“Yeah, I guess I believe him. Why would someone lie about their penis size?”
“I don’t know. Is bigger better?”
“I think so. Carina, stop playing that fucking song! It’s the fifth time already!”
During the half of the lunch period we spent in the auditorium—recess stayed with Glenwood—we sat in clusters, with the prime real estate being as close to John Thompson as possible. I rarely sat right next to John, despite the fact that we were friends and football captains together; I refused to be glued to his hip like Paxton, Pierce Stone, and the “Jew Crew”—a self-given moniker. It seemed that every grade at MMS had a Jew Crew, as if the details of running such an organization were passed down in a weathered tome. Being Jewish, however, was not a prerequisite for admittance into the Crew.
When Julie Fischer (unanimous number one on the hot list) posed the question, “Do you know how big you are?” I happened to be only two seats down from John Thompson, wedged between Paxton and Mitch Farber. The query conflagrated throughout the boys’ cluster like wildfire as we turned to each other, seeking approval on how to answer. But John, taking charge of the pandemonium, said “seven” so assuredly that you’d think he had measured during fourth period. “Five and a half. Five and a half. Five and a half,” began the Greek chorus, as John had made the ceiling, and anyone going over would be pressured into dropping trou right there in the theater to prove themselves.
I’m ashamed to say I joined in the yelps of “five and a half”—“Be a leader, not a follower,” my father would tell me—without ever actually measuring. That day when I got home from school, I grabbed an old ruler that changed images of dinosaurs depending on how I tilted it, and measured myself sitting on the toilet. Does it go from… from the side? Or underneath my stugots (translation: testicles, balls)? Knocks berated the door.
“Hey Vic, you almost done in there?” said my brother. Tony had moved in with us two years ago so he could attend Millburn High School. It had been the best day of my life. “Are you still sitting down to pee? I thought you were over that?”
I threw the ruler into a drawer and opened the door. “Hey Tony, is bigger better?”
“What? Like your pisciali? Vic, don’t ask me that. That’s gay.”
“Who’s sitting down to pee? Not my son,” said my father, coming out of his room. “Did I ever tell you boys about the Ferraro family crest? Oh, you’ll love this. It’s Saint Bernard micturating into a wine glass. Isn’t that something?”
“No way that’s true,” said Tony.
“What’s ‘micturating’?”
“Hey, don’t you guys forget that we’re going to the hardware store tomorrow.”
Groans.
“Yes, I don’t want to hear it. You haven’t seen Nana in a while and I need to speak with Uncle Shorty. He’d love to see you, Vito, and wants to come to one of your games. You know your Uncle Shorty played football and baseball at the University of Miami? They’re all jerks now, but they used to have class. You know he had a tryout with the Yankees?”
“I suck at baseball.”
“Hey! Language. And you don’t… stink. You just can’t hit. Ferraros were never great hitters. That’s why your Uncle Shorty never made it to the pros.”
I led my Little League team in getting hit by a pitch.
Our TV still had the crack, larger now due to a raucous WWF reenactment, and was never cured of that five-minute load time. Whenever I could, I slept on the pullout couch, flipping through the channels with an unsupervised, reckless abandon I wasn’t permitted when my father or brother were around.
“Hello, my lovelies.” I stopped flipping. Tom Jones Cleaver sat in his cream white suit in front of a burgeoning fire. “Listen up and listen close.” Next to Tom Jones Cleaver was a friend, Pastor Palmer, who frequently made guest appearances on the show. “I was asked recently about our jet. You remember that, Pastor?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“I was asked, Pastor Cleaver, ‘Shouldn’t that money go to the poor, the destitute, the meek, and the indigent’?’ and I said, ‘No! We preach that you plant your seed, you reap what you sow. God has given us our jet.’”
“That’s right.”
“And it is in the Bible that we are given precedent. The Gospel of Matthew 26:10, in which Jesus rebukes his disciples…”
“He does.”
“And says the poor will always have you and therefore she should use her perfume for my body, instead of selling it and giving that money to the poor. You see, my lovelies, we need our plane to reach you, our flock. I spoke to God yesterday on the plane…”
“On the plane?”
