The Late Bloomer (24 page)

Two women—Sherry, who works at an auto-parts store and Rose, a cashier at Wal-Mart—respond by declaring, “We like dysfunctional fun, too!” The date turns disastrous when we arrive at a
cowboy line-dancing club to meet our blind dates and they never show. Sherry later calls me and leaves a message admitting that they in fact saw us at the club. “But,” she says, “you and Glenn aren't our kind of guys.”

My alter-ego shenanigans continue for nearly a year and a half. Rather than confront my sexual confusion, frustration and befuddlement, I live my life in ink, through the experiences of a semifictional funnyman. I am my own PR rep promoting an image of this wild-and-crazy guy “Ken.”

This guy Ken is carefree and horny, willing to do just about anything to get a date (which female readers are explicitly alerted to on the Ken&Glenn Web site. Ken is sexy yet sensitive. “Ken” is the man I wish I was but can only be as a character in a newspaper column.

The real Ken has started eating nothing but salads and Cheerios (with no milk, as not to ingest any more fat that will only then settle onto his bloated boobs, making him look even more freakish and womanly) in an effort to wither his shameful body down enough so that, hopefully, muscle will emerge.

The real Ken is not horny; in fact, he spends most nights alone, wondering why he isn't more sexually driven, concluding that he just may be one of those rarefied shy guys who will only sleep with the girl he ends up marrying.

The real Ken once let the sting of his impotence get him down, to the point where he would cringe at the sight of his swollen nipples and his jelly belly and his dick, which seems about as long as an elevator button; Ken used to be perplexed by women and how they seemed to only want him AND his dick—not just him—and how they would summarily dump him when his dick repeatedly didn't perform. But now he has come to accept his being “different” much like an abused child copes with an alcoholic father. Grin and bear it.

The real Ken is torn between wanting to avoid the unbearable dread that accompanies not being able to get it up in the presence of a
woman and wanting to find a woman in whose comforting arms he can be himself. So he compromises. He goes on dates with girls but, rather than get physically intimate, he forges an emotional, platonic bond. He becomes their “friend,” a guy unlike any of the other guys, a guy who will listen to them, understand their frustrations with men. He can relate to women because, although he doesn't know it, he is, hormonally, similar to them.

Disgusted by his father's track record and cynical that half of all man-and-woman marriages fail, that statistics show that anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of husbands will cheat on their wives, he has ditched his dream of having 1.85 kids and a pretty wife, of being a “normal guy,” because he knows he would never divorce the woman of his dreams, that he would never cheat on a woman who was understanding and caring enough to put up with his penis problems, that he will never be the man that he must become.

To prove his antipathy toward marriage, he even scribbled a note to his doubting editor Marguerite that reads: “I will never get married.”

The real Ken can't even read the hockey scores listed in the newspaper because it only reminds him that his lifelong dream will never be realized.

The real Ken wanted to run the DC marathon again, but he had to stop a week into his training because (a) he nearly collapsed from dizziness after just two miles of jogging, and (b) he has been suffering from headaches that pulse so painfully, he must walk gently down flights of stairs because the jarring it causes pinches his brain as if a hockey puck has been implanted three inches behind eyes.

The real Ken keeps secrets that he will never tell a soul. He is hiding behind a mask of newspaper-column humor and an ironic detachment that is a shield of denial from the pain and confusion that is his physical self. The Bible, once a source of inspiration, is now bullshit to him. After reading everything from Jewish Haggadah to a Sufi text, the real Ken views religion as a drug that weak people use to dull the pain and loneliness that is the reality of our bleak human existence.
The real Ken is a journalist who focuses on other people and their feelings first; a person who feels his own emotions second.

When a
People
magazine correspondent stumbles upon Ken&Glenn's offbeat adventures on our Internet site, she interviews Ken for a possible story. After the interview, Ken (the real one? the character?) asks the reporter if she can help him flee from the land of y'alls and collard greens (and women who pursue him for sex that he cannot provide, which scares him—although he doesn't mention this part) and into “the epicenter of pop culture.”

When Glenn leaves Virginia to live with his fiancée in Los Angeles, Ken—now alone and lacking a newspaper persona to hide behind—wants out even more badly.

