Thankfully, at that time, I knew nothing of the “grundel button,” the area between the scrotum and butt hole also known as the “gooch,” “chode/choda,” or “t’aint” (“t’aint your balls, t’aint your ass”). Pressure on this area immediately prior to ejaculation—“pushing the grundel button”—results in an orgasm powerful enough to tilt the earth on its axis and has caused certain people to spontaneously combust. This is advanced shit: AP Jerking Off. Had I learned of the grundel button just as I started beating off, I would have quit school and run away to dedicate myself solely to masturbation, living a contemplative life somewhere among lush, verdant hills, possessing or desiring nothing of this earth, save for a lot (a whole lot) of moisturizer.*
Practicing for later in life, perhaps? Also, wearing the dumbest Halloween costume ever. I guess for Halloween that year I was a penis in sweatpants with a stick between its legs?
Adding gasoline to the fire of my masturbatory mania was “the chip,” for the summer that I discovered jerking off was the same summer that my family decided to start stealing cable TV (kismet!). A household did this by getting the chip installed in its cable box, thereby affording access to all the premium movie channels, pay-per-view boxing and wrestling events—and all the porno channels—for free. I could now watch, twenty-four hours a day and from the comfort of my living room, strangers having sex on television.
I had no personal experience with sex whatsoever. In sixth grade, I had had a girlfriend named Kara. We kissed a few times, and one time, she kissed my neck. Which was awesome. But then Kara broke up with me, and I had been on a major dry spell since. Other friends may have been feeling boobs (on top of shirts), but I was still hoping to kiss girl number two.
My knowledge of sex was more pathetic. In terms of the female anatomy, I’d seen a Playboy or two in my day, so I was familiar with the setup: girls had boobies, heinies, pubes. Got it. Though the nudie mags did inspire something in my pants, I was more fascinated by the female body than turned on by it, viewing it scientifically (“Hmm . . . very interesting, the complete lack of bird and balls that we have here . . .”) rather than lustily (“I would like to do things to that, though I’m not sure what type of things”).
In keeping with centuries of Irish Catholic tradition, I didn’t speak to my parents about sex—not once, not ever. My dad was a tough guy, a longshoreman who worked in sweltering heat and frigid winds and who had seen friends and coworkers die in horrible accidents on the pier. But asking him to tell me all about how babies are made might make him faint. Asking my mom about sex was out of the question; to do so would result in being shunned by the entire community. I’d be taken from my room in the middle of the night, forced into a van, and dropped off on the side of a mountain with some beef jerky, holy water, and a rosary, never to be spoken of again.
School didn’t offer any insight either. Once our class was split into boys and girls. The girls were taken into a room to watch a video about periods. The guys were talked to by Mr. Bruno, who taught eighth grade and was one of the few male teachers at the school. He said that we should be nicer to the girls because we were becoming young men and that part of being young men meant being nicer to young women.
Most of what I knew about sex came from the schoolyard, secondhand knowledge passed on from what so-and-so learned from an older sibling or friend or while away at camp. Even so, fingering or getting a hand job was the ultimate sex act. Actual fucking was the furthest thing from our minds.
But the porno channels and the sex they showed changed all that. Actual fucking went from the back to the very front of my mind. If I had any doubts about how the process of sex worked, they were cleared up after only a few minutes of viewing the Spice Channel.
See, in our society, we take pornography for granted. But for hundreds of thousands of years,* the only ways to experience sex were to have it or to think about having it. Now we can see people having it anytime we want. No, better. Now, I can find a video of two black chicks having sex with an Asian guy dressed up like a dinosaur in under twenty seconds—and view it on my smart phone while sitting in an airplane bathroom (and no, I don’t know this from experience, especially if you were on Delta flight 211 from JFK to Denver on April 6, 2011). For today’s male, looking at and masturbating to porn is as unexceptional an occurrence as going to the ATM or downloading a new album. As a matter of fact, I’m looking at two porn videos right now as I type this. They are terrific.
