The Late Bloomer (18 page)

“See
me
?” she says.

“Yeah, you.”

“I kinda thought you hated me or something.”

“Oh, no, no, no. I don't hate you, Jenny. I've always loved you.”

(Silence.)

“So . . . is it all right if I come out and see you . . .”

(More silence.)

“. . . you know, for just a few days . . . ?”

(More silence.)

“I've never really seen L.A., and, you know, I would like to see you.

Whoa there, Chachi. Back down. You're starting to scare the girl.

“Don't worry,” I interject, before she can. “There's also this guy—this Colgate alum who's a correspondent at ABC News in LA—who I want to meet while I'm out there too. So it's not like I'm just going out there to see you.” This is a 99-percent lie because I could talk to my ABC contact, Brian Rooney (a Colgate grad), over the phone.

“You mean you might get a job out here by me?”

Hmmm . . . “Out here by me” . . . That sounds so possessive, so you're-invading-my-territory of her to say.

“I don't know,” I reply, suddenly flush with embarrassment that I've even called her.

The truth is that I would move to LA—if she wanted me to. I am desperate and sex-deprived. Not only I am unemployed, but, judging by my physiological performance amongst the co-ed crowd, it appears that I am physically incapable of having sex with anyone other than Jenny, and that was a couple years ago. I need to see her, if only to determine whether my sexual hang-ups are a product of my being in love with her, and her only.

“Why do you ask?” I add with faux nonchalance.

“I just thought you hated LA is all.”

“I do . . . uh, I mean, judging from what I hear about the smog and traffic and all that. But I'm open to moving just about anywhere. So should I go ahead and get tickets?”

(More silence.)

“Ken, why don't I call you back later? Like tomorrow or something? I'm in the middle of something right now. I'm a little distracted. I'm sorry.”

We hang up and I chew my nails for the next twenty-four hours. The next night, on a Tuesday, she calls me back.

“I have to work Thursday and Friday, but I think it would be great to see you.”

With a phone call to the United Airlines reservations number, I extinguish my entire life savings ($500) and buy a round-trip plane ticket to Los Angeles to test my genitals.

—

When I exit the jetway into the terminal, Jenny greets me with the kind of stiff, asexual hug my grandmother gives me. She still has the same microcar that carried me to Toronto over four virginal years ago.
Everything else about her, though, is as alien as the smog layer I noticed hovering over the LA basin as my plane descended through the slop.

For our first stop Jenny skirts around South Central, home to the riots just a few months earlier, and takes me to a decidedly nicer part of town: Beverly Hills. I remind her that this is where she used to dream of someday opening up a private practice. “That was a looong time ago,” she sighs, turning onto Rodeo Drive.

The bland, stucco storefronts strike me as cheesy and superficial. Later, when we spot the guy who plays Doogie Howser sitting in cool-guy shades at Johnny Rockets on Melrose, I'm even less impressed with Jenny's La-La Land.

After dinner, we get back into her Escort and head to her apartment. Somewhere around downtown LA, she drops the bomb.

“Just so you know, I've been dating people,” she says, obviously waiting for me to react, which I don't, except for a conspicuous nonreaction. “Are
you
seeing anyone?”

“No, not really,” I say. “But I've been dating too.”

Dating. What is dating, anyway? I've been wondering lately what that entails, and why people do it. The whole ritual seems like such a colossal waste of time. I mean, isn't the whole idea of coupling to find a person you want to marry? Dating. I've seen
The Dating Game,
where young, attractive, supertan superhumans exchange sexual innuendo in order to get a date. But that's just television, right? Women wear those skimpy dresses, with their boobs billowing out from beneath the Lycra, just for show. It's not some Darwinian mating behavior, because, well, if it is, it's not attractive to me. I just want a girl who makes me feel comfortable in my own skin, who makes me calm enough to have an erection.

“It's been so nice just to be free out here, meeting people and everything,” she continues.

“Any one special guy?” I ask.

“Well, yeah, his name is Rob. But”—she interrupts herself—“it's
not a very emotional thing with him—not like it is with us, I mean, like it
was
with us.”

I bite. “What do you mean?

“I don't know,” she sighs. “With Rob, it's just about great sex. There's no deep connection.”

