Spanking Shakespeare (2 page)

I nod. “Exactly.”

“So how do you know what will happen if you don’t even try?”

I take a bite of my enchilada. “She used to go out with Jordan Miller. Why would she want to go out with someone like me?”

Neil opens his mouth to speak, then catches himself. “Well,” he says at last, “Jordan’s away at college now.”

“Harvard.”

“So what? He’s not here. Celeste’s single.”

We could go on like this for hours, but suddenly the futility and frustration of it all sweeps over me. “Okay, Neil, it’s really simple. Yes, I could ask Celeste out, and maybe, possibly, she might say yes. But here’s what would probably happen. She would get really uncomfortable because she’d quickly realize how lame I am. She wouldn’t want to make me feel bad, so she would say something like ‘I don’t want to do anything that could ruin our friendship,’ and even though we’re not really friends, I would play along and tell her I understand, and then I would have to spend the rest of the year trying to avoid her, which would be impossible since we have a class together, and any illusion I might be holding on to that she secretly likes me would be completely and irrevocably shattered.”

Neil considers this for a moment. “So are you going to ask her out?”

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

I do think about it. I think about it every day as I sit next to Celeste in class. I think about it every night as I lie in bed committing mass spermicide. It shouldn’t be so hard, I tell myself. Guys ask girls out all the time. Every day that I hesitate, hundreds of thousands of high school boys are busy having sex. But how do you actually get there? What do you actually say? Hi, Celeste, I really like you. Would you like to go out sometime? Hi, Celeste, I’ve been finding myself thinking about you all the time. Maybe you’d like to go see a movie after school? Hi, Celeste, I really want to get laid this year, and right now you’re the most likely candidate.

I wonder how Gandhi did it. He’s going out with this girl Meredith, who’s actually pretty cute. He never talked about it with me. He never acted like he had a crush on a girl. One day last year I saw them holding hands in the hallway, and when I asked him about it that night, he said she was someone he had just started going out with.

But how? I wanted to ask. What did you say? What did she say back? Of course when you’re sixteen and your brother is fourteen, you can’t really ask him to teach you how to get a girlfriend. Sometimes I wish we were still in elementary school so I could beat him up like I used to.

Mr. Parke says that writing our memoirs will help us understand ourselves better. He says that exploring our pasts will help us uncover the themes of our lives. What has become evident to me is that the course of my life was set very early. From the beginning, the Fates were conspiring against me.

THE EARLY YEARS

I was born on Hitler’s birthday. Whenever I did anything wrong as a child, my father would call me Adolf, and my mother, whose parents had been Holocaust survivors, would fly into a fury and accuse my father of being an insensitive pig. They would scream and shout at each other, fingers pointed and spittle flying, until one of them would remember that I was in the room. Not that it mattered. I always had unusually large accumulations of wax in my ears, so I rarely heard anything they said.

My brother, Gandhi, arrived when I was nineteen months old. He was an exceedingly violent child, who would celebrate his second birthday by kicking me in the eye and sending me to the hospital, bloodied, to be stitched up. By that time, I had already amassed an impressive collection of battle scars, including two dog bites, three beestings, and a partially botched circumcision.

My brother and I were difficult children, but much of this was due to my parents’ complete ineptitude. My father liked to sneak up behind us, make a scary face, and scream, “I’m going to eat you!” We would cry in terror as my father became himself again, gently comforting us and making funny faces and sounds until we started to laugh. Then, just as we had calmed down, he would spring his monster face on us again, sending us into another fit of howling and screaming.

My mother played games of a different sort. When she had had enough of our screaming and fighting, she would pretend we did not exist. We could call for her or tug on her leg, but nothing would get her to notice us. “I wonder where the kids are?” she would say as we sobbed hysterically. “I hope they’re not dead.”

We hated to go to sleep at night, so my father would bribe us with new installments of Nebuchadnezzar Schwartz, a running story he had created about an evil king with a penchant for torturing children. Each night, tucked beneath my blankets, I would listen to tales of disobedient children forced to kiss giant cockroaches, eat dead rats, or lick dirty toilet seats in large commuter railway stations. “Now go to sleep,” my father would say when he had finished, “because Nebuchadnezzar Schwartz saves his worst punishments for children who don’t go to bed when they’re told.”

