Pee-Shy

by Frank Spinelli

  After Bill paid, we went back to his house. I expected to see his mother in her chair, but there was no one else home. Seeing that empty chair with the crocheted blanket hanging over it made wonder where she was. I began to perspire, thinking Bill hadn’t brought me here just to change light bulbs.

  “Do you want a can of soda?” he asked from the kitchen.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Come in here and help me.”

  Bill had pushed the kitchen table aside to change the light bulb in the overhead lamp. He unfolded a stepladder and instructed me to hold it as he climbed up. The ladder barely moved under the weight of his body. Scanning the kitchen, I noticed the walls were covered in faded yellow-and-green wallpaper that crisscrossed, forming diamond shapes. There was a grease stain on the wall next to the stove. The linoleum table had chipped edges, and the aluminum chairs were upholstered in green vinyl.

  “Do you help your dad at home?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s a shame,” he added. “Boys should help their fathers. Fathers should make their boys help them around the house. That’s how boys learn to become men.”

  Once Bill finished, he took the ladder and carried it upstairs. I followed after him. We changed the light bulb in his bedroom, and then one in his closet. When he was done, he walked over to his bed and sat down. I knew what was going to happen next. Bill removed the magazines from behind the books and laid them out. “Come here,” he said. I sat down next to Bill. We were silent for a very long time. He picked up a stack of letters from his nightstand and began sifting through them. His legs spread wide. As I watched him read his mail, his leg inched closer and closer to mine until his knee pressed up against my thigh. It stayed there for a while.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  I moved in closer, and Bill put his arm around my shoulder. It felt heavy but nice. He opened a magazine and showed me more pictures. Slowly he turned the pages. Then he stopped when he got to that photograph of the woman with her mouth on the man’s penis. He handed me the magazine. I stared at that blonde and this time felt myself becoming aroused. Bill then unbuckled his belt and pushed his pants past his knees. I tried not to look up from the page because I was embarrassed. It was daytime, and unlike the other night, the room was brightly lit. Glancing up, I was shocked to see Bill naked in the light.

  Bill took the magazine from me. My leg began to shake again. “It’s okay,” he said. “Really, it’s okay.” Then he stood up. I felt his hands over my ears. My eyes were closed. He didn’t say anything else. I knew what he wanted me to do, and I did it. I did it because I wanted him to like me. I did it because I wanted to be a normal boy, and more than anything else, I wanted his approval so that he wouldn’t ever let boys like Chris Spivey or Seth Connelly hurt me.

  I can still remember how it felt and tasted, but it was the smell—pungent and sweaty, like clothes in a hamper—that stayed with me the most. A few seconds later he pulled my head off and stroked his penis, holding it tightly, until the milky fluid came out all over his hand. Then he lay down on the bed and exhaled deeply.

  Driving home, we rode in silence. Maybe if he had been mean, I might have run away, but he was showing me things I thought I needed to know to become a man. He was teaching me all the things my own father was incapable of.

  Before I got out of the truck, Bill grabbed my shoulder. When I turned around, he said, “By the way, congratulations. You made Tenderfoot.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Becoming a Monster

  FROM THAT DAY ON, BILL AND I MET ONCE OR TWICE A WEEK. Sometimes, we ran errands, but most times we just went back to his house and he showed me new things in his magazines. At Boy Scout meetings, Bill barely paid me any attention. I told myself he didn’t want anyone to think he was choosing favorites, but it still didn’t make attending meetings any more bearable. All the more, it was another reason why I never learned to enjoy Boy Scouts. Still, I continued to go because I knew that Bill wanted me to, and I wanted to please him.

  Eventually, we stopped going on errands altogether. He’d pick me up after school, and then we’d drive straight to his house. Sometimes his mother would be in the living room, watching television. Other times we were alone. It didn’t matter. He never acknowledged her when I was with him, so I grew to ignore her myself. Once we were inside his room, I’d forget all about Mrs. Fox because we were alone. When we were alone, Bill became a different person, unlike when we were at Boy Scout meetings or running errands. Inside his bedroom, Bill was quiet, brooding, and sexual.

