A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 5

  English was the first class of the day, and I had a bad habit of having to use the bathroom just as class was starting. I couldn’t help it. My digestive tract was and is notoriously unstable. I interrupted class dozens of times before Ms. Flynn, who on most days was so nice and understanding it actually seemed sinister, put her foot down. She informed me that I would no longer be allowed to leave her class to use the restroom. I respected her enough to grin, bear it, and wait to use the restroom until after class.

  While I understood Ms. Flynn’s point of view, I knew in my heart that human biology stops for no English teacher. I respected her wishes and stopped asking for the hall pass, but understood deep down that the stage had been set for disaster.

  “Ms. Flynn,” I said one morning, almost a month after she had handed down her edict, “I really need to use the bathroom.”

  “Chris,” she said, “I’m sorry. But I can’t. We talked about this.”

  Unfortunately, she didn’t realize that on this particular day I didn’t have to “use the bathroom” at all—I had to throw up. Violently. And more importantly, immediately.

  I raised my hand again, praying she would see the terror in my eyes.

  “Chris, you can’t go,” she said.

  “But—”

  “No!” she said, glaring at me. “I said no, and I meant it.” I had been put in my place, publicly. Stifled giggles filled the room. I had no choice but to tough it out.

  No one wants to be the kid who gets yelled at for taking too many shits, I reminded myself through gritted teeth. No one.

  My resolve lasted less than a minute. After a few seconds, I felt it: a wave of vomit suddenly rising from the depths of my stomach. At that moment, as my cheeks quickly ballooned with bile, Samantha spun around. Accompanying the rising tide of puke was a noise that every kid recognizes as the unmistakable prelude to throwing up. But Samantha, with her self-inflicted bouts of vomiting, was especially attuned to the sound and knew better than anyone exactly what it entailed. Her eyes widened. Somehow I managed to hold the steaming liquid inside my mouth. We made direct eye contact, and despite my own panic, I tried to convey that everything was going to be fine.

  When you are fifteen, shy, and strange, you develop an acute awareness of the reactions of everyone around you to you, particularly of those you have a crush on. It is thanks to this that I will never forget the look on Samantha’s face. I have never seen a woman react to me with as much disgust as Samantha did when she realized I was seconds from spewing hot stomach acid all over her cute, slightly pudgy face. It’s strange, but I think the vomit filling my cheeks actually helped my confidence with women in the long term. I’ve found a certain strength in being absolutely sure I will never leave a worse impression on a woman than I did that morning as I loomed over my crush with puke ready to fly.

  With cheeks full of throw-up, I calmly walked to the front of the room, made eye contact with Ms. Flynn, and yarfed the contents of my stomach into the garbage can.

  No one even laughed—a surefire sign that something in a high school environment has gone from odd to fucked up. Ms. Flynn stood frozen in the center of the room, the chalk she had been writing with now resting in her trembling hand.

  I wiped my sleeve against my vomit-covered chin.

  “Now do you want to let me go to the bathroom?” I defiantly asked before strutting out of the room—without a hall pass. At that point it was easily the coolest thing I’d ever done.

  Two things happened as a result of that incident. The first was that Ms. Flynn felt horrible, and for the rest of the year let me use the bathroom whenever I asked.

  The second was that Samantha thought I was somehow cool for nearly vomiting on her face and then mouthing off to a teacher. Maybe it made me seem rebellious. Maybe she’d been waiting for a big-headed nerd with a dark side to come into her life. Or maybe seeing me vomit made her attracted to someone within whom she saw herself. All I know is that the incident made her oddly fascinated with me.

  Shortly before the end of that year, fueled by my newfound vomit-driven confidence, I decided to put all of my cards on the table.

  “Samantha,” I told her one evening over the telephone, “I have to tell you something.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Do you like me or something?”

  This was not the ideal response, to say the least.

