The Late Bloomer (23 page)

He cracks a sly grin. “Okay, okay. Fine. You're right. But that's what
I
am about. The question is: What are
you
about?”

—

Glenn, my housemate and a feature writer at
The Daily Press
, is probably the quirkiest, wittiest, smartest journalist I have ever met. With his pale skin, skinny frame, black hair, dry wit and nerdy manner, he is Nicholas Cage and Billy Crystal cross-bred with Ferris Bueller.

Besides the fact that we're in our early twenties and share the same house and that the only thing separating us every night is a half-inch of wall plaster, the main source of our bond is that we both feel like outsiders living in southern Virginia. Glenn is from Colorado and a graduate of Northwestern, just outside of Chicago, where his fiancée is still living. Then why is he working for a tiny local newspaper one notch above the
Mayberry Journal
? Not even Glenn can answer that. It just sort of happened, is how he explains it.

Glenn spends his days two cubicles away from me, hunched in front of his computer screen, writing stories about brilliant teen geeks at Poquoson High School and socially awkward guys who collect antique Atari consoles. Clearly, Glenn's attracted to the region's, shall I say, nerdy underbelly.

Meanwhile, save for the occasional breaking news story surrounding Mr. Robertson's evangelistic empire, I'm mostly writing
about potluck dinners at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church and crafting the occasional
amazing!
local hero story. Needless to say, neither of us is practicing the kind of journalism that has us on the fast track to
The New York Times
—that is, until one day while we're eating stale turkey-and-bacon sandwiches at a Subway sandwich shop.

We've spent the last half hour or so kvetching about how our little
Daily Press
(i.e.,
The Daily Depress
or
The Daily Mess
) epitomizes why newspaper circulation nationwide has been falling faster than Hampton tidewater.

I tell him,
Most of it is all boring stories about boring people doing boring things!

Yeah, for old farts!

All just detached, third-person-voiced news stories that don't relate to young people.

A sad, folded, mutlicolored excuse to run the comics, weather, horoscopes and the obituaries.

What you said!

By the end of our bitch session, we have scribbled down on a couple napkins an idea for a slice-of-life humor column, cowritten by the two of us, that we have dubbed “The Adventures of Ken&Glenn.” Even though Glenn has never done a damn thing I have suggested—including that he cut his ratty black ponytail—he agrees that the column name sounds better with the Ken before the Glenn. I, however, nix his idea that I change the spelling of my name to “Kenn.” When we get back to the newsroom, we pitch our idea for the second coming of Huckleberry Finn to Will Corbin, our hard-ass managing editor.

“It's about two guys who go out, do stuff and write about it,” I explain to Will. Glenn, the more quiet of our duo, sits silently beside me.

“
Stuff
, huh?” Will says, obviously not buying a single iota of it.

“Yeah, you know, like we'll try out for a professional football team and write about it. We'll see how many Big Gulps a human being can ingest in one sitting. Stuff like that.”

“This is starting to sound more sad than funny,” he says.

Will is a tough customer, a roughneck from the Deep South whose thick arms and barrel chest suggest he has victoriously wrestled gators into submission. I tell Glenn that if we can sell Will on the idea, we can sell anybody.

“Sounds interesting,” he says finally, leaning back in his chair, stacking his snakeskin boots on his desk. “
Twisted
—but interesting. We'll try it out. One day a week. We'll see how it goes.”

As we stand, Will smirks. “But this better not be an excuse for you guys to get girls.”

“Don't worry, Will,” I say. “We wouldn't know what to do with one anyway.”

“My point exactly,” he chirp-chuckles.

As I leave his office I realize we have tapped into Will's editorial wild side and discovered one of my God-given gifts (humor writing) that Pastor Tim had said I needed to find.

