The Discomfort Zone (15 page)

“Nothing,” I said. “We had breakfast.”

I WAS INTRODUCED
to the German language by a young blond woman, Elisabeth, whom no word smaller than “voluptuous” suffices to describe. It was the summer I turned ten, and I was supposed to sit beside her on the love seat on my parents' screen porch and read aloud from an elementary German text—an unappetizing book about Germanic home life, with old-fashioned Fraktur type and frightening woodcuts, borrowed from our local library—while she leaned into me, holding the book open on my lap, and pointed to words I'd mispronounced. She was nineteen, and her skirts were sensationally short and her little tops sensationally tight, and the world-eclipsing proximity of her
breasts and the great southerly extent of her bare legs were intolerable to me. Sitting next to her, I felt like a claustrophobe in a crowded elevator, a person with severe restless-leg syndrome, a dental patient undergoing extended drilling. Her words, being products of her lips and tongue, carried an unwelcome intimacy, and the German language itself sounded deep-throated and wet compared to English. (How prim our “bad,” how carnal their “schlecht.”) I leaned away from her, but she leaned over farther, and I inched down the love seat, but she inched along after me. My discomfort was so radical that I couldn't concentrate for even one minute, and this was my only relief: most afternoons, she lost patience with me quickly.

Elisabeth was the little sister of the wife of the Austrian rail-equipment manufacturer whom my father had helped introduce to the American market. She'd come over from Vienna, at my parents' invitation, to practice her English and to experience life with an American family; she was also privately hoping to explore the new freedoms that Europeans had heard were sweeping our country. Unfortunately, these new freedoms weren't available in our particular house. Elisabeth was given my brother Bob's vacated bedroom, which looked out onto a soiled, fenced square of concrete where our neighbors' piebald hunting dog, Speckles, barked all afternoon. My mother was constantly at Elisabeth's side, taking her to lunch with her friends, to the Saint Louis Zoo, to Shaw's Garden, to the Arch, to the Muny Opera, and to Tom Sawyer's house, up in Hannibal. For relief from these loving ministrations, Elisabeth had only the company of a ten-year-old boy with freedom issues of his own.

One afternoon, on the porch, she accused me of not wanting to learn. When I denied it, she said, “Then why do you keep turning around and looking outside? Is there something out there I don't see?” I had no answer for her. I never consciously connected her body with my discomfort—never mentally formed any word like “breast” or “thigh” or “dirty,” never associated her knockout presence with the schoolyard talk I'd lately started hearing (“We want two
pickets to Tittsburgh, and we want the change in nipples and dimes…”). I only knew that I didn't like the way she made me feel, and that this was disappointing to her: she was making me a bad student, and I was making her a bad teacher. Neither of us could have been less what the other wanted. At the end of the summer, after she left, I couldn't speak a word of German.

 

IN CHICAGO, WHERE
I was born, our neighbors on one side were Floyd and Dorothy Nutt. On the other side were an older couple who had a grandson named Russie Toates. The first fun I remember ever having involved putting on a new pair of red rubber boots and, incited by Russie, who was a year or two older, stomping and sliding and kicking through an enormous pile of orange-brown dog poop. The fun was memorable because I was immediately severely punished for it.

I'd just turned five when we moved to Webster Groves. On the morning of my first day of kindergarten, my mother sat me down and explained why it was important not to suck my thumb anymore, and I took her message to heart and never put thumb to mouth again, though I did later smoke cigarettes for twenty years. The first thing my friend Manley heard me say in kindergarten came in response to somebody's invitation to participate in a game. I said, “I'd rather not play.”

When I was eight or nine, I committed a transgression that for much of my life seemed to me the most shameful thing I'd ever done. Late one Sunday afternoon, I was let outside after dinner and, finding no one to play with, loitered by our next-door neighbors' house. Our neighbors were still eating dinner, but I could see their two girls, one a little older than I, the other a little younger, playing in their living room while they waited for dessert to be served. Catching sight of me, they came and stood between parted curtains, looking out through a window and a storm window. We couldn't hear each other, but I wanted to entertain them, and so I started
dancing, and prancing, and twirling, and miming, and making funny faces. The girls ate it up. They excited me to strike ever more extreme and ridiculous poses, and for a while I continued to amuse them, but there came a point where I could feel their attention waning, and I couldn't think of any new capers to top my old ones, and I also
could not bear
to lose their attention, and so, on an impulse—I was in a totally giddy place—I pulled my pants down.

