(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

ROSE:

  I know, so do I—and we shouldn’t want that?

  VONNEGUT:

  No, I don’t think so. And I mean, I wish I didn’t own the house in the country, because I wonder what’s happened to it over the winter.

  ROSE:

  And you worry about somebody breaking in.

  VONNEGUT:

  Yeah.

  Huh?

  I know. I know. This is what Americans do. We hold the right beliefs, then do the wrong things. It’s been our national specialty, from All Men Are Created Equal to Support the Troops. Still, it hurt to see Vonnegut reveal himself like this. I had come to Bloomington in the secret hope that the guy would prove a worthy idol, that he had lived by his words, that my faith in him was well placed. And here he was, revealed as a limousine liberal. I felt like I was back at Wesleyan.

  IT WAS ON THIS somber note that I left the Lilly Library and sped off into the sunset, or at least as far as the Indianapolis suburbs, where my old pals Gerry and Michelle Lanosga were waiting with a much-needed infusion of wine and a slab of salmon, which Gerry barbecued on a cedar plank. The fish tasted so much like bacon that I suspected he had performed some kind of religious transfiguration.

  I’d met the Lanosgas twenty years earlier, at my first job after college. We were reporters in Phoenix. Michelle was engaged to another man and Gerry was stone cold crazy for her. The two of them spent the summer drinking to excess and attending AC/DC concerts and lusting after each other in the brutal, half-requited manner best suited to energetic twenty-two-year-olds. Now they had three boys and all the American bells and whistles.

  After dinner, the boys took me down to the basement to meet the great variety of bugs down there. Then it was time for a pillow fight. Then Miles (age eighteen months) took a header from the lip of the fireplace. It felt a lot like the house I grew up in, in terms of unconstrained boy energy. And I wondered, as I lay next to my sleeping wife that night, if any of these boys would fall for Vonnegut in the way I had. The wine had made me hokey; that was true. But it felt like an important question. The world really was going to run out of oil. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but it would happen in theirs. And our citizens—so infantilized by abundance, so well armed—would then face a mortal challenge: to look beyond themselves, to care more for each other. It doesn’t come naturally for most boys. They’d need someone like Vonnegut, someone smart and funny and forgiving, to show them the way. So I made myself one of those hokey, wine-soaked promises: to send each of those boys a Vonnegut book for his sixteenth birthday.

  WE SPENT TWO MORE days on the road. Erin did most of the driving, while I glared at the gas guzzlers around us and imagined that I was somehow better than the drivers who glared back at me. It’s one of my favorite pastimes.

  I should have enjoyed the drive. I knew it would be our last for a long time. But we were racing to get somewhere, like always, like everyone. We were treating America like the big floozy she so frequently consents to be. In Ohio, it was surly road crews, chunkedup road, the stink of tar. In Pennsylvania, it was distant hills and shitty drivers. And everywhere, the same shining fast food symbols. This was America by superhighway: beautiful curves and no ideas.

  Twenty miles outside Erie, we blew a tire at 70 mph. I needed to get the car onto the shoulder, but the drivers in the right lane wouldn’t let me in and the shuddering got worse and finally the back of the car began to smoke and we lost speed and I knew for a moment that it was all going to end; I had a terrible vision of crushed steel and blood. Then some brave soul decided to take pity on us and let me into the right lane and I lurched onto the shoulder. The tire had shredded down to the rim. The sign directly in front of us read: No Shoulder— 1/2 Mile Ahead. A semi screamed past. The blast of air nearly knocked me to the ground. Erin had gone white with dread.

  “Stay in the car,” I shouted.

  I unpacked the trunk and laid her possessions on the weedy embankment and pulled out the feeble little spare tire and set about failing to change it. This took twenty minutes. Then I stood by the highway and watched the traffic whip past, clenched and joyless faces. From this new perspective, I could see the psychosis of our arrangement. We had become dependent on machines that allowed us to traverse the land without in any way experiencing it, and worse yet to feel this was the natural order of things. It was a kind of violence, to pass by each other at such speeds. Was it really such a surprise that terrorists had turned our vehicles into weapons?