—

I haven't been this exhausted in a long time. I don't think I have ever felt so spent. I just can't figure out what's sapping me of my energy. It certainly isn't as if I'm working twelve hours a day, six days a week, as I often did at ABC News. Except for when Glenn and I are out late at night experiencing one of our “adventures,” my hours are better than a banker's: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

I speculate that I have grown lethargic as a result of my not getting any exercise after I quit running, due to headaches. Perhaps I need to boost my metabolism with some huffing and puffing and sweating and body movement, the kind of physical exertion I imagine sexually active guys get every day with their girlfriends. But my weariness has not waned even after I started lifting weights at the YMCA two or three days a week. Moreover, I don't seem to get any stronger. Weight-lifting seems to only make my headaches more severe, forcing me to stretch out on the mats while I watch the beefy rednecks bench-press their pecs into chiseled form. It's so discouraging.

Mom, whom I have begun talking to on the phone regularly since Dad died, suggests that I may be suffering from chronic allergies, which have plagued her all of her life. Virginia, she hypothesizes, may have more pollen and ragweed and airborne particles that are causing my sinus headaches.

When I wake up one spring morning with a throbbing brainbuster of a headache and feel too tired to slide my leaden legs off my mattress and onto the bedroom floor, I go see a doctor in Hampton.

“What are your symptoms,” the old doctor drawls.

“Really bad sinus headaches,” I say, sitting shirtless (and extremely chest-conscious) on the examination table.

“That's all?”

“No, I guess feel fatigued a lot too. Mostly in the mornings. That's when it is the worst. But otherwise I feel pretty good.”

“Hmmm,” he says, scribbling some notes on a sheet of paper.

He puts down his clipboard and presses a stethoscope to my chest, then my back, listening. He places his hands on the front of my neck and gently feels my glands with his fingers.

“Where exactly do you feel these headaches?” he asks.

I point to the middle of my forehead.

“So you don't ever feel pain on the sides or in the back of your skull?”

“No, not really.”

The doctor, a laconic southern fellow with a shock of white hair, jots down a few more notes as I bite my fingernails. But I'm impatient. I just want to get into work and write a story. I'm not about to tell him about my lactating nipples: It's probably just a gross body quirk, like nose hair, anyway. I don't have time for chin-stroking doctors when I have daily deadlines.
I don't even need to be here.

“It's allergy season, and I would say there's some stuff in the air that's givin' your sinuses a helluva time,” he posits. “This should help.”

He hands me a prescription for an antihistamine and asks me to return in seven to ten days if my headaches don't abate.

A month later, the headaches haven't stopped; nor have they become any less painful. Still, I never return.

As Dad said,
You gotta die of something.

—

Courtney Love's band, Hole, is playing a club in Virginia Beach and my friend Sam,
The Daily Press's
pop-music writer, has scored me two free tickets. I invite Melissa, a waitress at Sorry Sarah's tavern in downtown Hampton. I met Melissa recently while playing pool with Glenn while drunken crabbers and lobstermen hit on Melissa and the usual gaggle of redneck girls in cutoff shorts and tight tank tops. I didn't hit on Melissa, a “gentlemanly gesture” that she said she appreciated. Of course, I have heard this you're-a-different-kind-of-guy story before. . . . Melissa's a blue-eyed blonde with just enough of a twangy drawl that she reminds me of the busty girls Dad would ogle on
Hee Haw.
I bet Dad would have liked Melissa.

I haven't kissed a girl in over two years, nor have I even tried. Instead, I have been holed up in a shelter ever since my last flaccid encounter with Claudia on that New Year's Eve. Sure, there have been many lonely nights when I have wondered if I will ever find a woman who will put up with my low libido, but more often I have been enjoying my “gift” of celibacy by working six or seven days a week at the paper.

Melissa, however, may be the one. Maybe she is the girl with whom I will finally feel comfortable enough to have sex. I have gone out of my way to be friendly with her, acting in a nonsexual way in order to prevent any expectations on her part. Judging by how she calls me at least once a day “just to talk,” she probably likes me, but I hope I've kept a safe enough emotional and physical distance from her (I gave her a goodbye hug once at Sorry Sarah's) to not have to worry about the possibility of enduring the emasculating horror of not being able to get it up.

A Courtney Love concert, however, is more serious.

The nightclub, aptly called The Abyss, is smoky and dark yet expectant. At least a thousand fans, most of them guys in grungy jeans, flannel shirts and Doc Martens boots, puff joints and chug two-dollar drafts in anticipation of seeing Kurt Cobain's recently widowed wife perform her unique brand of sexy-metal music. Within thirty minutes I have drunk five or six beers—enough to make me less afraid about flirting with Melissa.

