The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  I shrugged, scratched my neck.

  “I don’t like the term ‘penis’ very much,” Brain sighed. “But my mother calls it a tally-whacker.”

  I nodded at his Britannica. “That thing probably doesn’t say anything about oral intercourse.”

  Brain’s eyebrows shot up. He said, “Oral?”

  When he couldn’t find anything about it in the Oligarchy–Pontoon encyclopedia, I explained oral intercourse to him, as far as I could understand it, and watched him go deadly pale. He staggered backwards a little, allowing his Britannica to flop shut. “Why?” he said, his voice pleading. “Why would anybody?”

  I had once shared Brain’s incredulity—what could a person ever want with something like oral intercourse?—but that was before puberty had swamped me like a rushtide. Now the very words themselves, independently of what they described, seduced me, I could not keep them out of my mind, even in church, where I kept vigil on Brenda Hollander’s bra strap and thought about, along with oral intercourse, nipples and pink panties and the giant, balloon-bosomed woman on the highway billboard who wore a halter top and straddled a Goodyear tire.

  “When we are at our most prideful, or most haughty, that is when God strikes us down, let me be the first to tell you,” Brother Hughes said. Brother Hughes was the kind of teacher who had to bear his testimony to us every Sunday and cry a little to let us know he was serious about it. He was just revving up, starting to get emotional, building up for a big finish. Nobody was paying any attention to him.

  For weeks we had been talking about the two main groups in the Book of Mormon: the Nephites and the Lamanites. They both lived on the American continent hundreds of years ago and fought all the time, fought like cats and dogs—this is what the whole Book of Mormon seemed to be about: the Nephites butchering the Lamanites and vice versa. It was not as exciting as it might sound, but anything was better than the Bible. Brother Hughes made much of the fact that the Lamanites had not followed the will of God and had therefore been marked with a curse: dark skin.

  “The darkness in their hearts was matched only by the darkness of their skin,” Brother Hughes said. “Eventually they became so evil, so wild and bloodthirsty, that they completely eradicated the Nephites, wiped them off the face of the earth. Those Lamanites are the ancestors of the people today known as the American Indians. Edgar, will you come stand up here next to me?”

  I stared down at my shirt as if I was counting its buttons.

  He asked again, I ignored him, and he finally came and took my arm and led me up to the front.

  “Edgar here, in his own way, is a relic of those Book of Mormon times,” Brother Hughes said, gripping my elbow, holding me in place. My face felt hot enough to ignite paper. “Out in the world they might call him an American Indian, but we know better. In truth he is as much a Lamanite as the prophet Samuel or King Lamoni.”

  There I stood, a Lamanite with a hard-on. I crossed my legs, blinked my eyes rapidly, made clicking noises with my tongue, desperate to divert attention from my groin.

  Meanwhile, Brother Hughes bore his testimony, told us how much he loved the Book of Mormon, that he knew that it was a true book and that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and that Jesus Christ was his personal savior, had suffered and died on the cross for his many, well, let’s face it, countless sins. His eyes got misty, then rimmed with water, and then the tears started to flow freely, plowing down his smooth cheeks in orderly lines. This man had crying down to a science. I felt like crying with him. None of this, the extreme embarrassment, the invocation of the name of God, the sincere Christian emotion of our teacher, did anything to discourage my boner; it felt like it was trying to tear a hole in my pants.

  After I was allowed to sit down, I heard Scotty Webster whisper loudly, “Hey! Edgar is the Lamanites and we’ll be the Nephites and we’ll have us a war!” I looked around, feeling very vulnerable, but nobody was taking up Scotty’s call to arms.

  That night, after being persecuted all Sabbath long by an unyielding erection, I knew the time had come. There was no way I could let this go on any longer. I had been fighting it for weeks and I knew, despite the grave consequences, I was going to do the unthinkable: I was going to jack off. It was a sin, yes, and a big one; our church leaders had spent a lot of time and effort to explain this to us. At first, when they talked about masturbation, they used cryptic, indecipherable language that sounded like a secret code. In our weekly priesthood meeting they handed out a pamphlet to everyone called “For Young Men Only.” Inside it had pictures of an assembly line, a large gear works and a couple of smokestacks putting up clouds of steam, and it explained that a young man’s body is like a factory, a factory which produces a certain substance. Sometimes, it said, this factory overproduces this certain substance, and occasionally has to expel it, usually in the middle of the night. These “night emissions” are perfectly natural, it explained, nothing to be ashamed of, but for the boy to manipulate his own factory so that the substance is expelled according to his whims, now this is certainly a sin. Our bodies are temples, the pamphlet concluded, and are not to be tampered with.

