months of locker room abstinence later, I walked into the bathroom, trying to avoid eye contact. But middle school isn’t about seeing; it’s about being and not being seen. Erik had seen me. Erik called my name and asked if I wanted to borrow his comb, then laughed as I turned around to run out, barking, “Wait, you don’t need one yet, do you, you pussy?”

For the most part, the word “pussy” as a derogatory term went the way of the hair-metal band. That is, you still hear it every once in a while, and every so often it tries making a comeback, but it won’t ever regain that same sense of pure, dirty, middle school frenzy and terror. I’ve been called a lot of things in the 17 or so years since that day in the locker room, and I got my own pubic hair, and I got over Angelica. I’ve adopted a relatively complex worldview and begun to get a more nuanced grasp of my identity. But I still can’t fully buy into the “size doesn’t matter” argument. For a while there, I bought into that “girth” thing, but I got out before that proved itself to be just another fad, a between-class myth propagated by the desperate naive. Those who say “size doesn’t matter” really mean “size doesn’t matter to me because I’m so mature that I don’t care what people say.” I cannot be that person’s friend. We have nothing in common. We did not go to the same middle school.

Now that I’m 30 years old, I’m beginning to feel hopeful. Not because of the technological developments and possibilities of prosthetics (the penis enhancement industry, whose business philosophy relies on the “give ‘em an inch . . .” principle, is, by its lust and need for continual growth, destined either to get too big for its britches or to peter out); not because celibacy seems to be coming back in style; not because I’ve managed to delete the penis and its accessories from my sphere of interest; but because I don’t take myself as seriously as I used to and am, thus, able to understand the world of my childhood and my adulthood a bit more realistically. I’m less likely to torture myself with the “what if” game: What if I hadn’t looked over at Erik’s crotch? What if I hadn’t given Angelica that poem? What if I’d never seen through my parents’ I-don’t-cares? What if they’d never said them?

The “what if” game is appealing because of our belief in and reverence for the power of choice, the idea that a split-second here or an inch there can alter the course of a person’s entire life. When a mother says to her daughter, “I don’t care what those girls say—you’re just right,” maybe what she’s really doing is innoculating her against fatalism, boosting that part of her that she’ll one day need to reject regret and paralysis. The father who tells his son that size doesn’t matter knows that such wisdom doesn’t stand a chance against the power of some bushy, greasy, middle school kid with a pubic hair pick and a monster dick. What he hopes is that one day someone will come along, someone who knows his son intimately, loves him genuinely, and offers him security, and that when that person tells him, “I don’t care what Erik Maldonado called you—you’re just the man for me,” it will have been enough to nudge him, if only an inch, toward belief.

Posted by ghetto monk at April 26, 2005 12:22 AM | TrackBack