Her objections to Brutus ownership were not without merit. They fell into three camps: dogs are a lot of work, dogs cost a lot of money, and we live in a small house without a proper yard. Well . . .
Yes, dogs are a lot of work. But, Mom (this is me talking to her), was I one to shy away from work or extra responsibility? As one who has witnessed my obsession on a daily basis, do you think I’m going to get a dog, lose interest immediately, and move on to something else? Has any pet or other living thing met its premature end under my watch or at my hands? Except for that turtle, like, six years ago? (Which Dad found while on a crabbing trip, might I add, so it wasn’t meant to be in a fish tank and most definitely went to a better place.)
Yes, dogs cost a lot of money. But, Mom, not that much money! I have a little bit of money from the paper route, which of course I would use for Brutus! And next year, when I graduate, I’ll get more cash from my graduation and the party for it, which of course would go into the Brutus fund!
Yes, we live in a small house without a proper yard. But . . .
. . . She kind of had me with this one. We lived in a row house with a “yard” that was no more than an eight-foot-by-three-foot slab of concrete shared with our next-door neighbors, an elderly couple we estimated were in their 130s. It was a place where we put garbage until trash day came around and where either my brother or I would pee if we really had to go and the bathroom was occupied. No, this was not ideal for a dog that could grow to seventy pounds.
But Mom (now we’re switching back to me talking to her), it can be done! We know other people who have even larger dogs—and the same size yard! And I would make sure Brutus gets plenty of exercise! And maybe that would help get me in better shape! See? Everyone wins!
And yet despite my best efforts, she would not budge. But I was not deterred. I knew this would be a long fight, and I settled in for a siege. However, my campaign would be shorter than I had expected. Because I had just won the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Spelling Bee.
Academic excellence was very important to my mom. Or at least, the pursuit of academic excellence by her children was very important to my mom. Both my parents were smart, but not exactly learned. Both had graduated from high school. And both read the paper every day. But aside from that, I don’t recall my mom reading anything that wasn’t a Star (or Star-type) magazine, or my dad reading anything other than a transmission manual or Popular Mechanics. Aside from the comic books that Dennis and I owned and a set of encyclopedias that may have been released before the end of the Vietnam War (and was only about 70 percent complete), there were no books in our house.
But neither my parents’ lack of a degree nor the near-complete absence of reading materials in our home meant that Dennis, Megan, and I couldn’t be learned. We were not only going to go to college, but we were going to go to good colleges. And in order to do so, we had to be academic superstars. Therefore, the need to do well in school was instilled in us from an early age. This was never forced—it’s not like my mom locked us in our rooms or beat us with hangers if we botched our recitation of the multiplication tables—but she did bribe the shit out of us.
I don’t think that a parent bribing a child is all that uncommon. I don’t have any children myself, and whenever my friends have kids I sort of drop them from my life because, Jesus Christ, all they want to talk about is their kid walking or talking or shitting, and it’s the most boring thing in the whole entire world to listen to. But I would guess that bribery is one of the basic and most effective tools of parenting. Clean your room and you can have extra dessert. Do the dishes all week and you can stay out late on Friday night. Do well on your final report card and maybe you’ll get that new bike, just in time for summer.
My mom bribed us with the usual perks: food, toys, money, extended TV viewing, allowing friends to sleep over. And it worked. I was doing well in school. Dennis entered the MG program in third grade (whereas I didn’t get in until fifth!). The jury was still out on Megan, who was only in first grade. While it’s not like our mother’s bribes had everything to do with how we approached and succeeded in school, there’s no doubt that her chocolate chip cake was a powerful motivator. We operated under the unspoken arrangement that doing well in school would be rewarded: get good grades, get good shit.
This is why I didn’t tell my mom about the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Spelling Bee. It didn’t affect my grades, and I didn’t think it was a big deal. Because I had participated the year before but lost—the bee included the entire junior high, so an eighth-grader won that year—I didn’t want to set myself up for failure by talking a big game and not delivering. It wasn’t until after the bee was over and I’d won first place that I casually mentioned it to my mom at the dinner table.
