Everything Is Wrong with Me (17 page)

When I learned that Milli Vanilli was actually a collection of middle-aged studio musicians and not the chiseled caramel and mocha specimens that I watched dance awkwardly on MTV, I felt a number of emotions. First, there was betrayal. Then sadness. Then guilt. Then not a small amount of hunger. All in, like, twenty seconds. But what I took away most from the Milli Vanilli experience was confusion. At the height of the fiasco, I turned to my mother and forlornly asked, “Mom, why can’t they just get the guys who sang on the last album to sing on another album?” She said, “I don’t know, Jason. That’s just not the way the world works.”

And so it was Rob Pilatus and the other, darker one who taught me arguably the most important life lesson of all: fuck you. You may like a song or a band or a friend or a girl or a football team, but in the end, fuck you. Things are not always what they seem to be. Things that are good now will not always be good. And nothing motivates people like personal gain, whether it be in the form of money, power, or fame. When you realize this, you have taken a major step in the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

I am thankful to Rob and the darker one for teaching me this lesson. I am not angry either with them or with the whole situation. I will continue to turn this song up when it comes on my car radio and if I feel any residual anger, I will blame it, of course, on the rain.

(This previous passage is dedicated to the memory of Rob Pilatus, 1965–98.
Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale
.)

“Over the Hills and For Away” Led Zeppelin

The first Led Zeppelin songs I heard were what you might expect: “Black Dog,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love”—those staples of classic rock radio that I heard pour out of roofers’ boomboxes as they did work above my head when I walked through the neighborhood on your average summer day. As I began to develop hair on my genitals (around sixth grade—and with the suddenness of a tsunami, if you’re keeping score at home), I found myself drawn to the power chords and thunder riffs of Zeppelin, a rite of passage and a badge of manhood for boys my age. But it was this song, with its lovely acoustic intro, that struck me most of all.

This, more than any other, is the song that made me want to start playing guitar. The aforementioned acoustic intro, with its hammer-ons and pull-offs, enchanted me. I could practically see Jimmy Page, taking a break from all his devil worshipping and heroin taking, sitting in a wicker chair in some English farmhouse, playing around and coming up with this introduction. Robert Plant, who would be in the kitchen simultaneously making some tea and getting fellated, would hear Jimmy playing the intro and walk into the room wearing a pair of jeans that not only left nothing to the imagination but also looked like they were suffocating his poor, giant penis. And he’d start casually singing, “Hey lady…” And then: R-O-C-K.

And because I wanted to be Jimmy Page, to sit around with stoned groupies who adored me and to wear my shirts almost completely unbuttoned and to say amazingly deep things while I was high, like “There is love, and there is nothing; it is our greatest responsibility to make the correct choice,” I needed to learn how to play this song. I needed a guitar. And in eighth grade on Christmas morning, I got one.

This story is supposed to end with me reaching rock star status—a life filled with gold records, smarmy hangers-on, small mountains of cocaine, and multiple sexual partners—all from the humble beginning of lying in bed, listening to the mastery of Jimmy Page, and masturbating (did I mention this earlier?). Instead the story of my musical career is one filled with heartbreak, failure, and financial distress. Save for a blow job in the woods of Vermont after a show at Middlebury College with my college band (the undeniably untalented Royce), my music career has been one disaster after another. Whether it was repeatedly being told that I “just wasn’t that good” or “would never be more than a below-average rhythm guitarist” or “will be going to jail if I don’t let go of those [genitals] right now”, or spending 90 percent of my income between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two on the latest, greatest, and most expensive guitar thingy, I now know one thing for certain: the guitar has not been kind to me. Had I known that Jimmy’s sweet intro would lead me down a path of lowered self-esteem and financial near-ruin, I would have tried a little harder to grow a dragon penis like that of Robert Plant’s; I probably had a better chance at becoming well hung than I had of becoming a guitar god.

“Loose Lucy” Grateful Dead

My first concert was a Color Me Badd–Paula Abdul double bill; a better introduction to the power and majesty of live music, I can think of none. My second concert, two years later, was the Grateful Dead.

I was a bona fide Deadhead by the age of twelve. Well, maybe not bona fide—I didn’t use drugs or preach love and hippie power—but I was obsessed with the Dead. There was a time when both Jimmy the Muppet and I could name all twenty-eight Dead albums released to that point. Among those albums,
From the Mars Hotel
was high on my list of favorites. “Loose Lucy” in particular stood out on that album for me, probably because of its racy implications. Even at the age of twelve, I knew that
loose
meant “whorish,” so that was certainly exciting. But there was also the theory that “Loose Lucy” was not a woman at all but similar to the Lucy in the sky with those diamonds that the Beatles had sung about, a possibility I found equally enticing. Advice to bands: if you’re looking to tap into the male preteen/early teen demographic, secretly suggest that your song is about sluts and drugs. Works every time.

Luckily for me, the Dead played “Loose Lucy” when I saw them in concert at the old Philadelphia Spectrum. But it was not what happened during the concert that so influenced my adolescence (even though watching an overweight, zonked-out Jerry Garcia hunched over his guitar for two and a half hours was pretty awesome), but rather what happened before the concert, outside in the parking lot of the Spectrum. It was there that for the first time, in person, I saw a boob.

