And yet it
still
didn’t seem fair that the girls would be allowed out of class to learn something as mundane as how to relieve themselves.
As my friends and I waded out into the chaos, we saw the playground ladies desperately trying to restore order. These out-of-shape guardians of our recess activities were running from group to group saying such effective crowd-control phrases as “Stop that—now stop that right now” and “Boys, you leave those girls alone!” The sight of the rotund Mrs. Warner’s enormous oldwoman breasts bouncing out of control under her “World’s Greatest Grandma” sweatshirt as she chased after a gang of marauding schoolboys would have been funny had I not been so consumed with my quest to decipher what this girl-movie was really all about. It was then that Tim Stepalonis, the dirtiest and skinniest kid in our school, ran up to us with more in-depth information. Tim was a kid who always scared me because, even though he was so thin that you thought he’d snap like a Pringle if you accidentally ran into him, he had an insane quality that made him seem like he would have no qualms about one day killing you when your back was turned. It was Tim who uttered the words “Man, if I did
that
my mom would kick my
ass
” when we were shown Gene Kelly’s famous downpour dance number from
Singin’ in the Rain.
But right now, Tim was the guy with the information I desperately needed and I couldn’t have been happier to see him.
“You wanna know what that movie they watched was about?” Tim asked, out of breath from running to us, clearly relishing the information he held.
“Yeah, was it about going to the bathroom?” asked Art uncertainly, sounding almost fearful of hearing that it was anything more complicated.
Tim got a scary smile and said, “No, it was about them having their
periods.
” The way he said that sentence made it clear that this was information we were supposed to find very funny and forbidden. Unfortunately, his factoid landed on the wrong ears. My group of cartoon-watching misfits and I stared at him, unified in our shared misconception, all puzzling over the suggestion that the movie was about punctuation for females. Tim immediately knew we had no idea what he was talking about and shook his head.
“Don’t you know what a girl’s
period
is?” he asked, incredulous. He said the word
period
as if he were saying the word
boobs
or
vagina,
two terms that all nine-year-old boys take great pleasure in overpronouncing.
“
Yes,
of
course
I do.” Mike was loath to admit that he didn’t know something, especially when it was something so clearly subversive as this mysterious girls’ “period.”
“Yeah? Then what is it?” Tim smiled smugly. He knew he had us all.
“Just tell us, Stepalonis,” Mike said, too curious to be embarrassed about his failed attempt to make himself seem learned.
“It’s when girls bleed out of their va-
gi
-nas.”
I can’t speak for my compatriots, but I know that the wave of horror that overtook me in that moment was as strong and mind-altering as the time I saw my next-door neighbor’s mother accidentally step on a large praying mantis in our driveway. “Why do they bleed?” I squeaked out, my head spinning.
“Because all girls do. That’s how they have
babies,
you retard.”
It’s hard to describe the dizzying assault of images that flashed through my brain at that moment; overscratched mosquito bites, scraped bleeding knees, and uncontrollable nosebleeds were among the highlights. But the most disturbing was the memory of something I had recently seen in a movie preview. The local Standard gas station by our house used to give away free passes to kids for a movie program that the Macomb Mall sponsored every Saturday morning. I used to go because the movie was generally along the lines of those harmless Disney
Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar
–type films, the ones in which a rambunctious forest creature would befriend a park ranger and reek madcap havoc upon an outpost’s flour sack. But the previous week they had shown a trailer for the film
Dracula—Prince of Darkness.
And in it, Dracula had a woman hanging upside down over a white cement floor and before my mind could process what I was seeing, Dracula snatched a sword from its scabbard and swung it toward the woman’s neck, whereupon the film cut to a shot of the white floor and then a tidal wave of blood pouring down on top of it. So disturbing was the image to me that, as I watched the zany misadventures of a pair of bear cubs in the low-rent Canadian nature film that was the feature presentation, all I could see were flashes of the crimson cascade that Dracula had caused. Even an adorable pair of gingham-stealing chipmunks didn’t cheer me up, as I was now fixated on the thought that the chipmunks and the bears and even the befuddled forest ranger were also filled with copious amounts of blood. I felt faint envisioning that if Dracula were to show up and perform his dirty work, I’d be watching oceans of bear and chipmunk and ranger blood stain the meadows of golden wheat through which they were currently romping. The image haunted me all week and yet today that splattering blood wasn’t part of a movie anymore. It was something I was now convinced I’d be witnessing on my wedding night.
