Come, Become a Man
I remember the very day my
adolescence began. I remember the ingredients at least. November 7th
, in the year 2000, I was twelve years old. It was election day. For me, it was
also erection day. Yes, I recall the very day I became a man: Erection Day 2K. It
all started when Kelsey Carr could not keep her eyes off of me in geography
class. That or she could not keep from noticing my inability to top staring at
her, meaning I thought her eyes said, “Let’s hold hands,” when they could have
been saying, “Stop staring at me!” This pubescent and ambiguous back-and-forth
went down as Barry Levaster, our seventh grade geography teacher, lead our
class through the most decisive issues in what everyone knew would be the
closest presidential election in recent memory. Bush v. Gore. We had no idea
how hotly contested it would become. Now, at this time, thanks to fellow
Arkansawyer Bill Clinton, America was pretty much hunky-dory; no one was
focused on debt crises or Islamist terrorism. Americans had time to debate
things like abortion and environmentalism and the morality of stem cell
research. I had started listening to Rage Against the Machine about one year
before, and so, naturally, I was in the Ralph Nader camp. My parents, yellow
dog Democrats and Gore people, did not approve of this. Mr. Levaster, on the
other hand, my geography teacher and downright evangelical conservative, my
favorite teacher and favorite rival other than the Republican candidate, had
always encouraged me to speak my views when politics came up in his class. Always
appreciated me. Always was impressed that anyone my age could be so passionate
about something so ‘adult.’ On the left side of the dry erase board Mr.
Levaster wrote Al Gore, and on the other he wrote George Bush. I remember most
clearly how he described their stances on abortion: Bush was pro-life, and Gore
was pro-death. I wasn’t ready for that kind of chutzpah, but I spoke my mind
anyway. At twelve years old I knew, or thought I knew, that abortion was not a
matter of life and death. (Today I’m not so sure.) When Barry Levaster drew the
line where he did, I shot up from my desk to speak my mind. A couple of the
more offbeat seventh graders in my class used their eyes to tell me ‘Thank you,
William.” I used my eyes to get one last glance at Kelsey Carr, and even she
smiled. And it was there that Erection Day 2K began in earnest.
I rode the bus home every day. The bus was filled with my
old friends from Washington Elementary and with camaraderie. Everyone on that
bus was at least a Democrat. The bus driver, like me, was in the Nader camp.
Ol’ Albert the bus driver, he took every opportunity to preach to the choir,
and I took every opportunity to listen. Unless I was at the back of the bus,
flirting with girls. That took precedent over everything. The thing I thought
about most on the bus ride home that afternoon was not election night, not the
beauty of the girls riding in the back row – it was the way Kelsey Carr had
looked so impressed at my gumption, and the blue of her irises, the prettiest
in school. When I got home I told my buddies no, can’t hang out and eat junk
food. No, can’t hang out and watch Total Request Live. No, can’t hang out and
watch y’all play Pokemon. I said my parents wanted me home early, and of course
they asked why and I quoted the Fresh Prince: “Parents just don’t understand.”
Which got me off the hook and closer to my fantasy. Upstairs in my room that
afternoon, I wasn’t sure what to do with that fantasy. I put on Led Zeppelin’s
“BBC Sessions” on compact disc, and since my folks weren’t home, I turned it up
as loud as it could go. When it got to the part where Robert Plant sings,
“Squeeze my lemon, baby/’Til the juice run down my leg,” I remembered the
naughty stuff Jeremiah Ball had told me about puberty, which was the stuff they
always left out in school, which was masturbation, namely the how-to of it. So
the Zeppelin lyrics made sense. They also gave me an idea. I had discovered two
important tools recent to November 7th, 2000: my father’s off-brand
lubricant, and track 18 on Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic: 2001.” (Track 18 was
entitled “Pause 4 Porno,” and was just two minutes of sex sounds.) Well, I’ll
skip the details of the deed, but I will say I put both tools to good use that
afternoon, lying on the bottom half of my bunk bed. And I will also say that my
first orgasm that day. With the help of lube and gangster rap, and hyperbolic
recollection of the way Kelsey looked at me in geography class when I stood up
for leftist principles, I felt something I’d never felt before. It hurt like
hell in the best way. It’s was exhilarating in an emotional sense. It was the
most pleasurable rush of blood to the head. And it was that first orgasm that
proved to me that soon, I, William Sterling, would be a man. A ladies man. A
rock and roll super star and a freedom fighter. It didn’t occur to me, though,
that it meant I would be a father someday. Erection Day 2K, I shan’t forget ye.
Jeremiah Belding was my best friend all throughout sixth
grade and up until the second or third month of middle school. So Jeremiah and
I were best friends for just a little over a year. Back at Washington
Elementary, other than the other boys I played basketball with, Jeremiah was
not just my best friend but my only friend. Jeremiah got me into ‘Nü Metal,’
which was that awful genre of music that popped up in the late nineties. He got
me liking bands like KoRn, Limp Bizkit, and Slipknot. We also listened to a lot
of Dr. Dre and Cyprus Hill. First, because Jeremiah thought he was a gangster.
