The Late Bloomer (21 page)

We walk over to my tiny apartment just south of campus, on 113th Street, and we put on our sneakers. Like two long-lost
platonic
friends, we walk eighty blocks down Broadway, talking about everything and nothing at the same time. Wanting to show her my favorite view of the Manhattan skyline, we walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and sit on a bench overlooking the East River, a perch from which we stare at the glassy fortress that is lower Gotham. Moms and dads pass by, pushing strollers. Lovers amble by hand in hand. Norman Mailer, the writer who lives in the neighborhood, shuffles past us looking scraggly and lonely.

“I don't ever want to be old and lonely,” I say. “That would be so depressing.”

Claudia stares across the cold, black river. No talk of sex. No talk of my penis and how she and I silently hate its meddling third-party disruption of our relationship.
I wonder if Mailer's dick works. If my dick is this lifeless in my twenties, what will happen when I'm in my seventies? Maybe I will end up an old and lonely guy ambling around Brooklyn by myself on New Year's Eve.

Sometime before midnight, we meet up with Claudia's friends, a guy and a girl. Claudia suggests we ring in the new year at Times Square, so we cram into a mass of bodies a few blocks from the bedlam at One Times Square. From our vantage point we can see half of the world-famous giant white ball that sits atop a pole. The human warmth tempers the chill of the steady pelting of rain. We squeeze our way to the front of the crowd, closer to the ball. Every few minutes or so, an ABC cameraman pans the crowd, prompting our drunken neighbors to wave cardboard signs at Dick Clark, clink champagne glasses, celebrate a new year in their lives with smiles and levity I can only fake.

Over the course of an hour, the crowd grows bigger and bigger. Packs of revelers are emerging from the nearby subway exit, hundreds of them, squeezing into the roped-off viewing area. Burly NYPD officers—some holding riot shields and nightsticks, others on horseback—guard the area just in front of the first row. Helmeted officers are pressing their batons against the front-liners whenever they heave forward.

By a quarter to midnight, the crowd has grown even bigger and starts pushing forward, more steadily, more drunkenly. People are popping champagne corks; a brass band is blaring “New York, New York,” which I can barely hear over the buzzing chorus of ten-cent kazoos. Three shirtless frat boys with painted torsos—spelling
A B C
—whoop whenever the camera lights shine down on them. Couples are kissing.

Where's Claudia?

Amid the ruckus, I have somehow separated from her. Suddenly, the crowd—at least a thousand strong now—surges forward. A girl next to me lets out a scream right out of a horror movie. People who were happy-go-lucky a second ago are now either scared or extremely pissed off; members of the latter group start pushing back. Their shoving throws me off balance and I topple forward, slamming my nose into the shoulder of the guy in front of me. When he steps aside, I'm sent crashing face-first onto the pavement.

I look up as the crowd swallows the air above me. A boot steps on my hand. A kick to the face.

“Let me up!” I shout into the muffled mass of winter coats and umbrellas. No one seems to hear. “Let me up!”

I am in a claustrophobic panic worse than the thought of any stuck elevator ever incited.

Grabbing onto jackets, pants, whatever I can get a hold of, I claw to standing and wriggle through a half dozen or so bodies until I reach the wooden blue police barricade corralling the herd. I drop to all fours and start crawling underneath the barrier—until a baton is thrust into my collar bone.

“Sir, you can't cross this line,” the cop shouts over the noise.

Tears are streaming down my face. “But I can't breathe!”

More annoyed than compassionate, the cop yanks me beneath the barricade and points to the roped-off sidewalk: “Go!”

I sprint to the sidewalk, collapsing against a lightpost. I slide down to my butt and suck in the cold air as the wind dries my tears and the crowd counts down in unison.

10, 9, 8, 7
 . . .

I stand up and desperately scan the crowd for Claudia . . .

6, 5, 4
 . . .

Still standing bewildered on the sidewalk, I spot her, amidst the revelers, jumping up and down. Her perfect, smiling row of teeth
stands out like a cottonball in a pile of coal. Ebullient, glowing, just as she should be. Young and beautiful with so much to offer. A woman filled with verve and potential and joy and life. She's a good woman who deserves a good man.