On the nights when my parents threw parties, my brother and I refused to stay in bed, so my parents used us as props to entertain the guests. By the time I was three, they had taught me a few routines, and I was expected to perform these on demand. As people milled around with their drinks, my dad would whisper in my ear and hand me a glass of apple juice and a spoon. I would climb on a chair, bang the spoon on my glass, and when everybody was quiet, holdup my glass and say, “I’d like to make a toast.” Sometimes I got it wrong and said, “I’d like to have some toast,” but this would make the guests laugh even harder. On other occasions, I would greet guests at the door and say, “You must be here for the funeral.” I never understood why these routines were funny and much preferred to create my own. These included running around the apartment making farting noises, waging fake gun battles with my brother, and dumping whatever I could find onto the floor.

We were wild boys, and my parents could not contain us. Anything that was standing, we would do our best to topple. Anything that could be broken, we would do our best to break. My parents put locks on the refrigerator, locks on the cabinets, locks on the telephones, and still it was not enough. My mother took us to the doctor to see if there was something wrong with us. “They fight all the time,” she said. “They run around the apartment like wild animals.”

“You were an only child, weren’t you?” the doctor asked.

My mother nodded.

“They’re fine,” the doctor said. “That’s the way little boys act.”

But apparently I was not fine. When I was four, my parents decided I needed to see a therapist because I had stopped using the toilet. I had been trained a year earlier but had suddenly begun walking into closets and crapping in my pants. There were other issues, I think—a perverse fascination with ketchup, a habit of humping my younger brother—but the toilet problem seemed to upset my parents the most.

My therapist’s name was Celia, and after she met with me, she told my parents that I needed to come every day. “There’s a lot of pent-up anger,” she said. “This will take some time.”

I enjoyed my afternoon sessions with Celia. We would draw pictures together and play with toys, and she always seemed very interested in everything I did.

“Do you like crashing trucks together?” she would ask as I played with the cars on her floor.

Or she would look at my drawings and ask, “Is that a picture of you and your brother? Why are you standing on his face?”

I remember that Celia had a little dog who used to climb on my lap and lick me allover. I loved the dog and would laugh and shriek as we played together. One day the dog became so excited that she urinated allover me, and for the next several weeks my toilet issues reached unspeakable levels of perversity. I never saw that little dog again.

At about the time I started kindergarten, Celia told my parents that I had made substantial progress and they should see how I did without therapy for a while. With my toilet issues resolved, I entered kindergarten poised for success.

The first day, we sat in a big circle on the rug and played games to get to know each other. The teacher put us in pairs and we had to introduce our new special friends to the class. My partner was a boy named Udi who had recently arrived from Israel and spoke only a few words of English. His accent, the wax in my ears, and my own predisposition to bowel movements all conspired against me, and when I introduced him, I said, “This is Doody.”

All the kids started to laugh, and I realized how funny it sounded. “This is Doody!” I screamed.

The teacher grew very red and shouted for quiet. Then she fixed me with a stern look and said, “Shakespeare, go sit in the corner. We do not make fun of other people’s names. How would you like it if people teased you because of your name?”

I don’t remember exactly what went through my mind as I sat in a little chair in the corner staring at the wall, but I feel certain that some of my earliest ideas about the lack of fairness and justice in the world were beginning to take shape. Before the year was out, these ideas would be dramatically reinforced.

Sally Hill was the most precocious five-year-old in my kindergarten class. She had been reading books since age three, could spell words like elephant and bumblebee, ate sushi with chopsticks at lunch, and, most astounding, had begun to experiment with sarcasm. If someone said something stupid, she would say, “That’s so brilliant.” If someone brought an orange peel or a scribbled-on piece of construction paper for show-and-tell, she would nod her head and say, “I wish I had one of those.” Most of the kids thought she was being nice, but I knew better.

Sally and I had known each other all our lives. Our families lived close to each other, and our parents were friends. We had spent time at each other’s houses, played together, and watched each other grow into the five-year-olds we had become. I loved spending time with Sally because she always came up with ideas that were much more imaginative than anything I could come up with on my own. I suppose she enjoyed spending time with me because she could set all the rules, devise all the games, and use me or discard me as she saw fit.

Most of Sally’s games involved elaborate role-playing. Her favorite was one in which she played a teacher and I played a student who could never do anything right. (When I asked her how to play my part, she said to act like I did at school.) Sally was very strict. Each time we played, she would yell at me and tell me I would not get any snack that day. Sometimes she would make me sit in the corner facing the wall. When I told her I didn’t want to play anymore, she would tell me that I had been very good and give me a sticker, and I would allow myself to be sucked into another round of verbal and emotional abuse.

One day Sally said she had a new game she wanted to play. The rules were simple. I would pull down my pants and show her mine, and then she would pull down her pants and show me hers. Even at age five, I knew exactly what she was talking about, and I also knew it was something we were not supposed to do. At the same time, I was curious to see what she had and what it looked like and to ask her how it worked. I stood there frozen, not sure what to do or say.