“Really? That’s great! That’s really, really great, Jase.” She then fired off a number of questions: Who else was in it? (I don’t know, maybe twenty-five kids?) How many rounds did it go? (I don’t know.) What word did I win on? (I forget.) Did I get a trophy? (Nah, just a piece of paper.) Why didn’t I tell her about it before? (I didn’t think it was a big deal.)
But it was when I explained to her what came next—the Philadelphia City Spelling Bee in a few weeks, from which a handful of finalists would advance to the Pennsylvania State Bee, the winner of which would qualify for the National Spelling Bee—that she got really excited. Her child, potentially the best speller in the whole city or the whole state or even (dramatic gulp) the whole country? Jesus, Mary, and St. Joseph. This was big, big news. And it called for a big, big bribe.
My mom and I made a deal. If I reached the state spelling bee, I got Brutus. This meant that I did not have to win the city spelling bee. I simply had to be among the kids who went on to the state bee. Not even win, just shoot for being among the top seven? Yeah, I could handle that.
I took the spiral-bound book of spelling-bee words that I was given after the school bee and went off to my room. It was time to get serious.
“Panegyric. P-A-N-E-G-Y-R-I-C. Panegyric.”
Panegyric? What the hell is that? I’ve never seen or heard that word in my life, and I’m about 50 percent sure it’s made up. She may have spent most of the competition in her seat sucking her thumb, but damn, that girl is a good speller.
It’s getting down to the wire. We’re on hour two of the bee and only twelve are still standing. Being in the top seven was all I needed for Brutus.
It’s getting warm in the auditorium. Parents, legal guardians, and loved ones are seated in the audience. The pressure is mounting. And the words are getting harder. At first, everyone got nice, easy words, perhaps to relax the participants. But then it was time to separate the wheat from the chaff. In those middle rounds, people started dropping out, losing either on difficult words or crumbling under pressure and blowing the easy ones. I was able to get a good rhythm going, and though I got some doozies (damn you, French, and your stupid maître d’), I was buzzing along at a pretty good clip. I didn’t know if I could win, but top seven? Yeah, I could do that. Especially now that it was so close. I could spell all day, baby.
After the thumb-sucker, it’s two more and then me. A kid who looks quite a bit like me, except with a catastrophic lazy eye, steps up to the microphone.
“Michael, your word is deleterious.”
That’s a good one. Not too easy, but not too hard—it’s just delete with –rious on the end. And Michael nails it. Good for him. I guess.
Next, an Asian girl. She gets recidivist. I think I could probably spell this, but you never know until you get up there. It’s one thing to spell the word in your head at your seat and another to stand in front of the judges and all the parents and do it aloud. I don’t usually have trouble with consonants—I know a C from an S and a K from a CH or X. It’s the vowels that sometimes trip me up. E vs. I, A vs. O. These were the spelling traps that kept me up at night.
The Asian girl spells recidivist right. Now it’s my turn.
“Jason, your word is accessory.”
There are audible groans from the other participants. This has happened before: occasionally, a softball sneaks in during the later rounds. And accessory is definitely a softball. I got this.
But . . .
But there was something strange in the way the judge pronounced the word. See, in Philly-ese, accessory is a hard, ugly word: ak-sess-uh-ree. The judge, who has been devoid of any accent throughout the bee, made it sound softer, a bit more flowing: ah- sess-ah-ree. Sort of like she was combining ass, ess, and the end of rotary. Ah- sess-ah-ree.
I know it starts acc–: that ain’t gonna trip me up. But is it –ory or –ary? I thought it was an o, but she made it sound like an a. Is accessory a different word from accessary? Is she using the latter? Like, maybe one is a clothing accessory, but the other is an accessary to a crime?