“On the plane. I stood up and I said, I said, ‘Lord, I need the strength to reach my flock because my flock neeeeeeeeeds me…’”
“You couldn’t speak to God on Delta.”
“No, I could not. You see, we need our jet, because, well, you see, we were in Charlotte one day, and then Nashville, and then Las Vegas, and then Sacramento, and then Las Vegas, and then Spokane, and then Denver, and then Las Vegas, and my lovelies, we just couldn’t do that on a commercial airline.”
“No, sir.”
“Listen to me, my lovelies, because the Devil will lie to you.”
I shuffled for the remote, lost in a myriad of blankets softened from years of use. I changed the channel to Nick at Nite, which was smack in the middle of an episode of Three’s Company. I had seen the episode before—Chrissy and Jack were left alone because Janet was keeping a lonely Mrs. Roper company. Despite Chrissy’s attempts to be unattractive, so as not to excite her roommate Jack, her bubbliness was uncontrollably natural. But Jack was a “one woman kind of guy” who was faithful to his girlfriend even though he assured Chrissy that if he were single he would have “thrown her on the sofa and ripped off her clothes and attacked her like a mad dog.”
I stretched and tucked the blanket under my knees so the soft fabric formed a cocoon where only my head popped out. I closed my eyes and took Jack’s place alone with Chrissy, with Suzanne Somers, the actress who played Chrissy, with Mrs. Varnas, the cold-as-ice queen who left me for another continent, and there was this rush I felt when I saw the tiny triangle of fabric creep out of Julie Fischer’s tight black So Low pants. I rubbed my toes in the blanket and tugged on myself and stretched out my legs as if I were on the rack in the Medieval Times dungeon. My legs shook and my pelvis thrust and I burst out of the cocoon like a monarch in metamorphosis, and in my hand was a glob of translucent green sludge.
Uproar—I yelped and the canned laughter of the sitcom followed.
I rushed to the wet bar and scrubbed furiously and looked up at the list of Prominent Italians that started “Da Vinci, Alighieri, Fibonacci,” for guidance. I truly believed I was sick. Not in a degenerate kind of way, where I could be healed by the messianic teachings of Jesus Christ, but in the kind of way that required immediate medical attention.
I considered dialing 9-1-1, but after seeing my glob slither down the sink with the water, I rushed to the phone mounted on the wall and hit the large button with the green cross—poison control.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Hello, I, uh… I think I’ve been poisoned.”
“What? Who is this? Why are you calling so late?”
“My name is Victor Ferraro and I think…”
“Vito? Is this some kind of prank? Where’s ya father? Why are you calling so late?”
I hung up—I forgot the preset had actually been connected to my Great Aunt Josephine. She was my father’s cousin’s mother on his… okay, I can’t remember. I never could keep track of everyone anyway.
I turned off the TV and went to sleep.
Nana’s side of the family owned Heights Hardware, a neighborhood establishment that continued to attract business despite the impending takeover by giants like Home Depot and Lowes. Nana would still wo
rk the registers with her sisters, all of whom went blonde years ago, as Italian women tend to do as they age.
“Hey boys, remember to look your uncles in the eye when you shake their hands and kiss your aunts on the cheek. And give Nana a big hug. Maybe she’ll slip ya some money.”
Uncle Shorty sat in a barber chair near the entrance with a gnawed-down fat cigar dangling from his lips.
“Who’s this one?” he would say as I shook his hand—I guess he couldn’t keep track of us either.
“Uncle Shorty, you remember Vito?” said my father.
“Oh, right, right, the ball player?”
I had often been referred to by my athletic abilities. I suppose “Writer of Epics” or “Warcraft Strategist” was not as prestigious a title in my extended family as I’d have hoped.
After we shook all of my uncles’ and/or cousins’ hands—I called the older ones uncles even if they were technically cousins—and kissed my aunts on the cheek, Tony and I snatched the price guns dangling from the side of the registers like battle-axes hanging in the arena at Medieval Times and got lost in the aisles of screws and paint swatches and WD-40.
“Hey Tony, have you ever had green sludge come out of your pisciali?”
Tony ran the price gun across a can of egg-shell-white paint: click—now it was $13.99. “What are you talking about? That sounds disgusting.”
