What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer

by Jonathan Ames

  I wasn’t worried about being sexually abused; it was the 1970s and sexual abuse hadn’t been invented yet. I was simply concerned about someone finding out that I hadn’t started puberty. So down came my underwear and the counselor put the lotion on my small penis, and he said, “Don’t worry, you have plenty of time.” This was very sweet and kind of him, though I felt a little funny when he quickly pulled up my underwear when he heard the door to the shower room open up. I intuited that what had occurred was perhaps not proper. And sure enough, this very nice, handsome counselor left the camp several years later under ominous circumstances. I still do wonder what became of him. For me, my encounter with him was actually quite tender. Before the judge, if I was ever called, I would say, “He was very reassuring.”

  And that counselor was right. I did have plenty of time. I turned fourteen, then fifteen, but still no armpit hair or fluid. I was starting to lose my mind over this. Then in the spring of my freshman year of high school, this puberty situation got really out of control when I made the tennis team. It was late March when I was selected for the squad—it was an honor to have been chosen as a freshman—and because it was still cold out, our practices were held at an indoor racquet club before school started. At the end of the first practice, our coach, who was short and dark and bore a slight resemblance to my father, announced that every day after we were done playing we were to go for a jog around the parking lot and then come in and shower. Showering was mandatory, he said, because we couldn’t go to school smelling of sweat. “It’s not healthy,” he explained.

  I didn’t know how I was going to escape exposure and humiliation. I hadn’t been seen naked for years, except by the understanding counselor at camp. I was practically of normal height for my age, but that was the only normal thing about me. My lack of puberty was my most guarded secret. I regretted having tried out for the team. I hadn’t considered the showering. There had been no showering during try-outs, and in the fall when I was on the freshman soccer team, none of us had showered.

  I thought my only chance, after we finished that first practice, was to be the fastest runner. So when we took off for our jog, I dashed ahead of the pack, raced around the lot, sped into the locker room, stripped down to my underwear, and headed for the showers. But before I could get anywhere, some of the other boys, who had also run fast, began to straggle in. It was impossible to go through with it. The shower area didn’t have private booths; it was just a large tiled room with spigots coming out of the walls.

  I sat down on the bench and began to dress. I watched enviously as the other boys marched around carefree with their large penises. They took towels out of the towel bin and didn’t even bother to put them around their waists. Each boy’s penis and surrounding pubic hair seemed to be as distinctive as his face and hairdo. Some of the boys were eighteen years old—they were practically men. It was unfair. I was a cherub compared to them. My penis was indistinguishable from that of a five-year-old’s. I could still do the trick of pushing it in so that it disappeared momentarily, went to Connecticut or someplace and then came back to me in New Jersey.

  So that first day, I didn’t shower. I got dressed and headed out of the locker room just as the coach was coming in. He looked at me accusingly and said, “Showered already?” I lied immediately. “Yes, Coach,” I said, and he let it pass, though I knew he was suspicious.

  I was nerve-racked for the next twenty-four hours, and at the end of the second practice, I again sprinted ahead of everyone in our tour of the parking lot, running even faster than the day before, and my teammates all thought I was trying to be the coach’s pet. But I was running for my life. A sophomore on the team tried to keep up with me, the bastard, but I left him behind. I made it to the locker room and had about a minute to take a shower. I got down to my underwear but could go no further. I was too afraid. Then a few of my teammates came in. I tried to summon the courage to reveal myself, but I couldn’t. So I sat on the bench and got dressed and I felt surrounded by the hairy penises of my teammates; it was dizzying, things felt out of focus, all those penises, it was like being in Hitchcock’s The Birds.

  I staggered out to the lobby to wait for a ride to school from one of the hairy seniors. As I stood there the coach came up to me. He looked at my hair and said, “You didn’t shower, did you?” It was incredible; it was only the second day of practice and he was already honing in on the most vulnerable aspect of my life.

  “I don’t want to get a wet head,” I said. “I have a little cold, and if I go out with a wet head, it might get worse. I washed a little in the sink.” I was always being warned by my great-aunt Pearl, who often stayed with my family, about the dangers of a wet head, that a wet head could lead to serious illness.

  “All right,” the coach said, “but tomorrow you better shower.”

  Why did he care? Why couldn’t he leave me alone? The next day after practice I just sat on the locker-room bench in my underwear, my barrier to humiliation, and I was practically catatonic with indecision. Should I just do it? Let them see me and laugh at me? Then the coach came and stood before me. He was nude. A towel was draped over his shoulder. His penis looked like a purple old man hiding in a black marsh. It looked like a poisonous mushroom, a chanterelle from hell. It looked like my father’s penis. My father’s penis, which I was always seeing in the bathroom and I would try not to look at it, but it would look at me no matter where I was, like the Mona Lisa.

  But the coach, despite his unattractive penis, wasn’t a bad man and he had an inkling of the problem I was having. He may have even thought he was helping me, as my coach, to conquer something. He probably figured I was only suffering from shyness. If he had known how small I was, he might have left me alone.

