The Late Bloomer (8 page)

—

At fifteen, I tell everyone that I will never get married. I've seen firsthand what marriage is about. Even so, having grown up singing along to fifties- and sixties-era love songs with my father, I can't imagine not ever falling in love.

Although Dad's romantic history isn't something I want to repeat, Dad's support of me is heartfelt and admirable. He sings my praises from the bleachers, cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting, “Attaboy, Kenny!” He also has no compunction about bluntly telling me after a game when I have played lousy: “You sure shit the bed tonight.” What he lacks in sensitivity, he makes up for with his
unconditional faith in me as an athlete. It certainly is a hundred times better than how he treats my other brothers, so I don't ask for anything more, and I don't cross him.

After work at least three afternoons a week, Dad will drive over to our duplex to pick me and Kris up for our hockey practice, and on the weekends he drives me to games in Rochester, Toronto, Montreal, Detroit, Erie, Pittsburgh. He never complains, partly, I'm sure, because it's his only break from working.

Sometimes we log hundreds of miles on the highway in a single weekend, talking hockey and listening to oldies stations the entire way. Elvis. Del Shannon. The Supremes. Roy Orbison. Oh, boy, Dad
loves
Roy Orbison and his sappy ballads. Like “Pretty Woman.” It sort of makes sense that Roy's lovelorn tunes resonate with Dad, who, while warning me of the dangers of having a woman in your life, flirts with every halfway attractive woman whom he encounters and remains as romantic (philosophically if not practically) as when he was a high school senior writing mash notes in my mother's yearbook.

But as a high school student I realize that he has a wandering eye that must have driven Mom crazy, although she's never said as much. As I've gotten older I'm noticing more and more that he checks out every woman's butt and breasts, even the girls my age. I'm not even checking out the girls my age! I tell him he's a dirty old man. To which he proudly concedes: “Guilty.”

I used to think he was just enjoying the scenery, which of course he was, only the sexual kind. I am embarrassed by his ogling and pretend I don't see him staring.
Am I supposed to do the same? Is something wrong with me because I don't?

—

Dad is a rink rat. If Kris or I am playing a game or a practice, which is on just about any given day of the week, chances are that he is in the stands watching. He even met his new girlfriend, Jan, a hockey mom, at the rink. I think they bonded over smoking. When not ferrying Kris
and me around western New York and Canada for hockey games, he spends a lot of time with Jan, and the rest of the time trying to find a job that pays as well as owning his own business did.

He seems to have less money than ever. Before the divorce, I would ask him for money to buy something from the snack bar and he would hand me five bucks and not ask for the change. Now, though, he fishes for change in his pocket.

According to Mom, one of their “issues” is that Dad could never explain to her where all the money from the print shop was going. He would just tell her it was none of her business. It turns out that even amid the shop's period of peak profitability, around 1980, he was drowning in debt—from the building's mortgage, the presses, the thirty-foot cabin cruiser docked on Lake Erie, the three cars (including a 1956 Cadillac in mint condition), the Yale Avenue home that he bought a few years after starting Port of Printing. Mom says money burns a hole in Dad's pocket, that Dad has always been poor and doesn't know how to manage his money. She is right.

Now he has sold, at a staggering loss, the debt-plagued print shop and has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Dad sums the loss up for me one day while we're riding in the car: No more boat, no more house, no more family. “If that ain't a shit sandwich,” he mourns, “I don't know what is.”

But he still can afford drinking Pepsi-Cola by the two-liter bottle and eating chicken wings drenched in blue cheese almost every night. In fact, it seems like the more stressful his life, the more he eats. His sumo wrestler diet has expanded him to about three hundred pounds, in fact, which is an especially obese weight when you consider he is barely five foot eight. He goes from stout to downright
fat
in less than six months.

Soon after the divorce becomes final, Dad complains of a constant unquenchable thirst and blurry vision. He pees constantly. And for some reason—stress? middle age?—he has trouble getting erections. (I heard him tell his friend Russ this on the phone: “My pecker doesn't
want to peck.”) I think to myself that maybe being impotent isn't the worst thing in the world for him.

Health problems plague his side of the family. His younger brother, Jerry, a diabetic, died from a heart attack at age thirty-seven. His father, Wally, also has diabetes. It's no shocker when a doctor finally diagnoses Dad with Type 2 diabetes when he is forty-two years old.

If he doesn't take insulin injections, his doctor warns, he not only may become impotent but he is also likely to die before he turns fifty. Such a dire prognosis would scare most people into straightening out their act. Not Dad. For as long as I can remember he has never thought he'd live past fifty, anyway. Nor does he seem to want to. When his hair started turning gray in his mid thirties, he dyed it jet black. “I'd rather die than get old,” he has said. He really believes people go to doctors for the same reason people (like my devout Catholic mom) go to church: because they are “weak sunzabitches.”

Not so surprisingly, Dad ends up only occasionally taking his insulin pills and cuts his soda pop guzzling maybe in half.