  Every time it was the same routine: sit on his bed, look at magazines, and then came the long wait—that period in which we would sit, side by side, with those same magazines opened up on his lap. He’d stare at the pages and then at me. I watched his eyes flicker as time seemed to stand still. Then he would close his eyes so tightly I thought he might cry. He seemed to struggle with something, but in the end, his hand always reached over to touch me. Finally, the long wait was over. Once he’d gotten past that point, he’d stand up, take off his clothes, and get on the bed. Afterward, we immediately left the house. Sometimes he took me for ice cream; other times he just brought me straight home.

  Over the next several weeks, I slowly began to withdraw from my usual after-school activities. I hardly played with my Evel Knievel doll and Scramble Van. When Diane and Karen came by the house, I told my mother to send them away. I even stopped calling Jonathan. Instead, I spent hours alone in the bathroom, exploring the forbidden female products stored under the sink: tampons, sanitary napkins, and vaginal douches. I became obsessed with them, taking them apart as I tried to figure out what they were used for. I even kept a tampon hidden between my mattress and box spring. At night, I’d take it out and sleep with it under my pillow.

  At school, I asked Chris Reynolds why girls needed such things. He told me: “When a girl gets her period, she has to plug up the hole so that she doesn’t bleed all over the place. So she can either stick a tampon up her cooch or lay a maxi-pad on her panties to soak up the blood.” How he knew all this I never figured out, but it made sense. Now I understood Aunt Flo’s visits better.

  One morning, I stole a sanitary napkin from the bathroom. I removed the adhesive strip and affixed it to my underwear. I wore it to school just to see how it felt. I found it very uncomfortable. When I got home that afternoon, I removed it from my underwear and masturbated on it.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER I MADE TENDERFOOT, Bill asked me to get my parents’ permission to sleep over at his house. He told me that he often did this with the other boys and that it would be a good experience for me. My parents were so excited when I asked them. From my mother’s reaction, you would have thought I’d just been awarded a full scholarship to Harvard.

  For years, my parents had tried everything to get me to participate in activities that other little boys were naturally drawn to. How many Saturdays had they stood by and watched me sit on the bench as the other boys played? How many times had my coaches told them I just wasn’t cut out for sports? Bill asking me to sleep over at his house was the acceptance my parents had been yearning for. Finally, someone with authority, a cop no less, was taking their son under his wing. This wasn’t just an invitation; this was a sign I was fitting in.

  Of course, my mother made it into a bigger deal than it actually was. Like most things, my father didn’t care one way or the other as long as my mother was happy. It seemed as if we were always trying to make Mommy happy because we knew the alternative was worse. Maybe that was why my father worked more overtime than he had to, why Maria snuck food into her bedroom at night, why Josephine couldn’t wait to move out, and why I always shut myself up in my room. These were the ways we coped with our mother’s excessive doting, knowing it was better to exist under her radar than in her line of fire.

  That Saturday, I packed up my red knapsack (my mother sewed up the hole), and my father drove me to Bill’s house. Standing on the dark porch, I wondered
whether Bill was going to make me wait in the living room with his mother again. Then I had this sudden overwhelming fear that Spivey, Mendola, and Metheny might be in his basement. In that second, I calculated the risk of seeing Spivey again and how my presence would only fuel his hatred toward me. I never understood boys like him, the ones who were mad at the world. For some reason, I always seemed to be the focus of their hatred.

  Since the first time I visited Bill’s house, I noticed that Spivey didn’t attend meetings as religiously as he had in the past. Then I remembered the night he saw me sitting in the living room. The inexplicable hurt expression on his face as Bill hurried him out the door lingered in my memory.

