The Late Bloomer (16 page)

Throughout my freshman year, Jenny occasionally paid me weekend visits. Jenny was always neurotic about sex, even after my devirginizing debacle in Toronto, often insisting that I wear two rubbers so she wouldn't get pregnant, which, she'd remind me repeatedly, would ruin her life, prevent her from getting her doctorate in psychology, rendering her nothing but a white-trash young mother with a bastard child, blah blah blah.

My most memorable college sexual encounters are with Amy, a long-legged varsity athlete whom I met at a friend's lakeside cabin in Maine the summer between my junior and senior year.

Throughout my senior year Amy drunkenly stumbles into my off-campus apartment nearly every Saturday night, typically following hockey games, during which she sits in the bleachers, amid a pack of her friends, chanting my name—
KEN-nee! KEN-nee!
—and waves banners and, basically, looks primped and pretty.

Topped with long brown hair she likes to pull back into a ponytail or pigtails, Amy is as undeniably beautiful as she is easy to spot in a crowd, which I do during breaks in the on-ice action.

My friends lust after her more intensely than I do, actually. John can't understand why I have not yet capitalized on her puppy-dog eyes and “tight little package” and deflowered her. I don't know what to tell him. I also consider Amy attractive, but I don't burn with desire to do anything sexual with her. It is more of an intellectual attraction: In my
mind I want to, and I know nature has wired me to, but my penis remains apathetic. I never stop to think that I may have a physical problem—I mean, I am a varsity athlete, for Christ's sake! But, still, my male ego won't allow me to totally resist her come-ons; I psych myself up to want to get in her pants, to get some of that “pussy” I have been promised from Day One. I don't want love; I'm not searching for a soul mate here. I just desperately want to be, sexually,
the man.

During Amy's frequent late-night visits to the apartment that John, who now has a girlfriend, and I moved into near downtown, we kiss or pet playfully on my living-room couch. One winter night she shows up unannounced in my bedroom, reeking of vodka.

I find Amy splayed on my bed in a black cotton miniskirt and a tight-fitting white top; her heels dangle off the edge of my mattress.

“Hi, there,” she giggles.

Okay, okay, relax. Play it cool. I will do it—the nasty. I will stick my “cock” into her “pussy”—just like my teammates. Yeah, that's the ticket. Then I'll boast about my bedroom shenanigans the next day at practice. Yeah, I fucked her. She's got a fire bush, man. Maybe then I'll gain access into their studly club.

“This sure is a surprise. How'd you get in?”

“The door,” she giggles.

Uh-oh. Here we go. . . . Oh, God, please make my dick work this time.

I plop down on the bed next to where she has fallen horizontal and she nestles beside me, wrapping her arms around my lower back and stroking my bare legs. Her drunkenness relaxes me—a little because it inhibits her from realizing how nervous I am.

“I like your boxers,” she says, stroking the silk. “They're cute.”

Some nine years later, the haunting images of what follows flash, frame by vivid frame, over and over with tragic repetition—my personal Zapruder film, reminding me of my biological imprisonment. The moist meeting of our lips . . . her gentle stroke moving up my thigh to my crotch . . . our wrestling tongues . . . the pressing of our naked bodies . . . her repeatedly squeezing and pulling on my flaccid penis . . .
the failure . . . yanking her hand away . . . her pleading, “Is it me?” . . . me telling her, “No, just go home. You're drunk.”

The morning after, Amy calls and leaves a message:
Is everything okay? Are you mad at me? If I did something wrong, I'm sorry. Call me.

I never call her back. My inability to get hard embarrasses me too much, and I figure I have nothing to say. I was just nervous, is all. Nothing is wrong with me. I was just psyched out or something. You know, uncomfortable. I feel bad that I've upset Amy. She deserves better. She deserves a guy who can be normal, make her feel good, be goofy. With me, she's left wondering what her defect is—whether she isn't pretty, smart or vivacious enough because I don't respond to her advances. I'm too afraid even to begin trying to explain why I can't have sex with her. It's easier to just avoid her, not return her calls and anxiously wait for my college career to end, like a white-knuckle passenger on a turbulent flight who's praying for it all to end. Perhaps when I escape this collegiate pressure cooker, steaming with hypersexual students and rabid hockey fans, I will be comfortable in my skin.