It was only a quick glimpse, but one never forgets their first booby. It came courtesy of a fairly chestily blessed but otherwise waifish Deadhead, a blonde who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. She was not flashing the crowd, flaunting her breasts for all to see. If this had been the case, I would have felt uncomfortable (in addition to feeling hard, of course). Instead she was merely walking around the parking lot, her one finger in the air, looking for that one magic ticket to get her into the show. I didn’t notice her until she was upon my friends and I, who were desperately trying to score nitrous.
*
As she walked by me, coming toward me on my right, I turned to look at her. It was her right hand that was in the air, creating a spectacular view through the armpit of her loose-fitting hippie dress, and there it was—a small, supple, pale white booby, no bigger than a fist. It dangled on her chest, unencumbered by a bra. I was transfixed. In that instant, it was just me and that booby. No one else—not my friends, not other concertgoers, not even the owner of the booby herself—noticed it gloriously perched above her slender lil’ ’shroom and veggie burrito–filled stomach. Just the booby and I, sharing a secret moment, creating a special memory, one that I recall each time I hear that opening riff of Jerry’s guitar and that first line, “Loose Lucy is my delight.”

A better introduction to the power and majesty of breasts, I can think of none.

Chapter Nine

My Bird: Inadequacy and Redemption

Apparently, the cop and construction worker costumes were in the cleaners.

I
have always been concerned with the diminutive size of my penis. I blame this on two things: Carlos Flores and the chip.

Carlos Flores was the only Hispanic kid in my first-grade class of ninety or so kids.
*
Actually, he was the only minority in the whole class; there were eighty-nine kids of Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, or Italian descent (or some combination thereof) and then ol’ Carlos Fucking Flores. Shockingly, he did not return to Our Lady of Mount Carmel for second grade, but in his short time at OLMC, Carlos Flores changed my life.

I was peeing next to Carlos at a urinal when he turned and looked at me peeing and said, “What are you doing?” I don’t remember my exact response but I’m guessing it was “Um, taking a pee?” followed by complete and horrified silence at having another kid talk to me while we were peeing. Regardless of my response, Carlos, who probably has a successful career in journalism now, followed up his first bold question with a second equally daring question: “Why are you holding it like
that
?”

The “it,” of course, was my penis—or as we called it in my family, my bird. I don’t know why my family gave such an innocuous name to something that would cause me such a great amount of mental and emotional distress—not to mention cost me over $480—later in life, but the etymology of
bird
is a discussion for another day. Carlos was waiting for an answer. I looked down at my penis, looking especially thimble-like in my soft, delicate, six-year-old hands. I looked at Carlos, confused.

“Why are you holding it like this,” he said while emulating my grip on my penis, “when you should do it like this,” and gripped his penis the “proper” way.

In this instant, I learned two important life lessons:

1. I am a pincher.
   Have you ever seen one of those animal shows on the Discovery Channel that show footage of mother lions carrying their cubs in their mouths? It looks very painful for the baby lion, what with his mother biting him around the nape of the neck, roughly picking him up, and then carrying him for a little while. But it’s not.
   *
   I know this because this is how I grabbed—and still grab—my penis when I urinate. I hold it by taking the skin from the side of my penis between my thumb and forefinger, pinching that skin, lifting the penis and letting it dangle below my fingers while urinating, just like a lion cub who cries out as his mother drags him by her teeth around the plains of the Serengeti. I thought this was the only way to hold a bird while one is peeing, but Carlos demonstrated to me that the “real” way to hold one was to cradle it in one’s hand, and not like the mother lion holding her weary cub in her teeth with her clenched jaw but (to continue with our wildlife kingdom analogies) more like a retarded boy handling a sleeping hamster—lovingly, and with a delicateness that is inspired by a complicated mix of fear, confusion, and awe. “See? Not like your way, but like my way,” he said, wagging his penis, which was no longer urinating, in his hand in front of the urinal next to mine. Which brings us to the second lesson I learned:
   
2. Carlos Flores had a penis the size of a table leg.
   It was giant, gargantuan. I did not then nor do not now have the words to describe it. It looked less like a penis and more like a weapon, like it had a purpose greater than peeing, like hitting Wiffle balls or knocking holes in Sheetrock. It needed a name, not a cute one like Mr. Willy or Captain Pee-Pee, but something like Max Strong America or James Bond Powerful Justice or God’s Tougher Friend Steve. It was larger than the Little Hug juices we drank at lunch, it was larger than the erasers we used on the chalkboard during class, it was larger than the remote control I used to turn on the TV after school. For weeks after this incident—hell, years even—I thought about whether what Carlos had was even a penis at all or perhaps another living thing growing out of his groin. Looking at it, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it took out a cigarette, lit it, and then asked me what I thought about that “anarcho-syndicalist bastard” Noam Chomsky before telling me I really needed to invest in a good pair of slacks. It was a force. It was respect, genitalized.
   

After being treated to Carlos’s gorilla-bird, I again examined my own bird, which looked even smaller now than it had before I saw his. I had not seen another penis before, so I had nothing to compare mine to. But the differences were clear after that encounter at the urinal. Carlos’s penis was a highlighter; mine was a pen cap. Carlos’s was a lightbulb; mine was a light switch. Carlos’s was the thermos that clanged around all day long in my lunch box; mine was the Hershey Kiss that had melted sometime during social studies.

Carlos, God bless his Puerto Rican–type heart, made no mention of my penile inadequacy. He zipped up, flushed, and promptly walked out of the bathroom and back to class. But he didn’t need to say anything else. For the first time, I realized that my dick was tiny. If Carlos’s penis was what other guys’ birds looked like, I was in for a lifetime of emotional pain and humiliation. Mind you, this was before I knew that penises were for sex, and yet I
still
was horribly dismayed by the inadequate size of mine, based on my preternatural understanding that in all things, bigger was better. What I had dangling between (or rather, sticking out above) my legs was not up to par. From this point forward, my life would be nothing more than a litany of excuses and apologies on account of my lil’ bird, whether they be directed to the women I’d be unable to please, or those frat brothers who paid me fourteen dollars to see it in 2006.
*