The Late Bloomer (26 page)

After our first kiss, I return to Los Angeles and start calling Robin every day. I begin sharing secrets with her that I have never revealed before: my impotence (which, I explain, stems from my fear of sexual failure), my not feeling like a normal guy, my periodic depression. I also admit that I having been starving myself to achieve an idealized male body shape, a similar goal to Heidi's. The five hundred miles of California coastline separating us allows me to open up. I have finally found a woman who, unlike Claudia, I will not nickname Monster.

I admit that I have had very little positive experience with sexual intercourse; as such, I don't want to have sex until I feel more comfortable, secure in our relationship. She says she understands this too. “Actually, that's refreshing to hear,” she adds. “I've never heard a guy say he wanted to
wait
to have sex. Don't worry. Just get back up here, okay?”

Every other weekend, I fly up to San Francisco to see her. We go shopping at Union Square, roller-blade in Golden Gate Park and walk along the beach, where we often will stop and hold each other as the sun sets over the Pacific horizon.

We play tennis, something I haven't done since college. And the city's cooler, cleaner air seems to make my sinus headaches less painful
than in LA. For the first time in many years I have a female companion, someone who understands me, and who, due to having just lost her close friend, understands how devastating it is to lose a loved one.

After one of our romantic weekends in San Francisco, I return to LA and fill Glenn in on where I have been the last few days. “She is so great, dude. She accepts me for the freak that I am,” I say, without, of course, telling him half of it.

But we still haven't had sex, and I am not sure I even want to try. Just in case, though, I not only have been preparing mentally (mostly telling myself to relax and not overthink myself into failure) but I also have been popping pills. They are a new “natural remedy” called melatonin. My roommate, Kelly, who works the graveyard shift at a video production house, has been taking melatonin for the last few months because the hormone is supposed to help regulate the body's sleep clock. He returns from work at about nine in the morning, usually about when I am trying to drag myself out of bed, and immediately pops a melatonin pill, which he claims helps him sleep all day long. Kelly tells me that melatonin, which is secreted naturally by the pineal gland inside your brain, is believed to keep a man's testosterone levels high. “I heard a lot of guys are taking melatonin to boost their sex drive,” he says.

Bingo! I immediately decide that I, too, will start taking melatonin, not only to help me feel more refreshed when I wake up in the morning but to prepare me for having sex with Robin. I take them every night before I go to sleep. I seem to fall asleep more quickly, rather than stay up past
Letterman
as I obsess over the pathetic state of my life. I don't notice an increase in my sex drive, but, then again, I haven't tried to have sex yet.

—

A month after we met, I bring Robin to Buffalo to meet my Mom and Norm. While Robin is in the shower one morning, Mom tells me how happy she is that I have finally found someone I love. “You deserve to
be happy,” she says. My brothers, on the other hand, act shocked that I even have a girlfriend, let alone someone so pretty. Most of my brothers, I conclude, have spent the last few years assuming I was gay.

Robin is taken on a tour down my memory lane, through my old neighborhoods in Hamburg. I have been back to Buffalo only twice since Dad died a little over two years ago; I still associate Buffalo with Dad. Every ice rink we drive past, every baseball diamond, is a reminder of the most influential man in my life. When I'm not angrily telling Robin how much of a jerk he could be (“He's a big reason why you're the first girlfriend I've had in a very long time”), I am tearfully recalling how supportive he could be, too, how he was my number-one fan, how the best parts of my personality—my ability to relate to all kinds of people, my work ethic, my sense of humor—come from him. I miss him.

We then fly to New York City, where I attend meetings with
People
editors. I treat Robin like a princess, pampering her in an executive suite at the Parker Meridien hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Free room service. Free shoe shines. Free pool and spa on the roof. I use my
People
connections to get us tickets to see the Broadway production of
Rent.