3, 2, 1
 . . .

1994!

A blizzard of confetti, corks, hats and plastic cups jettisons skyward and swirls in the Midtown wind. Claudia kisses and hugs her friends. She's swiveling around, looking for me. I can see her, but, appropriately, she can't see me. No one can; I feel so neutered—sexually and emotionally—that I might as well be an invisible man. I don't matter.

An hour later, we're back at my apartment. Knowing that I will be taking off my shirt in front of her, I go straight to the bathroom and lift my shirt, pinching each of my nipples until the gross, milky fluid stops seeping out from them. Once I have squeezed in the new year, I dab my nipples with a piece of toilet paper and flush it down the toilet, ready to return to Claudia as a normal man, not the freak that I am.

This is a new year. A chance to turn over a new leaf. A chance to just relax and have sex. Relax and do it.

Claudia is sloshed and dizzy, a nonstop giggle machine. She unbuttons her blue jeans and begs me to take them off her. Reluctantly, I start to and we fall down to my mattress and kiss tenderly as she climbs atop my naked body, pressing her body against mine. “I've missed you so much,” she whispers.

After a couple minutes she reaches down and finds that, as was the case a few months ago, my penis isn't doing what we want it to do. She leans forward and presses her deflated cheek against my chest.

I pound my fist against the mattress.

She wraps her arms around me. “Shhh . . . shhhh . . . it's okay . . . shhhh . . .” It is the last time we touch.

—

With the first week of January comes a much-needed week off from school. Lacking the money to go anywhere else, I take the eight-hour bus ride across the state to Buffalo to see my family.

Dad complains that Kevin, who once was a budding rock star and now is an evangelical church pastor, visits once every couple months, if that. Keith, who lives in a trailer just outside of Rochester, is busy raising three kids and working constantly. Kyle has gone back to college.

Kris lives in the basement of Dad's duplex, and when he isn't fighting with Green Card or blowing off Mom (she lives three miles away with Norm), he is arguing with Dad.

Dad is dying. He aches nonstop from his neuropathy. The pain he feels—in his hands, his legs, his neck, his arms—is the sensation of his nerves dying one by one. He calls it torture. The army of brown plastic pill bottles lined on the kitchen counter are his only weapon in this battle that he, unable to work for the last two years, is clearly losing.

Most days he wakes up around 6 a.m., when the Valium wears off. Clad in a pair of baggy Fruit of the Looms and a dress shirt he wore to work before he started spending his life on the couch, he slowly sits up. After a minute of eye rubbing, the flabby fifty-year-old battles gravity and, with his feet barely lifting off the worn shag carpet, labors toward the kitchen.

His hair is a messy thatch of black and gray and his skin looks yellowish under the fluorescent overhead light as he fumbles with the pill bottles. It is a morning ritual he has perfected: twist, dump in palm, swallow; twist, dump in palm, swallow. For the past few years he has methodically repeated this routine eight times every morning.

Names such as Procardia, Vicodin, Lasix and, for a short time, Prozac, have entered the household vocabulary over the years. Of all the pills, however, he concedes that it is “the little green ones”—the Valium—that are absolutely necessary these days.

Just a few years ago he could sleep without them. But when
nightmares and burning pain in his swollen arms and legs kept him up all night, he gave in.

His brain issued the first warning while driving home from work one night. Obese and unaware of his extremely high blood sugar level, he broke down and wept on the shoulder of the New York State Thruway. Diabetes—the genetic curse he had ignored his entire life—finally caught up to him. His three brothers all had “sugar problems,” as they call it, but ice cream, cookies, soda and chocolate were Dad's weaknesses. So was his ability to deny the fact that a five-foot eight-inch, three-hundred-pound man with a family history of diabetes would eventually self-destruct. Tears cascaded down his face as his hands trembled uncontrollably over the steering wheel. He was going into diabetic shock. He was confused. “I can't see,” he screamed, pulling to the side of the road.

