I Hate Everyone, Except You

by Clinton Kelly

  Yes! That’s it, kid. So, I’m getting old. So, I’ve had a few failures. So, I’m gonna die, just like everyone else in this damn room. Eh, who cares.

  TEXTBOOK PENIS

  My penis is technically perfect.

  I know what you’re thinking: Every guy says his penis is perfect. Well, that may or may not be true, but mine really is. Seriously. I’m not trying to be braggy or anything, just honest. Many things about me are not even close to being perfect. For example, my eyes are slightly too close together, I have a patch of curly hair only on the left side of my head, and no matter how much weight I lift at the gym, I still have forearms skinnier than Tori Spelling’s. We all have our crosses to bear, but luckily, my dick isn’t one of them.

  By the time I was fifteen, I began asking myself the same questions every guy asks himself. Does this thing look like what it’s supposed to look like? Is this thing the right size? And what about those two other things? Are they supposed to just hang out like that all day? And why do they always seem to be moving when I’m just lying there in bed? (I still don’t know the answer to that last one. Balls are so weird.)

  Most teenage boys compare wieners in the locker room, I guess, or maybe they talk to their guy friends about this kind of stuff. But I had successfully avoided all team sports and we weren’t forced to shower after gym class, so I wasn’t seeing too many soapy willies other than my own. Plus, my best friends were girls, and they only talked about their boobs and periods. I guess I could have gone to Mike with my questions, but talking to him about penises would have reminded me that he was boning Terri, and I would rather have eaten batteries than imagine that.

  So one Saturday I got on my bike and rode to the public library to do a little research on male genitalia. The sexuality books were on the second floor in the science section, so I meandered through the stacks, pulling random textbooks here and there, just so no one who might cross paths with me would think I was a pervert.

  “Hmmmm . . . Advanced Organic Chemistry. That looks interesting! I’ll take it. Animal Husbandry, sounds fascinating. Let me grab that one too. Human Reproduction. Ha-ha-ha. I already know everything there is to know about that topic, but let me flip through it just for a few laughs and cocks. I just looove the library.”

  I sat in the far corner of the reading room, back to the wall like a mob boss, praying that no one from school would enter. If they did, my plan was to discreetly place the reproduction book in the trash can next to my seat, feign a coughing fit, and slip out the front door. And if I saw a librarian approach at any point, I would leap from my chair, heading her off at the pass, and ask her if she needed any help organizing the card catalog. “I just hate when people take the cards out and put them back in the wrong spot. The Dewey Decimal System only works when we all do our part.” As though 95 percent of people going near the human anatomy books weren’t pre-Internet-era pubescent boys.

  As it turned out, I was uninterrupted in my research, and let me tell you, that book changed my life, especially the four-color, incredibly detailed illustration of the erect male penis. Because . . . it looked exactly like mine! I’m not kidding. It was like I had modeled for it. I had never felt prouder in my entire life. Not only was my penis a normal penis, it was The Penis. The writers of that textbook could have chosen any other penis in the entire world. But they didn’t. They chose my penis. It was the penis that all other penises should and would be compared to. It was the penis that inspired people to learn more about penises. It was the quintessential! The archetypal! The perfect textbook penis!

  And it belonged to me.

  That made me feel pretty damn good, as you can imagine. It provided me with a confidence that eventually led to a superiority complex, which culminated in a thriving television career.

  * * *

  Almost twenty years later, it’s New Year’s Day and my boyfriend at the time, Rick, and I are waking up in the Peninsula hotel in Bangkok.

  At 10 a.m., the sun was strong and light was flooding into the room around the curtains. I stretched, mildly hungover, and reached for the bottle of water on the nightstand. I took a few glugs and decided to take in the view of the Chao Phraya River. Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I looked down and, gadzooks, there it was.

  The spot was about the size of a nickel and almost as round. Light raspberry in color, it was located smack dab in the middle of the glans, or head, of my penis. In fact, it was so perfectly situated that its placement seemed intentional, as if put there by a graphic designer with a penchant for symmetry and a really fucked-up sense of humor.