I don't feel upset by what she has said. Not jealous, not envious. Or at least this is what I am trying to delude myself into thinking. I am as neutral as Switzerland and as cool as Lake Erie in January. How can I be jealous of this phenomenon she has described—hot-and-heavy,
great
monkey sex—when I virtually know nothing about it and am afraid to engage in it myself? Plus, we aren't even dating. I feel bitterness, perhaps, but certainly not jealousy. Romantic jealousy stems from possessive, hormonally passionate urges. Jealousy, in my book, is Dad shouting at Mom for having lunch with a male coworker. Jealousy is an emotion felt by human beings in an obsessive, muddle-minded mating mode—not by human beings in a state of sexual apathy and ambiguity such as me. Jealousy, I tell myself, is an emotion for the weak and vulnerable, not members of the strong male elite, such as myself. Under this logic, I'm
too
much of a man to feel jealousy.

Stop the bullshit. I am so hurt! Admit it: I am bitter AND jealous. I just want someone to love. I don't need this immature, wild-sex-all-night singlehood annoyance that seems to be the hobby of most people my age. My hobby? I have fantasies about being married
 . . .

About being some vague older age, around thirty
 . . .

Living in a nice home just outside of a city that is not Buffalo—the freshly mowed green lawn, the plastic patio furniture (with musty seat cushions), the shady trees to climb with my two kids, a son and daughter.

And there's my wife: Just look at her in her tight-fitting blue jeans and a sweat shirt. . . . She's a fit, pretty woman (but not too pretty, of course; then they use their beauty as a weapon against you) with a goofy sense of humor, a woman who appreciates just hanging out and enjoying life, not playing mind games, not making sex a high-pressure activity that makes me feel as
though every encounter is a test of my virility. She's a woman I can play catch with. Oh, man, look at us—happy husband and wife—laughing! Hahahahahah . . . all the time, nonstop. We talk, we kiss each other good night and good morning. I will do this because I am NOT Larry Baker. I know how to love—and how to show it. We go on long walks, holding hands and laughing . . . best friends, who, only because that is what society expects two opposite-gendered best friends to do, happen to have sex with each other too. Sex is incidental to everything else: seeing movies, cuddling on the couch, holding hands. Honestly, except for the vaguest of mental images, I don't really envision us having sex, but that's because I know that we are placidly together—bonded, committed!—so I've got peace of mind knowing that sex isn't so important or high-pressured, like it was in college, or like it is now.

My fantasy, however, is being shattered on this freeway like Reginald Denny's skull at the corner of Florence and Normandie.

As I stare out the car window at the blurry graffiti and squat East LA bungalows, I'm thinking that maybe love isn't all about my fantasy, that there are elements to the mating equation that I have not yet realized. I mean, I am a pretty good-looking guy—honest, fun, intelligent, athletic, motivated, romantic. Plus, I stopped sleeping with a bear a long time ago.

So I wonder: Why is it that I have no sexual charisma? Granted, I'm not exactly out trolling for girls. If I don't alienate them by refusing to kiss or have sex, I always end up being their “friend.” That five-letter word haunts harmless, husbandlike guys like me while the dickheads and the two-timers with the cocky swagger and wandering eyes get laid easier than a millionaire in a whorehouse. There's no doubt that Jenny would want me if I had been more of a sex machine when we went out. Then she wouldn't be having “great sex” with “Rob.”

I picture these thought bubbles, comic-strip–like rising from my right temple and out the car window, floating into the smoggy freeway air. They are struck by speeding hunks of plastic and metal and glass, slicing through them like a blender mashing a suicidal hand.
Pulverized into tiny pieces, flimsy remnants of love, thrashing above the concrete, above the people in their glamorous cars.

Gazing over at Jenny, I try and find a shred of raw sexuality for me to be drawn to. I notice she's got on a tight cotton tank top—which is too tight—pushing up her small breasts; they remind me of a set of butt cheeks, which is not very attractive.
I used to be attracted to her. But this is The Girl, the only woman with whom I have ever had sexual intercourse. As awkward as this is, I have to force myself to do it. As experiments go, this should be a reliable control variable, considering that if I can't have sex with Jenny, I can't do it with anyone.

Once inside her apartment, she walks into her bedroom, and I watch her undress from across the living room. She slips into nothing but a T-shirt and underwear. . . .
Nothing yet. No boner. No hint of wood, actually. . . .
Yawning, she pulls out the futon in the living room and spreads a sheet and blanket over the cushion for me, wishes me good night and heads for her bed. I'm relieved; I really didn't want to do this anyway.