The
People
correspondent, impressed with Ken's can-do attitude and charm, gets “Ken” an interview at
People
magazine's Hollywood bureau, in the capital of the American West, the place where, for the last 150 years, young Americans have been journeying to reinvent themselves.

Ken flies across the country to meet the legendary Jack Kelley, the magazine's longtime Hollywood bureau chief. Jack likes Ken. Ken gets hired. Ken gives his two-week notice to Will. “Well, Baker, it makes sense that you'd move to LA,” Will grouses. “All wackos eventually end up in California.”

Before leaving
The Daily Press
, however, Ken reminds all his friends in Virginia that “chicks dig
People
magazine,” which no doubt means he will be quite the stud in La-La Land.

Being as deluded as Ken is into thinking this self-effacing twenty-six-year-old guy is not at all ill, his friends believe him.

I move into an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month bungalow apartment in Brentwood, three blocks from the
People
offices and two blocks from where O.J. Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman were slashed to death almost two years before I unpacked my two suitcases and settled here. I last visited LA four years ago, when I came to see Jenny, whom I don't plan to call or see because I fear it will only remind me of that old doormat Ken.

One day, while I'm walking down palm-lined Bundy Drive, a chubby tourist politely stops me.

“Excuse me,” she says, a camera dangling from her neck. “Do you know where the O.J. house is?”

“It's the one with the gate,” I say, pointing to the stucco condominium across the street.

Walking away, I am heartened to think that I am now living in such a vast, transient city. After just three days in this smoggy, sunny, car-clogged urban paradise, three time zones and oodles of emotional twilight zones away from the emasculated confusion of my prior, East Coast life, I already qualify as a bonafide local.

Even so, I've got a long way to go before I can be considered a true Hollywood player, a man-about-town.

This transformation, from man-faker to star-maker, will require
me to shed all the emotional baggage I've been schlepping around for the last five or six years: Namely, I have to stop being about as sexually active as Pope John Paul II.

Glenn, now living in the Valley with his fiancée and writing for
The Los Angeles Daily News
, agrees wholeheartedly. Having just spent two years watching me celibately traverse my mid-twenties, Glenn says he is tired of seeing my stagnant sex life play out in all its lonely-guy glory. “You need a girlfriend,” he says, so often it's really starting to bug me.

One night Glenn and I are vegging out in front of the boob tube, watching a mindless dating show on MTV, when Glenn has an idea how I may be able to turn around my moribund manliness.

“Wouldn't it be cool if you got on TV, dude?” he says, jotting down the number for the show's contestant hotline, undoubtedly hoping that by immersing me in fifty single young women in a TV studio I may—call the wire services!—finally get laid.

“It would be funny,” he says. “We'll both do it.”

The show,
Singled Out
, is co-hosted by a former
Playboy
model, the bottled-blonde Jenny McCarthy. Glenn and I used to watch this Gen X version of
The Dating Game
all the time on boring and humid Virginia nights. On this boring and arid evening in LA, Glenn dials the number to get us on the show.

A mumbling cool-guy answers the phone. He asks Glenn how old we are.

“I'm twenty-four, and my friend is twenty-six,” Glenn replies.

“No-can-do,” the MTV coolster says. “Our age range is eighteen to twenty-four. Your friend doesn't
look
twenty-six, does he?”

“Oh, no, no. He looks younger than I do.”

“Okay, then. Just make sure he doesn't look twenty-six. Grunge him out in a flannel and shit.”

The dude gives Glenn the address of the MTV studio in Burbank, where Glenn and I promptly show up the next morning.

Outside the stucco studio huddle a couple hundred teenagers and twentysomethings. I'm wearing cut-off jeans, a faded purple T-shirt,
Teva sandals and a green-and-black flannel shirt tied around my flabby waist. But the predominant wardrobes are more urbane and sexy:

• Guys: baggy jeans, oversize button-down shirts and fat-heeled black shoes.
  
• Girls: short skirts or summer dresses, open-toe platform sandals, cleavage and lots of hairspray and makeup.
  

As we're filing into the building, a peppy grunge girl from MTV—“Um, excuse me, sir . . .” —stops a balding guy behind us who looks about thirty-five-desperately-trying-to-be-twenty-five. She tells him he has to leave.
Too old. Phew. Coulda been me. That was close.