  Samantha let me down gently. I knew it was coming. While I’d been busy playing “Magic: The Gathering,” she’d been actually dating. She routinely told me stories about how she spent her summers at the Jersey shore, which I imagined for any girl meant drinking vodka hidden in water bottles and hooking up with older dudes. As far as my imagination was concerned, she may as well have been regaling me with tales of her performing oral sex for the first (and second through eleventh) time(s) underneath the boardwalk.

  Regardless of how much of it was actually true, rather than feeling jealous I found myself wanting to save Samantha from this wild-child lifestyle. I wanted to give her a sense of stability, the chance to build a relationship not out of boardwalk-driven hysteria but out of our mutual respect and devotion to each other.

  Also, I wanted in on that blowjob stuff.

  Samantha and I continued to talk on the phone, at least once a day. But we both knew it would soon be coming to an end—I was set to attend a three-week-long summer school debate program at Georgetown University. In my mind, this only further illustrated our differences. I was into talking heatedly about political issues. I assumed she was into getting drunk and kissing wieners underneath a series of wooden planks. It was never going to work.

  Or so I thought. The night before I left, Samantha gave me a tearful phone call.

  “Why do you have to go?” she asked through sobs. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “I’m going to miss you, too,” I said. “But I am going to learn so much about debating. And that is definitely going to serve me well in the future.”

  It has not.

  “But . . . ,” she wept. “I’m in love with you.”

  “You’re . . . what?”

  We spent the rest of that night on the phone, crying, expressing to each other how happy we were that we had found love, with all the histrionics and hyperbole two teenagers could summon. Finally, someone felt the same way about me as I felt about her. We promised to stay true to each other while I was away.

  “Be safe down there,” she said. I’m not sure what dangers she thought I would encounter during a three-week program full of teenaged kids who liked to debate political hot-button issues. “When you come back, I’ll be waiting.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I promise, I’ll be careful.”

  “Chris,” she said. “I’m your girlfriend, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “You’re my girlfriend. That’s okay.”

  Then, in the morning, I left.

  That night, immediately after arriving, I bought a calling card and dialed Samantha. We talked late into the evening, and she told me that when I got home, we were hanging out the first night.

  “And when we do,” she told me, “it’s going to be fun, for both of us.”

  “You mean like . . . ,” I stammered.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That.”

  “Like we’re gonna make out and stuff?” I said, smooth as always.

  “Yeah. I keep saying yeah,” she said, getting annoyed.

  “Cool,” I said. “That’s so cool.” I said my good-byes and hung up the phone, sensing that my awkwardness was ruining the conversation.

  My floor of guys, whom I had just met that day, were psyched for me. Every one of them had more experience with girls than me, and enjoyed telling me all of their sordid tales of hooking up, passing it off as advice. I went to bed that night as happy as I had ever been, even though it had just been made explicitly clear that I was the least sexually experienced guy in a group of high school debate enthusiasts.

  The next morning, I woke up still on cloud nine. I hopped ou
t of bed, grabbed a towel, and headed down the hall to the communal shower in my underwear.

  I opened the bathroom door, and inside was a Turkish guy named Ali. He was a Republican and, from what I remember, a fierce debater. But as he turned to face me I realized even then that I wouldn’t remember Ali for his political leanings. What I would remember Ali for were his pubes. A full, jet-black bush that would forever burn itself into my memory. The kind that I now understand only a Turk can have at the age of fifteen.

  I turned and headed straight back to my room, the spring noticeably absent from my step. I sat on my bed and felt like I had to shit, which is the number one indicator that I am experiencing severe anxiety. I got under my covers and proceeded to cry.

  For about a year, I’d experienced a sneaking suspicion that I was drifting behind the pack, but I had no idea how thoroughly I’d been left behind. My school didn’t make kids shower after gym. Everyone just went to their individual corner of the locker room and quickly changed. Most days, I put in so little effort in gym that I didn’t sweat at all, so I generally didn’t even have a need to remove my underwear. A few guys did get nude in the locker room, but they were mostly jocks who liked to do homoerotic things as an excuse to say something homophobic. I didn’t spend any time checking out their pubes.