Both girls clapped hands to their mouths in delighted mock horror. I felt instantly that there was no worse thing I could have done. I pulled up my pants and ran down the hill, past our house, to a grassy traffic triangle where I could hide among some oak trees and weather the first, worst wave of shame. In later years and decades, it seemed to me that even then, within minutes of my action, as I sat among the oak trees, I couldn't remember if I'd taken my underpants down along with my pants. This memory lapse at once tormented me and didn't matter at all. I'd been granted—and had granted the neighbor girls—a glimpse of the person I knew I was permanently in danger of becoming. He was the worst thing I'd ever seen, and I was determined not to let him out again.

 

CURIOUSLY SHAME-FREE, BY
contrast, were the hours I spent studying dirty magazines. I mostly did this after school with my friend Weidman, who had located some
Playboy
s in his parents' bedroom, but one day in junior high, while I was poking around at a construction site, I acquired a magazine of my own. Its name was
Rogue
, and its previous owners had torn out most of the pictures. The one remaining photo feature depicted a “lesbian eating orgy” consisting of bananas, chocolate cake, great volumes of whipped cream, and four dismal, lank-haired girls striking poses of such patent fakeness that even I, at thirteen, in Webster Groves, understood that “lesbian eating orgy” wasn't a concept I would ever find useful.

But pictures, even the good shots in Weidman's magazines, were a little too much for me anyway. What I loved in
my
Rogue
were the stories. There was an artistic one, with outstanding dialogue, about a liberated girl named Little Charlie who tries to persuade a friend, Chris, to surrender his virginity to her; in one fascinating exchange, Chris declares (sarcastically?) that he is saving himself
for his mother
, and Little Charlie chides him: “Chris, that's sick.” Another story, called “Rape—In Reverse,” featured two female hitchhikers, a handgun, a devoted family man, a motel room, and a wealth of unforgettable phrases, including “‘Let's get him onto the bed,'” “slurping madly,” and “‘Still want to be faithful to wifey?' she jeered.” My favorite story was a classic about an airline stewardess, Miss Trudy Lazlo, who leans over a first-class passenger named Dwight and affords him “a generous view of her creamy white jugs,” which he correctly takes to be an invitation to meet her in the first-class bathroom and have sex in various positions that I had trouble picturing exactly; in a surprise twist, the story ends with the jet's pilot pointing to a curtained recess “with a small mattress, at the back of the cockpit,” where Trudy wearily lies down to service him, too. I still wasn't even hormonally capable of release from the excitement of all this, but the filthiness of
Rogue
, its absolute incompatibility with my parents, who considered me their clean little boy, made me more intensely happy than any book I ever read.

 

WEIDMAN AND I
once forged notes from our respective mothers so that we could leave school at noon and watch the first Skylab liftoff. There was nothing either technological or scientific (except, in my case, animals) that Weidman and I didn't interest ourselves in. We set up competing chemistry labs, dabbled in model railroading, accumulated junked electronic equipment, played with tape recorders, worked as lab assistants, did joint science-fair projects, took classes at the Planetarium, wrote BASIC programs for the modem-driven computer terminal at school, and made fantastically flammable “liquid-fuel rockets” out of test tubes, rubber stoppers, and benzene. On my own, I subscribed to
Scientific
American
, collected rocks and minerals, became an expert on lichens, grew tropical plants from fruit seeds, sliced stuff with a microtome and put it under a microscope, performed homemade physics experiments with springs and pendular weights, and read all of Isaac Asimov's collections of popular science writings, back to back, in three weeks. My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time. My first stated career goal was “inventor.” And so my parents assumed, not implausibly, that I would become some sort of scientist. They asked Bob, who was studying medicine, what foreign language a budding scientist ought to take in high school, and he answered unequivocally: German.