  How did this happen? I tried to remember if I had done anything that might have caused a circular irritation, but my recollection of the previous night was hazy. It was New Year’s Eve, so we went out to a gay nightclub, which was packed and smelled like chicken satay and Drakkar Noir. We had a few drinks . . . well, maybe more than a few . . . What was I missing? Think, Clinton, think!

  In my frantic attempt to fill in the blank, I came up with the only logical explanation: I must have had a sticker on my penis. Yes, that made perfect sense. At some point in the evening I must have whipped out my penis and let someone put a smiley face sticker on it. Or maybe I had peeled the label off a Chiquita banana and thought it would look good on my wang. And now I was experiencing an allergic reaction to the adhesive. Simple as that.

  I shook Rick, who was asleep in a tangle of white sheets and pillows next to me.

  “Hey. Wake up!”

  He groaned, as people do when they’re hungover and someone is attempting to dislocate their shoulder.

  “I need you to wake up. Now,” I commanded.

  He squinted, annoyed. His voice was gravelly. “What?”

  “Did I stick a sticker on my dick?”

  His annoyance gave way to confusion, which infuriated the hell out of me. It was a really simple question, asked in English, his first and only language. I didn’t think I could be any clearer, but I tried. “My dick,” I said. “Did I—or anyone else—put anything on it? Like a sticker of some sort?”

  Still nothing.

  “Rick, there is a spot. On my penis. Do you know how it got there?”

  “What kind of spot?” he asked. Finally we were getting somewhere.

  “It’s red. On the tip.”

  “Let me see.”

  Reluctantly, I showed Rick my dick. He turned on the nightstand lamp and regarded my willy as though it had just fallen to earth during a meteor shower. Then it hit me: I had an STD! I just knew something like this would happen. Our relationship wasn’t an open one, but it wasn’t exactly closed either. There was a matchbox in the door, I was fond of saying.

  “You did this to me!” I accused while he was rolling my penis between his thumb and forefinger. In retrospect, I’ll admit it’s pretty stupid to accuse someone of giving you gonorrhea when he has direct access to your balls.

  He looked up, his face a combination of righteous indignation and hurt feelings. “Me?”

  “You gave me something,” I said. “I don’t know what, but when I find out I’m going to kill you.”

  The entire time Rick and I dated, I knew on some level that we shouldn’t be together. When you regularly want to murder someone, usually it’s a sign that things aren’t “meant to be.” But I tried to convince myself we had things in common. For example, we were both Pisces. We were both tall. And we both lived uptown. Surely, relationships have been built on less.

  What probably kept us together was Rick’s ability to produce a level of rage in me so profound it actually inspired out-of-body experiences. And for that I give him credit, because I’m pretty even-keeled as humans go. The uppermost limit of my mania is jumping for joy after winning party games; on the low end I get mildly depressed for three consecutive days each year, during which time I tell my agent I’m quitting TV to open an animal shelter or sell mosaic tables. But with Rick I was psychotic, like batshit crazy. I threw drinks at him in bars. I stormed out of restaurants
. I yelled at the top of my lungs in hotel hallways: “I saw you! I saw you with your fucking tongue down his throat! I’m not blind, you fucking fuck of a fuck!”

  “Calm down,” Rick said. “It’s not an STD. I bet it will go away on its own in a few days. We’re on vacation. Let’s try to forget about it.”

  Rick was sort of right. The spot faded a little, but it didn’t quite go away. Two days later, we visited a beautiful hotel in Krabi, Thailand, where Jared Leto was also staying, and two days after that we had delicious dim sum in Hong Kong. But truth be told, I wasn’t really myself that whole trip. It’s hard to have fun on vacation when your dick looks like the Japanese flag.

  As soon as we got back to New York, I made an appointment with a dermatologist, a nice-enough guy who was on my health-care plan with an office near my apartment.

  “What brings you here today, Mr. Kelly?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I have what I think is a rash.”

  “Yes, I see you wrote that on your form. Where is this rash?”

  I had rehearsed what I was going to say, not everything, just the part about not using the word “dick” while talking to a doctor. Don’t say dick. Don’t say dick. “Penis. It’s on my penis.”

