Kick Me (6 page)

I took the flag and unfolded it completely. It was big, about six feet by four feet. I carried it around the house for a while, pretending to be a general leading my army into battle. The flag was so crisp and new-looking that I was completely enamored with it. I remember thinking that my dad was so cool because he had saved this flag that was part of history and that if everyone else knew my dad had done this, they would think he was cool, too. Maybe they’d even say he was a war hero and he’d get to be in the paper. Our local paper was always running pictures of wrinkled old veterans in their McDonald’s trainee–like army caps every Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and each year I thought that my dad should have his picture in the paper, too, since he probably did more than any of those old grandpa-looking guys ever did. I mean, my dad had landed at
Normandy.
One day after
D Day,
for cryin’ out loud.

Overcome with love for and pride in my father, I figured that I should let the whole neighborhood know just how great a guy my dad really was and decided right then and there to hang the Nazi flag in our front window.

I got some string and tape from the kitchen drawer and rigged up the top corners of the flag so that I could tie them to the curtain rod over our living room window. Once it was secure, I let the flag hang down and adjusted it so that it was centered. Satisfied that I had presented it in the most aesthetically pleasing manner, I went outside to take a look. From our driveway, the Nazi flag looked quite handsome. It filled the entire front window of our house. I walked all the way out to the street and checked it out from there. Yep, it was fully visible to any passing car. I felt good. I felt proud. People were going to love my dad when they saw that flag hanging in the front window of our house, right in their very own neighborhood.

As I stood there admiring my handiwork, my mother drove around the corner and onto our street unexpectedly. At first I was nervous, scared I’d get in trouble for going through my father’s closet. But the more I thought about it, I was sure my mother would be quite pleased that I was performing such a selfless act to show the neighborhood what a cool guy my dad was.

I waved at my mom as her car approached. She waved back with a smile. She turned into our driveway and suddenly her car screeched to a stop. Wow, I thought, she must be really surprised. I bet she’s going to be so proud of me she’ll take me to Dairy Queen. As I stood there debating whether I would order a Mr. Misty Float or a Dilly Bar, my mother immediately jumped out of the car, wild-eyed.

“Where did
that
come from?!” she sputtered.

“It’s Dad’s. I found it in his closet,” I said proudly. “I thought I’d hang it up for everybody to—”

“Oh, my
God,
” said my mother. And with that, she sprinted away from her still-idling car and ran into the house. I’d never seen my mother run before, especially in a pair of low-heeled pumps. And the next thing I knew she ripped the flag down from the window and closed the curtains.

I didn’t get to go to Dairy Queen.

That night, my father gave me a lecture on the horrors of the Nazis and told me that he had saved the flag and the dagger because most of the guys in his division had done the same thing, wanting to keep a few souvenirs of the enemy from their time in the war. Apparently he had picked up the flag and the dagger after his battalion had gone through France when the Germans had been defeated. He told me about friends of his who were killed during the war, and a wave of embarrassment at what I had done overtook me as I tried not to cry. Seeing this, my dad gave me a pat on the shoulder and said, “Hey, it’s okay. At least now you know.”

Since he knew I’d thought I was doing something nice for him by showing off his flag, he thanked me for trying to make him a war hero and told me that he was going to donate the flag and the dagger to a war history museum where they could be properly displayed in the right context. And then he grilled me over and over again to make sure that no one in the neighborhood had driven by and seen the flag in the window.

Fortunately for all of us, nobody had.

Well, that would have been one way to get my dad’s face in the paper.

MY FIRST AND BESTEST
GIRLFRIEND

I
met my first real and true girlfriend when I was in the second grade. It turned out to be the beginning of a very long and faithful relationship.