  I read the pamphlet four times, beginning to end, and was left completely mystified.

  Later, after church, I was leaning against the back wall, still trying to decipher it, when Vince Brown, a kid who had large fleshy lips and got so excited he spit when he talked, sidled up to me.

  “You know what that thing’s about!?” he nearly shrieked. Right away, I had to move out of range: spit was flying everywhere. “I didn’t know either until my brother told me! It’s about jacking off!” Vince hooted and got right in my face, practically had me pinned against the wall.

  “You know?” he said. “Wanking?”

  Apparently the pamphlet was not as effective as the leaders had hoped because two weeks later the bishopric held a special meeting after Boy Scouts on Wednesday night. Bishop Newhauser, a man with stark white dentures and eerie light blue eyes, explained that the bishopric was becoming alarmed at the amount of “unchaste thoughts and deeds” going on among the youth of the ward.

  “We’ve decided to take some action,” Bishop Newhauser said, standing up in front of the portable blackboard. The meeting was held on the auditorium stage, and the hot lights were trained in one spot at the front while the rest of us were left in the darkness, surrounded by velveteen curtains that smelled of dust. “We can’t sit idly by while Satan is sowing his tares in our midst.

  “The ability to procreate is a sacred thing,” the bishop said. Already the stage lights were having their effect; droplets of sweat were popping out all over his forehead like blisters. “And when you fiddle with it”—he stopped suddenly and cleared his throat—“what I’m saying here is when you abuse it, this power we all have, you are desecrating not only yourself, but your family, your God, and His church upon the earth.”

  Bishop Newhauser told us there were some things we could do to combat this evil among us. With great care he wrote up on the board:

  Spend no more than one minute in the bathroom.

  When in bed, always keep hands on top of blanket and above waist level.

  Avoid solitary pursuits.

  In case of immoral thoughts, sing a hymn.

  Wear two pair of underwear.

  Pray. Pray. Pray.

  Before he let us go, he held up his hands as if to quiet us down, even though no one had made the slightest noise through the entire ordeal. By now he was so thoroughly soaked with sweat that his tie hung from his neck like a dishrag.

  “Just so there is no confusion,” he said, knotting his hands into fists, “what we are talking about, what we are talking about here is…masturbation.” He let the clinical nastiness of the word sink in. “What we are talking about here, young men, is keeping your hands to yourselves.”

  I had done my best, I had tried praying and singing hymns, I had even curbed my time in the pink bathroom. But there was no way around it now, I had reached a breaking point: I
was going to let my hands have their way.

  Even in that hormone-frenzied state, I felt a bitter sense of helplessness. In this world of right and wrong, good and evil, there were rules, laws created for my own well-being, and I knew with a certainty it was simply not possible for me to keep them.

  That night I lay in bed until I could hear Brain making his little harrumphing sleep noises beneath me. When I heard the grandfather clock chime eleven times I slipped out of bed. I made sure that there was no light showing underneath any of the other bedroom doors, crept down the stairs, careful not to upset the parrots, and followed my hard-on into the backyard.

  In church I had learned that the home was a sacred place, a haven for the family unit, a temple, as much a temple as the one in Salt Lake City. In the front room next to the grandfather clock hung a large proclamation in needlepoint that Clay’s mother, Grandma LaRue, had made: This House Is a Temple—Let None Defile It. To Mormons, just about everything was sacred in one way or another. I would defile my own body, my own temple, and hope God gave me a little credit for leaving the Madsen house out of it.

  So I crept outside. I had it out of my pants before I reached the water tank and it took only three or four teeth-clenching tugs before a rushing orgasm drew all the strength out of my legs and brought me to my knees. I knelt there, my body as rigid as a fence post, trying to live in that moment forever, and then I felt it, the flash of a short circuit somewhere deep inside my damaged brain, the electric flutter of an oncoming fit rising up my legs, and I toppled forward into that familiar darkness.