  THIS, IN CASE YOU’RE wondering, is how we wound up at the Wal-Mart in Erie, Pennsylvania, on the Friday before July 4. I had vowed never to give Wal-Mart any of my money, but they were the only place available to fix our tire at that hour, or anyway, they were the most convenient, so we gave them our dough, gratefully, and got back on the road and then we gave the assholes at Holiday Inn our dough, then the assholes at Exxon, and by 2 P.M. the next day we had arrived at our new house in the unsustainable suburbs, where I had vowed for many years I would never live. So this was me being an American, no better than my own purchases.

  I should have felt a sense of relief at having conveyed my precious cargo safely home. But doing the Vulcan Mind Meld with Vonnegut for two days had upset me. I didn’t know how to feel about the guy, if I still wanted to be him when I grew up. To sit there, day after day, immersed in the question of whether humankind would survive its own despicable conduct? God had proved an abject failure. Science, the great hope of his youth, had delivered us a hundred new ways to kill and a few spare miracles. Americans enjoyed unprecedented material comfort, and yet they grew sadder every day, more frightened and lonely and mean. Literary prophet wasn’t seeming like such a dream job.

  And here I can feel myself struggling for the happy ending, something inspiring about my daughter and the wish that our better angels might still prevail, how the empty fuel can will slow us down, humble us into empathy, maybe even help us reestablish those big, happy families we never had. But that’s bullshit.

  Kurt Vonnegut became a writer expressly to oppose such bullshit, to articulate the true woe of his circumstance. Most of this woe, incidentally, came not from Dresden or Vietnam or Iraq—not from the Family of Man, that is—but from his own family, from the insoluble loss of those he wished to love, and from those small, private moments when two people who should love each other fail to do so.

  I remind you now what Vonnegut told the crowd down in Hartford: I write again and again about my family.

  Vonnegut never got over those moments, and he turned to language to express his wrath and disappointment. He did so with such elegance and humor and mercy that he turned me into a writer, too. I love him for that. And I’ll also never forgive him.

  Postscript

  On April 11, 2007, Kurt Vonnegut died of injuries sustained during a fall in his Manhattan home. He was eighty-four. When I received word, I couldn’t help but think of that moment in Hartford when Vonnegut rose from his chair and stepped slowly, so gingerly, over that errant microphone cord.

  Someone was cruel enough to send me a link to the Fox News coverage. The reporter cited Vonnegut’s “unique brand of despondent leftism,” which struck me as an apt reflection of Fox’s unique brand of thrift-store fascism. I couldn’t bring myself to scan any of the other obits. I knew what they said, all the praise mustered for such occasions.

  Vonnegut would have been revolted. As a younger man, he had lusted after acclaim. He thought people were actually listening to him, a respectable Christian mistake. Vonnegut was an athiest, of course. No sweet dreams of heaven for him. No jokes tossed down to the suckers in purgatory. He leaves us his books, his pleas for kindness, his foolish hope for our salvation.

  SHAME ON ME

  WHY MY ADOLESCENCE SUCKED DONKEY COCK

  Hot Tub

  I am twelve. My parents, in authentic Northern California style, have installed a hot tub in the backyard, a sweet redwood job with a deck. I am vaguely aware of my cock at this age, nothing specific. I can’t imagine a girl
touching it. I can’t imagine what it might do if touched. I haven’t yet acquired that glorious pathetic byproduct of male socialization: cock consciousness, which is to say cock vanity, cock insecurity, cock issues.

  One evening I jump into the tub wearing only thin nylon soccer shorts. It’s just past dusk. The purple clouds are seeping off into black. My parents and brothers are gone for the night and I am feeling—I guess the proper word is naughty. I pull off my shorts and fling them onto the deck and stand before one of the jets and suddenly there’s this, this…twinge. I sit down immediately. I try to keep still. My immediate suspicion is that I’ve done something very wrong. Then, somehow, I am facing the jet again.

