Spanking Shakespeare

by Wizner, Jake

  I look around to make sure no one from my math class is nearby; then I tell them about getting caught staring at Jody’s legs.

  “Pervert,” Katie says.

  I take a sip of milk. “Plus I made an idiot of myself in front of Celeste.”

  “Celeste again?” Neil says through chewed-up cheese and beans.

  Katie gives me a disgusted look. “Jesus, Shakespeare! You just need to screw this girl already.”

  “Why don’t you ask her out?” Neil says, studying his enchilada and trying to figure out if he can stuff the rest of it in his mouth without it falling apart. “You’ve been talking about her since ninth grade.”

  “These things can’t be rushed,” I say.

  “Jesus!” Katie blurts out. “If there was anyone in this goddamn place that I didn’t think was a total asshole, I would have screwed him five hundred times by now.”

  Neil looks up. “I’m available.”

  “Don’t make me puke.” Katie stands and picks up her tray. “I’ll see you losers later.”

  “Hey,” Neil says. “If you’re not gonna finish your food, I’ll eat it.”

  Katie takes her plate off her tray and hands it to him. “You’re sick,” she says.

  He attacks the half-eaten enchilada with quick, jerky movements, looking more like a woodpecker than a human being. Neil’s nose actually is rather beak-like, but it fits his tall, lanky frame. Much more jarring, at least to me, is how someone who eats like a hippopotamus could be a poster child for famine relief.

  “So,” Neil says, “what are you going to do about Celeste?”

  I watch a pair of junior girls walk past and make a quick calculation of which one I’d rather sleep with. “Listen, Neil,” I say. “When you’ve been burned as many times as I have, you learn to proceed with extreme caution.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ve never even asked a girl out.”

  I nod. “Exactly.”

  “So how do you know what will happen if you don’t even try?”

  I take a bite of my enchilada. “She used to go out with Jordan Miller. Why would she want to go out with someone like me?”

  Neil opens his mouth to speak, then catches himself. “Well,” he says at last, “Jordan’s away at college now.”

  “Harvard.”

  “So what? He’s not here. Celeste’s single.”

  We could go on like this for hours, but suddenly the futility and frustration of it all sweeps over me. “Okay, Neil, it’s really simple. Yes, I could ask Celeste out, and maybe, possibly, she might say yes. But here’s what would probably happen. She would get really uncomfortable because she’d quickly realize how lame I am. She wouldn’t want to make me feel bad, so she would say something like ‘I don’t want to do anything that could ruin our friendship,’ and even though we’re not really friends, I would play along and tell her I understand, and then I would have to spend the rest of the year trying to avoid her, which would be impossible since we have a class together, and any illusion I might be holding on to that she secretly likes me would be completely and irrevocably shattered.”

  Neil considers this for a moment. “So are you going to ask her out?”

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  I do think about it. I think about it every day as I sit next to Celeste in class. I think about it every night as I lie in bed committing mass spermicide. It shouldn’t be so hard, I tell myself. Guys ask girls out all the time. Every day that I hesitate, hundreds of thousands of high school boys are busy having sex. But how do you actually get there? What do you actually say? Hi, Celeste, I really like you. Would you like to go out sometime? Hi, Celeste, I’ve been finding myself thinking about you all the time. Maybe you’d like to go see a movie after school? Hi, Celeste, I really want to get laid this year, and right now you’re the most likely candidate.

  I wonder how Gandhi did it. He’s going out with this girl Meredith, who’s actually pretty cute. He never talked about it with me. He never acted like he had a crush on a girl. One day last year I saw them holding hands in the hallway, and when I asked him about it that night, he said she was someone he had just started going out with.

  But how? I wanted to ask. What did you say? What did she say back? Of course when you’re sixteen and your brother is fourteen, you can’t really ask him to teach you how to get a girlfriend. Sometimes I wish we were still in elementary school so I could beat him up like I used to.

  Mr. Parke says that writing our memoirs will help us understand ourselves better. He says that exploring our pasts will help us uncover the themes of our lives. What has become evident to me is that the course of my life was set very early. From the beginning, the Fates were conspiring against me.

  THE EARLY YEARS

  I was born on Hitler’s birthday. Whenever I did anything wrong as a child, my father would call me Adolf, and my mother, whose parents had been Holocaust survivors, would fly into a fury and accuse my father of being an insensitive pig. They would scream and shout at each other, fingers pointed and spittle flying, until one of them would remember that I was in the room. Not that it mattered. I always had unusually large accumulations of wax in my ears, so I rarely heard anything they said.

  My brother, Gandhi, arrived when I was nineteen months old. He was an exceedingly violent child, who would celebrate his second birthday by kicking me in the eye and sending me to the hospital, bloodied, to be stitched up. By that time, I had already amassed an impressive collection of battle scars, including two dog bites, three beestings, and a partially botched circumcision.