  I woke up facedown in the dirt. I rolled over and watched my breath rise as steam into a night sky scattered with stars. Faraway houses on a distant hill gave off a soft, buttery light, as if immersed in water. My heart beat slow and strong in my ears and I felt a peaceful clarity, not what I would have expected after desecrating my own sacred temple and topping it off with an epileptic fit. I turned my head to my left and could see Adelle, one of the goats, peering at me, her face stuck between the slats of the fence, her black nose glistening like a piece of coal. She didn’t seem alarmed to see me like this, which made me feel oddly comfortable, lying in the dirt as I was with my pecker in my fist, my pajama bottoms bunched around my thighs. I realized that I was already hard again, and this time it took about thirty seconds of inexpert mashing and squeezing to reach that shuddering state of bliss. I felt the same hot prickle in my nerves, but this time I did not black out. I sank into such a feeling of utter contentment that I eventually fell asleep. I woke up sometime in the early morning, soaked with dew, my hair full of sticks and chicken feathers, my arms and neck peppered with dirt and gravel and bits of straw, and I climbed up the stairs and into my soft bed a filthy, happy boy.

  NIGHT AND DAY

  AFTER THAT NIGHT, Edgar went on a masturbation binge: behind the water tank, in the old boxcar, on the far side of the horse corrals, in the bathroom at school, once in the backseat of the school bus when he couldn’t wait to get home. But never in the house and never in the barn; the dry dustiness of that barn, its smell and shadowy feel, reminded me of the cavalry stables at Willie Sherman and the frayed rope swinging above Sterling’s wheelchair. I couldn’t have jacked off in that barn if I wanted to.

  I felt wicked, but that wasn’t enough to stop me. And adding this new dimension to my lifestyle was not easy; Brain knew something was up. He peered at me over his cereal at the breakfast table, his eyes sharp with suspicion. He had been dubious of me ever since I had explained oral intercourse to him. He read every page of typing I did during the day, spied on me through the big keyhole of the bathroom door, but I was too much of a sneak and a thief to get caught by such a square little guy as Brain.

  For that first month or so I jacked off so much that I threw my arm out. One morning I woke up with a hot tingling in my elbow and my whole arm seized up like a burned-out piston. I could barely move it; it twitched and shuddered on its own like something in the last throes. It took me five minutes just to get my pants on.

  Lana, who had the uncanny ability to detect physical or emotional distress in anybody, human or animal, who seemed forever on the lookout for those who needed healing or consolation, who bore a ready sympathy that could be tapped like a vat, noticed my problem right away. She asked what had happened and I told her that I wasn’t sure, maybe I had slept on it funny.

  “We should take you to the doctor, just in case,” she said. She was already dressed for work and smelled like the sandalwood oil she dabbed on her wrists every morning.

  “No doctor,” I said. “Please.”

  Lana pursed her lips. “Doctors are the good guys,” she said. “They’re there to help.”

  So we went to the doctor. Dr. Wand, a high priest in our ward, was a cheerful old man who hummed “Yankee Doodle Dandy” while he scribbled things down on a thick pad of paper and occasionally scratched his butt with his fancy silver pen. I was relieved when he didn’t ask me how I was feeling or offer me his stethoscope to play with. He poked my arm, thumped it, gave it a yank as if he was trying to start a lawn mower. I stared straight ahead, trying not to grimace or flinch.

  “Will you touch your ear for me?” he said.

  I tried to swing my arm up to the side of my head, but all the connections were wrong, the blood vessels pinched, the nerves crossed up; it seemed that the arm hanging from my shoulder belonged to someone else entirely. I tried it again and managed to poke myself in the eye.

  He held the arm up in front of my face, where it hung limp as an empty bread sack. “Tell me, young sir, how did you get this limb of yours into such a state?” I looked over at Lana, who sat on a chair next to the examination table with a copy of The Disabled American in her lap.

  “Slept on it funny?” I said.

  Dr. Wand stepped back in shock as if I’d told him I’d hurt my arm tossing a spear at a charging rhino on the wild plains of Africa. “Sister Wand?” he called out. “Would you step in here a moment?”

