Everything Is Wrong with Me

by Jason Mulgrew

  After being treated to Carlos’s gorilla-bird, I again examined my own bird, which looked even smaller now than it had before I saw his. I had not seen another penis before, so I had nothing to compare mine to. But the differences were clear after that encounter at the urinal. Carlos’s penis was a highlighter; mine was a pen cap. Carlos’s was a lightbulb; mine was a light switch. Carlos’s was the thermos that clanged around all day long in my lunch box; mine was the Hershey Kiss that had melted sometime during social studies.

  Carlos, God bless his Puerto Rican–type heart, made no mention of my penile inadequacy. He zipped up, flushed, and promptly walked out of the bathroom and back to class. But he didn’t need to say anything else. For the first time, I realized that my dick was tiny. If Carlos’s penis was what other guys’ birds looked like, I was in for a lifetime of emotional pain and humiliation. Mind you, this was before I knew that penises were for sex, and yet I still was horribly dismayed by the inadequate size of mine, based on my preternatural understanding that in all things, bigger was better. What I had dangling between (or rather, sticking out above) my legs was not up to par. From this point forward, my life would be nothing more than a litany of excuses and apologies on account of my lil’ bird, whether they be directed to the women I’d be unable to please, or those frat brothers who paid me fourteen dollars to see it in 2006.*

  I may not remember my first day of class, the days either of my siblings were born, or even my first kiss. But I will always remember seeing Carlos’s ginormous hog at the urinal next to mine in first grade. The doubts that his Powerade bottle–penis instilled in me would remain with me for years, and would be buttressed when my family made the decision to get “the chip,” thus heightening my hysteria and all but confirming my greatest fear.**

  Whether the chip was an actual chip or a code or a cut wire, I’m not sure. Regardless, it was a contrivance that allowed a household to steal cable. How it worked was that one of your uncle’s friends, usually a shady alcoholic quite like your uncle, came into your house and finagled with your cable box. After hitting on the woman of the house and drinking five beers in twenty minutes, he’d take his $120 fee and it was all done. That household now had unlimited access to all the premium cable channels, like HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax. Not only that, but the chip also gave free access to pay-per-view events like boxing and wrestling and such. And, most important, the chip meant that I now had access to not one, not two, but three porno channels: the Playboy Channel (channel 35), Adam & Eve (channel 77), and the Spice Channel (channel 78).

  In sixth grade, my family got the chip, one of the first in the neighborhood to do so. * At that age, I felt about porn the same way I felt about crack: it was out there, it was dangerous, and it would ultimately ruin you. Blame this on my Irish Catholic upbringing and schooling, but pornography scared the hell out of me, especially when I knew I had unlimited access to it. Evil was right there, in my own home, and its presence alone nearly drove me to confession. I wanted no part of pornography.

  That is until, you know, I actually started watching it.

  One day after school, with my sister with a babysitter, my brother who knows where*, and my mother at work, curiosity got the best of me and I turned to channel 78, the Spice Channel, just to take a peek.

  Less than two seconds after putting it on, I changed the channel away from the Spice Channel. That brief glimpse of porn was a standard girl-on-girl scene, one that I’ve seen about a million times since (and about thirty to forty times today). But this first exposure was shocking. One thing I later learned about the Spice Channel in comparison to the Playboy Channel (which didn’t show penetration) and the Adam & Eve channel (which didn’t show “pop shots”—the man ejaculating on the woman’s stomach, back, chest, face, eyes, or hair) is that the Spice Channel didn’t pull any punches. It was far and away the most X-rated of the three channels. When I turned to channel 78, I was treated to a giant close-up of a vagina, being less than lovingly caressed by another woman. I still consider vaginas one of the most terrifying things on the planet,* so this extreme close-up of a region that I barely knew existed was not an ideal introduction to the female sex. Then and there, I made a promise that I would never put on the porno channel again.

  And for a few days, I didn’t. But the next time I had the whole house to myself, I tuned in again. On that afternoon, I learned two more important life lessons:

  This whole “free porn” thing was going to work out just fine. Once I got over my initial jitters, I sat there Indian-style on the floor, flipping between channels 35, 77, and 78, watching different scenes and different scenarios, taking it all in, learning, growing, living, and nearly ripping my poor penis off (after the second round, it became unclear whether I was masturbating or seizing). I’m surprised that detectives from the Special Victims Unit didn’t show up at my door and arrest me for penile endangerment. I actually don’t even like talking about this, since I still feel a tremendous amount of guilt for my actions on that afternoon. It got a little out of control.