  I am facing the jet and I am rock hard and holding myself firmly around the base. I let the water pound that one right spot, which is—though I don’t know this yet—where the nerves bundle below the tip. I push so close I’m blocking the jet, and nearly stumble with the feeling. The sensation inside my body is percussive, ecstatic, approaching violence. I reel backward and slam against the side of the tub. Within a minute, I have assumed the position again. It takes longer this time and it stings and I could care less. By my fourth go-round, I am in considerable pain and sporting what looks like a cock hickey.

  This goes on for months. One evening, I am almost caught by a friend of my mother’s, who bursts outside to find me straddling a jet, my eyes shut, shorts clenched deliriously in my fist.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “I’m really sore from soccer,” I yell quickly. “I pulled a muscle.”

  My brothers, like other normal boys, have already discovered the ardent tugging of terrestrial masturbation. Low-grade porn. Jergens. Kleenex. But it doesn’t happen for me until the following year.

  I am shocked, horrified, to discover the physical consequences of my habit, that something actually comes out when you come, and that (by rather unfortunate extension) I have been defiling the family hot tub for months. I am disgusted with myself and incapable of stopping. In the loneliness of youth, in the bruising doubts of boyhood, these moments become precious. With the fragrance of damp redwood thick around me and the jets blasting, I am precisely what I want to be: a brief ribbon of joy in black water.

  Exam

  I am sitting in the waiting room of our pediatrician, Joe Davis, with my brothers and our mother. Mike and I are thirteen. Dave is fifteen. We are all feeling vaguely embarrassed, not just by the ritual of our annual checkup (“Turn your head…now please cough…”) but by having to sit on bright red chairs intended for five-year-olds.

  Dr. Davis appears in the doorway and calls my mother over. Because she is also a doctor, he takes a certain professional pride in speaking with her personally. He glances down at his clipboard and announces the following results:

  “Almond, David: pubescent male.”

  “Almond, Michael: pubescent male.”

  “Almond, Steven: prepubescent male.”

  Dr. Davis does not whisper these words. No, they come booming out of him, as if my mother were standing across a busy street instead of where she is actually standing—right next to him.

  Becoming pubescent is all I have thought about for the last year. During this time, Dave has developed a set of shoulders worthy of Greek sculpture, while Mike, my upstart twin, has acquired facial hair and undeniable B.O. His body reeks of manhood. I, meanwhile, have remained stranded in some kind of post-latency limbo. Every evening before falling asleep, I pull down my pajama bottoms to check signs. I am so familiar with the hairs on the underside of my scrotum that I have considered naming them.

  My mother is still talking to Dr. Davis, whom I now decide I will poison. I will poison him so badly that his tongue will fall out and it will be blue. Mike and Dave are sitting next to me, but neither one looks over. No smirks. No giggles. No innocent questions such as “Have you tried asking the tooth fairy for a real penis?” The brutality of the disclosure has preempted even their capacities for cruelty.

  It will dawn on me only in the parking lot, as Mike and Dave launch into an earnest discussion of Estes Rocket technology, that the revelation of my prepubescence—which I have shouldered these many months, and which I have deluded myself into regarding as a private burden—is, in fact, so obvious, so taken for granted, that it no longer registers as a possible source of mockery.

  Handjob

  I am at Camp Tawonga. Tawonga is where Jewish kids from the Bay Area come to learn about creating community and respecting nature’s harmony and getting handjobs. It is located somewhere near Yosemite. The word tawonga is derived from the Miwok Indians. In Miwok, it means “handjob.”

  I have been going to Tawonga since I was six. I am now fourteen. Girls at Tawonga look upon me favorably because I have a cool older brother and I once fell down a waterfall and because the standards of masculine pulchritude at Tawonga are frighteningly low. The guys in my cabin are a mess of acne and orthodontia.

  At camp, I always find a girlfriend. This year, her name is Natalie. We slow danced at the costume party, though I had poison ivy all over my body and was therefore encased in a green polyester sweatsuit. She was dressed as a Playboy bunny. From a distance, we looked like a tree feeling up an underaged porn star.

  Natalie has the nicest tits I have ever seen. They are big and brown and fluted at the nipple. I have spent hours rubbing and licking them. Sometimes, if we are in a private place, such as the dugout of the auxiliary softball field, I will lift her Lacoste shirt and gaze at them, so as to be overwhelmed by their perfect tittiness.