It is only the second time I have been in New York since I graduated from Columbia over three years ago. Like most places I've lived so far in my life, I have avoided returning to them. I don't like to be reminded of the pain associated with my former homes—Colgate, DC, Manhattan, Virginia and, of course, Buffalo. But I feel better about myself on this trip to New York than I did the entire year or so I lived in Upper Manhattan. Walking hand-in-hand with Robin through Times Square, I actually feel like a normal guy with a normal girlfriend—not the male poseur I have been for so many years. I'm so grateful to be falling in love. Yet, I know I can't put off the inevitable—sex—too much longer. There will come a time when Robin, being a healthy woman with a healthy sex drive, will want to consummate our bond.

On our last morning in New York, I wake to find Robin lying on
the couch naked her lean ballerina legs spread apart. Usually, we will just kiss and, perhaps, I'll bring her to orgasm with my fingers or my tongue (then I will decline her advances to satisfy me). The intensity of her kisses this morning, however, tells me she is eager to do more.

As she kneels on the carpet, sucking and caressing me, thoughts of past sexual failures flash through my mind: Claudia's crying in bed; panicking with college girls; avoiding sexual intimacy by feigning sleep; my hotel disaster in Toronto with Jenny. The racing heart, the sweat, the anxiety, the
psych-out.
The moment is all too familiar.

“No, no,” I plead. “Please, don't.” I push her off my crotch and hug her, telling her softly, “I'm feeling a little rushed right now is all. I'm sorry.”

“But we have all day,” she says, annoyed. “I'm not rushing you.”

I tear the sheet from the bed and, suddenly uncomfortable being seen naked in front of her, wrap it around me. “I just don't feel like doing this right now,” I say.

“Why not?” she says.

“I don't know. I just don't.”

She starts throwing clothes into her suitcase.

“I wish I did, but . . .”

I knew this would happen. This relationship was too good to be true.

“Please,” I plead. “Don't leave.” I start crying—“I love you.”

“If you love me,” she says, “then why can't you make love to me?”

I don't know, I tell her.

“Maybe it isn't all in your head. Maybe it isn't all your dad's fault.”

Maybe, I nod.

“Maybe you are
sick.
”

Maybe, I say.

“I mean, there
must
be
some
thing wrong with you. A normal guy doesn't have problems like this. It's just not right.”

I know, I say.

“Promise me you will go see a doctor when you get back to LA.”

I promise her.

—

“Do you have any problems achieving or maintaining erections?” Dr. Trabulus, my physician, asks me as I sit across a desk from him in his Beverly Hills office.

“Um, yeah” I reply. “I actually do.”

It's a few weeks after Robin confronted me in New York, and I have just arrived for my first physical examination in over five years. Trabulus, a famously laid-back doctor with a celebrity clientele, proceeds with a clinical thoroughness that belies his cool demeanor. His erection question is about the twentieth of about forty queries (“Family history of diabetes?” “Yes.” . . . “Headaches?” “Yes, real excruciating sinus ones.” . . .) that he reads off of a rote checklist.

When I answer that I have erection problems, Trabulus, pen firmly in hand, glances up from his clipboard and counters, “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know,” I stammer. “I guess I have trouble getting hard sometimes.”

“What do you mean by sometimes?”

“Well, I really should say
most
of the time.”

“Not all the time?” he asks.

“Yeah. I mean, every now and then, if I concentrate and relax, I can make myself hard, sort of.”

I have hated doctors' offices for as long as I can remember. The sterile white walls. The crinkly paper over the examination table. The smell of alcohol. The old doctor feeling my balls for a hernia during elementary school exams. The oldsters in the waiting room, hacking up phlegm. The babies wailing behind closed doors. Everything about doctor's offices recalls my worst childhood memories of accompanying Dad, pale and prematurely frail, to the doctor because my mom didn't think he was well enough to go alone. But now I need to see one. If anything, I need to know that I am a healthy twenty-seven-year-old guy with nothing but sexual hang-ups stemming from a pressuring
father and a traumatic romantic history. That way I can focus on the psychological reasons for my impotence; then I can move on and become the sexualized man I desperately want to be.