—

To an impotent man, sex becomes all about the act; it has nothing to do with emotional investment or romantic love. Sex becomes an enemy to fight—
fight, fight, fight!

If romantic love is nature's way of bonding men and women who mate so that they will jointly care for their offspring, then impotence biologically handicaps a man's capability for romantic love, since sex and romantic love are inextricably linked. A severely impotent man will thus quash his hunger for that ultimate bond with a woman because it is an emotion that frustrates him as a forty-yard dash might a quadriplegic. Since emotions—love being the most treasured of them all—are what most differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, an impotent man very easily can feel less than human. If the bottom-line biological reason for a male's existence is to pass on his
genes via ejaculated sperm, when his mating desire and his ability to achieve the erection needed to deliver this life force is impaired, he is made to feel as if he inhabits a gender netherworld—neither male nor female, gay nor straight, man nor woman. He feels androgynous, uncomfortably so. He can either fight, seek an escape from that netherworld, or he can peacefully accept his middle place amid the sexual spectrum.

This is me as I near college graduation. I am tired of fighting against my own body, sick of it not behaving as I want it to. But I am not the kind of person to throw my stick down and skate away, and, thanks to my father's dubious example, I'm definitely not quick to admit weakness.

Instead of retreating, I begin flirting with girls more than ever. I may be a wet firecracker, but maybe I can light my wick if I strike enough matches. I will compensate by being as sexually predatory as I have been retreating. Then, I hope, I will find my comfort zone.

I start my quest for mating normalcy with a not-so-pretty but famously promiscuous senior who is notorious around the locker room for her desire to screw a hockey player before she graduates. She has cornered me countless times around campus, focusing her crazy blue eyes on me like a libidinous laser.
What are you doing Friday, Ken? . . . We should do dinner some night. . . .
I always had plans, but with my college career nearing completion I finally relent.

We go to the movies a few times, heading to The Jug afterward and making out in a shadowy booth. But when Horny Girl invites me over to her place, I decline—in a cool-guy way that suggests I have better things to do, not in a way that reveals my fear that she will find out that my dick isn't as strong as she has fantasized. I simply don't want to get too close, too vulnerable. The same avoidance happens with other women—Laura, Sarah, Christina—from whom I run away when our relationship progresses to the point where I either have to get naked or suddenly get up and leave the bedroom.

—

If I go through four years of college without getting laid, my attempt at having a social life will be a colossal failure. Only a month remains in my college career, and the prospect of graduating without having had sex looms. I should partake in some of that decadent sexual behavior that, I have been led to believe, is the birthright of collegiate males of America. Enough of this “lovemaking is more meaningful” bullshit that I used to write in philosophy-class papers. Where has this ascetic lifestyle gotten me? I am more miserable and more of a lonely monk than ever before. I'm sick of being the good son, tired of being Kiss Ass Kenny and doing all the right things. I'm sick of being celibate. All I want is to please myself—not just my misogynistic dad, not just my ambitious hockey-goalie ego. I am lonely and pleasure-deprived. I just want to be whole.

Throughout the final month of the school year, there are plenty of opportunities to prove to myself that I can be a sexual creature. Twice a week, the senior class council throws parties at one of the several downtown bars, sexually charged shindigs that I religiously attend with my friend—let's call him Joe Cool—a fellow hockey player. Joe, six feet of
GQ,
has a reputation around campus for being, well, a male slut. Canadian and cocky, he relishes the reputation and does everything he can to live up to it. In fact, when Boomer graduated, Joe Cool took over that role. I consider him a worthy mentor for my late-college sexual quest.

I head over to his apartment before these parties, invariably finding him coifing his heavily moussed hair in front of the mirror. Which is exactly where I find him on this Wednesday night.

“Hey, Bakes,” he says, not even glancing away from his reflection. “Bakes, we gotta get you laid tonight, man.”

“Dude, you're so preaching to the choir,” I reply. “I have the feeling tonight's the night.”