The next day we sight-see around LA, or at least check out whatever mildly interesting things there are to see amid the seemingly endless urban sprawl—kitschy water rides at Universal Studios, the decrepit
HOLLYWOOD
sign, the hard bodies nearly naked on rollerblades at the beach. I stay for only three days, although I'm supposed to stay for five. It's enough time to conclude that we're hardly even friends, let alone lovers.

At the airport, we hug. I know this will be the last time I'll ever see her. Even the summer heat of the San Fernando Valley couldn't rekindle the desire I once felt for Jenny, or that she once felt for me. I guess I needed to know that. I keep telling myself that it's not me that's broken; it is Us. And that Us is now over. I need a new beginning.

—

A month after I return to Buffalo, a month after reading
The New York Times
front to back ten times a day, every day, in between my
ditch-digging duties, a month after hearing a cretinous coworker recite his daily list of things he'd fuck (“I'd fuck that chick in the shorts.”. . . “I'd fuck that mom over there pushing the stroller.”. . . “Man, I'm so horny I'd fuck that pipe”), I finally get the call of my dreams: ABC News offers me a job as a newsdesk assistant at their Washington, DC, bureau. I was just about to begin a new kind of fight.

Looking back, there were so many times when I wish I could have possessed the self-knowledge to stop and realize my body was lacking the normal amount of male hormones and was grossly saturated with a female one. I can't help but wonder, What if? Would I have been a womanizer, or would I have been a respectful young man who only made love to the woman he was in love with? What if prolactin had not been mellowing my demeanor? Would I have reacted more aggressively when, during my first week of work at ABC News, I answered the phone on the newsdesk and was verbally assaulted?

“ABC News, this is Ken.”

“Gimme Cullen.”

“Excuse me?”

“Pat Cullen! Put him on!”

“May I ask who's calling?”

“‘May I ask who's calling?'
”
the apparently insane man mimics back.

“What I mean, sir, is can I have your name?”

“DONALDSON!” the man growls.

I instantly realize it is Sam Donaldson.

Not soon thereafter, I conclude that (a) most network news
beasts—even the telegenic women—suffer from testosterone-poisoning, and (b) if I wanted to avoid getting my ass reamed every day by the man who perfected the art of abusing American presidents, I better learn to recognize Sam's voice.

But I don't conclude that I am sick. I am simply behaving how I have for as long as I have been an adult.

—

I am a twenty-two-year-old single man who has had sex less than ten times in his life. Breasts don't mesmerize me. Buns don't blow me away. Whether a fit young woman is wearing a tight, short skirt or baggy jeans, I don't really notice the difference in her degree of sexual attractiveness. It's not like I don't love women. I do. It's just that I first see them as actual fellow human beings, rather than as a potential moist home for my penis, a fact that even the nicest guys I know admit guides most of their male-to-female behavior. So while it may seem like I'm just a gentle, intelligent guy who isn't controlled by his base sexual instincts, and therefore I would be a real catch in the eyes of women, the opposite is true. Being so uncharacteristically, unstereotypically male, I feel as if my male clothes are so ill-fitting that I need a new, more attractive wardrobe.

As for sports, I don't really give a shit about sports anymore. Occasionally, I'm dragged to one of those
Monday Night Football
nights at a bar in Georgetown where lobotomy cases drink pitchers and suck grease off chicken wings (the DC bars call them “Buffalo wings,” but, being a Buffalonian, I am qualified to say the Capital's deep-fried poultry pales in comparison to the real deal) and shout at their big-screen TVs, not to mention ogle every young lady who ambles by their stool. At times like these, I am ashamed of my gender. Yet, a part of me also envies how confident and comfortable they are with themselves. I watch in both awe and disgust.

—

At the ABC bureau, just a few blocks north of Clinton's White House, I work even harder at becoming a famous newsman than I did at becoming a famous hockey player. Within a few months, I am the newsdesk assistant whom the producers and correspondents will call upon when they need a rewritten script run to their desk, the first helper Carole Simpson looks for when she needs a cup of water right before the weekend evening news. Even DONALDSON!, who at first seemed like a tyrannical talking head, doesn't treat me like the TV rookie that I am. Occasionally, a few minutes before
Prime Time Live
is about to go live at ten o'clock East Coast time, Sam will hand me a script that he has just banged out (it's usually an on-camera intro to an exposé on one of Sam's favorite topics of journalistic inquiry: “waste, fraud and abuse”) and he'll ask me what I think of it. Although he apparently likes me, I'm not quite a member of “Sam's Angels,” a gaggle of assistants and interns whom Sam enjoys taking out to dinner on show nights. Yet, I do earn the occasional invitation from him to a post-show round of drinks at the lobby bar of the Hotel Washington.

