The Late Bloomer (14 page)

One might blame their having sex so often as being the main problem facing the characters in the story. Their sex is unimaginative, fake and too frequent. But sex is not the problem—fucking is the problem. When one has sexual intercourse, one is either making love or fucking. Sex between two people involved in an authentically mutual relationship in which love is present is termed lovemaking. Whereas sex done only to satisfy the wants and desires of people who do not truly love one another is referred to as fucking. I'm not saying that fucking is always wrong and that making love is always right, but I do believe that making love is more meaningful than fucking. Fucking only gives one a feeling of emptiness.

Colgate's ever-popular Spring Party Weekend is the manifestation of an entire year's worth of scamming and fucking crammed into one weekend. I personally spent three hours during this past rain-drenched Saturday afternoon drinking beverages and listening to a discussion about some of the “easier” women on campus
and how, when and where the men participating in the discussion had sex with these women. I was even ridiculed for not having had a sexual encounter with one of these highly acclaimed women, because, “everyone on the hockey team does this girl.” Something very wrong is going on here. . . .

I was right. Something
very wrong
was going on. While I was taking the moral high road, I really wanted to be part of the predominant, low-road crowd. What really was wrong wasn't the eighteen-to-twenty-two-year olds around me exploring their sexuality; rather, the problem resided at the base of the brain of this very frustrated nineteen-year-old student-athlete with an undiagnosed lump of abnormal cell tissue that had been strangulating his hormonal functioning for the last several years. As my college career was just starting, I found myself on the outside of all the fun. I coped by telling myself that there is more to being a man than having fun and having sex. It was an attitude that I wouldn't truly feel proud about having until my body permitted me to make the same choices as one of those typical males I so dreaded in college.

—

I was handicapped, but all I knew then was that my reflexes would be even faster with less fat. So I went home for the summer with the goal of getting stronger, faster and losing weight. I went on starvation diets, ran five miles a day, did five hundred sit-ups a night. My body trimmed down a little, but it stayed relatively flabby. I blamed my genetics: Heck, my dad and older brothers were all overweight. Maybe this was my curse and I had to
let
my body be whatever it was. Turns out, of course, that my muscle-building efforts were tantamount to inflating a pinpricked balloon. I was nineteen and couldn't remember the last time I had had a spontaneous erection.

At least I had my newfound Zen-inspired philosophy of life to keep me from thinking too much about my disappointment and
frustration. I read the stuff constantly. One passage, by the late Zen master D. T. Suzuki, stands out; he wrote, “Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness' has to be restored with long years of training in self-forgetfulness.”

When my freshman year ends, I return to Buffalo, return to living with Kris, Dad and hanging with Jenny. I am looking forward to being “childlike” and forgetting about Colgate for a few months. But like seemingly everything in my life lately, it doesn't exactly work out as planned.

On my birthday, I receive an envelope in the mail. It's from Dad. Inside is a Happy Birthday card. Instead of containing the usual twenty-dollar bill, there's an empty, crumpled pack of Pall Malls. Flakes of tobacco fall out of the card as I read his handwritten note:
This is my last pack of cigarettes. I am quitting. Happy Birthday, Kenny!

A few months ago he asked me what I wanted for my birthday: “A case of beer? . . . A subscription to
Playboy
?”

“No, Dad. I want you to quit smoking.”

He was up to three packs a day. He had been smoking since he was twelve years old, and I feared that if he didn't quit soon, he would die before I made it into the NHL, before I truly made him proud of me.

Since I was two hundred miles away, I had no way of knowing whether he was keeping his promise. In fact, as the school year progressed, I spoke to Dad less and less, from every day to about once a week. Part of the reason is that he only wanted to talk about hockey (which I was sick of rehashing over and over again), and that he was always bellyaching about his problems.

Nine out of every ten phone conversations began with him telling me how weak and tired he is all the time. He also began grumbling about a faint but constant aching in his toes and fingers. He had
recently been diagnosed with a diabetes-induced disease called neuropathy, in which the nerves in the extremities die. It started with a tingling sensation and has since digressed into a sensation he describes as someone poking him with hundreds of tiny needles. It's driving him crazy, he says, and he can't sleep. Valium eases the pain, but it also starts him on a drug-addicted descent.

Not too long ago, he quit his job selling printing—due to the pain, he tells me. His income now consists of a thousand-dollar monthly Social Security disability check and whatever money he can get from people by selling vinyl siding to them over the phone (he never calls it “telemarketing,” but that's what it really is).

The first thing he tells me when I return from school is that he is “maxed out” in the financial department. Rent on his two-bedroom yellow duplex (Kris calls it “urine-colored,” compared to our old Harwood duplex, which was “shit-brown colored”) in a scrappy lower-middle-class neighborhood called Blasdell runs him about $350 a month; surviving on a fixed government income of under a thousand a month, he is strapped for cash. He says he owes medical bills he will never pay, and, as such, he will never again step foot in a hospital. When the collection agency letters arrive in the mail, he tosses them in the garbage without even opening them.