Tim didn’t really have much more of an explanation regarding a girl’s period than simply giving it a name, and, from the looks on our faces, it was clear that none of us really wanted to know much more than that. I could tell that we were all dealing with this disturbing news in our own private way, bringing to it whatever personal plasma imagery we had available to us.
The conversation for the rest of recess was strained and awkward. When I got home that afternoon, I was tempted to ask my mom to explain the science of girls’ periods to me but quickly decided that it was something I didn’t really need or want to know for the next fifteen years. And even if I did, it was definitely
not
something I wanted to have my own mother explain to me as she stood in the kitchen mixing the ingredients to make a Texas sheet cake. And so I decided then and there to put the whole thing out of my mind by convincing myself that Tim Stepalonis was just crazy and wrong.
But a strange seed had been planted that day, a bipolar idea that a girl was both something I wanted to possess entirely and, at the same time, a thing of horrifying mystery, a blood-and-guts time bomb that seemed to be constantly ticking, always moments away from peeing unnaturally or unleashing a sea of blood or excreting a baby or any number of off-putting biological processes. The world of girlfriends and hand-holding and kissing and romance that I had so wanted to be a part of now looked like it might be a lot more
Dracula—Prince of Darkness
and a lot less
Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar.
I was starting to understand why other boys my age didn’t like girls. It wasn’t because of “cooties” or toughness or genetics but because of fear. We had never understood the way girls thought and now we had no idea how they even worked.
And yet, I couldn’t deny that for all the strange things that must be going on
inside
girls, everything on the outside of them was far too powerful to walk away from. Like it or not, my fate was set. The fear would have to be overcome and the girls would have to be understood. Just not that day.
But I had a feeling it would all be worth it. After all, Dracula may have been scary, but let’s face it. The guy was a perpetual bachelor.
LITTLE LEAGUE FAUNTLEROY
I
’ve never been much for sports.
This doesn’t mean I haven’t tried. Throughout my life, I’ve attempted on several occasions to do two things—smoke cigarettes and watch sports. And both quests have always proven to be miserable failures. Because of a nicotine allergy, any awkwardly held cigarette I have disaffectedly tried to smoke has resulted in over two hours of chronic nausea and dizziness, erasing any cool quotient I was hoping the “butt” would lend me. James Dean I was not on the numerous occasions that I would smoke a cigarette and then have to sit on a curb with my head between my knees trying not to pass out as my friends looked on, unsure if I was on death’s doorstep or just suffering from terminal loser disease. And because of a lack of competitive spirit and a short attention span, coupled with an overriding inability to figure out why teams of men scoring points should have any importance in my life, I’ve just never been able to get into sports, either.
I think part of the problem is that in order to enjoy watching sports, one must enjoy
playing
sports. And as my ill-fated encounters with kickball, softball, tetherball, basketball, dodgeball, and any other activity that ends in the letters
all
(or
olf,
for that matter) have shown, I enjoy playing sports about as much as I enjoy slamming my fingers in a car door.
It’s not for lack of trying. Once, when I was ten, at the prodding of my father, I joined Little League. I liked the idea of it, having enjoyed attending Tiger baseball games in Detroit. However, in retrospect, I think it was the consumption of hot dogs, the purchase of giant sponge “We’re Number One” hands, and being allowed to scream at the top of my lungs without getting in trouble and not the game itself that held the greatest allure for me. When I put my Little League uniform on for the first time, I was convinced that because I was dressed appropriately, I would be an immediate baseball prodigy. There are pictures of me in our family album posing in my living room with my uniform on, mitt on hand, hat on head, crouched in an enthusiastic attempt to look like I was ready to field a line drive. The clueless toothy smile on my face is quite ironic now, since my single season in Little League turned out to be nothing short of a nightmare.
On the first day of Little League training, I went merrily up to home plate and quickly learned that I was terrified that a kid my age was now about to hurl an object with the density of a billiard ball straight at me. I hunched over the plate, wiggling the bat back and forth over my head, not because I was tensing my muscles in preparation to swing the bat, but simply because I had seen Al Kaline do it for years and figured I was supposed to do it, too. The pitcher wound up and threw a meteor my way, and I immediately jumped back about five feet as the ball smacked loudly into the catcher’s mitt, sending out an ominous cloud of dust that seemed to say “This dust could have been your pulverized head, man.” My teammates laughed derisively and I suddenly felt like I wanted to quit the team.
“Feig, what are you doing?” yelled the coach. “Stay in the batter’s box.”
I looked at him and nodded dumbly. Figuring that maybe it was simply the shock of the first pitch that spooked me, I stepped back in, hunched over, and wiggled my bat over my head again, albeit this time with a little less enthusiasm.