“Well, am I sick?” I ran my gun across a bag of fertilizer: click—$0.59.
“Wait… were you playing with it?”
“Huh?” Click— $0.59 Phillips-head.
“Like, were you masturbating?”
“Mas-tur-bating?” I said, and repeated in my head: mas-tur-bating. I loved the way it sounded, like a verb for the actions of a king or lord: King Victor masturbated over his empire, which stretched from West Road to the faraway lands of Mendham, up to the mountains and lakes of Kittatinny, and down to the shores of Ocean City.
“Yeah, Vic, like playing with your pisciali?” Click— $13.99 gardening shears.
“Do you masturbate, Tony?”
“Have you seen that poster of Pamela Anderson Lee in my room?”
Click— $0.59 can of paint thinner.
“Hey Vito! Tony! Come here,” my father called down the aisle.
“Dad! Can I get this sign for the basement bathroom?” The sign read NO DUMPING. Tony and I started to laugh. “It’s only”—click—“fifty-nine cents!”
“What? Just come down here!”
I brought the sign with me.
“Vito, you remember Cousin Ricky, right?” I was familiar with the name but couldn’t’ve picked him out of a lineup if asked. “Cousin Rick played quarterback at University of Kansas.”
“Sure did.”
“Isn’t it true Gale Sayers called to recruit you, Rick?”
“Sure is.”
“Hear that, Vito? Gale Sayers.”
“Was he as fast as Deion Sanders?”
“Hear this, Rick? Kids these days like the jerks and showboats. Gale Sayers, now he was a classy player. He glided across that field. ‘I love Brian Piccolo,’” he said, reciting the famous quote from the film Brian’s Song. “‘I love Brian Piccolo.’ That James Caan, he’s Jewish but always playing Italians.”
“Hey Tony!” One of Nana’s sisters came storming down the aisle, her hair platinum, and purple veins popping out of her wrinkled arms.
“Aunt Josephine! How are you?”
Oh shit.
“Hey, yeah, hey Tony, why was Vito here calling me last night? Is everything okay? Vito, what happened? You okay? Look at this boy, he keeps growing. You gonna be a football star like cousin Rick here?”
“What are you talking about, Aunt Josie? Vito wouldn’t know your number.”
My brother nudged me and asked what the crap was going on. This was a perfect moment to use my incredible ability of pretending to be asleep. If only they would’ve turned around for a second.
“I don’t know. I got this call last night saying it was Victor Ferraro. He seemed frightened. I must be losing it, Tone. Maybe it was some kids playing a prank. Guess it wasn’t you, huh, Vito? Hey Vito, how come you never smile? What is it with this one? He never smiles.”
“Vito, stop playing with your hair. I don’t know, Aunt Josephine.”
“Yeah, okay, alright.” And we followed her to the little kitchen located in the back and around the corner where she handed us plastic tubs of pasta fazool to take home.
Dad bought the sign for us because he thought it was funny too—despite the fact that it wasn’t a full moon, or fifty-nine cents.
During the next few weeks at school all the guys were talking about masturbating like they had seen the same episode of Three’s Company. They swarmed around John Thompson for prime real estate in the auditorium and listened like Christ’s disciples listened to the parables as he described masturbating with his seven-inch penis to his older brother’s pornography.
After John finished, some of the other guys, like Mitch Farber and Josh Glassman, shared their own masturbating stories with such ease and confidence it was as if they had been doing it for years.
“You guys are gross,” said Jessie Levinson as she sat down with Stephanie Hinkle, Julie Fischer, and Jenna Tisch.
“That’s what I like about the Glenwood boys,” said Julie Fischer (number one). “They’re so well mannered.”
“Yeah we are!” said Pierce Stone, wrapping his arm around Paxton and giving me a high-five—I felt like such a phony acquiescing and giving him skin.
“Especially Vic. Don’t you think Vic is nice, Jenna?” said Julie Fischer. They thought I was nice because I was quiet. “I think you two should go out.” The disciples turned to me all at once. “I think you two make a cute couple. What’s that? I know, I know, they’re adorable. Okay, it’s settled then. Vic and Jenna are a couple.”
Uproar. The guys said “congrats” and a few slapped me on the back in masculine approval.