“That's the attitude,” Cool says, finishing buttoning his oxford, the veritable uniform for Colgate guys, including myself.

Cool thinks I've been having sex with all those groupie girls who hang around me. I'm too embarrassed to admit I can't confirm the color of their pubic hair. So I lie.

We walk across the street to a hole-in-the-wall bar that is the site of the, as the flyer advertised it, “Senior Pukefest.” Beer is only a dollar a pitcher. Cool and I sit down at a table and order four beers, hoping a couple of upstanding and horny ladies will saddle up between us.

Five minutes later one does: a curly-haired party girl named Annie. Short, about five foot two, Annie's most conspicuous feature is her set of plump breasts, which, large for her petite body, distinguishes her in the eyes of many Colgate men, including Cool. Annie tells us she has dated the same guy her entire college career—until now. She is free. Single. Good to go! Judging by the way she keeps stroking our thighs, she has a lot of pent-up energy to release.

Two pitchers later, all Annie wants to discuss is sex, her bra size (34D) and the size of our dicks (longer, we boast, than that beer glass over there).

When Annie broke up with her boyfriend earlier this year, she must have made it her mission to bed a hockey player, because just a few weeks ago she managed to make out with celibate little me (we got as far as under her sheets, but I—drunk—told her I had to get home and finish a paper before she started pulling down my pants or something as terrifying as that).

Annie reveals that she and Cool have had sex about a dozen times, evoking an aw-shucks grin from Cool.

“It's such a pity
we
never did it,” she adds, shaking her head.

“Yeah, well, I was saving myself,” I reply.

“For when?”

“For tonight.”

My beer-buoyed, Cool-inspired cockiness elicits a smile that
stretches her mouth from one freckled cheek to the other. Cool high-fives me like I have just scored a winning goal. Annie's clearly enjoying our fraternal banter.

“Then, let's go,” she says, abruptly standing.

Cool stands up too. “Not without me.”

Peer pressure weighs on me; alcohol lifts my inhibitions; several years of sexual frustration boils inside me.

“Okay.” I spring from my chair. “Let's go.”

Annie squeezes my ass like a roll of Charmin, causing me to spill my cup of beer all over my jeans. The three of us then gallop across the street and up the stairs to Cool's sloppy love nest. Ol' Boomer would be proud.

“Bakes, I can't believe this happening,” Cool whispers as Annie pees in the bathroom. “She wants it soooo bad, man.” He combs back his mane of hair with his fingers and adds, “Just don't touch me, man.” He punches me in the arm; I give him a friendly shove to the shoulder. “Don't worry,” I say. “I'll have plenty of other stuff to touch.”

If I were sober, I would leave the apartment right now, claiming I have a moral problem with the very idea of a ménage à trois or that I forgot my wallet at the bar; if I were as horny as Cool, I probably would already have my pants off. Neither being the case, I plop down on Cool's ratty couch and chug the remnants of my beer, numbing myself.

Annie returns and snuggles next to me, sucking on my neck like a vampire. Inserting a U2 CD into his stereo, Cool stares back at us and feigns jealousy. “Hey, guys, don't start without me.”

Too late. Annie straddles me, locking her hands behind my neck and pulling my face to hers. Cool hunches behind her and starts unbuttoning her shirt and caressing her breasts as she grinds against me to the rhythm of the music.

It's one love / We get to share it

It leaves you baby / If you don't care for it

We're all naked, a panting maze of smooth skin and hands and tongues. Cool may as well be invisible. My eyes are on the pale, supple female skin. I feel her wetness as she tugs at our penises. “Oh, guys” she coos. “I'm so loving this.”

I am getting hard, blood is filling my penis. At last, freedom. Reckless abandon! Fucking!

I kneel beside the couch and start kissing her. Neck. Cheek. Lips. Nipples. Big red nipples! Cool hands me a condom, and I tear open the foil packaging. Inexperienced with rubbers, I fumble in the dim light with the slippery sheath.
Fuckin' thing. Is it inside-out or something?

“C'mon, Ken,” she says. “Come into me.”

By the time I slide the condom on, the blood has left my dick.