But on that day those many years ago, when I had just started my career as a chronic masturbator and had never before seen actual sex, the effect was startling. This . . . this is sex? This is lovemaking? This is how babies are made? These people looked angry, intent on destroying each other (why is he smacking her in the face with his bird?). All the screaming, all the cursing (now why is she slapping him in the face?), all the hair pulling, all the sweating (did she just spit on him?), all the colliding of tanned, fit bodies, all the . . . all the . . .
I thought that sex was taking off all your clothes, getting under the blankets, kissing, and doing some rolling around. Not, for example, sitting in a hospital bed and when the nurse comes to check your temperature she—out of nowhere, apropos of nothing—starts giving you a hand job and then a doctor walks in and the nurse starts giving him a hand job (Two! Two simultaneous hand jobs! She must be really strong!), and then the three descend into an orgy of madness and yelling and aggression and basically have sex like lunatics. It was appalling. For about forty seconds. And then it was awesome. And then it was really, really awesome.
And then that was it. I was all in. Hooked, hard, and under the spell of the porno channel. I had to be stealthy: I couldn’t just plop down on the couch, turn on porn, pull out my penis, and go to town anytime I wanted. But for the rest of that summer, anytime I was alone in that house, channel 35, 77, or 78 was on and my bird was in my hand. Otherwise, I was in the bathroom. And I could have done nothing to stop this beat-fest. (Admittedly, I didn’t try.)
In the span of one summer, I went from a sexual neophyte who thought pregnancy was caused by peeing on a girl’s butt to a full-fledged, world-class porn monger and masturbator.
Growth, yes.
But the summer was not all jerking off twenty-four hours a day. I was going to summer school.
The Pre-Eighth-Grade Program at Saint Joseph’s Preparatory School (or “the Prep,” as it was known) was a seven-week course designed to prepare soon-to-be eighth-graders for the rigors of high school through a curriculum of English, math, and, for some reason, gym.
The Prep was King Shit of Philadelphia high schools. It was a hundred-plus-year-old Jesuit institution that produced young men who would go on to become intellectuals, professionals, and leaders in their fields. Graduates of the Prep went to the finest colleges and universities in America, and Prep alumni dominated Philadelphia politics, business, medicine, and law. They also had a crew team (rowing—how sophisticated!) and required all students to take three years of Latin plus three years of a modern foreign language. These were facts that I learned from the Prep’s glossy admissions brochure, whose cover photograph was of that year’s student council officers, handsome young men, smiling brightly, who looked like they could be senators. I’d requested the brochure a few months earlier and had since read it cover to cover eight hundred times, imagining myself hanging out with the student council officers, talking about fancy-pants stuff like art and literature and scotch and Europe. To my uncouth little Second Street self, though I hadn’t even seen it in person, the Prep exuded success, refinement, class, and intelligence. And as someone who considered himself the smartest person he knew, I wanted in.
(And “The Prep.” Its name alone represented peerlessness. And, let’s just admit it, douche-baggery. As much as I was enamored with the school, you can’t get away with calling yourself “the” anything without sounding like an elitist asshole. Did students at the Prep also eat the Food in the Cafeteria? I hoped to find out.)
It was
not all perfect, however: the Prep was exorbitantly expensive. Not on the level of college tuition, but well beyond what my mom and dad could afford. Yet the Prep maintained that though its tuition was high, Mother Prep opened her arms to all the best and brightest young men in the Philadelphia region, never turning away a student who possessed the aptitude but lacked the funds: “Where children of bus drivers study alongside children of doctors” was the line they used. (This would piss me off if I were a bus driver. That was the “poor person” job they came up with? I understand janitor is overused, but what about dishwashers, or carnies, or even the perennially unemployed?) True to its humble roots—it had been founded by a group of Jesuit priests in the 1850s—the Prep remained in North Philadelphia, which, over the past few decades, had become one of the worst, most crime-ridden neighborhoods in Philly. No ivy-covered walls or ivory tower here, folks! We’re in the shit! We still got that common touch!
I enrolled in the Pre-Eighth program as a sort of trial. If I loved the Prep, I could then seriously consider attending. If not, I could pursue other options. Those other options, however, were not so appealing.
