The Best Little Boy in the World Read online

  Though sibling rivalry had a lot to do with my hermetically sealed anus, there was more to it than that. Once when I was very young, three or four, I would guess, I was sitting comfortably in my little wicker-weave itty-bitty chair, contemplating the Howdy-Doody linoleum floor of my room, or whatever, when I was called to the dinner table. We had company that evening. I sat in my grown-up silver-silk upholstered dining-room chair—and it felt prickly-uncomfortable, as though I were sitting bare bottom on a pile of hay. Now that was funny, because if anything, this cushioned chair should have been more comfortable than my wicker-weave chair—and I made a number of remarks on that very discrepancy.

  My mother said I could go get the other chair, and followed me into my room, whereupon she lowered my little-boy-in-corduroy pants and—well, I was amazed! I had no idea I had done that. Mother took care of it quickly, without a word—but I was mortified. I could think of nothing so vile as what I had done—it was Goliath’s laughable sin IN THREE DIMENSIONS, yet, and I determined to be very careful from then on. Another slip like that and the BLBITW could just throw in the towel, for crying out loud.

  Some time later, around the age of twelve, at sleep-away camp, I deduced the meaning of the word “fart,” though it was too disgusting a word ever to pass from my lips. At the same time, I fairly quickly learned that “f—k you” was the single worst thing in the world that could be said by or to anyone, even though on rare occasions of rage, when I really wanted to shock and terrify my fellow campers, in the heat of some truly embittered dispute, I could bring myself to come out with it in a stage whisper. Of course, that utterance was possible only because I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant. Nor was I about to ask anyone. I was no fool, aged twelve. Aged fourteen. Aged sixteen. Around sixteen I suppose I learned what it meant. (And I learned how irrational, illogical, impossible, therefore, was the accepted response—I’LL BET YOU’D LIKE TO—when spoken by one boy to another.) But having some intellectual knowledge of the word’s clinical definition was different from my intimate, olfactory understanding of that other, unspeakably disgusting word.

  Now, after all that buildup, I can’t honestly tell you that I remember the occasion of my first deflation. I do remember, in general terms, a period of a few months around my sophomore year in college when, having once given just the tiniest, most hesitating, little-by-little testing sort of vent to what must have been extraordinary pressure farther than usual from the nearest men’s room—on a geological field trip perhaps?—having thus once experimented and found, mirabile dictu, that I could relieve myself in one dimension without going 3-D, I began gradually to become bolder and bolder and in less than a year I had it down to a science.

  Of course, I only did it in private—never where there was even the remotest chance that—BLBITW! ROLL DOWN YOUR WINDOW! And to this day, as I still struggle to get out the word, I stand forever in awe of my high school classmates who would actively seek an audience while they rolled back on their shoulders, lit a match, and made like some kind of perverted tapered-chinos dragon.

  But if the exact occasion and circumstances of my first gaseous relief escape me, I could write a 1,000-page monograph on the occasion of my first masturbation.

  I did it by accident, actually; without even using my—look, Ma!—hands. And I’ll tell you, I was one happy eighteen-year-old boy. The orgasm—the famous, fantastic, unforgettable, hold-it-back-with-every-muscle-and-nerve-in-your-body (well, I thought-I-would-be-wetting-my-bed, which-at-eighteen-would-have-been-awful) first orgasm—was a degree of six-feet-off-the-ground ecstasy and relief you experience only once. Yes. This was no eleven-year-old’s first dribble. I had been saving this, maturing, building the tensions FOR YEARS! So, yes, the orgasm itself was A-double-plus-WOW. But that was really insignificant in light of the larger fact: I had done it! I COULD DO IT! I was the last one in the world to learn how, but I DID IT! After recovering from my initial amazement and emotional exhaustion, I started to do it again. Within three weeks of constant practice I had learned: (a) to do it lying on my back, using my hands; (b) not to do it more than once a night.

  But I have really gotten ahead of myself because, as I say, the remarkable thing wasn’t the orgasm itself, but why it had taken me so long to have one.

  Let me dispel one hypothesis immediately. I was not one of those children who were taught from the first hint of puberty that masturbation was evil, that my thing would fall off if I did it, that my mind would turn to cornflakes, or that my knees would break out in goobers. You should be embarrassed for even having considered such a hypothesis. In my family, one of the things we never talked about was that thing down there. Never. As it was the only part of the body we never talked about, as we always kept it covered, and as society just manages to ingrain in every child, without necessarily ever getting explicit, this was a Bad Area. This was an area the BLBITW used for one thing, in private, and one thing only.

  So I had no old wives’ tales keeping me pent up. It was only a matter of learning how to do it.

  Now I imagine many children learn as I did, by accident. Only they stumble sooner. I can’t give an airtight explanation for how I managed to keep my footing so long, but I can offer some guesses.