They sit us down in a room where another peppy young woman teaches us
Singled Out
101. She says that one hundred of us—about fifty of each gender—will stand in “the dating pool,” a sort of corral located behind a partition, in front of which will be the contestant who, without seeing any of us, will “single out” one of us as the winner of a date with her.

I remember asking Dad what I should do when I'm playing hockey and not feeling like the best. “Fake it,” he said. As such, I mingle backstage in line with the super-pretty wannabe actresses and confident, tanned dudes and fake like I know how to play this game. One by one, each of us singletons works our way to the front of a line where we are “interviewed” by a producer. Meanwhile, other MTV'ers roam around us, looking for the most attractive members of the group, then selecting them to stand in the front, closest to the cameras that will be beaming images of beautiful people to the young American masses.

My turn.

“Okay, now, I have to rate you on a few categories,” the dating game clinician says. “First of all: wealth. What do you do for a living?”

“I'm a writer.”

“Like a screenwriter?”

“No, a journalist kind of writer.”

“All right. Fine.” She jots something down. “Lift up your shirt,” she continues.

“Why?”

“I need to rate the amount of body hair you have. And your chest size.”

I suck in my stomach and raise my T-shirt up to my armpits, praying that none of the girls is looking at my boobies.

The judge-lady glances at my torso (
Thank God, I got a tan at the beach yesterday
) for a few seconds that seem like minutes, then she moves on to the next few categories. At the end of her rating session, she hands me a slip of paper that categorizes me.

A few minutes before show time, an MTV hipster in a headset corrals us into the “dating pool.” A bouncer-type dude announces the ground rules:

• No nudity.
  
• No profanity.
  
• No touching Jenny McCarthy. “If any of you guys lays a hand on Jenny, I will personally kick your ass,” he says with I-pity-the-fool gravity.
  

When Jenny, microphone in hand, slithers onstage and into the middle of our single-guy group, it's apparent to me why the MTV mavens feel obligated to communicate this last rule: Jenny simply looks made for touching. A skimpy orange dress that shows off just enough of her assets to make all the guys around me stare but that contains just enough fabric to get the show past the censors.

Theme music.

Announcer.

We cheer.

“Welcome to
Singled Out
,” Jenny's male co-host, Chris Hardwick, tells the camera. “We start out the game with fifty single guys and fifty girls, and, through a series of completely arbitrary decisions, only two
of them will get dates. Now let's go to Jenny McCarthy in the dating pool.”

“Hello, hello,” Jenny coos. “As usual, the men will be the first ones thrown into the fire of love. So, boys, are you ready to fry?”

We men whoop and holler like we're competing in a Delta Upsilon beer-chugging contest, something I never got to do in college but, now that I am a frisky Hollywood guy with no pressuring father, no hockey, I will act like a sex-addicted teenager.

The object of our lust enters. The bachelorette, the reigning Miss America Petite, struts across the stage with a blindfold on.

A
blindfold.
The last girl I saw in a blindfold was Claudia. I had wrapped one around her delicate eyes—a shield keeping her from seeing my limp penis that was not reacting to her gorgeous body, which, though very nice and fit, was not nearly as attractive as the perfectly sculpted physical specimen that is Stephanie Brown, Miss America Petite, whom the announcer informs us is a “twenty-four-year-old Iowa native and dancing instructor” and, he adds, “a bit of a flirt.”

Oh, no. This is just the kind of mega-attractive, sexually assertive girl that scares the crap out of me, that sends my penis into retreat at even the thought of having to have sex with her. What if I win? Then I will have to date her, kiss her. There will be pressure to perform. I better not win.

The first category from which she is to start singling out her unwantables is
Age
. A cardboard wall lists her options:

1) Meat

2) Rotten Meat

3) Maggot Infested Meat

“I like a mature man,” she says. “So let's get rid of the meat.”

About half the guys, excluding me, in the dating pool desultorily walk off stage when Jenny instructs them to.

Next category:
Hair Style

1) Styles It

2) Could Give a @*#

The dangerously nubile Stephanie ponders her options for a few seconds and decides, “I'm not into the grunge thing, so let's get rid of the could give a shit.”

Yes! God bless my skateboarder bangs that have never seen a dollop of gel. I'm outta here.