Also, because Jeremiah was obsessed with marijuana. He told me he got high all
the time, in person and when we would talk on the phone. We probably spent more
time talking on the phone than we did hanging out in person, and that includes
both waking and sleeping hours when we’d sleep over on weekends, the twice a
week basketball practices and two games per weekend, and all the time we spent
talking about breasts during school recess. But whenever I was over at
Jeremiah’s house, he never seemed to have any marijuana. However one Saturday
afternoon we spent together at my house, he built a bong out of tin foil and
some gigantic plastic cup I got for my twelfth birthday. My parents must have
been wondering what we were doing out in the garage for all those hours of construction.
I was timid about the prospect of smoking pot. Especially while my parents were
home. He had no qualms though, as insisted he was a stoner pro. But the
‘marijuana’ he brought over to my house that Saturday afternoon just looked
like hemp yarn to me. I knew what hemp looked like because my hippie older
brother had been buying me hemp-necklace presents from the time I was ten years
old. I asked Jeremiah, “Are you sure that’s even weed? It looks like hemp to
me.” Jeremiah said, “You’re an idiot, Bill,” and sparked up the bowl in his
homemade water bong. He was a rude friend and it only got worse as we aged,
which is why he wasn’t my friend for more than a year or so. I knew what
marijuana smoke smelled like from the time my Mom took me out to Winfest, which
was a music festival out in the Winslow boondocks where they raised money for
the grade school there. And Jeremiah’s marijuana that looked just like hemp
yarn did in fact smell like marijuana. I decided I didn’t want to get high. I
was afraid of getting into trouble, and of what it might do to me. I was afraid
that what it might do to me is get me into trouble. That didn’t stop me from
becoming McNair Middle School’s foremost voice for marijuana legalization. That
my relationship with marijuana did not pan out as stonerism, and instead as
liberalism, is however what stopped Jeremiah from continuing our friendship.
The first few months of middle school, when Jeremiah and I were still speaking on
the phone, we spoke on the phone more often than ever before (because we were
not in the same ‘pod’ at McNair, and didn’t have any classes together).
Anymore, we did not talk so much about how to masturbate, or what sex was like.
Before that he was always claiming that, every single night of the week, he
would slip out of his house to have sex with a seventeen year old named
Catherine and that she was a total slut and loved his enormous penis. Then came
my Rage Against The Machine-fueled obsession with leftist politics when all I
ever wanted to talk about was leftist politics. I’d say, “But dude, you ought
to be all about this. You ought to be a communist! We’ll overthrow the
government and you can smoke as much weed as you want!”
“Shut the fuck up, Bill. You stupid motherfucker. Ain’t
nobody gonna stop me from smoking weed,” he’d say. “You’re such a goober.
You’re such a dumbass. My Dad fought the commies back in ‘Nam and you’re no
better than they were. I ought to kick your ass.”
“Well fuck you,” I would retort, more or less. “I’m not
afraid of you. Faggot.”
But that I was not afraid of Jeremiah was not the truth. We
had gotten into several fights. I would start them, he would finish them. One
night we went to Clunk Music Hall, an all-ages venue that didn’t last much
longer, to see a Nü Metal band called A.D.D. We had both been obsessed with
A.D.D., a local band, but Jeremiah always had to remind me (with a multitude of
curse words, I am certain) that he found them first and he knew the guys in the
band and they thought he was super cool and “They’d think you’re a total
dip-shit, dip-shit.” That night at Clunk Music Hall, he was talking to some of
the guys in the band and some other much older guys, talking about how stupid I
was. And so I ran up behind Jeremiah (who was at least six inches taller than I
was) and sucker-punched him, right in the back of his head. If I recall,
Jeremiah didn’t move an inch, even at the hefty blow, and immediately charged
me, nailed me right in the temple, and I fell to the asphalt of the parking
lot. “Fucking faggot.”
That was the summer after our sixth-grade year. By the time
we got to McNair, we were growing apart. Obviously it was for the best. I made
friends, he made new friends. I had a string of girlfriends and held hands with
them every day on the bus ride home. He had a string of new sidekicks and
threatened to beat me up with their help, often, if not daily. I was genuinely
afraid until I stopped trying to be his friend. I was genuinely afraid until I
started ignoring him. I made new friends myself, and Jeremiah more or less left
me alone. I started skateboarding with Chuck Bloomberg and Jesse Bolton, kids
in my pod, which was called “The All-Stars.” I made friends with Paul Sanders,
or “Paulvin” as we called him once we formed Human Radio the following summer.
Up until the final month or two of seventh grade, I spent most of my time with
Chuck. He was a fellow All-Star, a skater kid, and liked Rage Against The
Machine, just like me. Maybe because of me. He’d spend Friday and Saturday
nights at my house most weekends.