Alright, deep breaths. Focus. It’s either o or a, and I have to pick one. It’s gotta be o, right? But maybe not; –ary is a common suffix, too: necessary, arbitrary, literary. All I know is that when I say the word, the first syllable (ak) and third syllable (uh) are not alike. The way the spelling bee emcee says it, the first (ah) and third (ah) syllables sound identical. And since I know the word starts with a, that’s what I’m going with.
“Accessary. A-C-C-E-S-S-A-R-Y. Accessary.”
“I’m sorry, Jason . . .”
I was devastated. It was not just the loss, but the word. On the car ride home, the next day at school, several days later, I kept turning it over in my mind. Accessory? Really? I’m in M-fucking-G, but I can’t spell accessory? Not something like antediluvian or chartreuse or some other word that I could be proud of losing on? That I could look back upon with respect as a formidable foe that truly and fairly bested me? Losing a city spelling bee on the word accessory is like going off to fight the Nazis in 1944 but coming home a week later because a bad crêpe you had in Paris gave you the runs.
There is no shame in losing, I was told. You did a fine job, I was told. We are all very proud of you, I was told.
We’ll get you Brutus next week: this I was never told. Like I said, my mom was a tough broad.
summer of growth
The loss of Brutus was difficult, but the summer between seventh and eighth grades saw new developments that allowed me to move on. The most important related to my heightened awareness of my genitals and how they worked.
I had heard all about masturbation, but most of the hearsay revolved around the abstract concept of masturbation. That is, there was much talk of guys jerking off, wanting to get jerked off, stop being a jerk off, and so forth. In fact, jerk off was among the top twenty phrases I used or heard on a daily basis. Even the adults I knew used jerk off to describe a guy who was an asshole (though they generally preferred the more old-school strapper, which I have never heard used even once outside the adults in my family and neighborhood).
But what jerking off actually involved was unknown to me. While I had a rough idea of what it was, I had a number of questions about the physical process. I knew that touching one’s bird felt good.* And I knew that things touching one’s bird also felt good. (Two years earlier, while vacationing on the Jersey Shore, I spent an entire week in the exact same spot in the pool after discovering that the water jet shooting on my bird felt just oh so marvelous.) But when jerking off, do you just pull on your bird? I mean, do you literally jerk it? Doesn’t that hurt? I could see gently rubbing it, but tugging on it? Really? Even bonerized, it seems like a delicate thing to be yanking on.
And this jizz stuff . . . are we sure it’s not pee? I’ve heard that it’s supposed to be white, and pee is yellow, but I’ve peed not-as-yellow after drinking a whole bunch of water. Is that jizz? I was pretty sure that jizz and light-colored pee were different things. But you never know.
And after jerking it for a while, then the jizz comes out, right? That’s the endgame here? How do you know when or if that’s going to happen? What if it doesn’t? How long should I keep going? How do you know when to stop? When your arm gets tired?
And does the jizz come, like, flying out? What kind of speed are we talking here? Faster than the fastest pee? So fast that I’d feel a kickback in my hips, like after shooting a gun? Or does it just dribble out, like those last drops after a long pee? Do I have to wring out my bird to make sure it’s all out of there? What if there’s some left over?
And does it shoot all over? What kind of damage radius are we talking? You know how a bottle of household cleaner has the “stream” or the “spread” option? Which is it closer to?
The whole thing was confusing and intimidating.
Then one early summer evening, my buddies Phil, Vic, and I were hanging out on Phil’s front steps when the topic of jerking off came up. Phil and Vic were two of my closest friends. Phil was athletic and cocky, which meant that most girls liked him and most guys secretly admired and openly despised him. Vic was a bear of a kid, but very soft-spoken, and he possessed an intensely dry sense of humor. Both Phil and Vic knew a lot more shit than I did because they had older siblings (a sister for Phil and a brother for Vic) and access to their older siblings’ friends.