Dad suffered irreversible nerve damage that night. The tingling in his toes and fingers eventually turned to pain. He looks forward to total numbness, depressing because it means the nerves are dead, but encouraging because it means the pain is over. The doctors say he is a lucky diabetic because he hasn't gone blind and he hasn't had to have an arm or leg amputated.

“Lucky” diagnoses for him have become more common as his heart has grown weaker and his nerves have slowly deteriorated. “He's lucky he was near a phone when the chest pains started.” . . . “He's lucky only two toes got frostbite.”

Dad doesn't feel fortunate; most of the time he just feels sorry for himself.

He could have gone to a psychologist to help him cope with the effects of the insidious disease: the phobias, the impotence, the fits of depression, the constant pain from neuropathy, a degenerative disease common in diabetics in which your extremities feel like they are being pricked by needles. But he says “shrinks” can't understand his misery. For him to admit pain—especially of the emotional variety—is effeminate behavior, just not the manly thing to do.

“I'm as rock 'n' roll and apple pie as you get,” he likes to say. The 1950s, for Dad, was the best time to grow up in America. Elvis was the King, father always knew best, cars were fast, cigarette smoking was cool and, most importantly, the American dream dangled before him. Two heart attacks, five kids, a kidney operation and two failed marriages later, idealism now seems as foreign to Larry as 45s are to the CD generation.

When Orbison's classic “Pretty Woman” comes on the radio, he orders Kris or me to turn up the volume. “Damn it, Roy's on!” No matter how intense the pain, he will sit up, close his big brown eyes and tap his foot to the backbeat rhythms of his rock hero's melodies.

But when the tape ends and the music fades, the grim reality that his heart flutters at forty percent of its capacity haunts him. He still smokes two packs a day. He wants to care but doesn't, because his body—and his destructive treatment of it—gives him little reason to hope.

He reached the nadir of his physical health last month, shortly before Christmas, when he was rushed to the hospital after collapsing at the mall.

The doctors said “memory loss and drug-induced confusion” caused him to mistakenly overdose on insulin, which drastically lowered his blood sugar level. His heart, weakened by an attack three months earlier, nearly ceased.

He had been depressed for months because for the first time he couldn't afford to buy Christmas gifts for his family. He won't admit it to me, or to any of my brothers, but he tells Green Card that he feels guilty for all the mistakes he made raising us. He is sorry that he all but ignored Kyle, that he beat Kevin black and blue, that he let his bond with most of his sons break when his marriage did.

Lately, the holiday season has only reminded him of past years, before the illness, when he had money, when life was about working hard, making deals, playing catch with his kids, cheering on his son at hockey games, having sex. But now his body is shot and doctor bills,
of which many will never be paid, are siphoning most of his monthly Social Security checks. “The government,” he tells me one day, “pays for some of my dying bills and none of my living bills.”

Two months after his depressing Christmas, Green Card leaves a message on my answering machine in New York. She's whispering, and it sounds like she's crying. “Ken-eee. Larry not good. Bad things happen. Pleeze call me soon.”

When I call, she breaks me the news: Dad has lung cancer. It has spread. The doctor has given him a year to live.

—

When the specter of my dad's death prevents me from being able to attend classes, let alone write a news story, I open the phone book and find an affordable psychologist. By our second session the talk has turned away from my dad and to my sexual frustrations.

“You know, Ken,” Frank, my Upper West Side shrink, suggests midway through one of our sixty-dollar-an-hour sessions. “Maybe you should just try and not think about sex so much.”

Having made zero progress in two months, Frank, a balding man in his sixties, has actually advised that I practice denial in order to get over my so-called erectile dysfunction and feelings of insecurity. He has already tried the conquer-your-problem-by-figuring-out-your-problem approach by giving me a reading list, notably the book
Sons and Fathers
by D.H. Lawrence. The theory Frank was floating was that I was unable to have sex because I had become codependent with my father and his problems. In other words, Dad's illnesses have become my illnesses. My father is depressed; so am I. My diabetic father is impotent; so am I. Or at least that was his theory. He figured that, being an Ivy Leaguer, I would make an intellectual breakthrough by reading Lawrence. But the book only depressed me.

Now he is promoting the same sort of Zen—
just be
—approach that I have been attempting for years.