I had heard of arranged marriages during the Middle Ages and in India—Arjun said his parents never met before they got married. I felt like a prince marrying across the channel into French royalty.
But the moment Jenna and I were a “couple,” I felt this overwhelming pressure not to speak to her, to avoid her in the halls, to avoid eye contact by any means necessary. My thinking was that any and all forms of contact could only amount to blunders, imbroglios, or faux-pas. If we didn’t see each other, I couldn’t screw up.
One hundred percent of my communication to Jenna was through Stephanie Hinkle, her best friend. Stephanie would even call our house sometimes at night to update me on Jenna’s feelings: “She, like, really likes you, Vic. You have to go to Jared Rosenblatt’s party this weekend.”
Jared wasn’t even on the hot list, but he still went out with Carly Feldman (number four).
That Friday, my mom dropped Tank and me off at the top of the Rosenblatts’ driveway, which flowed down into a valley and split apart to surround a giant stone lion before reconnecting and reaching the house. It was a white monstrosity with a forest of Doric columns lining the front that I immediately recognized from Mrs. McNulty’s class on classicism—we had to carve our own columns from bars of soap.
“Okay, have fun,” Mom said as we undid our seatbelts. “And hey, remember to be respectful to Mr. Rosenblatt—maybe he’ll give you a job one day.”
Mrs. Rosenblatt greeted us at the door. “Hi, Mrs. Rosenblatt,” Tank and I said in unison.
“Oh please, boys, call me Cynthia,” she said as she waved to my mother.
That was another strange thing. Once we hit middle school all the parents wanted to be called by their first names, and the kids would refer to each other’s parents as if they were friends from “way back when.”
We followed the stream of middle schoolers into the basement, where TVs
double the size of ours (and without the infamous loading time) were surrounded by big leather couches. They had every video game system—even the rare ones like SEGA Dreamcast and the original PlayStation—and each had its own shelf where none of the controller cords were tangled, truly a miracle in a household with three boys.
Tank and I plopped onto the couch and I scanned the room for hidden portals or trapdoors—if history had taught me anything, it was that houses this big always had moveable walls or underground passageways illuminated by flickering orange torches, possibly even leading to Hell. Basements and attics were meant for treasures and exploration, not gaggles of girls whispering and laughing in huddled masses.
“Vic!” I almost jumped out of my clothing as Stephanie Hinkle snuck up behind me. “Hey, so Jenna is over there”—she pointed to a laughing huddled mass—“and she wants to see you.”
“See me?” I felt like the teacher was asking me to stay after class.
“Yes, ya know… so you guys can hook up?”
I was transported back to Ms. O’Donnell’s class with all eyes on me as Michaela Silves asked to kiss me and my heart went thump thump, thump thump, thump thump.
“Ohhh Vic, mah man!” said Tank, pushing and pulling me by the shoulders.
Thus erupted the Greek chorus: “Go for it, Vic!” “Thatta boy, Vic!”
Stephanie Hinkle pulled me by the wrist to the bathroom, shoved me inside, and slammed the door. I started to panic, again having flashbacks of being locked in the Geigers’ attic—I missed Karl.
After a few minutes of me checking myself in the mirror and pacing along the tile, Jenna was similarly thrown into the bathroom. We stared—smiling, but staring nonetheless, like strangers on the subway platform feeling the tickle of attraction.
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
I stood there wanting to love her, but I was empty-handed—a knight without a rose to give, let alone a kiss.
“So… do you want to kiss me, Vic?” I sat on the toilet. Outside I heard my name slung about the party, lodged between incoherent yelps and yawps of the amorous youth: “Atta boy, Ferraro! buzz buzz buzz buzz Get some, Vic! bizz bizz bizz bizz.” But I knew I wouldn’t kiss her. “Do you want to… touch me, Vic?” I knew I wouldn’t touch her either. It wasn’t a sense of confusion or anything like that. I liked girls, a lot—especially girls who looked like Jenna. If I can be completely honest, I would’ve put her even higher on that list. But I was a budding—struggling, but budding nevertheless—romantic, and being shoved into the bathroom like we were the last two members of our species couldn’t even get me hard enough to masturbate.
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