I couldn’t ask the specific questions that I had about jerking off. To let on that I hadn’t been jerking off for years, that I wasn’t masturbating several times a day, that I hadn’t masturbated three times that day already (let alone that I had never done it even once) would have been a grave error and significantly detrimental to what little social standing I had. So as Phil and Vic talked about how awesome jerking off was, I sat back and said things like, “I know, right?” and “totally” and “oh, that’s the best.” But despite my bluffing, I did manage to pick up one little nugget. The winning technique wasn’t to jerk your bird, but to slide your hand up and down around it. “I think of it like you’re fucking the tube of a toilet paper roll,” Phil said at one point, miming the action. “But instead of humping it, you let your arm do all the work.” Well, there we go.
Inspired, I bid my friends farewell at the first opportunity and raced home to see what all the fuss was about.
First I had to decide where to jerk off. As everyone was at home, my options were limited. I considered the basement, but it was unfinished, grimy, and, frankly, scary. My bedroom was another option, but there was no lock on the door, and I was often disturbed while in there. I thought briefly about the roof (“Oh look, Frank—there’s the oldest Mulgrew child masturbating on the roof”), but knew there was only one viable option: the bathroom.
I still have to sleep on my back. I think they might have screwed something up.
The bathroom made the most sense. If I was going to murder someone, it would be in the bathroom. It was the easiest room to clean: everything was tile. There were ample amounts of both cleaning supplies and toilet paper. I could run the shower to drown out any noise. I could flush almost anything down the toilet. True, it was the only bathroom in our house and was therefore highly trafficked. But the lock was good and strong, and unlike my bedroom—into which my mom, brother, or sister had no problem barging at any time—there was no interrupting someone in the bathroom except for a top-flight emergency. If the bathroom was the best room in the house to murder someone, it was the best room in the house in which to jerk off.
I sat on the toilet. Bonerization was no problem; strong breezes, sudden changes in barometric pressure, and 99.97 percent of my waking thoughts were enough to give me an erection. I formed the toilet paper tube with my hand and began the sliding process. At first I was concerned with the end product. What would happen when or if the jizz came out? But then a funny thing happened: during the course of the (let us call it) sliding, I grew less and less concerned about the final result. Or about my homework. Or about where I was, what time it was, whether there was a God, and whether He was watching me disapprovingly. I was rather focused on the, uh, process.
And so I kept going. I kept going. And kept going. And then: boom. Or shall we say:
BOOOOOMMMMM!!!
[Makes sl
ight choking noise, blacks out for a few seconds.]
Now, I’m not going to tell you how wonderful it is to have an orgasm, because a) I’m not a good enough of a writer to adequately describe it, and b) you’re not a fucking idiot. I will tell you that my life was henceforth divided into two distinct eras. There was BC and AD for Western civilization; there was BJ (before jizzing) and AJ (after jizzing, or, anno jizzino, if you prefer) in my own world. Not quite the birth of Jesus Christ to separate the two, but pretty damn close. It was the most significant of my critical life moments to that point, ranking above the time I learned there was no Santa and finding out that the really friendly ice cream truck guy who always complimented me on my hair was actually Class 2 felony ice cream truck guy. I knew that from that point forward, nothing would be the same. Things were different now, and there was no going back.
I took so much to my new hobby that I am certain there were bordellos in the Old West during the height of the Gold Rush that didn’t see as many orgasms as the cold, blue tile floor of that bathroom on Third Street in South Philadelphia during the summer of 1992. Not only were all the questions that I’d previously had about jerking off answered immediately, but I went from novice to expert in no time, experimenting with a number of different approaches and tactics, including going southpaw (masturbating with the left hand), doing the invert (flipping your hand over so that you’re beating off with your palm on top as opposed to the more standard palm-underneath technique), meeting the Stranger (sitting on your hand until it fell asleep and then masturbating, creating the impression that a stranger’s hand is jerking you off), and a personal favorite, meeting the Jersey Stranger (while standing in the shower, sticking your arm out and wrapping it around the shower curtain, as though a stranger, presumably a stranger from New Jersey, is reaching into the shower to jerk you off).*
236 Pounds of Class Vice President Page 2