I would move in with Mom and Norm, but the house they're renting in Hamburg, right next door to a fire station with a siren so loud that you have to stop talking during its thirty-second wail, is not big enough. To placate Dad's worries that he will have to support me for the summer, I tell him I'll be working for the town, mowing baseball diamonds and weed-eating ditches. Mom got me the job. I'll be making close to five bucks an hour.

It's only a few months after my “present,” but the first day I am back I learn that Dad is still smoking, although he is trying to eat healthier and regularly giving himself insulin injections (unless he needs me to poke him in the rear because the scar tissue on his arm makes it difficult to break the skin). His diabetes makes him more
prone to infection, though, and in the sticky peak of summer he is struck by yet another flare-up of epididymitis.

He's running a 102-degree fever and his right testicle balloons to tennis-ball size. He stays flat on his back for a week, but, despite the dozen aspirins a day, the infection persists and the swelling won't go down. His doctor calls to advise him to check into the hospital. Dad says that his insurance won't cover all costs; a few days in the hospital, recovering from a draining abscess on his sperm duct, would put him into even more debt.

He insists on toughing it out.

So we wait. But days pass and the swelling only magnifies.

“Ohhhh . . . ohhhh . . . ,” he wails, quavering like a grieving mother over her child's grave. The curtains dampen the afternoon light. Dad's humanity amounts to a moaning lump of blanket.

I bring him a glass of water and five Bayers, as he requested, although aspirin, which thins the blood, probably won't help stop the bleeding. My mind's too cluttered—I'm too scared—to think straight, so I give him the aspirins anyway.

He's on his back, his giving-birth legs spread, wearing nothing but a bathrobe; the pillow is a sponge for his sweat.

I leave the water on his nightstand and tell him I'll be in the living room with Kris, if he needs anything.

We have been through this at least three or four times before, but the swelling usually went down after forty-eight hours. This time the fluid has been accumulating for over a week and the red bulge between his legs is only getting bigger. He reveals the abscess and I feel vomit curdling in my esophagus.

Running a fever fueled by the more than 90-degree temperature outside, he cries, “Get me a knife, Kenny.”

“A what?” I ask.

“A knife. I'm gonna poke it, to relieve the pressure.”

“No way. You'll bleed to death, man. I'm calling the doctor right now.”

“I have to, Kenny. I can't take it anymore. I need to drain it—real bad.”

I tell him the
smart
thing to do is to call an ambulance.

“If this doesn't work,” he sheepishly reasons, “then you can call the ambulance. Now, please, Kenny, just go get me a knife.”

“Kris, just go back to the living room,” I tell my brother, who is standing behind me in the hallway.
No son should see his father so pathetic.

Hands trembling, I pull a four-inch steak knife from a kitchen drawer and rinse it under a stream of hot water. I then rub it dry with a clean towel, a crude method of sterilization.

I hand him the knife and a couple of feminine napkins I bought at the corner store earlier that morning to soak up the blood.

“Here,” I say. “Be careful.”

He squirms up off his damp pillow to sitting to get a better angle on his groin.

I wish I was on Cape Cod right now, soaking up rays and drifting away in Margaritaville with my Colgate friends, rather than soaking up pus from my dad's balls.

“Should I stay?”

“No,” he says, sipping his water. “Just leave me alone for now.”

I leave the room, cracking the door open, and join my little brother on the couch where he lies stone-stiff, curled into a fetal ball and watching television. Kris is now too old to distract with a shadowy game of war. So I turn down the volume and big-brother rub his back.

“Don't worry, little dude. He's going to be fine.”

It takes fifteen minutes of tentative poking before Dad works up the nerve to gently slice the abscess.

A grunt . . . a shriek . . . a cry: “Oooooooooh, JESUS!”

I cover Kris's ears.

A few hours later, the swelling recedes and Dad sleeps for the first time in days. And I breathe.

—

Throughout the summer, Jenny and I see each other almost every day. We watch TV, go see movies at the mall and hang out with my dad as he tries to get his health back. But the passion between us is not there—mostly from her. We have sex once in three months. Whenever I start talking about where we might live together when I graduate in three years, she stops me. “I'm just living in the moment,” she asserts. By the end of the summer, she confesses to having kissed another guy at school that spring. An accident. She was drunk. Stupid move. She feels bad. So do I, and we vow to be more honest with each other.

A few months into my sophomore year, Jenny informs me over the phone that she will be leaving Upstate New York to attend graduate school in California. And, in keeping with our full disclosure pact, she wants to break up, explaining, “You need to experience other people before you know for sure that I am the one.”

I tell her I don't want to see other people. We're Jack and Diane. Two peas in a pod. Birds of a feather.

It doesn't matter. She has made up her mind. We've grown apart, she insists, and she's leaving for LA. “It's just the way it's gotta be,” she says.