  What I suspected before was now official: I had the smallest bird in the world. While I never forgot the lesson I had learned the day Carlos Flores showed me his forearm-esque penis, I had finally been able to push it to the back of my mind. My small bird would forever be my cross to bear, but it was also still my secret—Carlos had left school and taken the events of that day with him, and since then I hadn’t been in a situation where someone saw my bird. In time, I thought about my little penis less and less.

  But porn changed all that. The guys in the pornos that I watched that afternoon had not penises, but PENISES. Like Carlos, their birds seemed to be not mere appendages, but rather freestanding entities that could make positive contributions to society under the right circumstances, as carpenters, karate instructors, or politicians.

  And the women in the pornos were obviously enjoying these penises. What I found menacing, they thought was just the tops. Now that I was old enough to realize that my bird would eventually be counted on to make a woman happy (or at least not completely bored and/or shameful), the notion that women wanted giant dicks depressed the hell out of me. How would I ever be able to please a woman with this half-pinkie I had for a bird? What woman would be able to find enjoyment from something that she needed to find with a flashlight and a pair of eyebrow tweezers? Not only that, would I even be able to have sex at all? The mechanics of sex confused me. How would I, with what I had, even be able to get the proper amount of penetration necessary to establish the very basics of sex? From what I learned from the porno channels, in my case it would be like sticking a Jolly Rancher into a bowl of oatmeal.

  These questions would haunt me, keep me awake at night, make me doubt my very manhood. Until my thief friend helped me answer them.

  Stealing was what Ronnie White did best. It seemed like each kid in my eighth-grade class had a personality trait or hobby that defined him or her—Timmy Cooper the Gay, Cheryl Baker the Girl with Giant Boobs, Chris Turner the Kid That Fell off Batting Cages, Janine Harris the Black Girl—and Ronnie was definitely the Thief. Ronnie looked like a marine, with his crew cut, his thin, wiry frame, and his intense gaze, but he was a very affable guy whose ability to laugh at himself made him fun to be around. And of course, there was the stealing.

  Ronnie stole everything. He was just as likely to rob Tower Records of CDs and movies as he was to steal plastic hangers and cough medicine from CVS. There was really no limit to what he’d pinch. On the same Saturday, he’d walk out of Foot Locker wearing a new pair of shorts, steal a plant from Home Depot, and swipe a ream of construction paper from Staples. But he truly never stole for utility. Ronnie stole for the fun of it and to get a laugh out of us, his friends. The more random the item he stole, the more we laughed when he told us about it.

  Kmart was a favorite victim of Ronnie’s, filled as it was with such a variety of items. Stereos, pizza, shampoo, tank tops—all of it could be found at the Kmart at Third and Oregon, smack in the m
iddle of the area where we spent most of our time. It was in the parking lot of the Kmart on a Sunday afternoon in fall that Ronnie pulled out his latest booty: a royal blue box of Trojan condoms. None of us had seen condoms before, but we knew how important they were. To have sex, you needed to wear a condom.* In essence, if you had a condom, you were halfway to sex (more or less). Ronnie ripped open the box and gave each of us present—me, and my friends Ernie and Hutton—three condoms each. In that moment, we became Men.

  The four of us would not need to use a condom for many years,** but the very fact that we owned them, that we had them at our disposal should the need arise, instantly made us more confident and more adult. I was not thinking of the long-term implications of condom ownership, but rather focusing on the immediate future. The only way to resolve the question that had haunted me for years—was my bird big enough?—was to try on one of these condoms. If the condom fit, my penis and I would be fine. If not, there would be a problem, one that would be resolved with either an entrance into the priesthood or a bottle of whiskey, a butter knife, and a Ken doll to use as a model. This was a matter that needed to be addressed right now.