“Come on,” she said impatiently. “We don’t have much time.” Obviously she knew we were doing something wrong, too, and while this might have been a major turn-on in later years, it was horribly unsettling to my five-year-old self.

“I don’t think we should,” I said nervously.

I had always done whatever Sally told me to do, so this refusal, however weak, was new to both of us. We stood there in my bedroom looking at each other.

“We’ll do it at the same time,” she finally said. “Ready, set, go.” And just like that I found myself unbuttoning my pants, unzipping my zipper, pulling down my pants, and pulling down my underwear. The whole thing should have lasted fewer than ten seconds, and for Sally it did. Before I could get a good look at whatever she had, she was already back in her clothes, acting as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately, as I tried to pull my underwear back up, I lost my balance and fell. I struggled to stand and dress myself at the same time, lost my balance again, crashed into my dresser, and ended up in a tangle with my penis exposed.

Sally took a good long look as I lay there helpless, and her face screwed itself up in genuine disgust. “I’m leaving,” she announced.

“Wait!” I screamed. Somehow, the thought of being abandoned like this was more than I could bear, and I started to cry. I cried because what should have been a momentous event had not been momentous at all. I cried because I had barely seen hers, but she had most certainly seen mine, and what she had seen had obviously fallen short of here expectations. I cried because I felt no wiser or more experienced than I had felt before, because I had done something that I knew was dirty and wrong, and because somehow I knew that my relationship with Sally would never be the same again.

It could have been worse. No parents walked in, and nobody ever found out. But Sally had clearly lost interest in me. From that day forth, she chose her books over our games, and she paid me little attention in our hours together at school.

Twelve years have passed since that first humiliation, and Sally and I still go to school together. We are not friends, though we do say hi when we pass in the halls. She’s a lesbian now, and sometimes I wonder if I am partially responsible.

OCTOBER

Senior year is about two things: getting into college and getting laid. At my school, pretty much everybody is successful at the first, but only about half the guys in any given year are successful at the second. I’ve come up with a few theories about why this is so.

Money.
We pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend college, but we hope to have sex for the price of dinner and a movie.

Support.
When it comes to getting into college, everybody is in your corner. You’ve got a guidance counselor, you’ve got an SAT tutor, you’ve got people to help you with your essay. Who do you have helping you get laid?

False Advertising.
Colleges only see you on paper before they accept you, and people always look better on paper than in person. Think about it. How many people respond to personal ads thinking they’ve found the man or woman of their dreams, only to be bitterly disappointed when the face-to-face meeting takes place?

Safety Schools.
You don’t just apply to a few colleges and hope for the best. You apply to a lot of schools, including ones that are not your top choices but that you feel confident will accept you. If the object is going to college, then any school is better than no school at all. That’s the secret. Just get in somewhere.

You know how people make lists of all the colleges they’re applying to? I decided to do the same thing with girls. Here’s what I have right now:

UNREALISTIC, BUT WORTH FANTASIZING ABOUT

Jody Simons:

Jody Simons is in the popular crowd and has dated the boys that the popular girls date, but something about her seems different. For one thing, she volunteers for the school’s community service program and tutors disadvantaged children. For another thing, she has friends outside the party-going, trendsetting, partner-swapping circle she’s associated with. And for a third thing, she told me once she thought I had the coolest name. Even though we’ve never had a real conversation, I’ve convinced myself she has a secret crush on me that she’s been nursing since we were in a class together in tenth grade. I could stare at her legs forever.

Lisa Kravitz:

Lisa Kravitz and I were friends in elementary school, when she was still awkward and flat-chested. Toward the end of sixth grade, she blossomed into the hottest girl in the class, and since then I’ve had a huge crush on her. She’s one of those girls who’s friendly to everybody and probably knows everyone in our grade. When she spots me by the lockers or in the hallway, she always seems genuinely pleased to see me, and for a moment I can pretend that we’re still really close. She’s had a few not-so-great boyfriends over the years. What she needs is a nice, sensitive guy like me.

MORE REALISTIC

Celeste Keller:

The day Celeste heard my obituary was the day our relationship took on new life. We sit together in class now, and I smile when she makes references to novels I haven’t read and wonder if this is how literary people flirt. I missed a great opportunity the other day. She was talking about a battle scene in The Iliad as an example of Homer-erotica, and it wasn’t until later that I realized Homer rhymes with boner.