We met in gym class. It was about a month into the new school year when our teacher, Mrs. Handler, informed us that we were going to learn how to climb ropes. We looked over and saw a two-inch-thick cotton cord hanging down from the very high ceiling. I had seen those ropes stored up in the rafters before but always assumed they were there to keep the roof from blowing away if a tornado tore it off. Beneath the rope was an extra-thick mat, signaling to us all that severe injury was possible. Mrs. Handler, making it sound simple, informed us that we were to grab the rope and use our hands to propel ourselves upward. She said that as we climbed we should use our thighs to pinch the cord and hold ourselves in place to prevent us from sliding back down and negating whatever progress we might be making before we reached the top. I was immediately terrified because it looked to me like the ceiling was about one mile up, and if I were to get up there and then lose my grip and fall, the mat would only prevent my body from breaking apart upon impact as I was killed. But like all things in any gym class, we had no say in the matter, and so we lined up to wait for our turns. I watched as each of my friends, both boys and girls, scurried up the rope as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. It sure didn’t look like anyone else was having any problems. However, nobody else in the class cried when they got a mosquito bite, either. So I had no idea what to expect.

When my turn arrived, I approached the rope and awkwardly took it in my hands. It was hard and a bit slick-feeling, not at all what I was expecting. I assumed the rope would be soft and easy to grip, a magical Nerf rope of sorts that would render me weightless and carry me up to the gym ceiling like Mary Martin in that creepy TV version of
Peter Pan
my parents made me watch. But the minute I touched that rope, I knew my success was going to depend strictly on how much strength I did or didn’t have in my arms and legs. I reached up as high as I could on the rope and tried to pull myself off the ground. It was almost impossible. I’ve never had much upper-body strength, and at age seven I couldn’t defeat a newborn baby in an arm-wrestling tournament.

“Just pull yourself up,” Mrs. Handler said in an encouraging tone, assuming I was a newcomer to the ways of gravity on this planet.

“And spit on your hands,” said Norman, a future bully who was on this day still about five years away from making my life a living hell.

I looked up the rope and decided that if I could jump up and grab it, at least I’d be off the mat. I sprang up a few feet and gripped the rope. I immediately wrapped my legs around it and hung on. It felt like I had gotten myself pretty high up, but when I looked down, I saw that I was about one foot off the mat. I looked over at my classmates, who were staring at me impassively. My aunt Sue was an Avon lady and she had given my dad a Soap-on-a-Rope for his birthday once. I suddenly knew what the soap felt like.

“Keep going,” Mrs. Handler said politely, although there was already a hint of “Jesus Christ, just climb the goddamn rope already” in her voice.

I peered up and tried to figure out the best way to accomplish this. A couple of kids had done it using nothing but their arms, kicking their legs wildly as they climbed. I knew this wasn’t an option for me and so I fixated on the kids who had taken the teacher’s advice and held the rope tightly between their legs as they pulled themselves up hand over hand. I readjusted myself so that the rope was firmly pinched between my thighs and started to pull my body up. And to my amazement, I was actually getting up the rope. Mrs. Handler is quite a teacher, I thought. I pulled and locked my legs, pulled and locked my legs, pulled and locked my legs.

And then something happened.

All of a sudden, I felt this strange wave coming over me, a powerful sensation that seemed to be building inside my body but I didn’t know from where. It almost seemed to start in my chest and expand outward. I felt it in my butt, in my legs, in my arms . . . but especially in my pants. (These were the days when you wore your school clothes in gym class. I guess this was either because we didn’t sweat at that age or because we
always
smelled bad, so what was the point of making us change into clothes whose job it was to get stunk up anyway?) I stopped climbing and held on to the rope. The feeling was building stronger and stronger. And the weird thing about it was that it felt good. Better than anything I’d ever felt in my life. Suddenly, my body started to pulse and, the next thing I knew, the entire sensation rushed into my groin area and specifically into my—as the girls who lived next door to me used to call it—“thing.” It was a strange, wonderful pounding sensation, a velvety version of the pile driver that almost crushed Bugs Bunny during a Warner Bros. cartoon I had seen about a construction site. Boom boom boom. All my muscles tightened and I was frozen in a blend of ecstasy and utter confusion. Was I having a heart attack? Was this what a stroke was? I had no idea what they were and figured that maybe this was what they felt like. But the biggest thing I remember was that (a) I didn’t care if it was a stroke and (b) I didn’t want it to end. Ever.