  When the front porch light went on, I took a step backward. Looking over my shoulder at my father waiting in the car, I felt the urge to run. Sleeping over at Bill’s house suddenly seemed like an awful idea. Then Bill opened the front door. The porch was flooded with yellow light, and I froze. The next thing I knew, Bill was taking my knapsack off my shoulder and I was waving good-bye to my dad.

  Bill led me straight upstairs. He seemed hurried. I peeked into the living room and caught a glimpse of Mrs. Fox in her chair. This time I was sure she saw me. Without lifting her head, she peered up at me, and our eyes met for one brief second. This surprised and scared me at the same time. When I looked up at Bill, he was already inside his bedroom. I followed after him, but just before I climbed the stairs, I peeked over at Mrs. Fox again. This time she was staring at the television.

  Inside Bill’s room, we didn’t speak. Closing the door, he undressed to his underwear. I did the same. Then we got in bed, and he turned out the light. It was only 9 P.M. I stared up at the ceiling, wondering how I was going to fall asleep. Then I rolled on my side and stared out the window. I listened to the cars drive by and thought about this relationship I had with a grown man. Spending time alone with Bill in his bedroom had become so much a part of my life. I never told anyone about our secret visits because I instinctively knew we’d get in trouble. I continued to protect Bill even as these visits became more and more unpleasant.

  I don’t recall how long we lay there in the dark. Bill started to stir, and then I felt his hands on my shoulders pulling me toward his body. Bill removed his underwear, and then I felt the pressure of his penis against my back. He maneuvered his arm around my chest, and with his free hand, he pulled down my underwear. Then he began to push his penis in between my buttocks. It started to hurt. With my eyes still closed, I thought about the time my family went to Disney World. We rode Space Mountain. My father sat next to me holding my hand because he knew I was frightened. I wished my father was holding my hand now.

  That night was different from all the other times before. I tried to squirm away, but Bill’s arm was pressed so tightly against my chest that I couldn’t move. I felt trapped, and that terrified me. Despite his persistence, Bill wasn’t able to push himself inside me. Eventually he stopped. His grip relaxed, and I breathed heavily with relief. Had Bill succeeded, I might have screamed. Maybe he suspected as much, and that was why he relented. But it wasn’t over yet. Grabbing my shoulders with his hands, Bill turned me around to face him. Then he pushed my head down under the covers and onto his penis. When it was all over, I opened my eyes. Bill had gotten out of bed and was in the bathroom. In the dark, I could still see the poster of Farrah Fawcett on the wall, staring, smiling, laughing . . . at me.

  I began to wet my bed shortly after that night.

  The first time it happened, my mother simply changed the sheets. When it happened again, she confronted me. Even though I felt I had successfully deflected her questions, something told me my mother wasn’t completely satisfied with my answers. It angered me that she gave up so easily, but I knew she didn’t want to hear the truth. Just as she didn’t want to know why I stole that Barbie from Diane’s trash. Instead, she’d rather have believed that Barbie was accidentally left behind the couch. I suspected the truth would have been too painful. If I told my parents what Bill and I were doing when we were alone, they would have been horrified. And even though they should have picked up on the clues, I lied to protect them.

  The next day, when I returned home from school, I went straight to my bedroom as usual. But something didn’t seem right. So I made a quick assessment: My collection of Micronaut men was aligned on my dresser, assembled for battle. My desk still contained all my drawings and writing utensils. Even the bed had been restored with a newly laundered Evel Knievel comforter. Nothing tangible seemed different yet; that made it all the more frightening. Finally, sitting down on my bed, I was startled by a strange crackling noise. Immediately, I removed the sheets and found my mother had upholstered my mattress with a thick plastic cover sheet.

  Now I felt trapped by the secret I shared with Bill. Until now I’d thought I could just keep this secret, pretend it wasn’t there. I thought it wouldn’t affect my life, and I would just continue to go on like before. But now I knew that wasn’t true. The plastic sheets were proof. There were two realities now: the one I shared with my family and the one I had with Bill. And he was the only one who knew who I really was.