Trabulus has me strip down to my boxers and lie back on the table. He listens to my heartbeat through a stethoscope, he pinches my nipples.

“You ever have any discharge come from here?”

“Yeah,” I say, almost gleefully.

No one has ever asked me this question; I have never heard any guy mention this happening to them. That he would ask, I hope, means that it wasn't as bizarre a bodily function as I have feared. “As a matter of fact,” I add, “every now and then a little stuff comes out. Not always. Just sometimes.”

“Any soreness around here?” he asks, pressing the tissue around my nipple.

“Yeah,” I say. “Especially when I go running or something.”

A nurse then draws several vials of blood, and I pee in a cup. Trabulus returns and says he will call me in a couple of days with the results.

The very next morning, Trabulus calls me. He wants me to come into his office to talk about “the results” of my blood tests.

“Can't you just tell me over the phone,” I reply. “I'm really busy today, and would rather . . .”

“No,” he brusquely interjects. “I want to go over them with you in person.”

This is the death call. Where I learn I'm going to die of some dreadful disease. AIDS, cancer. Just like in the movies. Just like Dad.

An hour later I'm sitting in Trabulus' office. I'm gnawing my fingernails.

“First of all, I think you're going to be fine,” he begins, his grave expression suggesting otherwise. “But you could have a problem.”

Rigid as a tongue depressor, I sit up in my chair.

“Because of some of the symptoms you reported to me, I went
ahead and ran an across-the-board check on your hormones. They all looked okay. Except for one.”

He places a sheet of paper in front of me. It's the laboratory report for my blood test. “I tested the level of prolactin in your system. You probably don't know what prolactin is; don't worry, most guys don't,” he continues, explaining that prolactin is a milk-producing hormone secreted by the pituitary gland, a pea-sized gland at the base of your brain. “Most men have just trace levels of prolactin in their blood system.”

He taps his finger on the report, and I look down. Just above his index finger reads the number
1578
.

“One thousand five-hundred and seventy-eight,” he says. “This is your prolactin level.”

“What should it be?” I ask.

“Anywhere from 2 to 18.” He adds, “Even women who are lactating—you know, breast-feeding—usually have a prolactin level lower than 200.”

I glance up, straight into his eyes. He says, “I think you might have an adenoma, or a tumor. In most cases, the prolactin level is so elevated because a tumor, attached to the pituitary gland, is oversecreting that hormone. But—and I emphasize the
but
—we can't know for sure until we see it on an MRI.”

I sit with an unflinchingly stoical stare. A hockey stare. A tough-motherfucker stare. A Larry Baker stare. I don't cry, nor do I feel scared. I feel nothing. I am numb.

“You told me yesterday that you sometimes can get an erection,” Trabulus says. “When's the last time you had one?”

“Within the last few months, I'd say. Not a real hard one. But it was an erection.”

“Really?” he replies, his eyes widening with surprise. “With that high a prolactin level, I'm surprised you've been able to have one in the last five years.”
Fake it, Dad liked to say. If you believe it, you can achieve it.

I learn that autopsy studies suggest that as many as twenty-five percent of the general adult population is walking around with benign tumors feeding off their pituitary gland, a pea-shaped nub of tissue at the frontal base of the brain known as “the master gland” because it secretes the hormones that, chemically at least, make men men and women women. The overwhelming majority of these pituitary tumors, however, remain so small that the person feels little or no symptoms. But in rare cases, such as mine, the tumor grows so big that it can short-circuit your endocrine system, disrupting the biochemical balance that is one's natural state.

I pull a pen and reporter's spiral notebook out of my black leather shoulder bag; rather than emotionally confronting this grim news, I do what I have been doing my entire journalism career: I hide behind my journalistic shield and seek from him the cold, hard facts.

What's it called?
A prolactinoma. Because it is a growth, a tumor, that is secreting prolactin.

Are these malignant, cancerous kind of tumors?
No. They're usually benign.