by Paul Auster
Some weeks or months before or after this conversation with your mother, the little neighbor boy who smashed you on the head with the toy rake inexplicably went missing. His frantic mother rushed into your backyard and told you and your friends to start looking for him, and off you all went, thrashing into the borderland of wild shrubbery and tangled undergrowth that served as your secret hiding place, calling out the name of the boy, which was Michael, although he was commonly referred to as Brat or Monster—a midget felon whose life thus far had been devoted exclusively to acts of terrorism and violence. You entered a dense patch of bushes, flicking leaves out of your face and parting branches as you moved forward, fully expecting to find the runaway hoodlum huddled at your feet, but what you found instead was a nest of wasps or hornets, which you inadvertently stepped on, and seconds later you were engulfed by those stinging creatures, who were attacking your face and arms, and even as you tried to swat them away, others had crawled inside your clothes and were stabbing you in your legs and chest and back. Horrific pain. You went running out of the bushes onto the grass in the backyard, no doubt screaming your head off, and there was your mother, who took one glance at you and immediately began stripping off your clothes, and when there was no longer a stitch on you, she swooped up your naked body into her arms and ran with you toward the house. Once inside, she carried you upstairs, turned on the water, and put you in a cold, cold bath.
The boy was found. If you remember correctly, he was discovered in his own house, asleep on the living room floor, either hidden behind the sofa or curled up under a table, but if you need further proof that he did not die or vanish that day, you have only to recall the afternoon four or five years later when you were in bed with a case of the flu, one of those dreary sick days spent in the airless confinement of pajamas, fever, and aspirin tablets every four hours, thinking about your friends, who had already been let out of school and were no doubt playing a game of pickup baseball in Grove Park, since the sun was shining and the weather was warm, which made it an ideal afternoon for baseball. You were nine or ten years old, and as you remember it now, more than half a century later, you were the only person in the house. Outside in the backyard, chained to the wire runner your father had built for him, the family dog was dozing on the grass. He had been a part of your life for a good two years or longer, and you were intensely fond of him—a frisky young beagle with an appetite for adventure and a mad penchant for chasing after cars. He had already been run over once, injuring his left hind leg so badly that he could no longer use it, which had turned him into a three-legged dog, a strange, peg-legged kind of dog, a swashbuckling pirate of a dog in your opinion, but he had adjusted to his infirmity well, and even with just three legs he could still outrun any four-legged dog in the neighborhood. So there you were lying in bed in your upstairs room, certain that your crippled dog was safely tethered to his runner in the backyard, when a sudden volley of loud noises burst in on the quiet: a screech of tires in front of your house, immediately followed by a high-pitched howl of pain, the howl of a dog in pain, and from the sound of that dog’s voice, you instantly knew that it was your dog. You jumped out of bed and ran outside, and there was the Brat, the Monster, confessing to you that he had unhooked your dog from his leash because he “wanted to play with him,” and there was the man who had been driving the car, a much rattled and deeply upset man, saying to the people who had gathered around him that he had no choice, that the boy and the dog ran straight into the middle of the street, and it was either hit the boy or hit the dog, so he swerved and hit the dog, and there was your dog, your mostly white dog lying dead in the middle of the black street, and as you picked him up and carried him into the house, you told yourself no, the man was wrong, he should have hit the boy and not the dog, he should have killed the boy, and so angry were you at the boy for what he had done to your dog, you did not stop to consider that this was the first time you had ever wished that another human being were dead.
There were fights, of course. No one can get through boyhood without some of them, or many of them, and when you consider the tussles and confrontations you took part in, the bloody noses you both gave and received, the punches to the stomach that knocked the wind out of you, the inane head-locks and hammerlocks that sent you and your opponent sprawling to the ground, you can’t think of a single instance when you were the one who started it, for you hated the whole business of fighting, but because there was always a bully somewhere in the vicinity, some brainless tough who would taunt you with threats and dares and insults, there were times when you felt compelled to defend yourself, even if you were the smaller one and were almost certain to be thrashed. You loved the mock wars of tackle football and Capture the Flag, the rough-and-tumble of barreling into a catcher at home plate, but real fighting made you sick. It was too fraught with emotional consequences, too wrenching in the angers it provoked, and even when you won your fights, you always felt like crying afterward. The slug-or-be-slugged approach to settling differences lost all appeal to you after a boy at summer camp came at you by jumping down from the rafters of the cabin and you wound up breaking his arm when you retaliated by slamming him into a wooden table. You were ten years old, and from that point on you steered clear of fighting as best you could, but fights continued to come your way from time to time, at least until you were thirteen, when you finally figured out that you could win any fight against any boy by kneeing him in the balls, by driving your knee into his crotch with all the force you could muster, and just like that, within a matter of seconds, the fight would be over. You acquired a reputation for being a “dirty fighter,” and perhaps there was some truth to it, but you fought like that only because you didn’t want to fight, and after one or two of these bouts, word got around and no one ever attacked you again. You were thirteen years old and had permanently retired from the ring.