The pitcher wound up and fired another rocket in my direction. Long-dormant primitive survival sensors deep inside my brain, which had once saved my caveman ancestors from saber-toothed tigers and flying rocks, lit up and screamed at me that I was in mortal danger. I once again leapt out of the box, and thus began a monthlong battle between the coach and myself to keep me from jumping away from the plate.
“Feig! Stay in there!”
“Feig! Lean in on that ball. It’s not gonna bite you!”
“Feig! Goddamn it, stay in the goddamn batter’s box!”
Now, look. I’m the first to admit when I’m being a big baby, but I don’t think I was in the wrong on this one. I mean, this wasn’t the major leagues. Kids were always making mistakes, and none of the ten-year-olds I knew were truly in control of anything their bodies did. So why would a kid, just by virtue of the fact that he had the title “pitcher” in front of his name, be any less apt to have a moment of bad aim and accidentally drill a hard ball into my head? He wouldn’t, as far as I was concerned. But according to my coach, this never happened.
“Look, Feig, these guys are
trained
pitchers. I work with them day in and day out on their control. They can hit any spot they aim at. That’s their job. And so the only thing they’re going to hit when they pitch to you is the catcher’s mitt, since there’s no danger of them hitting your bat when you’re running away from the plate like a little girl.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, Coach, but I seem to recall seeing a lot of major league players being hit by pitches. The image of a ball caroming off a batter’s helmet, the player then slumping lifelessly to the ground and subsequently being carried off the field on a stretcher to a round of pity applause from the crowd, had been burned into my brain many times via the local sportscaster on our evening news, who would always preface the clip with the phrase “Some scary footage from Tiger Stadium tonight.” And now that I was standing at the plate feeling that ball whiz by, emitting much the same whistling sound I always imagined an African tribesman’s spear would make nanoseconds before it pierced my chest, I had the distinct feeling that I was being conned by a guy who didn’t really like me.
“Do I
have
to bat?” I would plead. “Can’t I let someone
else
do it for me? I don’t mind.”
The coach sighed and gave me a long, searching look. I could tell he wanted more than anything to just buy me a dress and pom-poms and let me cheer the team on from the sidelines, but because his job was to provide all of us with athletic training and help our self-esteem, he quickly regrouped.
“Okay, Feig, here’s what I want you to do. When you go home tonight, get your dad to go out onto the driveway with you. Get a bunch of tennis balls and stand against your garage door. Then have your dad throw the tennis balls at you as hard as he can while you dodge out of the way. You’ll get used to it in no time and then you’ll see it’s not such a big deal. I did the same thing with my boy last season.”
The pity I felt for his son at that moment was immense. The thought of this grown man putting his poor kid up against a garage door and then cathartically hurling tennis balls at him seemed more like something that should merit a visit from Child Services than self-congratulation. I’d hate to see what happened if his kid ever told him he was afraid of guns.
With the horror of his sadistic tennis-ball scheme fresh in my mind, combined with a fear that somehow he’d call my dad and actually convince him to do it, I vowed to stand my ground in the batter’s box for the next pitch. I got in my stance and actually forced myself to lean into the plate, attempting to disconnect my danger sensors for the next few seconds. The pitcher sized me up as I forced myself to envision fluffy clouds, soft feather pillows, and oversize Nerf balls lazily drifting into my bat. The pitcher went into his windup and threw a screaming fastball that curved toward me like a guided missile and promptly hit me like a bullet right in my butt. Before I could even react in pain, the coach rushed over and grabbed me and started rubbing my butt vigorously, as if he were sure I was going to burst out crying and somehow his therapeutic touch could stop it.
“Okay, okay, you’re all right, you’re all right,” he said quickly with a tone that had absolutely no concern for my well-being and everything to do with avoiding a potential lawsuit. The irony was that it actually didn’t hurt that much, since the ball had hit me right in the fleshiest part of my butt cheek. But the fact that a grown man was now rubbing my hinder with a big fake reassuring smile on his face made me wish the ball had hit me in the head and knocked me unconscious.
Amazingly enough, my encounter with the baseball, coupled with the creepy feeling I got from the coach’s manhandling of my ass, actually did slightly lessen my fear of being pitched to. Which was unfortunate because now that I could stay in the batter’s box, there was no real excuse for the fact that I couldn’t hit a ball with a bat any more than I could tear a telephone book in half with my bare hands.
Once the season began and our actual games started, I quickly realized that I hated everything about Little League. It was hot and depressing to stand out in the sun that long, I couldn’t catch a ball to save my life, I constantly swung the bat too hard and would always miss and spin around and fall over like a ten-year-old Bowery drunk, and even the fun of chanting “Hey, batter batter, hey, batter batter,
swing
!” and “Cheer cheer cheer, the pitcher’s full of beer / That’s not all, the catcher’s full of al-co-hol” couldn’t make those endless games go by any quicker or easier. My teammates clearly hated me because to them I represented nothing more than a guaranteed error or an automatic out. I
wanted
out and all I could see was a season’s worth of tedium and humiliation stretching ahead of me like miles of unpaved road. At night, I would look at those early pictures of me in my uniform posing in the living room with my big I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-getting-myself-into smile and think, What a dope.
As my mother and I were heading to my third regular season game, I looked up at the sky and decided that the few fluffy white clouds amidst the sea of sunny blue were indicators that a massive rainstorm was on its way to wash out our game, so there was really no sense in driving the three blocks to the diamond to check with my coach to see if the game was going to be called. My mother, who hated sitting in the hard sun-baked bleachers, who hated having to listen to the complaints of my teammates’ mothers whenever I would leave one of them stranded on second base, and who hated having to watch me play Little League as much as I hated playing it, agreed with me that the weather looked ominous. And so the two of us merrily headed off to the local mall to eat Coney Island hot dogs and shop for clothes. This led to my missing the next three games as my mother and I became very adept at weather prediction, psychically foretelling impending storms out of clear blue skies. Our predictions never seemed to pan out, but I was more than happy to admit my mistake as I merrily sipped an Orange Julius and proudly wore my Little League uniform as I walked around an air-conditioned mall instead of standing on a humidity- and humiliation-soaked baseball diamond.
Unfortunately, all good things do come to an end and my good thing ended when the coach called my father to find out where I had been for the past four games. My dad, unaware that we had not been attending, gave both my mother and me a stern talking-to about the evils of avoiding hard work and about the importance of seeing things to which you had committed yourself through to the end, whether you liked them or not. We both nodded in shame, embarrassed at having been caught but mostly depressed that more bleachers and painful moments of nonathleticism were in our respective futures.
When I returned to my team for the next game, one of my teammates asked me where I’d been for all the games I’d missed.
“Oh, my mom made me go shopping,” I said with a shrug. The kid stared at me as if I’d just told him I’d been out kissing guys.
“Your mom made you go
shopping?
” he said incredulously.
I felt trouble a-brewin’ and knew I had to blame the whole thing on my mother. “Yeah, you know,” I said with a Kabuki-like eye gesture that was supposed to say “You know how goofy moms can be.”
The kid immediately called over to the rest of the team. “Hey, you guys, Feig missed all those games to go
shopping,
” at which point the whole team came over and started laughing and shoving me around.
“Oh my God, Feig. You’re such a fag.”
“Did you buy a dress, Fag Newton?”
“I bet the homo bought a purse.”
Ah, the camaraderie of your teammates.
It wasn’t until the final third of the season that something actually respectable happened to me. By that point, I had become the clown prince of our team, my skills in the field and at the plate so woefully inadequate that I almost became the team’s mascot, much the same way that a group of nice, cool guys will take the school’s retarded kid under their wing out of one part compassion and five parts amusement at his uncontrollable antics. I had dropped so many fly balls and tripped over so many bases and ducked away from so many line drives that I think the guys felt it was a little like having the San Diego Chicken on their team. If they didn’t expect too much out of me except laughs, then they were usually satisfied. I had become the Designated Boob.
And that’s why it was so surprising to everyone that during this one game, by a string of miracles, I had actually made it to third base. It had not come without a price. I had gotten to first base after being hit by a pitch in my upper thigh, then had advanced to second only after a line drive nearly took my head off, then stumbled my way onto third off a hit my teammates and the parents in the stands made me abundantly aware I could have easily run to home plate on. As I stood on third base, with the coach standing five feet away yelling, “Now, pay attention to everything I say—if I tell you to run, then you’d better run,” the enthusiastic Paul Feig who months earlier had put on his uniform for the first time and dreamed of being the Most Valuable Player for the Clinton Township Little League Association slowly started to come back to life. It was the realization that I could possibly score a run without having to do anything other than sprint to home plate that made me think I should actually try and enjoy this moment. And so I went into my best one-foot-on-the-bag/the-other-foot-ready-to-spring-down-the-line pose, arms and fingers extended east and west, tensed and ready for action. I had no idea exactly when I should run if the ball were to be hit, but I figured that if I did indeed pay attention to everything the coach said, I might actually be able to do something competent for the first time in my baseball career.