  My brother and I were difficult children, but much of this was due to my parents’ complete ineptitude. My father liked to sneak up behind us, make a scary face, and scream, “I’m going to eat you!” We would cry in terror as my father became himself again, gently comforting us and making funny faces and sounds until we started to laugh. Then, just as we had calmed down, he would spring his monster face on us again, sending us into another fit of howling and screaming.

  My mother played games of a different sort. When she had had enough of our screaming and fighting, she would pretend we did not exist. We could call for her or tug on her leg, but nothing would get her to notice us. “I wonder where the kids are?” she would say as we sobbed hysterically. “I hope they’re not dead.”

  We hated to go to sleep at night, so my father would bribe us with new installments of Nebuchadnezzar Schwartz, a running story he had created about an evil king with a penchant for torturing children. Each night, tucked beneath my blankets, I would listen to tales of disobedient children forced to kiss giant cockroaches, eat dead rats, or lick dirty toilet seats in large commuter railway stations. “Now go to sleep,” my father would say when he had finished, “because Nebuchadnezzar Schwartz saves his worst punishments for children who don’t go to bed when they’re told.”

  On the nights when my parents threw parties, my brother and I refused to stay in bed, so my parents used us as props to entertain the guests. By the time I was three, they had taught me a few routines, and I was expected to perform these on demand. As people milled around with their drinks, my dad would whisper in my ear and hand me a glass of apple juice and a spoon. I would climb on a chair, bang the spoon on my glass, and when everybody was quiet, holdup my glass and say, “I’d like to make a toast.” Sometimes I got it wrong and said, “I’d like to have some toast,” but this would make the guests laugh even harder. On other occasions, I would greet guests at the door and say, “You must be here for the funeral.” I never understood why these routines were funny and much preferred to create my own. These included running around the apartment making farting noises, waging fake gun battles with my brother, and dumping whatever I could find onto the floor.

  We were wild boys, and my parents could not contain us. Anything that was standing, we would do our best to topple. Anything that could be broken, we would do our best to break. My parents put locks on the refrigerator, locks on the cabinets, locks on the telep
hones, and still it was not enough. My mother took us to the doctor to see if there was something wrong with us. “They fight all the time,” she said. “They run around the apartment like wild animals.”

  “You were an only child, weren’t you?” the doctor asked.

  My mother nodded.

  “They’re fine,” the doctor said. “That’s the way little boys act.”

  But apparently I was not fine. When I was four, my parents decided I needed to see a therapist because I had stopped using the toilet. I had been trained a year earlier but had suddenly begun walking into closets and crapping in my pants. There were other issues, I think—a perverse fascination with ketchup, a habit of humping my younger brother—but the toilet problem seemed to upset my parents the most.

  My therapist’s name was Celia, and after she met with me, she told my parents that I needed to come every day. “There’s a lot of pent-up anger,” she said. “This will take some time.”

  I enjoyed my afternoon sessions with Celia. We would draw pictures together and play with toys, and she always seemed very interested in everything I did.

  “Do you like crashing trucks together?” she would ask as I played with the cars on her floor.

  Or she would look at my drawings and ask, “Is that a picture of you and your brother? Why are you standing on his face?”

  I remember that Celia had a little dog who used to climb on my lap and lick me allover. I loved the dog and would laugh and shriek as we played together. One day the dog became so excited that she urinated allover me, and for the next several weeks my toilet issues reached unspeakable levels of perversity. I never saw that little dog again.

  At about the time I started kindergarten, Celia told my parents that I had made substantial progress and they should see how I did without therapy for a while. With my toilet issues resolved, I entered kindergarten poised for success.

  The first day, we sat in a big circle on the rug and played games to get to know each other. The teacher put us in pairs and we had to introduce our new special friends to the class. My partner was a boy named Udi who had recently arrived from Israel and spoke only a few words of English. His accent, the wax in my ears, and my own predisposition to bowel movements all conspired against me, and when I introduced him, I said, “This is Doody.”

  All the kids started to laugh, and I realized how funny it sounded. “This is Doody!” I screamed.

  The teacher grew very red and shouted for quiet. Then she fixed me with a stern look and said, “Shakespeare, go sit in the corner. We do not make fun of other people’s names. How would you like it if people teased you because of your name?”

  I don’t remember exactly what went through my mind as I sat in a little chair in the corner staring at the wall, but I feel certain that some of my earliest ideas about the lack of fairness and justice in the world were beginning to take shape. Before the year was out, these ideas would be dramatically reinforced.

  Sally Hill was the most precocious five-year-old in my kindergarten class. She had been reading books since age three, could spell words like elephant and bumblebee, ate sushi with chopsticks at lunch, and, most astounding, had begun to experiment with sarcasm. If someone said something stupid, she would say, “That’s so brilliant.” If someone brought an orange peel or a scribbled-on piece of construction paper for show-and-tell, she would nod her head and say, “I wish I had one of those.” Most of the kids thought she was being nice, but I knew better.

  Sally and I had known each other all our lives. Our families lived close to each other, and our parents were friends. We had spent time at each other’s houses, played together, and watched each other grow into the five-year-olds we had become. I loved spending time with Sally because she always came up with ideas that were much more imaginative than anything I could come up with on my own. I suppose she enjoyed spending time with me because she could set all the rules, devise all the games, and use me or discard me as she saw fit.