  And so I thanked Ronnie, bid my friends good-bye, and headed for that familiar place where I spent the majority of my adolescent sex life—the cold tile floor of the bathroom. I disrobed into what would become my preferred level of nudity for sex for many years—no pants or underwear, but with a shirt and socks on.*

  I studied the condom in the wrapper and was surprised at how easy it was to open it.** Once I removed it from the wrapper, I was also surprised at how terrible it smelled—in the spectrum of nasty smells, latex covered in spermicide is right up there with “garbage fire” and “testicles after eight hours working the grill at Chili’s.” The whole experience left me feeling quite unaroused, but as I was thirteen years old, a quick flashback to that day in gym class when in the process of falling and spraining her ankle Cheryl Baker’s boob nearly fell out fixed me right up and I was bonerized in no time. Now it was time for the reckoning.

  As I would do four more times in my life, I put the condom on my penis. I didn’t have the instructions but figured it out rather quickly because as a young child I used to store my socks away by rolling them up like doughnuts and putting them in the dresser, so that when I put them on all I had to do was place them on the my feet and roll them up. The condom worked the same way. There, half naked and lying on the bathroom floor, I placed the condom on top of my bird, which seemed frightened by the whole experience and looking for a way to escape, and slowly started rolling the condom down. And—

  It fit.

  I rolled it down until I couldn’t anymore, but the condom, which I feared would hang loosely on my penis like a toga, gripped my bird snugly. I tugged on it a bit to see if it would slide off, but it did not budge. I stood up, fearing the movement of my body might cause it to fall off, but it did not budge. Erect but getting softer, I shook my hips and swung my condom-covered penis back and forth, but it did not budge. That condom was not going anywhere. Because it fit.

  After years of mental torment and hundreds of sleepless nights, my concerns about the size of my penis were erased in one afternoon. That the condom fit meant that my bird met the minimum standard of penis size among American men. Fathers, lock up your daughters.

  Chapter Ten

  Guns. Fucking Guns.

  Guns are cool. This is one of the basic premises we operated under as kids, right up there with Yes, I’ll have some more Pepsi and Nintendo is better than homework. Now I’m a bleeding-heart liberal and the very mention of guns sends me screaming into the nearest bathroom, where I will shit and cry until someone assures me that no, there are no guns around. But when I was a mere child, I loved me some guns.

  I don’t think I really need to explain the appeal of the gun, but we have some time to kill here, so I might as well give it a shot.* Most of the people I wanted to be as a kid—cowboys, GI Joe, James Bond, innumerable video game characters—used guns and did so with extreme prejudice. This was back when the desire to inflict death and destruction were normal impulses for a child and wouldn’t warrant an intervention or trip to the child psychologist. To wit: I was a cowboy for at least three of my first seven Halloweens, using my pump action (cap) shotgun to mow down the lesser Cookie Monsters, She-Ras, and even Batmen (I wasn’t buying the whole “bulletproof face cream” thing; if I shoot Batman in the face, he’s going down). Toy guns were a go-to gift, one that would never fail to disappoint. I don’t think a single birthday or Christmas passed between 1979 and 1993 that I didn’t get something that I could use to fake-kill something else.

  (And don’t even get me started on water guns. Sure, maybe they were a bit lame, what with water rather than bullets raining terror upon enemies, but we didn’t have any bullets. Water guns at least let us know that we were hitting our adversaries, and the Super Soakers’ streams of water proved to us that we were obliterating our enemies. When Super Soakers were released in 1991, I slept with mine every night until college. There were three main technological advances of my youth that changed me forever when they debuted: Sega Genesis, Upper Deck baseball cards, and the Super Soaker. I don’t think, in terms of innovation, America has seen anything before or since like the three years in which these were released.)

  What made guns even more appealing was that they were so forbidden. Later in life, when I met and made friends with people who never asked for a glass of wudder and didn’t respond to the question “Did you eat?” by saying “Nah, jew?” I learned that some people grew up around guns. That is, not only were guns displayed in their homes, not only were they accessible, but these people, as children, were actually taught to shoot guns (!). I cannot fathom what would have happened if this were the case in my home. I’m pretty sure that I would no longer have a brother and my little sister would have only one arm or would otherwise have been chased out of the house to join a troupe of Gypsies, frightened off by my shotgun blasts.