  And no one could have checked out mine. Because I had none.

  For the rest of my three weeks at Georgetown, I participated in three separate rituals. First, I woke up every morning hours before any of my classes so that I could shower in an environment where I was sure no one would see my weird, smooth, hairless pubic mound. After classes and dinner, I called Samantha, my second ritual of the day. It was an over-the-phone love affair, easily (and sadly) the farthest I’d gotten with a girl.

  My third ritual commenced at bedtime. Each night, I got under my covers, lifted my penis, and furiously examined the base of my shaft for any signs of pube growth.

  I was furious at my dick. And instead of suffering quietly, I let it know.

  “Why do you want to ruin this for me?” I asked pointedly. If anything in this world understood my affections for Samantha it should have been my penis. After all, it had been a sympathetic and willing participant in all of my many filthy fantasies about her.

  Late one night my frustration reached a boiling point. “Grow!” I shouted at my pitiful, bald privates. “Grow! Grow! Grow!”

  Moments later there was a knock at my door. I threw on a towel and answered it. It was Jesse, a kid who lived down the hall.

  “You okay, man?” he asked when I opened the door.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “I thought someone was in here,” he said. “I heard you shouting the word ‘go.’ ”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, there was no one in here. I was just shouting the word ‘go.’ ”

  “Why?”

  “No reason, okay?” I said, in a huff. “I just felt like shouting the word ‘go.’ Jesus, everyone is so fucking nosy here.”

  “Uhh . . . ,” he squeaked out. “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to interrupt you . . . while you were shouting the word ‘go.’ ”

  I slammed the door and tumbled back into bed. I lifted my shaft once more.

  “Please,” I said, my rage turning into desperation. “Just a little bit. Just enough that she won’t get grossed out.” When I woke up I checked and, sure enough, no hair had grown. This process repeated itself every night. My penis refused to listen to reason. Or begging. Or shouting. My penis would not be swayed.

  The day before I headed home to New Jersey, Samantha and I told each other how excited we were, and how we couldn’t wait to see one another.

  She was being honest. I was outright lying. Because due to my pubeless state I never wanted to go home, and I certainly never wanted to face her. The phone thing was great. I was able to say all sorts of heartfelt, risky stuff and there was no consequence. I was in total control. All I could think of was that once I saw her again in person I was going to be exposed as a sham, as a little boy, in the emotional and—more importantly—the physical sense. I could only imagine the shock, the disgust, the horror that she would feel if she reached into my pants and felt a man’s front that felt like a baby’s ass.

  The drive back home was unbearable. With each hour on the highway bringing me closer to Jersey and the inevitable unveiling of my bald crotch, my panic grew. In my state of depression, I decided it would have been better if I had thrown up all over Samantha’s face that day months ago. That way she never would have spoken to me again, and I wouldn’t be in this whole mess of her wanting to provide me with hand release.

  I finally got home, and within hours Samantha was at my front door. She looked great. I don’t know if it was a result of her diligent bulimia, but she seemed more toned than usual. She was also tanned from a summer spent at the beach—three weeks of thus far shunning every guy who tried to convince her to rendezvous beneath the boardwalk, all so she could be with me, a pubeless boy wonder who yelled at his own genitals.

  In my parents’ basement, I put on a movie—the John Cusack classic Say Anything, because I am completely unoriginal. We sat on opposite ends of the couch, but as the night progressed Samantha inched closer. The next thing I knew, her hand touched mine. And before I realized it I had experienced my first kiss.

  It got aggressive fast. It was the sort of passion only fifteen-year-olds can summon after they’ve been apart and talking dirty to each other for a month.

  Then, as suddenly as Samantha had instigated it, I stopped our make-out session. I turned away from Samantha’s eager mouth and fixed my gaze onto the misadventures of Lloyd Dobler. I was scared to be discovered for the freak I was.