I
lived pretty much downtown so on Saturday and Sunday afternoons we’d skate from
my house to downtown proper and hesh at the Methodist Church, the Catholic
Church down the street from it, the Walton Arts Center, and whatever other
downtown places had stairs and ledges. I was an awful skater and Chuck was
pretty decent at it. What made me like him so much was that he wasn’t a
butthole like Jeremiah, who took every opportunity to remind me how ‘retarded’
I was, what a faggot I was, and of my tiny penis. Most days when we would ride
downtown to hesh, and ultimately and get told to skedaddle by whatever uptight
adult happened to be around, we would videotape our skating adventures and
whatever else we found entertaining. When it wasn’t skateboarding we were
filming it was usually degenerate nonsense inspired by the television show, Jackass. The most memorable nonsense of
it all was the ‘episode’ where my buddies convinced me it was time to carry out
our most outrageous and ambitious idea yet. That idea was that we go into the
lingerie store not far from my house, purchase a thong, dress me in the thong,
and insert into the front of that thong my afro, which I had acquired to fill
out my Che Guevara Halloween Costume a few months before. Pubic hair was a
fairly recent (and ongoing) development in our lives at that time, and the
perfect expression of our adolescent obsession with an ever-evolving sexuality
and catalogue of emotions. And the afro wig’s alternate use as pubic hyperbole,
rather than freedom-fighter hairdo, might serve as a decent metaphor for the
evolution of my teenage priorities. I pranced around the streets of
Fayetteville, Arkansas wearing nothing but Osiris skateboarding shoes and
ladies lingerie stuffed with an afro wig for pubic hair, and there they were,
my priorities changing before the eyes of all those passersby in my otherwise
quiet neighborhood. Chuck directed me between giggles. “Okay now cross the
street!” hollered Chuck, cackling at the brilliance of such an idea. “No,
Billy! Walk right in front of a car!” Paulvin hollered at me not to do it and
threatened to leave. Paulvin did not want to get into trouble. He didn’t find
it so funny as the rest of us did. No one who witnessed our idiocy seemed to
care even a smidge, but of course we imagined they did. Chuck and I imagined
they were baffled, that a gag so genius would brighten anyone’s day. Paulvin
was certain too that we were making an impact. He just didn’t see what good
could come of it. It’s safe to say, I think: that degrading-by-choice and
exhilarating-by-God moment marked my lightening up. George Bush – still hated
that guy, but it was the other kind of bush that really inspired me to do
something with my life. Like make a fool of myself, and insist that folly be
documented. So that my peers would know that I, Wiliam Sterling, was super
badass and cool. Girls thought it was hilarious, dare I say sexy, though at
this point in my life I don’t care to think about what teenage girls find sexy,
nor will I ever. But I know first hand that Alzheimer’s can get pretty zany, so
I guess you never know.
Hard
to say what, at thirteen, I thought it was that girls that age found sexy. Thought
is not the right word. Thinking implies there is some reasoning going on, and a
peach-fuzzed, squawking thing with a penis and zero experience hasn’t much in
the way of reasoning. Try debating teenage me. Try losing by contrition.
Thought is the wrong word. Assumed is more like it. Assumptions are not the sum
total of adolescent knowledge, but assumptions are the essence of adolescent
knowledge. I suppose sexiness is a foreign concept up until the age of first
orgasm. I could not have cared less what girls my age found sexy, just that
they found me sexy. Here I am, Kelsey Carr. Now behold me. The end objective of
course being, “Hold me, Kelsey Carr.” Outside the canon of film and radio stars
of the day, I had no idea what girls were looking for. And at my age now, it’s
uncomfortable to consider what young girls find attractive. Many of them
settled for what I had to offer, but I have no doubt it was quite what they
were looking for. Surely they had no idea what they were looking for either. At
that age, taste is liking it when you see it. Preference is love at first
sight. I knew what I found sexy. Boobs were sexy. But really, it was the way
girls laughed and poked fun at me. They would call me silly, and that was sexy.
The sexiest girl is the girl who pays the sexiest attention to you.
Not
all that much has changed.
 |
Joey was his slave name. |
Bruce’s
hair is its natural blonde again and not the purple that got him kicked him out
of middle school. Mine is not in rinky-dink dreadlocks anymore, hasn’t been for
a while. There’s hair on most of my face, and I don’t need an afro in my
underwear to look like a grown-ass man. I still listen to The Smiths. I listen
to The Smiths more often nowadays than ever I did in adolescence. Hell I even
sing like Morrissey is what I hear.
So
here we are, a decade and a half after I first jacked off (successfully). I’m a
married man. I’m not listening to Morrissey, I’m singing like him. I’m not
afraid of THC. In fact we’re best friends. A man my age doesn’t hang out with
shitbirds like Jeremiah. (Though I will say the guy’s come a long way, and,
it’s safe to say, graduated from shitbirddom.)
These
days.
Life
is less exciting, life is more beautiful. Life is less fun, life is gratitude.
Life is measured out in coffee spoons whose refrain is that there will, there
will be time, and life has mermaids for backup singers. A night is not
remembered for a uniquely late curfew (a reward for acing that algebra quiz,
perhaps). A night nowadays welds itself into your synapses for the way its
sprawls etherized upon the table. You go to college, you start to use
semicolons, and ultimately, somebody makes you read poetry and you start saying
shit like that.
Adulthood:
it begins with jizzin’ and ends with Prufrock.
(I still wonder what song it was those mermaids sang him.)
(I still wonder what song it was those mermaids sang him.)
Just a guess.
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