  Most of Sally’s games involved elaborate role-playing. Her favorite was one in which she played a teacher and I played a student who could never do anything right. (When I asked her how to play my part, she said to act like I did at school.) Sally was very strict. Each time we played, she would yell at me and tell me I would not get any snack that day. Sometimes she would make me sit in the corner facing the wall. When I told her I didn’t want to play anymore, she would tell me that I had been very good and give me a sticker, and I would allow myself to be sucked into another round of verbal and emotional abuse.

  One day Sally said she had a new game she wanted to play. The rules were simple. I would pull down my pants and show her mine, and then she would pull down her pants and show me hers. Even at age five, I knew exactly what she was talking about, and I also knew it was something we were not supposed to do. At the same time, I was curious to see what she had and what it looked like and to ask her how it worked. I stood there frozen, not sure what to do or say.

  “Come on,” she said impatiently. “We don’t have much time.” Obviously she knew we were doing something wrong, too, and while this might have been a major turn-on in later years, it was horribly unsettling to my five-year-old self.

  “I don’t think we should,” I said nervously.

  I had always done whatever Sally told me to do, so this refusal, however weak, was new to both of us. We stood there in my bedroom looking at each other.

  “We’ll do it at the same time,” she finally said. “Ready, set, go.” And just like that I found myself unbuttoning my pants, unzipping my zipper, pulling down my pants, and pulling down my underwear. The whole thing should have lasted fewer than ten seconds, and for Sally it did. Before I could get a good look at whatever she had, she was already back in her clothes, acting as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately, as I tried to pull my underwear back up, I lost my balance and fell. I struggled to stand and dress myself at the same time, lost my balance again, crashed into my dresser, and ended up in a tangle with my penis exposed.

  Sally took a good long look as I lay there helpless, and her face screwed itself up in genuine disgust. “I’m leaving,” she announced.

  “Wait!” I screamed. Somehow, the thought of being abandoned like this was more than I could bear, and I started to cry. I cried because what should have been a momentous event had not been momentous at all. I cried because I had barely seen hers, but she had most certainly seen mine, and what she had seen had obviously fallen short of here expectations. I cried because I felt no wiser or more experienced than I had felt before, because I had done something that I knew was dirty and wrong, and because somehow I knew that my relationship with Sally would never be the same again.

  It could have been worse. No parents walked in, and nobody ever found out. But Sally had clearly lost interest in me. From that day forth, she chose her books over our games, and she paid me little attention in our hours together at school.

  Twelve years have passed since that first humiliation, and Sally and I still go to school together. We are not friends, though we do say hi when we pass in the halls. She’s a lesbian now, and sometimes I wonder if I am partially responsible.

  OCTOBER

  Senior year is about two things: getting into college and getting laid. At my school, pretty much everybody is successful at the first, but only about half the guys in any given year are successful at the second. I’ve come up with a few theories about why this is so.

  Money. We pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend college, but we hope to have sex for the price of dinner and a movie.

  Support. When it comes to getting into college, everybody is in your corner. You’ve got a guidance counselor, you’ve got an SAT tutor, you’ve got people to help you with your essay. Who do you have helping you get laid?

  False Advertising. Colleges only see you on paper before they accept you, and people always look better on paper than in person. Think about it. How many people respond to personal ads thinking they’ve found the man or woman of
their dreams, only to be bitterly disappointed when the face-to-face meeting takes place?

  Safety Schools. You don’t just apply to a few colleges and hope for the best. You apply to a lot of schools, including ones that are not your top choices but that you feel confident will accept you. If the object is going to college, then any school is better than no school at all. That’s the secret. Just get in somewhere.

  You know how people make lists of all the colleges they’re applying to? I decided to do the same thing with girls. Here’s what I have right now:

  UNREALISTIC, BUT WORTH FANTASIZING ABOUT

  Jody Simons:

  Jody Simons is in the popular crowd and has dated the boys that the popular girls date, but something about her seems different. For one thing, she volunteers for the school’s community service program and tutors disadvantaged children. For another thing, she has friends outside the party-going, trendsetting, partner-swapping circle she’s associated with. And for a third thing, she told me once she thought I had the coolest name. Even though we’ve never had a real conversation, I’ve convinced myself she has a secret crush on me that she’s been nursing since we were in a class together in tenth grade. I could stare at her legs forever.

  Lisa Kravitz:

  Lisa Kravitz and I were friends in elementary school, when she was still awkward and flat-chested. Toward the end of sixth grade, she blossomed into the hottest girl in the class, and since then I’ve had a huge crush on her. She’s one of those girls who’s friendly to everybody and probably knows everyone in our grade. When she spots me by the lockers or in the hallway, she always seems genuinely pleased to see me, and for a moment I can pretend that we’re still really close. She’s had a few not-so-great boyfriends over the years. What she needs is a nice, sensitive guy like me.