When I was ten, I broke my index finger playing football. It hurt real bad, and the doctor put a splint on it to keep me from bending it. After a few days I found that it hurt less when I relaxed my wrist muscles and just let my hand dangle limply. Apparently my method wasn't manly enough for Dad.

“You're walking around like a fairy, Kenny,” he said, staring me down from his horizontal perch on the couch.

“But, Dad, my finger is killing me, and this takes the pressure off it.”

He grabbed my hand. “Instead of flopping your wrist down, why don't you just hold it up with your hand?”

“What's wrong with letting my wrist relax?”

“You look like a fucking fairy, that's what's wrong.”

Mom came to my defense and, as usual, an argument ensued.

A few years later, while driving back from hockey practice, Dad glanced over at a guy walking down the sidewalk and said, “Look at that faggot.”

“How do you know he's gay?” I snarled.

“I just know,” he said.

“How would
you
know?” I said, tauntingly.

“What?” he bristled.

“Nothing,” I said, staring out my window.

“That's what I thought.”

I was at the age when you can no longer stay silent when your parents say ignorant things. And, as societal progress has things arranged, your ideas are almost always more liberal than your parents'. I had developed my own, more tolerant thoughts on homosexuality.

A few miles down the road, I couldn't hold back. “Even if he is gay, I don't care. I mean, what would you do if I was gay?”

Dad focused like a laser into the road ahead and said, “Then you wouldn't be my son anymore.”

I suppose Kyle knows what that feels like. As a shy homebody, my brother Kyle had very few friends and stayed home most of the time. As a Deadhead, though, Kyle goes to parties and brings friends over to the house all the time. Suddenly, Kyle has become more of a socialite than me.

Judging by my daily schedule throughout most of high school, I may as well live in a monastery:

7
A
.
M
.
—Wake up and take a shower.

7:35
A
.
M
.
—Catch bus to school.

8
A
.
M
. to 1
P
.
M
.
—School. Mostly daydream about hockey, hiding the sports section in an open textbook.

2
P
.
M
.
—Eat lunch at home and/or then play my drums.

3
P
.
M
.
—Arrive at ice rink.

3:30
P
.
M
.
—Read through my Jacques Plante goaltending manual, which is my Bible.

4
P
.
M
. to 6
P
.
M
.
—Team practice. Achieve that day's goals (i.e., fifty up-and-downs, fifty breakaway saves, ten sprints).

7:30
P
.
M
.
—Eat dinner.

8
P
.
M
. to 11
P
.
M
.
—Watch TV or study (only if a test is the next day). Write in my hockey diary; set goals for next day. Do sit-ups and push-ups. Talk to Dad on phone. Hang out with Kris (playing Trivial Pursuit or sock hockey in the hallway).

11
P
.
M
. to midnight
—Doze off while reading magazine or practicing positive imagery (me stopping pucks) with Zen meditation, or watching Johnny Carson or Letterman if I can't sleep (which is par for course the night before games, when I am so tense and irritable everyone knows to avoid me).

Basically, I do anything but waste my time hanging out with neighborhood kids, whom I consider a bunch of losers.

One afternoon I emerge from my upstairs cocoon to get a drink of water. Kyle is sitting there with a few of his friends, among them a blond girl named Sheila and her brown-haired best friend, Tonya, who lives down the street.

She is one of the stoner kids in the Harwood neighborhood who sits in the back of the bus on the way to school. Tonya and her posse, from my ascetic, goody-goody, jock point of view, do little more than wear jean jackets and smoke a lot of pot. I don't yet know her sister Jenny, who is two years older and always working at the chicken wings joint.

Tonya has long brown hair tied back into a ponytail and adorable Howdy Doody freckles sprinkled all over her face. When Kyle barks at me to go back to my room, Tonya throws a pillow at Kyle and says, “Don't be mean.” She pats the spot on the couch next to her. “Sit down, Kenny.”

“So this is your mystery brother.” Tonya says, beaming as I sit beside her.

“Why don't you ever hang out with us?” she asks.

I tell her I'm a pretty busy guy, explaining how I am basically the greatest goalie to ever come out of Buffalo.

For the next ten minutes she peppers me with questions.
Wow, you play hockey? . . . You're a goalie? Doesn't the puck hurt? . . . How come you never party with us?
As I smugly reply to her fawning, Kyle, who has been flirting with Tonya ever since we moved there, glowers, rolling his eyes in disgust. I, however, eat up all the female attention.

A few days later I'm home alone and the doorbell rings. I open the front door and find Tonya standing there, alone. She isn't wearing her usual stoner uniform of tattered blue jeans and a concert T-shirt. Instead, she's wearing cutoff jeans and a white halter top, without a bra. Lipstick glows from her lips.

“Is Kyle home?” she says, all cheerleader-peppy.

“No.”

“Oh . . . uh . . . do you know where he is?”

“Maybe he's at the mall. I really don't know. Sorry.”

She starts twisting her hair and steps backward off the porch.

“I'll tell him you stopped by.”

“Okay, cool,” she says, walking away. She turns around. “Hey, you wanna go for a walk?”

“Sure.”