Sam's a gut guy. His gut tells him within a matter of seconds after meeting someone (or grilling them, if they are a politician) whether or not he likes and trusts that person. If he doesn't like you, watch out. If he does, he's your greatest ally. I like Sam because he possesses an aggressive, alpha male side of his personality that I am severely lacking. I begin to think that maybe if I hang around Sam long enough, I will become more like him.

At ABC, I'm a glorified secretary, a news grunt, but I learn the ropes of television journalism very quickly. Soon, I start producing “bumpers” (the five-second teasers promoting pending stories before every commercial break), as well as voice-over clips of various international and national news stories.

The war in Bosnia is at its peak of daily massacres. On weekends, I plop down in the video suite at the bureau at five in the morning to record satellite feeds of the carnage beamed to us from the war zone.
ABC has a correspondent with a British accent who is covering the conflict. The scenes he describes day after day in his voice-overs are horrific:
The shelling began early in the hills overlooking Sarajevo. This bread line was struck by a series of missiles. Five were killed; dozens wounded. . . .
The massacres often bring tears to my eyes, while the coffee-addicted techies twisting dials around me seem emotionally immune to the bloodshed. One of the guys calls Bosnia-Herzegovina “Bosnia Hurts-a-Vagina.” He's the same guy who, in trying to convince me to ask a busty producer out on a date, informed me that ABC stands for “All Boners Come.” Sexist cretins like him are as plentiful as the scent of hair spray around the anchor desk. For me, though, it's all about the work.

A few months into my job, I'm put in charge of putting up all the names printed on the screen of guests and hosts on
This Week With David Brinkley,
a task that requires me to sit in a dark room behind the
Brinkley
soundstage, commanding a techie at the controls. As the pundits yap away, the director barks into our headsets which talent to identify with a “super” (graphic lettering that identifies them by name and title at the bottom of the screen). The show appears live on the East Coast, which means there's no fucking up, a rule which the show's taskmaster executive producer has lectured me on every day for months. I've heard stories about production assistants getting canned for one misspelled word. He's put me in charge because someone told him I was smart. So I really don't want to fuck this up.

The show starts, and I put the supers on the screen as the director requests them . . .

George Will

Sam Donaldson

Cokie Roberts

David Brinkley

George Stephanopoulous

Oh, no! I spelled it fucking wrong.

“Pull the super,” I yell to my assistant the second I see that I have misspelled the then Clinton adviser's name.

“Why?” she asks.

“Because we have one TOO MANY Us IN STEPHANOPOULOS!”

Just then, the red phone at my desk—the so-called Bat Phone linked to the control room—rings. It's the show's ball-busting executive producer—“Get that off the fucking screen RIGHT NOW!” He is not a happy camper.

The phone rings again.

“Stephanopoulos is spelled—” someone says.

“I know,” I bark.

The phone rings again, and I pick it up.

“I KNOW!”

Panicking, Betty's tapping buttons like a
Star Trek
technician on the bridge of the
Enterprise.

It rings again.

Before another know-it-all caller can reprimand me, I hold the phone an arm's length away and shout into the receiver, “I KNOW.” Then I slam it down and unplug it.

Man, you'd think my finger was on the ICBM launch button at NORAD.

Betty deletes the second U and, the next time the director wants to ID Stephanopoulos, we put it up on the screen and peace is restored to the bowels of the
Brinkley
set. Or so I think.

“What happened today is just unacceptable, Ken,” a producer harangues me in the hall after the show. “One more fuckup like that and I'll have to let you go.”

My feelings are so hurt I leave the building and wander the city, in and out of tears as I stroll hangdog along The Mall, past the Lincoln Memorial, along the reflecting pond. It's all so fucking melodramatic.

I used to be a tough-nosed goalie, just like my dad had taught me, but now I'm a drama queen.
What has happened to me?

I'm not longing to be some Neanderthal knucklehead who barrels through life without feelings. I just want to be . . . strong. Instead,
I'm soooo tiiiiired.
Emotionally and physically. The reason I butchered Stephawhatever's name is that I am just plain exhausted, all the time, 24/7. No one would understand even if I tried to fully describe to them the depth of my fatigue, how damn hard it is for me to drag my ass out of bed in the morning before the sun is up, and walk down Connecticut Avenue, half asleep, like a zombie into the news bureau. And it doesn't matter how much sleep I get, my legs sometimes feel as if they're dragging twenty-pound ankle weights. And the headaches. No matter how much allergy medication and Advil I swallow, I have head pain, as if someone is constantly twisting the loose tissue just under the skin on my temples. Lying on the couch is my best pain reliever. Problem is, it's depressing to veg out all day while the city people bustle on the sidewalk below my window.