  “So you’re going to take a shower,” he said cheerfully, yet forcefully, trying to manipulate me. “There’s nothing to be worried about. It’s healthy to take a shower after exercising. But you better hurry up, you’re running late.”

  He walked off to the tiled room, sure that I would follow him. I regarded his unbecoming lower-back hair, and then dressed as fast as I could and escaped out to the lobby to the pay phone. I called my mother in a panic to come save me. I was almost crying. I said, “Mom, come get me right away. Please!” Luckily, she hadn’t left early to go teach at her high school, and I begged her to meet me at the gas station, which was down the street from the tennis club. I didn’t want the coach to find me.

  When she pulled up in her car, I felt tremendous love for her. We were very close back then and always had been. I was an immature boy, not just physically, and my mother had encouraged this. Behind my father’s back she had continued buying me G.I. Joe dolls, though by the time I was fifteen I would only play with them in my closet so that my father couldn’t see me. I would have them hold on to the hangers with their special gripping hands, and when I wasn’t playing with them, I just liked seeing them hiding in the closet when I would get dressed in the morning. I felt less alone and I must have identified with them—they were masculine but had no genitals.

  So my father didn’t know about the G.I. Joes, but he was quite aware of my close relationship with my mother. Long before I knew what it meant, he often called me Oedipus. He would summon me to the dinner table by shouting, “Oedipus! Oedipus!” He also said it whenever he saw my mother giving me a kiss. And when that would happen, my sister, three years older than me, would join my father in calling me Oedipus, and she would also make a heart shape with her hands.

  My father’s other frequent nickname for me was Dick Tracy because of my large, bent nose. My penis was small but my nose was big. So there was a certain parallel to my father’s nicknames for me: Oedipus and Dick Tracy—two mystery-solvers.

  And my father was right. It was all very Oedipal. For years my mother and I had played this game where she would ask, “Who loves you?” It became a game because she asked me so often. I’d answer by naming one of my grandparents or my father or my sister. Then she’d ask again, “W
ho loves you?” and I’d name another person, but she’d keep asking, “Who loves you?” And the more relatives or friends of the family that I could think of, the more suspenseful it became. But then finally I’d always submit and shout, “You do!” And this shout not only affirmed that she loved me, but that I was crazy about her. And when I was with my mother in that car, being saved from my tennis coach and my teammates, I loved her very much. I told her what was going on.

  “The other boys won’t notice,” she said.

  “They’ll notice! I’m the only one who hasn’t started puberty. They’ll kill me!”

  My mother wanted me to talk to my father, but I wouldn’t do that. I hadn’t let him see me naked for a long time. I must have sensed intuitively the other side of the Oedipal dynamic—that if my father knew I wasn’t a threat, i.e., a mature male, he could easily do away with me. He was a member of the NRA.

  So I wanted to quit the tennis team immediately, but my mother wouldn’t let me. Still, she was sweet to me; she reassured me that someday soon I would develop. You have plenty of time, she said. I had heard it before, but I was running out of time—I needed to start puberty by the next practice.

  It didn’t happen. The next day, the coach was going from court to court observing us. I was on line for a backhand drill and he stood next to me and said in a snide way, “Think you’ll shower today?” I didn’t say anything to him. I was too embarrassed, and he walked away from me. And then a few minutes later during a volley drill, as I made my approach to the net, I fainted. I remember seeing the net cord and rotating my hand for the proper grip on the racquet, and then there was the cement of the court rising up to slap me, but there was also the feeling of relief, of going to sleep. I’m sure the coach, for a moment, saw an opening as I lay passed out. “Let’s strip down Ames and see what he’s got!”

  But he restrained himself and my mother was called and I was taken to a doctor. I had mononucleosis. I had never kissed a girl, I was still in love with my G.I. Joes, and yet I had come down with the kissing disease. I must have picked it up from a water fountain or an improperly washed utensil in the cafeteria, or a wet head had done the trick. In any event, it was the best thing that could have happened to me—I missed the rest of the tennis season, and I never played competitively again.

  That summer, a few months removed from my trauma on the tennis team, I began to experiment instinctively with masturbation. I still hadn’t started puberty, but each night I strummed myself for a few minutes before falling asleep. I found it soothing, and I say strum, because I’ve never been one to jerk on my penis, unlike most men, who employ that rapid up-and-down yanking, which when I’ve witnessed other men masturbating—in parks or public rest rooms, those sorts of locales—I’ve always found to be somewhat violent and unattractive.

  Anyway, one night as I strummed in the motion and rhythm peculiar to me, my penis seemed larger than it ever had been before, and then a dribble of clear substance came out with a noticeably pleasurable feeling. I had heard about orgasms by this time, but it was only at that moment that I made the connection between “coming” and the fluid I had been waiting so long for (which I had just about given up on). I immediately went running to my mother.

  My father was out of town, which he often was as a salesman, and my sister had already left home, on her long journey to becoming a psychiatrist, having sensed early on, I imagine, what was going on in the old Oedipal household. So it was around ten o’clock at night and I sprinted down the hall to my parents’ bedroom completely nude. I burst in upon my mother, who was propped up in bed reading. I shouted at her with joy, “Mom, it’s happened! The fluid came out! I think I’m starting puberty! My penis seems bigger!”