“Paul? What are you doing up there? Are you stuck?” Mrs. Handler called up.

“. . . no . . .” was all I could muster. I was now guarding this moment and I wasn’t going to let anything interrupt it. I was afraid that if I moved, it would stop. And I couldn’t move, even if I wanted it to stop.

“Can you go up any higher?”

“I don’t know.” The sensation continued to pound in my privates. My head seemed to fill with fog.

“Well, either keep going or come back down. People are waiting.”

“Uh, okay.” The feeling was starting to subside and so I cautiously began to let myself down. As I slid slowly down the rope, it happened again. This time it hit harder and actually made me gasp. I froze again. Another wave of euphoric muscle contractions swept through my midsection. Boom boom boom.

“Paul, I don’t know what you’re doing but please hurry up.”

This time the feeling faded quickly. But it was now indelibly etched in my brain. And I knew it was something that I was going to make happen again, even if I had to dedicate my life to it.

I got to the bottom of the rope and put my feet on the mat. As I tried to walk away, I almost fell onto the gym floor. My legs felt like Jell-o and I was having ghost pangs of the feeling. It was like my body was now vibrating slowly like a car that’s about to stall because of a dirty carburetor. I walked among my fellow students but everything was a blur. I had experienced something that felt almost religious in its scope and I was quite sure that no one else in the gym that day could even begin to understand what I’d just been through.

A few hours later at recess, I decided to find out if I was the only one who’d experienced “the rope feeling.” I asked my friend Brian if he’d felt anything during his climb.

“My hands really hurt after it” was all he offered up.

“Didn’t you feel anything else? Anything that was really good?” I didn’t want to get more detailed than that for fear that I would be informed of some life-ending disease that had as its main symptom “an intense, pleasurable sensation when climbing ropes in gym class.” Kids were always interpreting any abnormality or injury I had as the tip-off of a fatal disease. Once I had a scratch on my arm and a kid in my class saw it. He told me that if you have blood poisoning, it looks like a red scratch on your arm that runs along one of your veins and when the red scratch reaches your heart, you drop dead immediately. Of course I spent the rest of that day staring at my scratch, convinced it was growing longer, and well on its journey to kill me. But as far as “the rope feeling,” Brian just shrugged at my question.

“I didn’t feel anything. What did it feel like?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to figure out how to verbalize it. “It was like I was floating or something. It felt really good.”

“Huh. I don’t know. Maybe you have cancer.”

The next day in gym, the rope had been put back up into the rafters and I stared at it longingly. “Can we climb the ropes again today?” I asked.

“Paul, you were the only one who couldn’t make it up the rope yesterday. Why do you want to do it again?” Mrs. Handler said as she bounced a kickball, clearly more excited at the prospect of teaching us a new competitive sport.

“I don’t. I was just wondering if we were going to do it again.”

“Not today. We’ll try them again next Wednesday.” She then launched into a lecture on the fundamentals of kickball and I stood there trying to calculate how many hours separated me from next Wednesday.

That night, I was watching TV in my usual position, lying on my stomach with my chin on my hands and my legs bent at the knees behind me, my calves and feet slowly moving back and forth. Then something strange happened. The rope feeling started to come back again. It wasn’t as strong this time but it was definitely creeping up on me. As I had on the ropes, I immediately froze. I stopped moving my legs. The feeling pulsed a bit, then started to fade. I was very surprised and stunned. What happened? I began moving my feet back and forth again and the feeling started to return. I stopped breathing, hoping that it wouldn’t fade again. I kept moving my legs and the feeling continued to grow. I started to move my feet faster, as if I were swimming in the air. When I started to go too fast, the feeling began to fade again. And so I held a steady pace with my legs. My brain was now beginning to overload with the joy I was experiencing at the return of my new best friend, “the rope feeling.” As the sensation built, my father walked in the room.

“What are you watching?” he asked.