  Foremost must be the situation just described. It was simply no-man’s-land. I would no sooner have fooled around with my Bad Area than I would have stuck my finger up my Other Bad Area. In addition, at some point I learned the phrase—I don’t know where I heard it, probably counselors in camp—DON’T PLAY WITH YOURSELF. Well, that just confirmed what the BLBITW already knew. He had not yet developed the kind of fine legal mind that could make the distinction between playing with yourself on the Fifth Avenue bus and playing with yourself in bed.

  Then there was the general gut feeling that perhaps things were not all right and proper down there. And sure enough, around the age of thirteen—by which time I had become very uncomfortable with the whole subject of that area, its uses, its abuses—I noticed that the left side of my scrotum was bigger than the right side. And while I tried as hard as I could not to think about it, I was aware deep down that something was out of kilter. Not in my mind, you understand—I haven’t gotten to that yet. A real, gen-u-ine physical defect.

  I could think of no way to avoid my annual medical checkup, and sure enough, even before he said “cough,” the doctor noticed. Okay, Doctor: Notice it, if you must, but for God’s sake, ignore it the way I do…. PLEASE don’t give it any sort of recognition.

  He did far worse than that. He asked me why I hadn’t called him when I first noticed it.

  Let me give you a moment to let the full force of that mortal blow sink in.

  Right? Why hadn’t I told anybody? Wouldn’t that have been the natural, normal, BLBITW thing to do? I mean, are you hiding something? ARE YOU HIDING SOMETHING? What’s been going on down there anyway? Hmmmm, you little phony? You’re not the BLBITW they think you are, now are you?

  Hiding something? Friends, I was hiding everything. But I will get to that.

  My defense department computer, defective as usual, should have gone ticking along the perimeter of its linear program and stopped with a buzz and a print-out at the optimal solution: Tell a casual, convincing lie: “Gee, Doc, it only got this way a couple of weeks ago, and it hasn’t hurt or anything, so since I knew I’d be seeing you today, I just didn’t bother to do anything. I hope that’s okay?” That’s what Chip Morgan would have said, isn’t it?

  But me? I said the only thing I could think of—nothing—assuming that sooner or later he would start talking again.

  He did, explaining that I had a rather routine “varicocele”—too much blood pumped to the scrotum, which swells it up on the left side and looks a little ugly—but about 10 percent of the male population has it and, unless it begins to bother me, nothing need be done about it. He would call my parents just to let them know.

  MY PARENTS? Are you out of your mind? What about the confidential relationship between doctor and pati
ent? I could have you disbarred for telling my parents! Instead, of course, I just let the film wash over my eyes and did a halfhearted Jackie Gleason hamina-hamina-hamina. To my credit, I did not pass out.

  I even made it home. And when my dad asked to see what the doctor had called about—to see it—I looked so adolescent-embarrassed that he didn’t push it. He may have been the BLBITW, to a lesser extent, in his day, too, which may be why we never talked about these things.

  After that experience with the doctor, my Bad Area was unquestionably, more than ever, off limits. I just didn’t want to think about it.

  So where was I going to learn to jerk off? When was Famous Artists Schools going to start advertising a correspondence course on the subway panels? I might have learned from the birds and bees lecture, but as I say, it was not my father’s favorite topic. He made a concerted effort once and got as far as wet dreams and ejaculations—but I finally prevailed upon him to stop. I couldn’t take it. Listening would have been admitting I didn’t already know it all, which would have seriously called into question my adolescent normality—everybody knew that stuff—and the last thing I wanted to do was to call into question my adolescent normality. I mustered one of my rare performances: Oh, Dad! For heaven’s sake (which was somehow in an altogether different category from For Crying Out Loud)—I know all those things.

  So I didn’t learn to masturbate from him. Even if I had let him continue, I doubt the prescribed text included a chapter on that subject.

  Well, what about Goliath, for crying out loud? What are older brothers for? It never occurred to me at the time even to wonder whether he had mastered this art—as I say, I did my best to keep my mind off such subjects—but I found out last year, when we finally got to know each other, that indeed he had been doing it since he was twelve—sometimes right in the next bed from me. Gad.

  In fact, it dawned on me after our recent conversation, as I sifted my early years over and over … that night in the East Side apartment—oh, WOW, of course!—there was that night when he kept wiggling his toes against the sheets ever so softly—just loud enough to get on my nerves to keep me awake—and then we started fighting, and I went in to my parents’ bedroom to complain—at which he took more than the usual offense, for some reason—but kept wiggling his toes all the same when I returned—my God!

  So I would have had an apt instructor in Goliath, but we didn’t have that kind of relationship. Sure, we loved each other. We were supposed to love each other, remember, so I certainly did. But ours was not your all-American Wally-Leave-It-To-Beaver kind of fraternity.

  I first went away to overnight camp when I was ten. Goliath was in his third or fourth year at that camp, and a moderate big shot. He knew the tent ropes. I, on the other hand, was only now being cast onto my own resources for the first time and was, as usual, terrified.