No more battles with boys, but an abiding passion for girls, for kissing girls and holding hands with girls, something that started for you long before the onset of puberty, at a time when boys are supposedly not interested in such matters. As far back as the kindergarten class in which you fell for the girl with the golden ponytail (whose name was Cathy), you were always mad for kissing, and even then, at age five or six, you and Cathy would sometimes exchange kisses—innocent pecks, to be sure, but deeply pleasurable for all that. In those years of so-called latency, your friends were unanimous in their public scorn for girls. They would mock them, tease them, pinch them, and pull up their dresses, but you never felt that antipathy, could never rouse yourself to participate in these assaults, and all during that early grammar school period of your life (that is, up to the age of twelve, when you carried the American flag with a blood-soaked bandage around your head during your class’s graduation ceremony), you continued to succumb to various infatuations with girls such as Patty, Susie, Dale, Jan, and Ethel. No more than kissing and holding hands, of course (you were physically incapable of having sex, the mechanics of which were still rather vague to you, since you did not arrive at full-fledged puberty until you were turning fourteen), but the kissing had become altogether ferocious by the time you reached graduation day. There were dances and unchaperoned parties in that final year before you entered junior high school, nearly every weekend you and a gang of fifteen or twenty others were invited to someone’s house, and in those suburban living rooms and finished basements, impotent boys and girls with newly sprouting breasts would dance to the latest rock-and-roll songs (the hits of 1958 and 1959), and eventually, as the evening wore on, the lights would be dimmed, the music would stop, and girls and boys would pair off in hidden corners of the room, where they’d all neck crazily until it was time to go home. You learned much about lips and tongues that year, were indoctrinated into the pleasures of feeling a girl’s body in your arms, of feeling a girl’s arms wrapped around you, but that was as far as it went. There were lines that could not be crossed, and for now you were happy not to cross them. Not because you were scared,
but because it never even occurred to you.
Finally, the day came when you went hurtling across the threshold that separates boyhood from adolescence, and now that you had felt the feeling, now that you had discovered that your old friend the fireman was in fact an agent of divine bliss, the world you lived in became a different world, for the ecstasy of that feeling had given a new purpose to your life, a new reason for being alive. The years of phallic obsession began. Like every other male who has wandered this earth, you were in thrall to the miraculous change that had occurred in your body. On most days, you could think of little else—on some days, of nothing else.
Nevertheless, when you recall the years immediately following your transformation, you are struck by how cautious and backward you were. In spite of your ardor, in spite of your constant pursuit of girls in junior and senior high school, the romances and flirtations with Karen, Peggy, Linda, Brianne, Carol, Sally, Ruth, Pam, Starr, Jackie, Mary, and Ronnie, your erotic adventures were frightfully tame and insipid, barely one step beyond the make-out sessions you took part in when you were twelve. Perhaps you were unlucky, or perhaps you weren’t bold enough, but you tend to think it had more to do with the place and the time, a middle-class suburban town in the early sixties, and the unwritten code that girls did not give themselves to boys, that good girls had reputations to uphold, and the line was drawn at kissing and petting, notably the least dangerous form of petting, that is, the boy’s hand placed on a breast covered by two or three layers of clothing, a sweater (depending on the season), a blouse, and a bra, but woe to the boy who tried to put his hand inside a blouse, let alone reach for the forbidden territory inside a bra, for that hand would be swiftly pushed away by the girl who had a reputation to uphold, even if that girl secretly wanted the hand to be there as much as the boy did. How many times were you rebuffed in this way, you wonder, how many useless expeditions did your hands make into the skirts and blouses of your companions, how many partial journeys toward the realm of bare skin before being turned back at the gates? Such were the impoverished conditions of your early erotic life. No bare skin allowed, no shedding of clothes, and forget, once and for all, that genitals have any part in the game you are playing. And so you and Linda go on kissing, kissing and then kissing some more, kissing until your lips are chapped and drool is sliding down your cheeks, and all the while you pray that the erection bulging in your pants will not explode.