First, there was public school. There were a number of public high schools in and around my neighborhood, but the estimated time I’d last in any of them before I was murdered in a massive wedgie incident or a lunch money robbery gone wrong was between two and five weeks. The public schools where I grew up were not so much high schools as they were pre-prisons; whereas most students got lessons in Shakespeare or geometry in high school, I imagined that students at the local public high schools took classes like “Hooch: How to Make It and How to Make It Not Kill You,” and “The History of Shivs III.” These were rough places, and they would eat me alive.
The other option was Neumann, a Catholic high school for boys that was the alma mater of my father, most of my uncles (the ones that had graduated from high school), and my grandfather. If I were to attend, I would be the first of the third generation of Mulgrews to go to Neumann. Furthermore, this was where the great majority of my friends were planning to go, which meant my estimated time of attendance prior to wedgie death was probably more like a year—a year and a half, maybe. And while Neumann cost a little bit of money, the tuition was manageable, and I was almost sure to get financial aid or a scholarship, thus lessening the burden on my parents.
I considered Neumann a back-up plan. A decent back-up plan, but I wanted a piece of the Prep. I was pretty sure I did, at least. That’s what Pre-Eighth was for.
It was only a short time before I had fallen in love with, pledged my allegiance to, decided I would do anything to attend, and possibly even fight and die for the Prep. I began to feel this way even before the bus reached the parking lot. While not one to be smitten by the architecture of houses of worship, the Church of the Gesu, rising above the neighborhood’s rundown houses, was a beacon of hope that called to all nerdy, socially awkward tweens everywhere: “Come to us. You and your in-depth knowledge of both the Marvel and DC comics universes are welcome here. And please ignore the junkie beating the hooker with what appears to be the business end of the Club. It is safe here. Promise!”
To enter the high school was a powerful, transformative experience. Not only was this the nicest building I had ever been in, I had been fantasizing about the moment for months. The entrance foyer, the library, the multipurpose room, the auditorium, the gym, the cafeteria, the theater, the weight room, the pool—I had studied pictures of each in the introductory brochure, and when I saw them in person, they were already familiar. On the very first day, I felt like I was home.
The teachers, staff, and administrators were so pleasant, going out of their way to reach out to each student, to introduce themselves in the hall and ask questions, that I wasn’t sure if this was a high school or a cult. Not that it particularly mattered to me; if the Prep was a cult, I was ready to shave my head, cut off my left pinkie, and start recruiting newbies.
The subject matter of the Pre-Eighth program was challenging, but I could handle English and math. Gym was a different animal. Unlike the high school, which was boys only, the Pre-Eighth grade program was co-ed. And I had little interest in exposing my athletic shortcomings in front of girls that I had only just met. While I could acquit myself well enough on the basketball court (catch the ball, dribble no more than once, pass the ball, cheer on teammates, don’t cry) and was decent enough at volleyball because none of us really knew what we were doing, the weekly pool session was troublesome.
It wasn’t that I disliked swimming, but doing so without a shirt on was a nonstarter. I could get away with wearing a T-shirt in the pool on family vacations because of the old “I sunburn easily” excuse. And this was true—when I was younger and carefree, I’d spend the whole day swimming in the pool shirtless, and, despite the use of sunscreen, I’d then spend these summer nights with massive sunburn and a bottle of refrigerated aloe, a can of Solarcaine, and a collection of cold, damp towels within arm’s reach, staying in the motel room all by my lonesome while the rest of the family went to the Wildwood boardwalk for rides and games and fun without my lobster-red self. As I got older and wiser (and fatter), I always stuck to a white T-shirt while swimming, the ultimate protection from both sunburn and insults about my burgeoning man-boobs. But the Prep’s pool was indoors, so there would be no sunburn excuse. Instead, I could only thank the Lord above when the gym instructor allowed me to forgo each pool session because I claimed an allergy to chlorine. Nasty stuff, that chlorine. Really makes me rashy and, uh, allergic.