The best thing about my life right now, I suppose, is my roommates. Steve, Kelly, Dan, George, Jim, Peter. They're all Colgate grads and smart dudes. Although I didn't know them very well, they took me in when I arrived in DC, a homeless yuppie needing a place to sleep. The guys are not at all like the hockey players I've been around all my life. They aspire to more than chugging Molson and doing chicks. They work for law firms, for lobbyists on Capitol Hill, for think tanks. They
think
for a living. They're good role models for me—socially and professionally. I can't tell Dad these things; he wouldn't understand, and, if he did, he would be jealous.

I am a little envious of their normalcy, actually. When they go out and party, either with their girlfriends or out looking for one, I usually have to stay home and hit the sack early so I don't fall asleep in the darkened video edit suites in the morning, which, alas, usually happens anyway, which, alas, is probably why I misspelled that damn name.

Let you go,
the producer said. I've heard that one before: Slater
held that over my head, and Jenny has let me go. I can't fuck this up, because I have nothing to fall back on but a five-dollar-an-hour job digging ditches in Hamburg, living in a house for loonies and the terminally ill.

Hockey is over. My equipment sits in a box in Mom's attic, gathering dust, filled with the stench of wet leather and the memories of the glory days past.

Exercise, now that's what I need to jump-start my life. I've been so busy working fifty to sixty hours a week at ABC, taking care of other people—fetching copy for Donaldson and Koppel, ripping the news wires for Brinkley—that I have forgotten to take care of myself, namely my body. That must be my problem! That explains why my body feels ten times the force of gravity, why I feel so goddamn slothful most of the time . . . especially in the morning. Maybe that explains why I come home after work, make a bowl of pasta, and veg out on the couch, then almost always immediately fall asleep, the emptied bowl still in my lap and its starchy carbohydrates turning immediately into fat cells on my hips and chest. About my chest . . . I must not be doing enough push-ups or something, because the other day, while brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, I noticed what used to be my right pec jiggling like a Jell-O mold. Gross.

In order to combat my low energy and high adiposity (and despite my headaches), I decide to train for the Marine Corps Marathon, which is held in DC every year. I've got two months to prepare.
No problem. Ken Baker is back. He is ready to fight, fight, fight! As he always has.

Luckily, Kelly and Dan are athletic and willing to join in on my twenty-six-mile footrace. Kelly is a natural runner, lean and short. Dan's got a runner's build as well. The other guys in the apartment offer their moral support.

In the evenings, after work, the three of us jog down the bike path in Rock Creek Park, past the Watergate complex, looping around the Lincoln Memorial, and then back again. Kelly and Dan are slightly faster than me, which is good, because they push me harder. We
average close to seven-minute miles, a respectable pace. I need a good kick in the ass, what with me sitting around feeling sorry for myself and whining like a little girl every time my feelings are hurt or when I look in the mirror and don't like the body that I see in it.

The four-days-a-week running regime helps. I feel like I have more energy, and that spare tire around my waist gets a little less rubbery. I don't stop there, though. I join the YMCA down the street from the ABC offices. I lift weights two or three days a week, obsessively trying to construct a male physique like the ones I saw carved into marble at that exhibit of classical Greek sculpture at the Smithsonian, the Kouros boy with the broad shoulders and firm buttocks, the male body ideal, the ancient predecessors of Calvin Klein underwear models, the male form that I long to embody.

This middle-aged guy named Fred works out at the YMCA at lunchtime with me. He often spots me during my bench press and overhead lifts. He's a political junkie and a journalist. He's a nice enough guy, if a little pudgy around the middle and a little bald up top, physical qualities that are as prominent in wonky DC as fake boobs are in LA. I grow to like Fred. I don't feel pressured to act like a foolish macho man around him, as I always have around most guys my age in weight rooms. Fred and I talk about Newt Gingrich and Sandra Day O'Connor, rather than whatever hot chick may happen to amble by at any given moment. We also talk about my father's illness. The day L.B. had another heart attack and I had to rush home to see him, Fred called ABC for me and let them know I would be out that day.