  Fortunately for my brother and sister, guns were not accessible in our house. But they were present. My dad had guns and I knew this, but I was only vaguely aware of them. Prior to the divorce, my dad had a box in his and my mom’s bedroom closet, a cross between an oversized jewelry box and a safe. In it, I assumed, were his guns. I was never explicitly told this but was repeatedly warned to stay the hell away from the box. The most dangerous thing that my six-year-old brain could conjure being in the box was guns. In retrospect, it could have been anything from guns to drugs to porn. Now I have a similar box in my own bedroom closet but there are no guns in there. Lots of lots of movies of black people fucking each other at frat parties, but no guns.

  My dad preparing me for gang warfare. Four hours later, I had stolen a car stereo and shivved three Dominicans.

  As I got older (or as he got crazier), my dad was less concerned with concealing his weapons from my siblings and me. After my parents’ divorce was settled, just after my family and I moved back into our house after living with my grandmother for over two years, my dad moved out and around a lot, going from one seedy neighborhood to another. He must have changed apartments four times in three years, but there was one thing he always had wherever he lived: his elephant gun.

  The elephant gun was a giant, single-shot rifle that stood as tall as I did, weighed as much as my little sister, and used bullets the size of a grown man’s middle finger. My dad said that it was used to hunt elephants, so my brother and I called it (naturally) the elephant gun. This was always kept behind whatever couch my dad had in whatever living room he was living in. For some reason (possibly marijuana-induced), my dad allowed my brother and me to play with the elephant gun. But don’t go saying that my dad was an irresponsible parent; he made sure to unload the gun before every visit. Except that day when I spent most of one lazy afternoon aiming the gun at my brother, Dennis, who was then six, before my dad took it from me, because, I can only assume, I was being obnoxious. When he did so, he realized that there
was a bullet in the chamber. Oops. This remains one of the only times I’ve ever seen my dad rattled. His face turned pale and after a moment of reflection, once he recognized what a mistake he had made, he asked us not to tell our mother. We obliged. Looking back, if I had told my mom about this, at this delicate time in their divorce, I may have never seen my dad again.* Instead, now every time I get drunk, sleepwalk, and piss in my dad’s hallway, I only have to say, “Remember when I almost killed Dennis because you didn’t unload your gun?” and I get a free pass.**

  My dad finally settled into a place on Beulah Street. There, behind a hutch that was designed to hold china but instead housed bottles of Smirnoff and Courvoisier, stood some sort of samurai axe. Also tall, though not as big as the elephant gun (the axe was about the size of my brother), it was a double-sided axe with a bladelike spear on top. I have no idea how my dad got this or why he had it, but my brother and I were allowed to play with this, supervised of course, as well. But in my dad’s defense, I seem to remember the blades looking pretty dull, so I’m sure if would have done only minimal damage to my brother’s neck/shoulders/arms/balls if I struck him with it.

  The ever-present danger and the fact that my dad had guns only made me want them more. I carried a cap gun on me constantly until about age ten, partially to feel cool, but partially because I believed it really protected me. When I was old enough, I graduated from toy guns to “real” weapons. In seventh grade, my friends and I started carrying around “blackjacks.” These were made by breaking off one of the long, thin pieces of wood under the chairs of our school desks. We’d take this piece, which looked like a shorter, thicker wooden ruler, and pile pennies along the length of it, four pennies high in a row of seven. Then, using black hockey tape, we’d tape the pennies down to the piece of wood, first lengthwise to secure them, then by wrapping the tape around the wood. The end product was a mobile but effective weapon that could easily be hidden down one’s pants or in one’s waistband. Theoretically, we carried the blackjacks in case we got jumped. We believed that this was a constant threat in the neighborhood—that a group of kids from another corner would grab you and fuck you up.* If you were going to get jumped, there was very little you could do to avoid it. You had two options: either name-drop like a mother fucker, saying your brother/cousin/sister’s boyfriend was [insert badass dude here] or call out one of the guys in the group about to jump you and offer to fight him one-on-one. However, rarely was there so much thinking involved and you just got beat the fuck up. So essentially the blackjack was useless, as it did almost nothing to combat getting jumped. Sure, you might be able to brandish it, but when a half dozen or a dozen kids are descending on you, there isn’t much you can do, blackjack or not. But hey, at least the blackjacks made us feel cool.