  Sister Wand, who doubled as the receptionist and nurse, looked like a frazzled owl. She had a round face, close-together eyes and fly-away kinky white hair.

  “Sister Wand, this young man says he got his arm in this state by sleeping on it—how did you put it?—funny,” Dr. Wand said, giving my arm a shake so it flopped and bounced with its own dead weight. “Have you ever seen such a case as this?”

  “He must have slept on it really funny,” said Sister Wand.

  “Are there any other possibilities?” Dr. Wand said to me.

  “Basketball?” I said.

  “You play basketball, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “He doesn’t play basketball, Sister Wand,” Dr. Wand said. “Any other kind of physical activity, something with repetitive movements? Maybe you’re a shot-putter on the track team, maybe you sand a lot of furniture?”

  “I type,” I offered. “I type every day.”

  “He types, Sister Wand.”

  “It’s a skill not many boys have anymore,” Sister Wand said.

  Dr. Wand shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and scrutinized me under those bristling eyebrows. I felt the heat rising to my face. Dr. Wand looked like he was about to bust out with a laugh. He composed himself, glanced at Lana, who seemed completely confused by all of this, and stood right next to me and whispered, as if he didn’t want Lana and Sister Wand to hear what he would say next.

  “What we are going to do, my young typing friend, is fit you with a sling, which you are to wear for three weeks, night and day, in bed, in the bathroom, behind the woodshed, wherever you may roam. You won’t take it off except to bathe, and even then you must keep this limb of yours perfectly stationary, no repetitive movements. Three weeks, night and day, you hear me?”

  “Night and day,” I said, nodding.

  “I’ll make sure,” Lana said. “Night and day.”

  “You’ve got to give that arm a break,” Dr. Wand said, patting me on the leg. “Many product
ive years ahead of you yet. It’s a good idea to pace yourself.”

  “Slow down, son,” said Sister Wand.

  “Night and day,” I said, hopping off the table and heading for the door. “Okay.”

  I took it for granted that God had done this to my right arm as a punishment for my sins, but He had made one mistake: He had spared my left.

  So there was Edgar one night, over by the windmill, in his sling and green flannel pajamas, wanking awkwardly with his left, concentrating so hard that he wasn’t sure if he heard the noise behind him. Maybe it was one of the cats; they were always coming up looking for a scratch behind the ears or a scrap of food.

  Then there was a distinctly human sound, so out of place here in this land of animals: somebody cleared their throat. I froze. I did not look back, did not move at all, but sat motionless in the weeds hoping in vain that my bright plaid pajamas might find a way to camouflage themselves among the drab colors of dirt and fence and cloudy midnight sky.

  “Edgar,” came the voice, a harsh whisper.

  It was Sunny. She was wearing a sweater and a down vest, her blond hair giving off a dim glow. She stood with her arms cradled against her, her elbows in her palms.

  “I’m out here checking on the animals,” I said.

  Sunny stepped closer. “Aren’t you cold? You should at least put some shoes on.”

  As casually as if I was folding a pair of tube socks, I arranged my genitals back into my underwear. “I’m not cold,” I said. “I get hot in the house.”

  We both peered into the small space of dark air that separated us. “I’ve seen you out here a bunch of times,” she said. “But don’t worry, I’m not going to tell on you.”

  “Okay,” I said. My voice sounded thin, childlike. I was having a hard time catching my breath. I squeaked, “I won’t tell on you either.”

  Even when she was not catching me abusing myself in the barnyard in the middle of the night, Sunny made me nervous. It was not only that she was a girl in close proximity, sleeping in her underthings in the room right next to mine, using the same bathroom I did, sometimes stepping out of a cloud of steam in nothing but a towel wrapped snugly around her body, water dripping off the ends of her hair. It was her quiet, self-assured ferocity, her dead-eye glare, her long, blood-colored nails. All of her friends had that same menacing air. Once I came in one afternoon from doing my chores to find Sunny and two of her friends sitting on the couch with a magazine, their butts jammed together. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen and they all looked up at me at the same time. The chubby one acted like she was puking, her finger in her mouth, and the tall one with blue eyeliner and frizzy hair that had been bleached into an impossible hue of green rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, God.”