Katie Marks:

If you look closely enough at Katie, you can see that she has a pretty face and a nice body, even though she plays down her femininity as much as possible. Sometimes I fantasize about her ripping open her oversized army coat and being completely naked underneath. The way she curses, you know there would be a lot of dirty talk. The way she drinks, you know she would be wild and uninhibited. Neil says he is going to try to sleep with her, and I tell him it’s lame to talk that way about your closest female friend.

SAFETIES

Jane Blumeberg:

Jane Blumeberg is a sweet, shy girl a year behind me in school. I am sure she has never had a boyfriend or even kissed a boy. Our families know each other and belong to the same temple. She always smiles when she sees me, and I’ve caught her staring at me when she didn’t think I was looking. She is actually pretty cute, with long brown hair and big doe-like eyes, but I think what she would like is a nice, safe boy to hold hands with. You seethe problem.

Most any ninth-grade girl with low self-esteem:

I’m just kidding. Sort of.

My list of colleges is far more extensive, with at least half a dozen schools I have absolutely no chance of getting into.

“You never know,” my mother says. “It doesn’t hurt to try.”

We’re in the living room before dinner, and my father has just finished his second martini.

“George Bush got into Yale,” he says, looking wistfully at his empty glass.

“And you’re certainly smarter than he is,” my mother adds.

Given that she’s a high school guidance counselor, it is remarkable how little my mother understands about how colleges choose their students. Thank goodness she works at a school other than mine.

“Who wouldn’t want you?” my mother says, giving me a hug.

Every girl in my high school class, for starters, I think.

“You’re certainly a better writer than most of the students in my freshman seminar,” my father says.

This is small consolation. My father is probably the only tenured English professor in the country who volunteers to teach a remedial writing course to incoming freshmen, and most of his students speak English as a second language. His dissertation was entitled
Chewing GUM: Sinking Our Teeth into Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics,
and I’ve caught him more than once salivating over a well-placed semicolon.

“Well, hopefully I’ll get in somewhere,” I say, because I can’t resist the opportunity to provoke him.

Sure enough, his face goes red. “
Hopefully
is an adverb. Do not use it to mean ‘I hope.’”

And now the farmer example.

“The farmer looked up at the sky hopefully,” my father says.

I smile.

“You scoundrel,” he says, and goes off to fix himself another drink.

Mr. Parke often begins class with a free-write. When we come in, he has us take out a piece of paper and make a list of the things we are most preoccupied with.

“Don’t spend a lot of time thinking,” he says. “Just write down whatever is on your mind.”

To demonstrate, he quickly scribbles his own list on the board:

BEAUTIFUL WRITING, BEAUTIFUL WOMEN
, 100-
YEAR-OLD GRAND MARNIER, ALIMONY PAYMENTS, MARQUIS DE SADE
.

He points to the last item. “That’s the name of my Saint Bernard,” he says by way of explanation, “though the original’s not bad either.”

“Are we going to have to share this with the class?” Eugene Gruber asks. Eugene is president of the Dungeons & Dragons club, which puts him just slightly below me on the social food chain.

“This is just for you, Eugene,” Mr. Parke replies. “So don’t hold back on any of those secret perversions.”

The class laughs, and I join in, grateful that I am not the one they are laughing at.

On my paper I write:
CELESTE, GETTING LAID, GETTING INTO COLLEGE
, SAT
S, MEMOIR AWARD, PUBLIC HUMILIATION, MR. PARKE’S LEFT TESTICLE
.

“Now,” says Mr. Parke, “write for twenty minutes off the list you came up with and see where it takes you.”

Eugene’s hand shoots up.

“No, Eugene, you will not have to share, though I hope some people will volunteer.”

I begin to write and, uncensored, the words come easily.

Stanley Kaplan and The Princeton Review Offer SEX Preparation Classes

After years of success offering SAT and other test-preparation courses, Stanley Kaplan and The Princeton Review have decided to expand their tutoring empires to prepare male teenagers for the new SEXs.

SEX, which stands for
S
ex
Ex
am, comes at a time when an increasing number of teenage boys are finding they lack the necessary skills to get laid. “Something had to be done,” said Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine and a strong supporter of the new testing program. “We’ve got a whole generation of young men growing up without the tools they need to be sexually productive members of our society.”

The Sex Exam consists of two sections. The first—Getting Someone to Go to Bed with You—focuses on strategies that will make you more desirable. The second—Sexual Performance—focuses on maximizing both your and your partner’s pleasure during the act itself.

Testing was scheduled to begin last year, but protests of sexual bias from the gay community convinced test makers and education officials that new tests needed to be developed. “We’re very conscious of political correctness,” said an education spokesman. “Students now have the option of taking a version of the exam that focuses specifically on gay sex.”