The building and the classes and the so-nice-they-gotta-be-up-to-something faculty and staff were great. But it was my fellow classmates that really got me hooked on the Prep. These kids were different from my friends back in the neighborhood. I’m not implying that they were better. No, sir. They were not very likely to buy mice from the pet shop and release them into the wild after giving them some gin, or to pelt Ronny “Stinkin’ ” Lincoln’s car every Wednesday for a month with rotten oranges, or to do any of the other fun shit that my buddies and I did at home. I bet if they saw their grandfather get into a fistfight with a friend’s grandfather outside a bar over a televised horse race, they’d shit themselves and run home to mommy rather than shrug it off and continue lighting firecrackers. Even by my standards, they were a little soft.
But these kids were, in many ways, much more like me than my other friends. We were a collection of nerds made to feel like outcasts at our elementary schools because we liked reading books or doing our science homework. And now, for the first time, we were in an academic environment in which we were free from bodily harm and able to let our nerd flags fly. We reveled in the opportunity and experience, free to speak up in class, talk to the teachers after school, discuss with other students the merits of The Fellowship of the Ring vs. The Two Towers.
While some of the students were almost Rain Man-ish, as if they were so weighed down by their massive intellect that they had no room or energy to learn how to communicate effectively, some of us geeks were quite high functioning (I’d like to put myself in this category). The same was true for the girls. At one end of the spectrum were the super-nerds who could recite Pride and Prejudice from memory and spoke French fluently but couldn’t talk to a boy if he asked, “Can I borrow your pen?” And at the other end of the spectrum was Shannon.
Shannon looked more suited for Southern California than a summer school in North Philly: blonde, blue-eyed, tan, with a smile so bright it sparkled like waves breaking in the Pacific during sunset. That she smiled at strangers, didn’t say “fuck,” and didn’t regularly pee between parked cars made her unlike any girl I’d met before. What’s more, she was just so charming. She talked to boys, girls, friends, teachers, kids, and adults all in the same way. She was as comfortable standing in front of a group as she was in a small circle of people. She was polished, perfectly.
Shannon McNally (so Irish! my family would be so happy at our wedding!) pulled this off without being obnoxious an
d while seeming to be completely unaware of her charms. This only made her more alluring. She didn’t come from a fancy private elementary school, nor was she a blue-blood that summered in Stone Harbor or Avalon or other exclusive Jersey Shore towns. No, she was the daughter of an English teacher: humble roots not unlike my own.
As her last name was McNally, she sat in front of me in homeroom that first day. Once I got over the shock and good fortune of being able to stare at this gorgeous girl without creeping her or anyone else out, I prepared to make my move. Should I make fun of the teacher’s choice of tie? Or maybe “accidentally” drop my pen near her school bag? But it was unnecessary.
“Hi! I’m Shannon. What’s your name?”
When she spun around in her chair to introduce herself, her hair swung over her shoulders like she was in a goddamn shampoo commercial; she was all yellow hair and white teeth and blue eyes and tan skin. I melted.
From that moment, Shannon and I were inseparable. While I attribute much of my good fortune to having a last name starting with M, putting me in geographic proximity of her for several hours each day, I think Shannon liked me because I could listen and I could talk, two skills that most thirteen-year-old boys lacked. Maybe because I came from a family of talkers, maybe because my mom was such a big presence in my life, or maybe because I didn’t have disdain for girls the way most boys that age seem to have, I never had trouble talking to or befriending girls, not just at this age, but when I was younger and throughout high school as well. My communication with members of the fairer sex grew so frequent that for my fourteenth birthday, my mom sprung for my own phone line and telephone number so I would “stop clogging up the goddamn phone.”
My crew of buddies—Phil, Vic, Floody, Jimmy the Muppet, Screech, Doc, Kruzer, Brown Eye—gave me shit for hanging out with and talking to girls, criticism that I brushed off and refused to engage. I thought to myself, Why not? What is the downside of being friends and spending time with girls? Isn’t this a no-brainer? All the girls that my buddies would talk about, I’d talk to. What was so wrong with having an abundance of girl friends? The problem, I would learn, was that little space between the words. I had girl friends, meaning companions of the female gender, as opposed to girlfriends, meaning companions of the female gender who kiss you with their mouths open.
236 Pounds of Class Vice President Page 3