  Natalie is a year younger than I am, but she lives in San Francisco. She is a city girl, and this means—if I have done my math right—she will touch my dick. She has already felt my dick with other parts of her body, such as mainly her belly and tush, because, unless specifically directed not to, I am grinding against her at all times. With my body I am saying to her: You feel that? You feel that, baby? That’s what we call in these parts a D-I-C-K! The night before the session ends, our cabins go on an overnight together. We have been waiting two weeks for this chance. The campfire burns down. Natalie and I sneak off to a secluded patch of sand beside the Tuolumne River, where we dry hump ineptly for three and a half hours.

  “This is our last night,” she says, dramatically.

  “It should be special,” I say, dramatically.

  “I know,” she says, dramatically.

  I pull down my underwear dramatically.

  Natalie knows this is coming. She slips her hand under the sleeping bag and takes hold and begins, well, yanking is probably the best word.

  I want to give her some direction, but I’m not in a very good position to do so because I am terrified that if I say anything she will stop, and because I myself don’t really know how to jerk off, because my primary form of onanism has to date involved the use of the hot tub as sexual aid.

  Natalie continues to yank, as if I were a particularly stubborn weed.

  “How does that feel?” she whispers.

  “Good,” I say. “Really…good.”

  But her fingernails are scratching me, the tender skin is rending. Natalie is looking into my eyes and I am trying not to wince and playing with her epic boobs and wondering what happens if her nail actually slices through the thin skin that encases what I will later learn (in health class) to call the spongy tissue. I close my eyes and see a sausage slipping from its casing.

  “Can you make it slippery?” I say.

  Natalie dabs her tongue on the curve of skin between her thumb and index finger. My handjob now exudes the faint scent of Watermelon Bubble Yum, and things move much faster. Within a minute, I start to feel the unmistakable tremors. But the more excited I get, the more I squirm, and the more I squirm, the further in her nails dig, until, on the very threshold of release, I blurt out, “I better take over now!” and tear myself away from her just in time to inseminate the sand.

  The next day, we hold hands on the bus the whole way and talk about how this isn’t just a summer
thing. It is something much deeper. We are soulmates. We have licked one another’s souls. We are soulmate lickers.

  Natalie is getting off in San Francisco, so we have our final farewell. All around us, other campers are singing about West Virginia, mountain mama, and Natalie is sitting on my lap, whispering, “I’ll miss you, I’ll miss you so much,” and I want to thank her—for her shy foolish notes, for her feet, which are grubby and beautiful in yellow flip-flops, for the hickeys that ring her neck like plum skins, for the night in the arts and crafts shed when the lights blacked out and she fell against me without a thought.

  But I am thirteen, so I say only, “That was the best handjob ever.”

  Speedo

  Back home, I am just another freshman. I wear knockoff polo shirts and Jacomo cologne from free sample bottles I forage at the mall. I try out for the soccer team, but get cut after I kick the ball directly at Scott Sutcher’s head during a drill. “It was a mistake,” I tell the coach. “My foot slipped.” My brother Mike goes out for and makes the swim team. This makes no sense. I am the designated jock of the family.

  I have no intention of ever attending one of Mike’s swim meets. We do not attend each other’s extracurriculars, as this would violate the unspoken Code of Fraternal Disregard. But I need a ride to my job scooping ice cream, and my dad says picking up Mike is part of the deal. We arrive just as the meet is ending. My brother climbs from the pool and huddles with his teammates.

  Seeing his body is something of a shock. The uncoordinated pudge of our youth has grown into a swan: long, muscular, absurdly handsome. And then he is walking toward me and my shock redoubles. His Speedo. My God—there is something of great masculine significance in there, barely contained.

  This should not come as a surprise. He is my twin brother. But strange as this may sound, I have never seen him or Dave naked. We are too fragile for such acts of self-exposure, though it now occurs to me, as Mike pulls a towel modestly around his waist, that perhaps he has been trying to spare me.