A year ago I discovered a magical thing about my penis, which involves that squirting thing I had always heard guys talking about. I'm more curious about sex than horny, and I look at my squirting penis as I did my ability to tie shoes when I was five: Since I
can
do it, I might as well do it.

Under the ruse of looking for Kyle, we walk up the street to the neighborhood playground. No sign of Kyle; no one is there. We sit at a picnic table and she says she can't believe a guy as “cool” as me doesn't have a girlfriend and that—hint, hint—she has just broken up with her boyfriend. I tell her I'm a busy hockey player, how I'm working hard to be a
professional
hockey player someday.

She places a menthol-flavored cigarette between her lips and, grabbing a lighter from her purse, offers me one.

“No, thanks,” I say. “I don't smoke.”

Sprinkles begin falling from the slate-gray sky, and she suggests we go to her house and sit on the porch.
I guess we're no longer looking for Kyle.

Halfway back to her house it starts pouring, so we sprint to her porch, play-racing, and when we get there we collapse, huffing and
puffing. Tonya brushes my stringy, wet hair off my face and looks me straight into the eyes, emitting something I've never sensed from a girl:
lust.

I peer down at the pink nipples clinging to her drenched white shirt. She smiles. Then we make out, just like in the movies.

We kiss. French kiss. Lip kiss. Neck kiss. I've never done this before, but my body is operating on Darwinian autopilot.

A few minutes later I come up for air. “I thought you and Kyle had a thing,” I say, petting her back. She shakes her head and sighs, “No. Kyle's very sweet, but we're just friends.”

Just friends.
Something tells me that Kyle feels differently. But that doesn't stop me from going back to making out. I can taste her minty cigarette breath as she guides my hand to her crotch and rubs it against her shorts.

Holy moly! Third base!

I've heard friends talk about “fingering” girls, but until this very moment, I have only kissed two girls, and I didn't touch anything below their neckline. My inexperience notwithstanding, I'm not about to chicken out, even though it is broad daylight and Kyle will kill me if he ever finds out about this. I handle the pressure like a breakaway in sudden-death overtime: I focus on the task at hand. I don't know where to go and exactly what to do with my fingers, but I gently poke around her wetness using a vague image of a vagina I have seen in my biology textbooks as a reference point. She moans softly while keeping an eye on the street.

Soon it stops raining. Dinnertime. A hug. Another kiss. An awkward hug goodbye.

Once home I frantically dial the numbers on the phone and call my friend Dave, the quarterback of the junior high school's football team.

“You did
not
stick your finger in her pie,” Dave replies. “You're lying.”

Fortunately, I have kept the aromatic evidence of my act on my right hand.

“Oh, yeah. Come over and smell for yourself.”

Ten minutes later Dave arrives. Tonya's femininity still fresh on my skin, I stick my unwashed right forefinger under his nose. He presses his nose flush to my finger. “You lucky bastard,” he says. “You really did finger her.”

Lucky indeed. I am so excited about my achievement that I stay up till 3 a.m. watching baseball highlights on ESPN, breaking into giggles every few minutes and smelling my still unwashed finger.

—

The next morning I see Tonya at the bus stop, huddling with her friends—among them (gulp!) Kyle—smoking cigarettes. She's ignoring me. I pretend not to care, but of course I do. When they look my way, I just know (or at least fear) that she is telling them I don't know how to kiss, or that I clumsily fingered her as if I were cleaning out a pumpkin.

Act tough, man.

The entire ride to school I bury my head in a book.

The following Saturday, while passing by Tonya's house on my way home from a baseball game, out of the corner of my left eye I see a guy running at me from Tonya's front yard. I walk faster, my cleats clomping like a Clydesdale.
This guy's definitely running at me. Do I bolt like hell? Or play it cool like a man?

Before I can decide, the guy broadside-tackles me. I remember it in slow motion: My face scraping against the asphalt . . . my elbow taking the force of the fall . . . my baseball glove flying into the ditch.

I roll onto my back and see a guy who looks my age, only he is about twenty pounds heavier, all muscle, and four inches taller. He straddles my body like a cowboy over a steer.

Before he can hog-tie me, I jump to my feet. “What the fuck are
you—” Before I can finish, Angry Guy kicks me back down to the road with a swift sneaker to the sternum.

Tonya comes running toward us from her porch screaming, “Leave him alone!”

“Get up, asshole!”

Ah . . . Angry Guy is actually Angry Boyfriend. Tonya must have confessed to cheating.

“I didn't know she was your
fucking
girlfriend . . . you
dick.
She told me she didn't have a fucking boyfriend.”

This confuses Angry Boyfriend, who, with his dumb-guy face and beefy muscles, obviously has spent more time in the gym than the library.

As his feeble brain processes the data, I grab my baseball mitt, flash Tonya the evil eye and continue walking home.
Dad's right. Girls are nothing but trouble.

A month later Tonya stands on the railroad tracks by our house and gets struck from behind by a speeding train. She dies instantly. No one knows for sure whether it was a suicide, but some of her friends think that she has been depressed recently, confused about her life and unhappy with her boyfriend.

Mom buys Kyle a new dress shirt and slacks for her funeral. I stay home.