  Samantha took a pillow and laid it on my lap, resting her head there. For the rest of the night I watched the movie, and she watched me. She smiled at me enticingly. There was no way to explain that I was terrified to open a very hairless Pandora’s box. Samantha looked at me with three weeks’ worth of build-up in her eyes, but I couldn’t find it in me to risk a humiliation that would lead to a lifetime of insecurity. So Samantha simply sat, her head resting on a pillow that was balanced on my raging boner. Looking back now, I can understand that the situation couldn’t have been comfortable for her, physically or socially.

  As soon as the credits rolled, I headed for the stairs. My dad offered to drive Samantha home. I went along for the ride. She and my dad talked more than she and I did.

  The next night, Samantha asked me to come to her place. Her turf. I dreaded the thought that she would feel more free to be aggressive. With Samantha in control things were bound to go further, and I was sure my lack of hair would finally be exposed to the world.

  When I got to her house, Samantha’s best friend Veronica was there. I wasn’t sure why at first, but her presence there was off-putting to me. Then a rare male instinct kicked in, and I recognized that for the first time in my life I was being cock-blocked.

  I was torn. On the one hand, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to deal with the prospect of making out with Samantha again. Sure, my cock had been blocked, but I had been actively searching for a way to block my cock on my own. On the other hand, it still hurt and I still felt shame.

  Samantha took me quietly into the next room.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m so sorry to do this.”

  I looked down at the ground. I was completely aware of what was coming, but I was confused and unsure how to react. Did I pretend I was sad about what was happening? Was I sad? Was it embarrassing getting dumped after one date, or was it the biggest stroke of luck I’d yet experienced in my decade and a half on earth?

  I went with what I thought was the smartest option—stoically absorbing the blow while hinting that there was a deep well of pain just under the surface. That way, Samantha would think I was some sort of sensitive guy, yet tough enough to weather a breakup.

  I looked back up at Samantha.

  “Just say whatever you have to say,�
�� I said.

  “I really like you,” she said. “But just as a friend. Something didn’t quite click last night. Something was off. It was just. . . . ”

  It was just my boner stabbing your temple through a pillow, I thought to myself. We both know it. Now. Let. Me. Go. Home.

  “It’s over,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  She hugged me. And as she did I inhaled deeply and took in a strong waft of that unmistakable birch beer smell Samantha had long been famous for.

  I walked by Veronica on my way out. She smiled at me, gently, not condescending at all. Her greenish-blue eyes spoke to a kindness that was very genuine. I stopped.

  “I’ll see you when school starts back up?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Veronica answered. “I’ll see you then.”

  Then I gave her a very goofy grin. She laughed.

  She’s cuter anyway, I thought to myself.

  As the summer wound down I kept up one of my rituals from debate camp. Each night, I stayed up late and examined my genitals for signs of hair. On occasion, I still quietly talked to them. And eventually, those hairs appeared. Within months, I would be blessed with a bright-red fire crotch that became its own source of embarrassment.

  Over time I realized that while my lack of pubes had been a problem, it had never really been the problem.

  The real issue was my awkward, clunky behavior. It was my nervousness, my uncomfortable shifting and sweating. It was my remarkable inability to deal with the situation in a straightforward way.

  I had completely betrayed the attitude that had enticed Samantha in the first place. I had played it cool when I almost threw up on Samantha’s head. But I couldn’t play it cool when faced with the prospect of her seeing my hairless pubic mound. If I had figured out how to summon that same level-headedness, and managed to convert the impending disaster into another victory, we might have had a relationship that went somewhere.

  I may at least have gotten a tug job out of it.

  As an adult I’ve learned that even if there are moments when I feel I am mere seconds from vomiting on my life, I can still pull it together to regain control, and that good things can still come from it. On my best days, this helps. When it doesn’t I can feel my same old insecurities set in—my awkwardness, my over-thought reactions to things, my inability to act when any action at all will turn a situation from tense to fine. It is a pattern that has reoccurred often, and it is in these instances that I feel like a frightened fifteen-year-old again, scared to take his eyes off the television screen, managing only to awkwardly jam his unwelcomed boner firmly into the temple of life.