Although the test is new, representatives from Stanley Kaplan and The Princeton Review are confident they can prepare anybody who takes their classes. “We’ll be teaching our courses in a revolutionary way,” said a spokesman for Stanley Kaplan. “Not only will students work their way through practice problems in our review books, they will also observe and discuss live simulations. We’re very excited about our program. I’ve got a hard-on just thinking about it.”

“Any volunteers to share?” Mr. Parke asks.

Rocco raises his hand.

“Mr. Mackey,” Mr. Parke says with a smile. “Have you actually written something today, or are we to be treated to one of your fabulous drawings?”

“Both,” Rocco says proudly.

Rocco reads a few sentences about how much he loves football. Then he holds up his drawing, which shows a huge player in a uniform that says
MACKEY
crashing down on a cowering quarterback.

Mr. Parke shakes his head. “Painful,” he says. “On so many levels.” Then, more brightly, “Any other volunteers?”

Everybody looks at everybody else.

“Share yours, Shakespeare,” Rocco calls across the room. “I bet that’s some funny shit.”

I try to make myself as small as possible. “That’s okay.”

“Come on, Shakespeare,” Celeste whispers. “I’m sure it’s great.”

Everyone is suddenly looking at me, and even Mr. Parke seems to be nodding encouragement. A few more seconds and I will lose control of the situation completely.

“It’s not appropriate,” I say.

Mr. Parke’s eyes light up. “I should hope not.”

I look down at my paper. There is no way I can read this out loud to the class. Every girl in here will think I’m some kind of pervert.

“Would you like me to read it for you?” Mr. Parke asks.

It feels like I have no choice, so I hand him my paper.

I keep my head down as he reads, and my skin prickles with excitement and anguish. Even though I go to great lengths to make myself invisible, deep down I crave the spotlight. I hear people laughing, but somehow it all seems very far away. I peek up and see Celeste looking at me and smiling.

“You’re the man!” Rocco yells when Mr. Parke has finished.

Mr. Parke shakes his head. “I must say, Mr. Shapiro, your writing certainly is provocative.” He hands me my paper and smiles. “Brilliant work.”

Celeste comes up beside me as I leave class and puts her arm through mine. “You’re bad,” she says.

There are very few things more exciting than being called bad by a girl you want to do bad things to. Why, then, do I feel like I might throw up?

“Where do you come up with your ideas?” she asks.

I shrug. It’s hard to concentrate with Celeste touching me.

“I get it,” she says. “Great writers never reveal their inspiration.”

“No, it’s just…I don’t know…I wish there really was a class like that,” I say. “I sure could use it right now.”

Celeste laughs but does not say anything.

“Do you want to maybe go to a movie after school?” I ask without looking at her.

Celeste stops and turns to me. “Today?” She has a troubled look on her face. “I can’t today. I have an appointment.”

“That’s okay,” I say quickly. “I should be working on my memoir anyway.” Idiot, idiot, idiot, what were you thinking?

“I could go on Thursday,” she says.

“Thursday? Yeah, Thursday’s good. Great.”

We stand there looking at each other, smiling awkwardly.

“So I guess I’ll see you later,” I say, already moving away. Miraculously, I manage to escape without tripping or bumping into any large objects.

I’m sitting in Ms. Rigby’s math class basking in the glow of my conquest when the assistant principal comes in and calls Charlotte White out of class. Charlotte is a quiet, serious student, so it seems unlikely that she is in trouble. All I can think is that there must be some sort of family emergency, and when Charlotte walks from the room—quick and pale—I flash back to a poem she wrote in English last year. She never shared her work in class, but one time we were paired together, and I had to read what she had written. I remember she seemed uncomfortable sharing, and though I don’t recall exactly what the poem was about, I do remember a frightening image of a girl walking across a frozen lake, and knowing somehow she was writing about herself.

She’s a strange girl, Charlotte, though it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly is off. It’s not her clothes or her mannerisms or the way she talks. She doesn’t have any tattoos or weird piercings or purple hair or unshaved legs. She’s actually very plain-looking, a little tall maybe, with a slightly tomboyish face. What sets her apart, I think, is the way she always keeps to herself. It’s like there’s an invisible wall she’s put up to keep people from getting too close. She came to the school partway through eleventh grade last year and, as far as I can tell, has never made any friends.

I push Charlotte out of my mind and return to more pleasant musings. I imagine walking through the hallways hand in hand with Celeste, and people who have never paid me any attention suddenly taking notice. I imagine acknowledging my brother and his girlfriend with a knowing grin as I wrap my arm around Celeste’s shoulders. I imagine kissing Celeste by the lockers the way I’ve seen other couples kiss as if it’s no big deal.