I walk offstage. Glenn (also rejected due to his unkempt hair) and I, with relief, watch the rest of the game from the shadows. A pretty boy with broad shoulders wins the date with Stephanie in the final round by correctly guessing how many pairs of panties she owns (twenty-five).

As Jenny hands Stephanie over to the lucky dude, the rest of us are escorted outside and handed a T-shirt along with a
Singled Out
condom. Glenn gives me his. “I don't need this,” says Glenn, just months away from doing what I am more and more convinced I will never be physically, psychologically or emotionally able to do: getting married.

Alhough he's my best friend, even Glenn doesn't know the depth of my sickness. And neither do I.

—

I'm interviewing rock guitarist Carlos Santana for a special issue of
People
featuring stars “Before They Were Famous.”

I ask Carlos if he remembers when he first realized he might become a world-famous musician. “When I decided to be my own man,” he tells me. “I was sixteen and living at home. If you want to become a musician you have to go out and get your own stories, away from your parents. You have to go to the streets and get firsthand experience with life.”

Like most of my journalistic experiences in my first year as a
People
magazine correspondent, I write down what Santana says, write a short
profile of him based on the interview, and then send it to the New York office as soon as possible so that I can quickly move on to my next celebrity story. I don't consider how Santana's commentary on manhood relates to me.

I've long since stopped the obsessive introspection of my youth; instead, extrospection is my preferred practice, my job being the ultimate tool for my outward analysis. Perhaps, I reason, through seeking to understand the lives of others I can untangle the cross-wired circuitry that has strangulated my own manhood. As a journalist covering the personal lives of famous people, week after week I am bombarded with enough headline-grabbing celebrity distraction to keep me from focusing on my own problems.

• Margaux Hemingway dies from an apparent suicide.
  
• Robert Downey, Jr., gets busted for heroin possession and for falling asleep in the bed of his neighbor's child in Malibu.
  
• Barbra Streisand gets engaged.
  
• Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal get divorced.
  
• Pamela Anderson Lee quits
  Baywatch.
  

It's common for me to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., sitting in my eighteenth-floor office overlooking the Lite Brite–like sprawl of LA's west side in the evening. Week after week I craft stories about the rich and famous, all for the reading benefit of some thirty-five million readers whom I don't see or speak to. It's impersonal, and I like it. It is a one-way form of mass communication. Me to them. My gaze is outward. I can ignore my pain.

I love my job, and my bureau chief, Jack, a dapper man with Kevin Costner coolness, lets me know he appreciates all my hard work. Dad would be proud of me.

While spending yet another late night at the office making phone calls to sources long after the rest of the staff have gone home to their wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, dogs, cats, sports—their fun
lives—Jack walks by my office on his way to the elevator and does a double take when he notices me banging out a story in the dim light.

“You're still here?” he says.

“Just makin' the doughnuts,” I say, ever the good worker bee.

“We appreciate it,” he says. “But, for your own sake, get a life, dude.”

He's right.

But it's not only because I don't have a life that I work late hours. Often I must work so late because I had to spend a few hours in the afternoon at home lying in bed, waiting for my over-the-counter sinus medication to ease the ever-present throbbing in my skull. Working at night is nice because I don't have to speak to anybody in the office. Talking, especially in the loud, hyperkinetic style that is the norm among correspondents, makes my head hurt even more. At night, when I am alone, I find peace.

Jack is right, though. I do need a life. I'll stand at the window of my office in the evenings looking down on the Brentwood yuppies sipping beer at the pool hall on Wilshire Boulevard and the athletic yuppies playing soccer at the high school. I'd like to play sports, but I am too fucking tired by the end of the day to walk home, let alone go running or play soccer or baseball. (Hockey is not an option; I still can't even watch it on TV without feeling depressed.)

What I could really use is a girlfriend. Not only did my MTV-assisted mating prove to be an exercise in frustration, but so has Glenn's other brilliant idea for getting me laid.

Recently he introduced me to a friend of his, a very sweet and smart staff writer for the
Los Angeles Times.
I had hoped that this time, perhaps benefiting from the transformative experience of moving three thousand miles away from my dark, impotent past, I would just be a normal guy and have sex with this nice young redhead. Before I can talk myself out of it, I decide that I will sleep over at her apartment and “see what happens” from there.