  Everything was going smoothly until I arrived at my tent and met my counselor, an ex-marine. He told me to make my bed. Fine. I unlocked my trunk, which was miraculously in my tent when I arrived, took out the sheets and such, and began to make the bed.

  “Don’t forget the rubber mattress cover,” the marine said.

  “The rubber mattress cover?”

  “Yeah. The rubber mattress cover.”

  I searched diligently for it, though I had never heard of one before and could not remember its being on the list of things—thirty-two white Camp Winnepesaukee handkerchiefs, fourteen pairs white Camp Winnepesaukee athletic socks, one athletic supporter (optional to age thirteen)—we had packed in Brewster, the last time I saw the trunk. I searched knowing I would not find it, that I had failed miserably, that I would be sent home by the next available train, a disgrace to the family. That phony feeling again.

  “I don’t think I have one. Could I make the bed with this cloth one?”

  “You’re supposed to have a rubber one. It says here that you wet your bed.”

  THAT I WHAT? Oh my God, I think he’s talking about that area! We never talk about that area. The last thing I was prepared to do was to talk back to an authority figure, let alone an ex-marine, for crying out loud, but this was the white paint on the lawn all over again. “No, sir, I don’t wet my bed.” Now, the fact is that maybe once or twice in my life, like any kid, I had wet my bed. But what’s going on? Authority figures don’t make mistakes. Maybe my parents hadn’t had the heart to tell me that I wet my bed and sent me away to have this marine tell me. Have I told a lie—do I really wet my bed? A lie to a stranger, no less? But I am ten now, not five—you can see how far I’ve come—and I am almost certain that I don’t wet my bed, that there is some mistake.

  We went back and forth a couple of times—“No, I don’t.” “It says here you do, but I’ll cure you of it soon enough.” “AGH!”—when Goliath happened along. For perhaps the first time in my life I was overjoyed to see Goliath.

  I got Goliath to admit his blood relationship with me, and then, oh-so-relieved, I asked him to tell the ex-marine that I did not wet my bed. If anyone knows, it should be you who sleep in the same room with me! F. Lee Bailey couldn’t have constructed a stronger defense.

  “How should I know whether you wet your bed?” That is all Goliath said. He went off to play tennis.

  So I wouldn’t have learned how to do it from my brother.

  I can think of only four possible courses of instruction that remained, three of which I can eliminate out of hand. I could have read how to do it somewhere, but the BLBITW didn’t start reading dirty books until a couple of years ago. I could have learned from our sex education program in school, but all they told us about was good posture, deodorant, and taking your hat off indoors. I could have learned about it “in the street,” but the street in Brewster was a state highway on which I was not allowed to ride my bicycle, and the street on the East Side was populated primarily by doormen.

  That leaves the general category of friends: in camp, in high school—freshman year in college, for crying out loud.

  Camp was quite an awakening for me. All of a sudden I had to fend for myself, and the standards by which performance was measured were largely physical rather than academic. Unfair! They are changing ground rules on the BLBITW, who has never even learned to play baseball (how can you play baseball if the only other kid within miles—we had thousand-acre zoning, I think—is always setting the table?)—baseball, the national pastime, the symbol of all that is normal and wholesome.

  Having become quite used to being one of the best in my class at whatever I did (multiplication, state capitals), I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of standing out there in right field, left out, frightened to death that someone, some stupid lefty crackerjack batter, just might slam one out to right field. And there I would be, trembling, knees weak, CHOKING—and miss it. Everything is a self-fulfilling prophecy, my fielding being no exception. Invariably, once a game, somebody had to hit a ball out there; invariably, I would miss it. So I only played when I had to, one game a year.

  My dreaded once a year in right field, as any former camper will have guessed, was during color war. Everybody had to play. And the last year I played, I must have been about fourteen, my worst nightmare came true.

  Sure, I must have missed the inevitable right-field fly—that was so routine I can’t even remember it now. But someone up there, the Great Phonifier, had something far more humiliating in mind for the BLBITW. It was “the bottom of the ninth,” in our seven-inning game, with our side one run down, the bases loaded, two outs, and a three-and-two count. (I swear I am not exaggerating.) Need I tell you who the three-and-two count was on?

  I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t Goliath. Nor was it Tommy Roth, the camp charisma, the fifteen-year-old whose friendship and respect I sought in every way I could. Tommy was on the other team. And now, at fourteen, while I was hardly the camp charisma, I had become a color-war force to be reckoned with. I won all my swimming events, I led the relay, I won my tennis match on a 16-14 set, I shot a 94 on my ten-bull. But while Tommy w
as doing all these things in his age group, he was also leading the team sports. Like baseball.

  Tommy had come down to watch this game, with most of the rest of the camp, because the five color-war points that rested on it were becoming increasingly important to the outcome of the entire war. Tommy, of course, had not said a word to me for the past four days—this was war, after all—and was now a few yards away, laughing at me, and at how I was going to CHOKE! CHOKE! and blow the whole thing. HEY, ADAM’S APPLE! CHOKE!