It's not that I
want
her back, that I crave her presence. I'm just afraid that without her as my sexual security blanket I will have to go out and meet other girls, expose my insecurities and sexual hang-ups to someone who might not accept me for the different kind of guy that I am. Either that, or I will be a lonely loser.

Dad is right: Girls will ruin your life.

—

Coach Slater calls me into his office after practice one day to tell me not to worry, that he knows that in practices I have been outperforming the other two goalies, Dave and Greg.

“But I have to play Davey as long as we are winning,” he explains.

The team is ranked number two in the national polls behind powerhouse Wisconsin. It's the winningest season in Colgate hockey history. I understand the situation. Sports coaching is a profession rife with clichés, and among the most prevalent is “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.” The team does not need me.

But that doesn't make not playing a single minute of college since joining the program any easier to swallow. If I practiced voodoo, I would be poking needles into a Dave doll before every game. Since I am a Catholic boy from Buffalo, however, I just keep working hard and hope for a break.

Finally, I get one.

Two months before the NCAA Final Four Championships in Detroit's Joe Louis Arena, where we eventually will lose in the finals to Wisconsin on ESPN, Dave strains his knee. He can't even walk, let alone twist his knee ligaments like the joints on a rubber stretch doll, which is what we goalies often must do to stop the puck.

The next game, against Harvard, Slater puts in Greg, who is a year ahead of me. Although we win 6 to 1, I can sense that I soon will get my shot.

A week later, on February 16, 1990, Greg starts against Brown University. Our team has lost only three games out of the last twenty-six, all but one played by Dave Gagnon. Brown, however, has lost more games than they have won. We should crush them. But Greg lets in seven stinkers, and we are losing. I'm where I always am during games: at the end of the bench, cheering on my team, like a good soldier, but secretly thinking,
I shouldn't be sitting on my ass, I should be in the NHL!

When Greg lets in another atrocious goal with twelve minutes and fifty-two seconds left in the game, Slater stomps in his black “good-luck” sneakers over to my end of the bench. He slaps my shoulder pad and bends over to me.

“Kenny,” Slater says, so close I can smell his coffee breath, “get in there.”

I react with a Who-me? gaze.

“I said get in there!” he says, smiling.

Before he can change his mind, I slide my mask over my head, grab my goalie stick and skate swiftly to the goal crease, where Greg stands with his shoulders slumped. He doesn't see me until I stop right in front of him, and when he does he shakes his head disgustedly.
I've waited too long for this chance, pal. Move the fuck over.

“What the fuck's going on?” he says.

I point at Slater, who is motioning for Greg to come to the bench.

Greg slinks back to the bench.

The crowd, about three thousand of them packed to the rafters in their flannels and fleece and mittens and maroon Red Raiders caps, sits silently, probably wondering,
Who's this guy . . . this Ken Who? . . . Who's this guy nervously stretching out and doing deep-knee bends like he's in a 1950's Army recruiting film?

I block them out.
Zen Ken . . . This is my moment. . . . The inner game . . . Let it happen.

I try to not think about how bowel-emptying nervous I am to be finally getting my chance. The fans thumb frantically through their programs. . . .

#2 Ken Baker, Sophomore, Goalie, 5-11, 180, Blasdell, New York

YEAR
    
GP
    
MINS
    
GAA
    
SAVES PCT.
    
W–L–T

1988–89 no statistics

1989–90 no statistics

. . . undoubtedly prompting the more optimistic fans to turn to their neighbors and say, “Well, at least he's got a perfect record.”

A half hour later I do.

I stop ten out of ten shots. A perfect performance. Still, we lose 7 to 6.

After the game, as I'm skating toward the locker room, Slater pulls me aside and says, “You're starting tomorrow. Get a good night's sleep.”

In the locker room, Boomer comes over to my stall. “You've earned it, Bakes.”

I call Dad from a pay phone in the lobby.
I'm starting!
I don't tell him Boomer finally called me Bakes, rather than Pear, because I am too ashamed to ever tell him that I had been nicknamed after a female-shaped fruit.

To keep his ticker from seizing up like an un-oiled engine, the doctor prescribed him a tiny glass bottle filled with nitroglycerin tablets, which he is supposed to place under his tongue whenever he feels the tightness building, the panting, the light-headedness, the . . . heart . . . attack . . . coming. He pops them at least once a week, usually when carrying grocery bags from the car to the kitchen or climbing a flight of stairs. He's not even fifty years old; it's a sad sight.

“I wouldn't miss your first game if I had to stick an oxygen tube into my nose,” he says. “We'll see ya tomorrow.”

I'm so amped up, I don't sleep a wink. I have had enough dress rehearsals. It's time for the show.

I have seen our team's pre-game routine so many times—either from the bench or the press box (where, out of boredom, I have occasionally done color commentary on the student radio station)—that I could start this game with my eyes closed.