  He turned and began to put on a pair of latex gloves. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I’m pretty sure I heard him exhale while his back was turned, the kind of exhale that is usually accompanied by an eye roll. “I’ll need you to drop your pants and underwear, please, and sit on the edge of the table.” I did as requested, and as luck would have it, this guy had the air-conditioning in his exam room set to absolute zero. I tried thinking dirty thoughts to perk things up, but there wasn’t enough time for any major change. It was all happening so fast.

  “Let’s see what’s up with this little guy.” He turned my penis between his thumb and forefinger. (More people than usual were doing that lately.) I turned to face the wall only to be confronted by a poster I remembered from the last time I went to the dermatologist, the one detailing the different types of skin cancer.

  I blurted: “Do I have penis cancer?”

  “No, you do not have penile cancer, but this is very interesting. It looks like something called a fixed drug reaction. It’s pretty rare.” His eyes met mine. “Have you been on antibiotics lately?”

  “No. No I haven’t.” And then it hit me. “Oh, wait. I took some Cipro.”

  “Why were you on Cipro?” he asked.

  “My mother gave them to me during that anthrax scare.”

  In late October 2001, a Bronx woman died of inhaled anthrax, which she contracted while at work in the Manhattan Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital, just three blocks away from my apartment. It was a sad and scary time to live in New York, the Twin Towers having been attacked the previous month. People were waiting for the next terrorist attack. They were afraid to open their mail, and the news media got everyone riled up about the availability of Cipro, the antibiotic used to fight anthrax infection. “Drug manufacturers can’t make enough Cipro!” they screamed. “We’re all gonna die! Only Cipro can save us!” It was the typical bullshit, but it was difficult not to get at least a little caught up in it.

  Somehow, amid the hysteria and stockpiling, Terri managed to get her hands on a case of Cipro. How she did it, I have no idea. My parents are crazy—and a little scary—like that. If my sisters or I need something really important, it shows up and nobody asks questions.

  “That was over a year ago. Is your mother a doctor?”

  “No. I was in Thailand and I was afraid of getting food poisoning.”

  I don’t know where I got the idea to use Cipro as a prophylaxis against traveler’s diarrhea, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. The bottle of Cipro Terri had sent me after the anthrax scare sat in my medicine cabinet for more than a year, never opened, but I took it to Asia, just in case I needed a powerful antibiotic. Before Rick and I left on our vacation, my friend Patty got me all worked up about crazy Asian stomach bugs. She told me that during her trip to Thailand, she had to literally jump off a boat in the middle of the ocean to poo in the water (which is literally my worst nightmare!) because she had eaten some bad shrimp. So when I noticed a dead dog floating down the river not five feet away from me in Bangkok—while I was eating fried shrimp from a food cart, no less—I immediately popped a couple of football-size pills and said little prayer to the travel gods that the contents of my large intestine not liquefy.

  Evidently, the travel gods have a wicked sense of humor.

  The dermatologist shook his head, picked up his pen, and began to write in my file while lecturing me. “Mr. Kelly, you should never take any medicine that was not prescribed to you by a physician for a specific purpose.” I was actually being scolded while my pants and underwear were bunched around my ankles. I apologized, and he explained to me that I’m allergic to a family of antibiotics called quinolones and should I ingest them ever again I could expect another spot in the same place. This “reaction” would eventually disappear on its own. But before that happened, he said, “I’d like to show your penis to my students.” He taught dermatology to medical interns.

  “Look,” I said, “there is absolutely no way I’m showing my dick—er, penis—to a bunch of doctor wannabes. I’m on television!” Then I had to explain that I was hosting a show on TLC and the last thing I needed was someone posting a picture of my spotted dick on the Internet.

  “Well, I could take a picture,” he suggested, “and nobody would know it was you. I contribute to several dermatology journals and I’m writing a textbook.”

  My penis in a medical textbook? With a spot on it?

  “Oh, hell no!” I could not get my pants on fast enough. “I appreciate your time, but I have to go now.” The last thing I remember is leaving a ten-dollar co-pay on the counter and bolting out his office door.