Over an hour after their scheduled start, the stage lights pop on. The crowd whoops. Looking very slutty in a short, black baby-doll dress that the front-row guys desperately are trying to peek up, Courtney Love steps to the mike, takes a lazy drag from a cigarette and starts screeching.

They get what they want, and they never want it again. . . . Go on, take everything, I want you to. . . .

Primal drums . . .
Bah-bah-bop . . .

Screaming guitars . . .
wah, wah, wah . . .

White strobe lights flash.

Sweaty bodies mosh.

Melissa's lips, her wanting, longing, lustful eyes.

We kiss.

Love wails:

I fake it so real, I am beyond fake. . . . Some day you will ache like I ache. . . .

Two hours later, many kisses and hugs and lustful glances from Melissa later, our songstress stomps her show to a close.

As I turn to Melissa to leave, Courtney dives into the panting mass of horny males huddled six feet below her. The men catch her lithe body, passing her atop their ass-squeezing, bra-tearing hands. The hands roll her to me and—
I am one of the guys!
—so I grip her
ivory-white thigh, holding her above my head like she's the Stanley Cup and I'm Wayne Gretzky. Glancing up her skirt, I notice she's wearing black lace panties.

A team of bulky bodyguards elbow their way to the molested rock star and pull her from the crowd and dump her listless body to the stage. Love, her dyed-blond hair strands sprouting in a thousand directions, grabs the mike. Shaking a naughty finger, Love playfully points to the crowd. “Hey,” she shouts over the sound system, “which one of you guys stuck their finger in my pussy?”

A hundred whistling and howling men claim responsibility.

I meet Melissa outside the club. Concentrating hard to stay between the yellow highway lines, I drunk-drive her back to her Hampton condo. She invites me in. I accept her offer and walk her up to the front door.

Uh-oh. I can't have sex. . . . I can't have sex. . . . I can't have sex. . . .

“I'm gonna get ready for bed,” she says as we enter, pecking me on the cheek. “I'll be right back.”

I plop onto her couch, dropping face-first into a pillow. I pinch my eyes shut, trying desperately to fall asleep. A few minutes later I hear her footsteps coming closer to the living room, where I lay—available, vulnerable, impotent.

I feign snoring.
I can't have sex.

Kneeling beside me, she rubs my back and strokes my hair. “Come to bed with me,” she whispers, unlacing my boots and sliding them off. When she starts to unbutton my jeans, I groan. A leave-me-alone-I-am-sleeping groan.

It works. She flips off the lamp and walks upstairs.

—

There's this character named “Ken.” He's one half of the young-and-wacky writing duo of Ken&Glenn. He is funny and adventurous. Smart. Fearless. Young. Sexy. Cool. Just like the studs on TV.

Every week he, along with his nerdy sidekick, go out and do what
all of southeastern Virginia's Walter Mittys only dream of doing. Just for fun. Then this character Ken writes about it, every Thursday, in the LifeStyles section of
The Daily Press
, making a great portion of the paper's more than 100,000 readers chuckle at their brazen hijinks.

• Ken visits a massage parlor to see what it is like to get half naked and have a young woman rub slippery oils that smell like jungles all over his body.
  
• Wearing a very macho pair of brown-leather cowboy boots, Ken tries to get a date with a twenty-three-year-old Dutch blonde who was chosen to be the queen of NATO's (headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia) annual International Azalea Festival:
  

Ken: “So, when you come down, we could take you out. Show you around and stuff.”

Queen Emilie: “I don't know. I don't know how tired I'll be.”

Ken: “There's a lot to do around here.”

Queen Emilie (raising her eyebrows): “Really?”

Ken (laughing like a knickers-wearing schoolboy): “Not really.”

• Ken tries out as a wide receiver for a semiprofessional football team. Despite his valiant effort, he fails.
  
• Ken and Glenn place a personal ad in the newspaper:
  BORED TWO DEATH. Two white, slim, anti-social males seek two females with similar flaws, for dysfunctional fun: