Spanking Shakespeare (12 page)

My brother doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then he smiles. “You shouldn’t have told me,” he says. “Now I’m gonna fuck with you all through dinner.”

“What? You better not.”

He rubs his hands together. “Oh, this is gonna be sweet.”

“You’re an asshole,” I say.

Aunt Sylvia is my father’s older sister. She does not have her own family, having never married, so she spends a good deal of time annoying my family instead. Dinner with her will be a torturous affair of listening to her boring stories and answering her boring questions and watching her talk with food in her mouth. Between Sylvia and my brother, I realize I am doomed.

We end up eating at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. We are sitting at a round table, with my mother on one side of me and my brother on the other. From the moment we sit down I begin to feel boxed in, and when my aunt Sylvia begins chattering on about her taxi ride from the airport, I have to restrain myself from jumping up and running outside. As Sylvia goes on and on, my mind begins to drift, and suddenly I remember that earlier in the day I was sucking on my shirt in Danny Anderson’s bathroom. The memory comes so suddenly and so vividly that I actually let out a burst of laughter.

“What’s so funny?” my mother asks.

By the way everyone is staring at me, I realize I have probably yelped at an extremely inappropriate moment.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

They stare at me a little longer, and then Sylvia says, “It was the most awful thing I have ever seen.”

She is referring to a car accident she has been describing, but at the moment I am feeling so paranoid that I automatically assume she is referring to my rude interruption.

“I’m really sorry,” I say. “Sometimes I just laugh without knowing.”

Everybody is staring at me strangely, which I interpret to mean that I am not making any sense and need to explain myself more clearly. Unfortunately, I discover that trying to explain something clearly when you’re stoned is about as easy as driving a school bus full of screaming children through an obstacle course blindfolded.

Still, I plunge ahead. “Like one time I was with my friends, I mean, they’re not exactly my friends…well, one of them is, and then it was his older brother and one of his older brother’s friends. But they go to the same school—well, now they’ve graduated, but then we all went to the same school. And we were at the park and the same thing happened.”

Blank stares. I am not making sense. I need to do a better job explaining.

“What are you talking about?” my father asks.

I realize my mind has gone blank. “Wait, what was I talking about?”

“You were telling some story about your friends at the park,” Sylvia says helpfully.

“Friends at the park?” I try desperately to remember.

“Yeah,” my brother says in a superfast voice. “Youandyourfriendsatthepark.”

“Shut up,” I say, punching him in the arm.

“What’s the matter with the two of you?” my father says sternly.

“Nothing,” my brother says.

The waitress brings the menus, and I immediately take refuge behind mine.

Next to me, behind his own menu, my brother is whispering so only I can hear.

“Munchies. Munchy munchies.”

“Shut up,” I hiss.

“Would you like some gnocchi?” he whispers. “Munchy gnocchi?”

I try to ignore him.

“Isn’t that a funny word?
Gnocchi.
Gnocchi, gnocchi.”

“You’re an asshole,” I mutter, and angle myself away from him.

I am having a lot of trouble concentrating on the menu and finally decide it will be easiest just to order what I usually get, which is lasagna and a Caesar salad. The problem is I’m stoned, and this is making me feel like I can eat everything on the menu. Would it be strange to order onion rings, too? The thought of biting into an onion ring dipped in ketchup is making me very excited.

“Are you ready, Shakespeare?” I look up and see that the waiter is at the table and that it’s my turn to order. Everyone is staring at me.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll have the lasagna and a Caesar salad.”

The waiter nods and writes my order.

“And can I have a side order of onion rings?” I say, feeling extremely self-conscious.

Gandhi bursts out laughing.

“Onion rings?” my mother gasps. “With lasagna?”

The waiter stops writing and looks up, waiting to see if I intend to change my order. This whole dinner is going from bad to worse, and we have barely been here ten minutes, though it feels like ten hours.

“Shakespeare, you’re not really ordering lasagna and onion rings, are you?” my mother asks.

“Let him order what he wants,” my father says.

“It is rather strange,” Sylvia says.

“I’ll have the gnocchi,” my brother says.

We finish ordering, and I beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom to avoid getting embroiled in a table-wide conversation about my eating habits. I stand in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror and take a few deep breaths. “This sucks,” I say out loud, then laugh, then become wholly absorbed in studying different facial expressions I can make. “Stop,” I command myself. “Get it together. Just go out, eat dinner, and act normal.”

There are moments in life when we are confronted with nightmarish situations, and somehow, from somewhere, we find the strength and courage and resolve to meet these situations head-on and emerge unscathed. As I walk back to the table, I do so with a determination that I can make it through this dinner, that life will return to normal, and that years from now I will be able to look back on this evening with a sense of pride and accomplishment.

I sit down. Everybody at the table is looking at me. “What?” I say, suddenly nervous and on guard.

“Shakespeare, are you stoned?” my mother asks.

The question hits me like a sledgehammer. I sit stunned for a moment by the force of the blow. Then I feel a smile creep across my face. I feel myself begin to nod, and a voice that sounds curiously like my own says, “I’m stoned out of my mind right now.”

My brother’s jaw drops. Sylvia gasps. My mother seems frozen, completely at a loss for words. My father lets out a little chuckle before he catches himself and tries to look stern.

What can they do? We are out at a restaurant, we have already ordered, and my mother would rather eat shoe polish than cause a scene in public.

“We’ll discuss this when we get home,” she finally says.

We eat most of the meal in silence, though my brother keeps looking at me with newfound respect. My onion rings and lasagna are delicious, but by the time we leave my high has worn off and I am feeling sluggish and bloated.

Over the weekend, my mother tries to talk to me about what happened at dinner, and my reluctance to go into it convinces her more than ever that I have larger issues I’m not dealing with.

“Are you depressed?” she asks me several times.

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“I really think you should see a therapist,” she says.

I shake my head. “Would you drop that already?”

“Just go once,” she says. “If you hate it, you don’t have to go back.”

“Why don’t you send Gandhi to therapy? He smokes more pot than I do.”

“I’d like him to go, too,” she says. “But right now we’re talking about you.”

I’m tired of arguing with my mother. Would it be so bad to go once? I wonder. I mean, there is something appealing about getting to unload all my issues on someone anonymous and seeing how he reacts.

“Who’s the therapist?” I ask. “Not yours.”

“No,” my mother says quickly. “She recommended one of her colleagues.”

“You’ve talked about this with your therapist?” I am not really upset, but I don’t want to make this too easy on her.

She gives me a guilty look. “I just think it’s important.”

My mother knows I will eventually give in, because it is not in my nature to fight. She knows that deep down I am probably not as resistant to therapy as I pretend to be, and that I am fascinated by the fact that I had a therapist when I was four. What she does not know is that I have actually seen a therapist since that time, and though it was only one visit, the experience was one of the few shining moments in my life.

THE TIME I VISITED A SEX DOCTOR

I was getting near the end of tenth grade, and my hormones were in a state of frenzy.

“Feed us!” they screamed.

I masturbated constantly—seven, eight, nine times a day, even more on weekends. The way chain-smokers smoke, the way alcoholics drink, that’s the way I masturbated.

“My hormones are out of control,” I told my friend Neil. “I’m masturbating nonstop.”

He was sitting on my bed, looking through a box of CDs. “So what, it’s normal for asexually frustrated fifteen-year-old boy to whack off. I did it myself last night.” He looked up and smiled in fond recollection.

“Neil, I’m not talking about once or twice a day, here. I’m out of control.”

He pulled a CD from the box and studied it. “Well, how often are you doing it?”

I didn’t want to tell him the truth, because the truth seemed so out of the bounds of normal behavior that I was afraid even Neil, who was probably the biggest freak on the planet, might not be able to handle it.

“Three times a day?” he asked, looking up.

I shrugged.

“More? How much?”

I did not respond, and his eyes opened wide.

“Four? Five?” His voice was rising in volume.

“Would you keep it down,” I hissed.

“SIX?”

I didn’t like how excited he was becoming. “A lot, okay?”

He slid off the bed and stood facing me. “What’s the most times you’ve ever masturbated in one day?”

“Neil, you’re supposed to be helping me,” I said in an exasperated voice.

He picked up a calculator from my desk. “More than ten times?”

“Neil!”

“What do you think the world record is?” His voice brimmed with excitement. “You could be famous.”

“I doubt they have a world record for whacking off,” I said.

“They might.” He held up the calculator.

“How many times do you think you can do it in a day?”

I could see where this conversation was going and I refused to get sucked in. “Neil, I want to figure out how to masturbate less, not more.”

He looked like I had just popped his favorite balloon.

“C’mon, Neil, you’re the only person who can help me.”

He studied me for a moment and then nodded. “Okay,” he said, “let me think.”

I watched Neil close his eyes and stand absolutely still for what seemed like a full minute. I was about to ask if he was okay when a smile curled over his face and he opened his eyes.

“A support group,” he said.

“What?”

“You know, like Alcoholics Anonymous.”

I laughed. “I doubt they have a group like that for people who masturbate too much.”

“Well,” he said, “I think it’s worth looking into.”

“What do you want me to do, walk into a group of total strangers and say, ‘Hello, my name is Shakespeare Shapiro and it’s been three hours since the last time I whacked off’? No way.”

Still, that afternoon Neil and I sat in my room with the Yellow Pages. We looke dunder
M
for masturbation, under
P
for personal satisfaction and perversion, under
S
for self-love, but we couldn’t find anything. I was ready to give up when Neil saw an ad under S for sexual counseling and therapy.

“Bingo,” he said. “Just what you need.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think this is for people like me.”

“Just call the number,” he said, handing me his cell phone. “What harm could it do?”

Because I was someone whose entire life had consisted of one catastrophe after another, I had learned to exercise the most extreme caution. If my mother asked me to go to the store, for example, I would prepare myself to be mugged, to get hit by a bus, or to knock over a shelf of condoms with several of my teachers looking on in horror. Clearly, then, I was not going to do something as rash and reckless as calling a number for sexual counseling and therapy.

“If you call, I’ll go with you,” Neil said.

I shook my head. “No way.”

“I’ll even make the call for you.” Neil reached out for his phone.

I held it away from him. “I’m not going.”

“I’ll pay for half of it.”

Was he serious? “Why are you so excited about this?” I asked suspiciously.

Neil’s voice dripped with feeling, like a bad actor delivering his final soliloquy. “I need this, Shakespeare,” he said. “The most exciting part of my day is comparing bowel movements with you. Please, can’t we go see the sex doctor? Please?”

Dr. Melody Harmony’s office was in a large building where many doctors rented office space. If you looked at the lobby directory, everybody was listed alphabetically with what kind of doctor they were next to their name. Dr. Melody Harmony, sexual counseling, was on the second floor, office number 217.

“Here it is,” Neil said excitedly.

I felt gas pains in my stomach. I needed to spend about thirty minutes on the toilet. I let out a few small farts.

The waiting room was almost entirely red, with pornographic magazines spread out across the table.

Neil went to the receptionist and came back with a form for me to fill out. Most of it was basic stuff: name, address, Social Security number. Then came a list of questions regarding my sexual history. Was I married? Was I sexually active? How often did I have sex? Did I ever have problems achieving or maintaining an erection? Was I taking any performance-enhancing medication?

“This is crazy,” I said to Neil. “I’m getting out of here.”

Neil grabbed my arm. “You can’t leave now. We’d still have to pay for the appointment. And think of the stories we’ll have to tell.” He helped me finish filling out the form and brought it back to the receptionist.

A few minutes later, a door opened, and a large woman with a low-cut orange blouse, shiny red fingernails, a lipsticky smile, and gargantuan breasts came out.

“Which one of you is Shakespeare?” she asked, looking at us.

I got up slowly.

She smiled. “Right this way.”

“Can he come, too?” I asked.

“Well,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”

Neil jumped up, and Dr. Harmony ushered us into her office and closed the door.

We sat down, and she sat directly in front of us. I tried unsuccessfully to look everywhere except at her cleavage. Neil had his mouth slightly open and seemed to be in some kind of a trance.

Dr. Harmony let out a little laugh. “Come on, boys, we’re never going to get anywhere if all you do is sit there staring at my breasts.”

We both blushed and looked at the floor.

“Oh, don’t be embarrassed,” she said.

“It’s perfectly natural for boys your age to be fascinated by breasts, especially ones as big as mine. Now just relax and tell me why you’re here.”

What could I say? I looked over at Neil for support, but he was still staring hard at the ground, trying desperately not to fall under the power of those enormous breasts again.

“Let me help,” Dr. Harmony said kindly. She looked over the form we had filled out in the waiting room. “It says here that you’ve been feeling some things that don’t seem normal.”

I nodded.

“And have you been feeling those feelings, too?” she asked Neil.

He looked up, startled. “No, of course not. Those are his answers, not mine. I just came with him. I’m fine.”

Dr. Harmony laughed. “Come now, there’s no reason to be ashamed. We’re all friends here.” She paused. “What’s your name?”

“Neil.”

“Don’t you ever get those feelings, Neil?”

“Sometimes, but not as much as him,” Neil sputtered.

Dr. Harmony looked at us both for a longtime. “Have you talked to each other about these feelings?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Kind of, I guess.”

Neil looked at me. “But you still haven’t told me how often you do it.”

“Why are you so damn interested? Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”

“Not as weird as whacking off ten times a day.”

I felt my cheeks beginning to burn. “I don’t whack off ten times a day.”

“What, nine, then? You said you do it all the time.”

“At least I don’t keep written records of every time I take a crap.”

Neil’s mouth hung open for a second, and he looked at me in horror. “Well, at least I don’t go to porno movies with my grandmother.”

“Slow down, boys,” Dr. Harmony said. She was writing furiously. “I want to make sure I get all this.”

Her voice snapped us out of it, and we looked at each other, shamefaced, then dropped our eyes to the floor, mortified by our performance.

“I should probably go,” Neil said, standing up.

“Me too,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” Dr. Harmony said.

“We’re just starting to make some progress.”

All I wanted to do was escape from that office. Every ounce of my being was concentrated on getting to the door. I would have left a little finger behind if it meant getting out more quickly. Neil was two steps ahead of me.

“Sit down,” Dr. Harmony commanded.

We sat. I couldn’t sink much lower. I stared at her cleavage and imagined curling myself up in a fetal position between those colossal breasts.

“Now,” she said. “Let’s look at what’s happening here. You two are best friends, right?”

We looked at each other and shrugged.

“And now you’re starting to realize that maybe the feelings you have for each other go beyond normal friendship.”

Our heads snapped up as if jerked by a chain. “WHAT?!”

“It’s totally normal for close friends to become confused about their feelings for each other from time to time.”

“We’re not…,” I sputtered.

“You think we’re…,” Neil gasped.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Go ahead and tell each other how you feel.”

And as I sat there, absorbing the full meaning of what Dr. Harmony was saying, I felt myself beginning to relax. If it was normal to fall in love with your best friend, then maybe my problems weren’t so serious after all.

I turned and looked at him, and he smiled at me and winked. Then he nodded solemnly, closed his eyes, and took a few deep breaths. Quietly, very quietly, without opening his eyes, he said, “I do feel confused sometimes.”

Dr. Harmony nodded. “Good, Neil. Very good. What about you, Shakespeare? What do you want to say to Neil?”

I had to muster every ounce of self-control not to burst out laughing. I shrugged and looked at the floor.

Dr. Harmony sat and waited.

“Sometimes it hurts,” I said.

Dr. Harmony nodded. “Yes. When we hold in our feelings, it just makes us hurt more inside.”

“I said we could use Vaseline,” Neil said.

I put my hand on his arm. “You know I don’t like how it feels.”

Dr. Harmony nearly choked on her pen. “I—I didn’t realize…,” she stuttered.

We both started to laugh, and her face slowly registered comprehension.

“Very funny, boys.”

We laughed harder.

She let us laugh ourselves out, and then she looked at her watch. “Well,” she said,

“I guess that’s about all the time we have.”

We got up to leave, feeling incredibly smug and self-satisfied. It was a sunny day out side, and as we wandered home, talking and laughing, I thought to myself that life was good, and it was good to be me.