  As for my penis, it soon returned to normal, and by “normal” I mean perfect. And that spot, I remember it fondly. Maybe I’m even a little proud of it. I mean, it’s not every penis that can be a textbook model. Twice.

  STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

  For a brief period in 2015, I toyed with the idea of cashing in my chips and moving to Sweden, mostly because I had started to develop disturbing visions and convinced myself I could escape them by relocating to Scandinavia. Damon agreed to come along for the ride; he had been wanting to try authentic Swedish meatballs anyway.

  I guess you could say my visions were religious in nature, even though I am not what most religious people would call religious. I believe there’s a strong possibility that God exists. But I also believe there’s an equally strong possibility that God is a concept humans created because we didn’t understand things like gravity and lightning and DNA, and that we perpetuate because the thought of being one tiny speck out of billions of tiny specks on a large spherical mass orbiting a huge ball of fire, which is just one of immeasurable balls of fire out there in a pitch-black sky, is scary as fuck. And quite frankly, I don’t understand how anyone who has given the topic considerable, rational thought can be 100 percent certain either way. But that’s not important right now.

  What’s important is my vision. I didn’t see Jesus in a waterfall or Buddha on an English muffin. One Sunday morning in the media room of our house in Connecticut I was watching This Week with George Stephanopoulos and witnessed something terrifying. It was Ted Cruz’s face. No, his whole head actually. Words were coming out of it, like a normal head on a talk show, but then it turned bright red, swelled to twice its size, collapsed in on itself, and morphed into something resembling a prolapsed anus. You can imagine the horror. One minute Ted Cruz was a US senator and presidential hopeful; the next a pulsating, crimson, gurgling sphincter. And George didn’t even bat an eye! That’s how I know God was letting me, and only me, in on a pretty substantial secret.

  I went upstairs to the kitchen, where Damon was making poached eggs.

  “Good timing,” he said. “These are almost done. Can you
put the silverware on the table?”

  “Sure,” I said and grabbed two forks and knives.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked. “You have a weird look on your face.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “You look like you just smelled something really bad and can’t figure out where it’s coming from,” he said. “Remember that time we found the dead mouse in the sofa?”

  “Yeah, that was gross.”

  “Well, that’s your face.”

  Over breakfast, I relayed what I saw, and Damon asked me how I knew what a prolapsed anus looked like. And so I had to explain how I had stumbled upon some photos of them a year or so ago during an innocent Google search. Well, maybe not completely innocent. I had been looking for images of Jon Hamm in tight pants.

  “Wait,” Damon said. “Why were you searching for pictures of Jon Hamm in tight pants?”

  “I was curious about the Hammaconda, obvi. But will you please let me finish?” You see, I continued, Jon Hamm stars in Mad Men, which is about an ad agency in the sixties, and Darren from Bewitched also worked at an ad agency in the sixties, and Darren was constantly derided by his mother-in-law, Endora, played by Agnes Moorehead, who made her on-camera acting debut in Citizen Kane as the mother of Charles Foster Kane, who died thinking about his childhood sled named Rosebud. And if you type “Rosebud” into the search bar, you’ll quickly learn it’s the slang term for an inside-out anal sphincter. And if you’re even slightly curious to see what one of those looks like, you will stumble upon images you can never fully expunge from your brain. Could happen to anyone, really.

  The Ted Cruz visions continued and intensified as primary season approached, whipping me into a state of emotional distress. Every time I would turn on the news or engage in social media, there it was: the Satanic Rosebud, throbbing, pulsating, taunting and mocking me, threatening to swallow this great nation down its thorny gullet into a stinking pit of venomous bile. God was obviously speaking directly to me, but I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a sign, I figured, a sign to get as far away as possible. So I booked us a weeklong trip to Stockholm, reasoning that if Cruz were elected president of the United States, we could move there for four or—heaven forbid—eight years. No big deal. On paper Sweden seemed like the perfect place for us. Its people, for the most part, speak English, are immaculately clean, and appreciate a cute outfit from H&M. That’s pretty much me in a nutshell. We would go in mid-June for the summer solstice, I decided. Nineteen hours of sunlight!