 

WHEN I WAS
seven, my parents and I had gone to visit Bob at the University of Kansas. His room was in Ellsworth Hall, a teeming high-rise with harsh lighting and a pervasive locker-room smell. Following my parents into Bob's room, I saw the centerfold on his wall just as my mother cried out, in anger and disgust,
“Bob! Bob! Oh! Ugh! I can't believe you put that on your wall!”
Even apart from my mother's judgment, which I'd learned to fear greatly, the bloody reds of the pinup girl's mouth and areolas would have struck me as violent. It was as if the girl had been photographed emerging, skinny and raw and vicious, from a terrible accident that her own derangement had caused. I was scared and offended by what she was inflicting on me and what Bob was inflicting on our parents. “Jon can't be in this room,” my mother declared, turning me toward the door. Outside, she told me that she didn't understand Bob at all.

He became more discreet after that. When we returned for his graduation, three years later, he taped a construction-paper bikini onto his current pinup girl, who in any case looked to me warm and gentle and hippieish—I liked her. Bob went on to bask in my mother's approval of his decision to come home to St. Louis and go to medical school. If there were girlfriends, I never had the pleasure of meeting them.
He did, though, once, bring a med-school acquaintance home for Sunday dinner, and the friend told a story in which he mentioned lying in bed with his girlfriend. I barely even clocked this detail, but as soon as Bob was gone my mother gave me her opinion of it. “I don't know if he was trying to show off, or shock us, or act sophisticated,” she said, “but if what he said about cohabiting with his girlfriend is true, then I want you to know that I think he's an immoral person and that I'm very disappointed that Bob is friends with him, because I
categorically disapprove
of that kind of lifestyle.”

That kind of lifestyle was my brother Tom's. After the big fight with my father, he'd gone on to graduate from Rice in film studies and live in Houston slum houses with his artist friends. I was in tenth grade when he brought home one of these friends, a slender, dark-haired woman named Lulu, for Christmas. I couldn't look at Lulu without feeling as if my breath had been knocked out of me, she was so close to the ideal of casual mid-seventies sexiness. I agonized over what book to buy her for a Christmas present, to make her feel more welcome in the family. My mother, meanwhile, was practically psychotic with hatred. “‘Lulu'? ‘Lulu'? What kind of person has a name like Lulu?” She gave a creaky little laugh. “When
I
was a girl, a lulu was a crazy person! Did you know that? A
lulu
was what we called a kooky crazy person!”

A year later, when both Bob and Tom were living in Chicago and I went to see them for a weekend, my mother forbade me to stay in Tom's apartment, where Lulu also dwelt. Tom was studying film at the Art Institute, making austere non-narrative shorts with titles like “Chicago River Landscape,” and my mother sensed, accurately, that he had an unhealthy degree of influence over me. When Tom made fun of Cat Stevens, I removed Cat Stevens from my life. When Tom gave me his Grateful Dead LPs, the Dead became my favorite band, and when he cut his hair and moved on to Roxy Music and Talking Heads and DEVO, I cut my hair and followed. Seeing that he bought his clothes at Amvets, I started shopping at thrift stores. Because he lived in a city, I wanted to live
in a city; because he made his own yogurt with reconstituted milk, I wanted to make my own yogurt with reconstituted milk; because he took notes in a six-by-nine-inch ring binder, I bought a six-by-nine-inch ring binder and started a journal in it; because he made movies of industrial ruins, I bought a camera and took pictures of industrial ruins; because he lived hand to mouth and did carpentry and rehabbed apartments with scavenged materials, hand to mouth was the way I wanted to live, too. The hopelessly unattainable goddesses of my late adolescence were the art-school girls who orbited Tom in their thrift-store clothes and spiky haircuts.

 

THERE WAS NOTHING
cool about high-school German. It was the language that none of my friends were taking, and the sun-faded tourist posters in the room of the German teacher, Mrs. Fares, were not a persuasive argument for visiting Germany or falling for its culture. (This much was true of the French and Spanish rooms as well. It was as if the modern languages were so afraid of adolescent scorn that even the classrooms were forced to dress predictably—to wear posters of the bullfight, the Eiffel Tower, the castle Neuschwanstein.) Many of my classmates had German parents or grandparents, whose habits (“He likes his beer warm”) and traditions (“We have Lebkuchen at Christmas”) were of similarly negligible interest to me. The language itself, though, was a snap. It was all about memorizing four-by-four matrixes of adjective endings, and following rules. It was about grammar, which was the thing I was best at. Only the business of German gender, the seeming arbitrariness of
the
spoon and
the
fork and
the
knife,
^*
gave me fits.