The Best Little Boy in the World (2 page)

We had an elderly black maid, a Negro then, of course, whom we loved dearly. She would come up to our room in the country—Goliath and I shared a room—and tickle our feet to make us go to sleep. I don't remember her reasoning, but we loved it, went wild over it, would not go to sleep without it. (No hidden meaning here, really; all she did was tickle our feet.) To this day I am very ticklish, but have been getting somewhat less so over the past few years. People are not assigned ticklishness the way pansies are assigned colors: Ticklishness has something to do with where your head is.

I remember sitting in front of my mother's night table with a pencil in my hand and some paper and her telling me it didn't matter which hand I used to hold the pencil, I should use whichever one felt more comfortable. I tried each a couple of times and chose my left one. I don't remember whether I had learned the difference between left and right. Both hands looked alike. Wouldn't my left hand become my right hand when I turned around?

I remember riding around my room in the city, in our West Side apartment, on a tricycle, just around and around in a circle on the orange Howdy-Doodie linoleum floor, thinking I can't remember what, fantasizing I can't remember what. Most of the time just bored.

I remember my brother and me being mugged in the park by a ten-year-old, the neighborhood Bad Boy, who I vaguely remember had once been charged with setting fire to the playground with his magnifying glass on a sunny day. He wanted our scooter, and he wanted to bully my brother—which didn't make me feel as good as I would have thought it would.

As there is no particular ego gratification in bullying a five-year-old when a nine-year-old is available, the mugger said I could beat it. I ran to the edge of the park—our building was right across the street—but I had never, never in my life crossed a street by myself. When I got older they would let me, maybe. Still, my brother was being mugged in the park by a convicted arsonist, and even I knew the thing to do was to run home for help.

There was a woman at the corner waiting for the light to change—we
never
talked to strangers—and I decided to take drastic action. I asked her if she would walk me across the street. She looked at me a little surprised, not very sympathetic—what's there to walking across the street, for Christ's sake? When the light's green, walk. So I just followed her (it wasn't that hard after all, but it felt
different,
all of a sudden being responsible for myself) and buzzed the buzzer of our apartment, fearing the worst, feeling very guilty. How could I explain the loss of Goliath? How could I explain being back here alone—I mean,
How did I get across the street?
Not
alone,
I hope. Not by talking with
strangers,
I hope. My mother quickly grasped the situation through my mumbling and went to retrieve my brother from the ten-year-old mugger, scooter and all.

Shortly thereafter we moved to the East Side.

I remember missing the school bus to kindergarten one morning and my father taking me in a cab on his way to work. He knew the block my school was on, but not the proper entrance. I remember not knowing, either. I had been going for months, of course, but had always found my classroom by following the head in front of me.

Another time, one afternoon in the first grade, they changed school bus drivers on me. The rookie driver asked me where I lived. Where I
lived?
Are you
joking?
I know how to read, I know how to multiply—do I know where I
live?
I live at
home,
that's all.
You're
the school bus driver, not me, for crying out loud—what do you think this is, a
taxicab?
Of course, I didn't say any of that. I just began to well up with embarrassment, which was quickly overtaken by fear—lost among thousands of look-alike buildings, millions of
strangers—
on my own at the age of six. After some thought, I remembered my last name. (Well, I went to the kind of school where everyone was called by his first name and treated very carefully. We were gifted children, you know.) My last name was all the driver needed, apparently, as things quickly returned to normal.

And then another time—I may even have been seven or eight by now, or nine—one of the people who came periodically to measure our IQ's and to interpret our ink blots asked me what my religion was. Oh for crying out loud, here we go again. When I reddened, she tried to help, listing off the possibilities. I was on the spot and just took a guess. I sat there kind of expecting her to tell me whether I was right or wrong, as normally happened when I answered a question in school—but this time
I
was the original source.

Of course, through all these shining performances I was feeling less than entirely adequate. Embarrassed? Look, let me tell you about embarrassment! But it was more than that: It was the basic understanding, that sick, guilty feeling in the deepest recesses of my psyche, that I was a phony. I was
not
the best little boy in the world as my parents thought. I mean, the BLBITW couldn't possibly be so OUT OF IT! I was superpolite, maybe, but not superbright as I was supposed to be. What kind of idiot doesn't even know his own
religion?
I was sure everyone else in the class knew. Chip Morgan certainly knew. He knew what was coming off, believe me. Chip Morgan was wearing white bucks and playing spin the bottle before I had ever
heard
of either one, for crying out loud.

And if I was superpolite, it was for the wrong reasons. I was not polite because I loved other people or was considerate or believed in the Golden Rule, or any of that other crap. I was a goody-goody because it was the proven road to reward. It was the way to play the game. I was one very Establishment little kid. And deep down, I knew I wasn't "good" at all—just selfish, just out for myself. I was a phony, and I knew it.

Meanwhile, the religion thing went even further. If I didn't know my own religion, do you suppose that could mean that I didn't believe in God? Aged seven, and already a heretic. With one simple question the researcher had discovered the evil lurking within me.

There really was evil lurking within me. I didn't want there to be. I didn't ask for it. But it was there. For example, I always forgot the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and to the Anointeth-My-Head-With-Oil psalm that we did at the beginning of every day. And while I made the best show of mouthing the words that I could, deep down I knew that I was the only one in the class who
didn't understand
what the things
meant,
even, let alone believe that the Lord was my shepherd.
"Anointeth"?

But while I was dumb, I was not so dumb as to let on just how dumb I was. You never caught
me
asking what "anointeth" meant. Or, later, "masturbate."

I learned to masturbate the same year I learned to fart. Eighteen. I was a sophomore in college. I had been to Europe twice, had won most of the academic honors at my high school and six varsity letters. But I had not learned to fart. Or to masturbate.

I had never farted because I knew it was a bad thing to do: The family would drive to Brewster every Friday evening, and back on Sundays, eating the peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwiches my mother had made and listening to
Our Miss Brooks,
whenever we could catch it on the radio, or, mainly, fighting. That is, my brother and I would be fighting in the back seat—DON'T CROSS THAT LINE!-and my father would be for crying out loud in the front, wondering how he could be responsible for such brats, while my mother would be predicting imminent 60-mile-an-hour gory disaster if we didn't behave ourselves and let our poor father concentrate on his driving, during all of which I would be getting clobbered, physically and psychologically, by my brother's intimidations—which I probably invited out of excruciating boredom—when all of a sudden the tables would turn. GOLIATH! The car hushed. We all knew instantly, without a word spoken—it is bad enough to
do
it, let alone speak of it (of course, at the time I didn't know there was a word for it).... GOLIATH! ROLL DOWN YOUR WINDOW! I would already have rolled down mine, hand to my throat, looking as nauseated as possible, playing my brother's lapse in manners for all it was worth, again... gasping for fresh air, but really basking in my undisputed supremacy: The BLBITW would
never
do a disgusting thing like that. Here was a level on which I, at little more than half his age and something less than half his weight, could compete and
win
time after time. For some reason it took him years to learn control, and by the time he finally had, and we could make it all the way from Brewster to the East Side without so much as a single GOLIATH! ROLL DOWN YOUR WINDOW! he was about ready to go off to college. Which left me, naturally, the undisputed best little boy around.

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-Doodie 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. / 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 I don't remember the exact occasion and circumstances of my first gaseous relief, 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.