You live in a torment of frustration and never-ending sexual arousal, breaking the North American masturbation record every month throughout the years 1961 and 1962, an onanist not by choice but by circumstance, trapped inside your ever-growing, ever-mutating body, the five-feet-two-inch thirteen-year-old now transformed into a five-feet-ten-inch fifteen-year-old, still a boy, perhaps, but a boy in a man’s body, who shaves a couple of times a week, who has hair on his forearms and legs, hair under his arms, pubic hair because he is no longer pubescent but almost fully formed, and even as you forge on with your schoolwork and your sporting activities and travel ever more deeply into the universe of books, your life is dominated by your thwarted sexual hunger, you feel that you are actually starving to death, and no ambition is more important to you, no cause is more central to the well-being of your aching, starving self than to lose your virginity as quickly as possible. Such is your desire, in any case, but nowhere is it written that desires must be fulfilled, and so the torture goes on, all the way through the delirious abnegations of 1962 and on into the fall of 1963, when finally, at long long last, an opportunity presents itself, and although it is less than ideal, not at all what you have been imagining, you don’t hesitate to say yes. You are sixteen years old. In July and August, you worked as a waiter at a summer camp in upstate New York, and the fellow who served as your partner, a funny, fast-talking kid from Queens (a city boy who knows his way around the New York streets—as opposed to you, who know next to nothing), calls to tell you that he has the address and telephone number of a brothel on the Upper West Side. He will make the appointment for you if you wish, and because you indeed wish, you take a bus into the city the following Saturday and meet your friend in front of an apartment building in the mid-Eighties, just off the river. It is a damp, drizzly afternoon in late September, everything is gray and sodden, umbrella weather, or at least a day for wearing hats, but you have neither an umbrella nor a hat, which is nevertheless fine, perfectly fine, since the last thing you are thinking about now is the weather. The word brothel has conjured up a host of enticing mental images for you, and you are expecting to walk into a large, sumptuously decorated establishment with red plush-velvet walls and a staff of fifteen or twenty alluring young women (what wretched film put that idea in your head?), but as you and your friend step into the elevator, which is the slowest, dirtiest, most graffiti-scarred elevator in all of New York, you quickly readjust your expectations. The luxurious brothel turns out to be a shabby little one-bedroom apartment, and only two women are there, the proprietress, Kay, a round black woman pushing fifty, who greets your friend with a warm hug, as if they are old familiars, and a much younger woman, also black, who appears to be around twenty or twenty-two. They are both sitting on stools in the tiny kitchen, which is separated from the bedroom by a thin curtain that doesn’t quite touch the floor, both are dressed in colorful silk robes, and, much to your relief, the young one is highly attractive, with a very pretty face, perhaps even a beautiful face. Kay announces the price (fifteen dollars? twenty dollars?) and then asks you and your friend which one wants to go first. No, no, your friend laughs, he’s just come along for the ride (no doubt the girls in Queens are less reluctant to shed their clothes than the girls in New Jersey), and so Kay turns to you and says that you can choose, either her or her young co-worker, and when you do not choose Kay, she does not appear to be offended—merely shrugs, smiles, puts out her hand, and says, “A little money, honey,” at which point you dig into your pocket and pull out the fifteen or twenty dollars you owe her. You and the young one (too shy or too nervous, you forget to ask what her name is, which means that she has been nameless to you for all these years) step into the other room as Kay pulls the curtain shut behind you. The girl leads you toward the bed in the corner, she slips out of her robe and tosses it onto a chair, and for the first time in your life you are in the presence of a naked woman. A beautiful naked woman, in fact, a young woman with a remarkably beautiful body, with glorious breasts, glorious arms and shoulders, glorious backside, glorious hips, glorious legs, and after three long years of frustration and failure, you are beginning to feel happy, as happy as you have felt at any time since your adolescence began. The girl instructs you to take off your clothes, and then the two of you are on the bed together, both naked, and all you really want, at least for now, is to touch her and kiss her and feel the smoothness of her skin, which is marvelously smooth skin, so smooth that it makes you tremble just to put your hand on her, but kissing on the mouth is not part of the program, since prostitutes do not kiss their customers on the mouth, and prostitutes have no interest in foreplay, no interest in touching or being touched for the simple pleasure of touching and being touched, for sex under these circumstances is not pleasure but work, and the sooner the client can finish the job he has paid for, the better. She knows it is your first time, that you are an absolute novice with no experience whatsoever, and she treats you kindly and patiently, she is a good person, you feel, and if she wants to get down to the fucking part right away, no problem, you are more than willing to play by her rules, for there is no question that you are ready, that you have been sporting an erection from the instant you saw her take off the robe, and therefore, as she eases herself onto her back, you happily climb on top of her and let her guide your penis to the place where it has longed to be for so many years. Good, everything is good, it feels as good as you always imagined it would, no, even better, much better, and all is good for the first little while, when it seems only a matter of seconds before you will finish the job, but then you beco
me aware of Kay and your friend talking and laughing in the kitchen, which is no more than ten or twelve feet from the bed, and once you become aware of them, you start to feel distracted, and as soon as your mind begins to wander from the task at hand, you can feel how bored the girl is, how tiresome this whole business is for her, and even though you are lying on top of her, she is nowhere near you, she is in another city, another country, and then, losing patience, she asks you if you can finish, and you say yes, of course, and twenty seconds later she asks you again and you say yes, of course, but the next time she speaks to you, she says: “Come on out and let me jerk you off. You young kids. You jerk off all the time, but when it comes to the real thing, you don’t have a clue.” And so you let her jerk you off, which is precisely what you have been doing to yourself for the past three years—with one small difference: better her hand than yours.