  I got onto the bed next to her. She didn’t say a thing to me. She kept on reading her book, she wouldn’t look at me, but I could see that she was smiling. I figured that she was happy for me. I knew that I was happy. In fact, I was delirious, which seems to be the only explanation for my unusual behavior. In my delirious, exuberant state it felt perfectly natural to share this with my mother, who looked beautiful and kind sitting there. Her long blond hair, normally fastened in a bun, was loose and lay over her shoulders. I felt like snuggling next to her. In my mind, she had been waiting four and a half years with me for my pubescence, ever since I first asked her when I would change. She had been my sole confidante. She was the only person who knew my secret about how tiny I was, and she was the only one who knew what I had gone through on the tennis team.

  And as I lay beside her on the bed, I admired my penis. I felt like all my problems were over. I decided to masturbate again. I wanted to show her how I could do it. “Watch, Mom,” I said. “It gets big.” I wanted to impress her. She was still smiling, but still not looking at me, which I thought was strange—she was always attentive to my accomplishments. And then when I touched myself, she said, “Maybe you should do that in your room.”

  She didn’t say it with disgust or anger, her tone was gentle, but suddenly I felt shame. I knew then that it wasn’t normal to show your mother your first official erection. I slid off her bed and I ran to her bedroom door, cupping my penis in my hands, holding myself like Adam, guilty with knowledge. I scurried down the hall, wondering if she might tell my father. I was embarrassed, but I also wanted to try masturbating again. I had started puberty! My troubles were over. New ones were beginning, but I didn’t know it yet. I opened the door to my room. I was leaving my mother behind, and she may have sensed this, felt the umbilical-Oedipal cord snapping, and she tried to bring me back. She played our game, but it was too late. She’d had her chance. She called out, “Who loves you?”

  Hair Piece

  IN JANUARY OF 1995, during a fit of depression, while living at home with my parents in New Jersey, I took my father’s tiny electric beard trimmer and shaved my head. Because of the trimmer’s size and the dullness of its single blade, the whole scalping process took almost forty minutes. This would seem to be the act of a rebellious teenager, but at the time I was thirty-one years old.

  I was depressed for a number of reasons (I was broke and in debt and living at home, after all), but one of the chief causes of my depression, before I attacked my hair, was that I was going bald in a very strange manner. I had hair on the sides, on the point, on the back, and I had a hairline in place on my forehead, but behind the hairline was a large bald spot. I didn’t have my bald spot in the back of my head, but at the front! I combed the hairline, which I called the hedge or the fringe, back over this spot, but you could see right through the hedge/fringe to the empty lot behind, and if a strong wind came along, the fringe/hedge was knocked over and my spot was exposed. (Please see diagram/map on the next page, and author photograph on cover.)

  I’d always had a nice head of hair, but as my hair thinned, I felt that I was sallying forth into the world with a faulty helmet. I was

  LEGEND Fringe : Strong: Weak: Very Weak:

  defenseless, vulnerable, laughable. A friend of mine suggested that I had mange. It was all too much. At the nadir, I wrote in my journal: “I feel very bad today and very bald.” So then I shaved my whole head to match the bald spot.

  The result was disastrous. I am pale and have white eyebrows, and so by shaving my hair and removing all color from my visage, the effect was as if I had erased my head. I was now an invisible man.

  This wasn’t too bad because I started commuting to New York to teach grammar at a business college, and since the students hated the subject, it was good that I was invisible. All they could see was a jacket and tie that had a voice emanating from the neck hole. I maintained my invisible-man status by shaving my head weekly with a pair of barber’s clippers.

  The grammar job was my ticket out of my parents’ house in New Jersey and I moved to Brooklyn. On my own again, my depression lifted and after a few months, I decided to regrow my hair. I’d often had dreams that my hair was back, looking lustrous and beautiful, and I missed it terribly, like an amputee dreaming of
a limb.

  Unfortunately, my hair looked terrible as it came in. The hedge/ fringe wasn’t long enough yet to comb back over the bald spot, so I looked like I had a monk’s tonsure, except that it was at the front of my head.

  During this time of painful regrowth, the late spring of ’95, I was doing research into WASP culture and had managed to get invited to a grand party at a Newport mansion. I put on my blue blazer and drove up to Rhode Island. I was having a good time at the party, but then a drunk older gentleman, a white-haired yachtsman, asked me a question, and he was quite sincere and concerned. “Have you had brain surgery?” he asked.

  “My God, no,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you had an operation in that SPOT.” And he pointed his swollen, ancient mariner’s finger right at my prow, my forward-placed tonsure.

  The next day, I reshaved my head and it stayed that way for two years. Then this July (1997), I moved from Brooklyn to the East Village and I couldn’t stand seeing how many men had shaved heads. I didn’t want to be a soldier in a trendy, bald army, so I decided to be brave and regrow my hair.