At that moment, I had no idea what I was watching. I was numb with intense feeling as the pounding returned. Boom boom boom.

“. . . nothing . . .” was all I could get out.

“Well, you shouldn’t lie so close to the TV. You’re gonna hurt your eyes. Move back.”

It was as if the world were conspiring against me. I started to think that maybe what I was feeling was somehow forbidden and so God had sent my father in to put an end to it. But once again, I couldn’t move.

“Okay, I’ll move in a minute.”

“Move
now,
” my dad said impatiently.

I slid myself back and the feeling immediately peaked. I gave a little gasp.

“What’s the matter? Did you get a carpet burn?”

I couldn’t summon the breath to speak and so just shook my head no, pretending to be too engrossed in whatever it was I couldn’t see on the TV through my orgasm-hazed eyes.

“Well, just be careful that you don’t get so close to the TV. You’ll end up having to wear glasses.”

Whereas bath time used to be an opportunity to make my G.I. Joe perform all sorts of underwater adventures in his Army Jack scuba gear, my time in the tub was now transformed into a quest for knowledge. It had become apparent where the feelings were emanating from. I just didn’t know exactly how to re-create them. My mind fixated on the idea that if I could somehow figure out how to replicate the circumstances under which “the rope feeling” occurred that didn’t involve sliding a twenty-five-foot-long piece of braided cotton between my legs, then I would discover the key to overwhelming joy. The incident in front of the television had given me hope. Re-creation of “the rope feeling” apparently had something to do with pressure or contact between my private area and another surface and movement or friction between them. The bathtub became a virtual testing ground as I tried everything within reach to create the necessary ingredients. Shampoo bottles, sponges, washcloths, soap bars, the side of the tub—yes, I’m afraid even G.I. Joe was called into duty—but nothing seemed to work. “The rope feeling” was to remain elusive for another day, it seemed.

However, as with all great inventors, a breakthrough occurs when one least expects it.

Somehow, through a coincidental sequence of washing with soap, scrubbing certain areas harder than normal, and keeping my eye out for any possible disturbances in my lower reaches, I stumbled across what appeared to be a possible winning combination. There was a stirring deep within the part of my brain that had earlier frozen me to both the rope and the carpet that seemed to say, “You may be on to something here.” Bath time lasted longer than usual that night and by the time I emerged, my skin wrinkled and puckered from too much exposure to water, I was a veritable Jonas Salk on the day he discovered his polio vaccine. I had cracked the code and found that my discovery worked every single time I performed the same sequence of events. And trust me, I had just test-driven it. Many, many times.

That night as I lay in bed, the universe seemed a strange and wondrous place. I felt as if I had discovered something that hadn’t existed, at least not before I plucked it from the world of overlooked human abilities. I had found a mysterious way to manipulate my body that could produce a feeling of such intense pleasure and euphoria that now my only worry was how I would prevent myself from doing it constantly. Would I ever be able to leave my room? Would I be able to control this ultrahuman power I had stumbled upon? I was now a seven-year-old Clark Kent, possessing an awe-inspiring secret that I would have to hide from the world. Superman never used his powers to rob banks and so I vowed that I would somehow find the strength to keep my new ability in check.

But I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

When next Wednesday arrived and I was reunited with my girlfriend, the rope, it was as if I were a formerly cornpone country boy who had returned to his sweet and innocent new bride after coming home from the war. Our first encounter the previous week had been a brief, fumbling union that found both of us inexperienced and awkward during our inaugural dip into the rivers of ecstasy, much like the virgin recruit who marries his best girl the night before he ships off.

But on this day I had returned a savvy, worldly-wise Lothario, bringing a week’s worth of experience back from my travels and into the world of my braided cotton lover. As I ascended the rope that day, I knew what to expect and planned on taking full advantage of it. I had been struck with the notion that if, instead of freezing on the rope, I were to continue my climb as the feeling overtook me, I might find myself sailing into unthinkable new heights of pleasure. I was practically trembling with excitement and anticipation as I waited my turn to once again become one with my twenty-five-foot friend.