  I BEGAN TO AVOID BILL’S CALLS BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT TO SEE HIM. I didn’t fully understand why, but I knew deep down inside me—in that place where the gnawing sensation developed below my ribs—that what we were doing alone in his bedroom was a sin.

  After two weeks, Bill showed up at my house one day after school. My mother came rushing into my room. She instructed me to put down whatever it was that I was doing and go with him.

  After the night I slept over his house, his behavior toward me became sterner and more commanding, less friendly and inviting. He hardly smiled at me at Boy Scout meetings, and that day, too, he hardly spoke as he drove down the streets of my neighborhood. He seemed to drive aimlessly. After a while, I thought he was going to kidnap me, and then I would never see my family again. But like all the other times, we ended up in his bedroom and had sex. Then he drove me home.

  One Saturday, he made me kneel on the floor before him. He pressed my head down so firmly with his hands I panicked. His penis pushed my mouth wide open. I braced myself by placing my hands on his knees, trying to pull away, but he overpowered me. I was suffocating, but the more I resisted, the more he held me against my will. My eyes watered, and I began to retch. I was petrified that I might vomit, and that made me panic even more. The smell of his sweat filled my nose, and suddenly I felt a surging acidic taste fill my mouth. Bill was done.

  That evening, I locked myself up in the bathroom and took a long hot bath. I let the water run so that it made my skin red, and I turned it off only when I couldn’t stand the pain any longer. Then I sat there quietly, wondering how I’d gotten to this place. The world I knew, my world, seemed strange. Clearly, Bill was not my friend. I was his prisoner.

  I must have been in the tub for at least an hour when Josephine began banging on the door. “What are you doing in there?” she shouted. Then I heard her laugh. That made me cringe, and I sank down under the water. Her laughter echoed in my head, reminding me of the Farrah Fawcett poster in Bill’s room. It haunted me, yet no matter how I tried to convince myself that Josephine couldn’t possibly know the truth or that Farrah was just a photograph on a wall, I couldn’t drown out the laughter, even underwater. After several seconds, I flipped the lever with my toe and listened to the water gurgle down the drain. As soon as I stepped outside the bathroom, my sister called, “What were you doing in there?” She was standing in the doorway of her bedroom with my mother behind her. “You’ve been in there, like, forever.”

  Without a word, I walked to my room and slammed the door behind me.

  That night, I wet the bed again.

  About the same time, I began to have abduction nightmares. I worried that strange men in overcoats and hats, faceless men who traveled in packs, would come and get me in my bed. I started sleeping with my covers tied to the headboard so that I would be safe under my makeshift tent. I
never walked around my neighborhood alone, and when I rode my bicycle, I maintained a conscious awareness of everyone around me.

  AFTER EVERY SUNDAY DINNER, my parents and I would drive to Brooklyn to visit my grandfather, or Nonno, as we called him. After several weeks, my fear of abduction evolved to the point that I was convinced the tollbooth operator worked for the strange men who wore overcoats and hats. Before my father stopped to pay the toll, I’d wrap my sock over my mouth and lie on the floor of the car in order to trick the tollbooth operator into thinking my parents were delivering me to these strange men. Of course, my parents didn’t know what I was doing in the backseat, and the tollbooth operator must have thought I was a peculiar child. Then once our car passed the tollbooth and drove onto the bridge, I relaxed, taking the sock from my mouth and putting it back on my foot.

  Visiting my grandfather on Sundays was something I grew to enjoy. Josephine and Maria no longer accompanied us once they became teenagers. Josephine called my grandfather’s apartment a “mausoleum of boredom.” But I didn’t feel that way, because my uncle Sal and aunt Olivia lived upstairs with their son, Alex, who was seven years my junior.

  Uncle Sal was my mother’s older brother. He was a paranoid schizophrenic who married my aunt despite my mother’s vehement objection. The day he announced their engagement, a huge fight broke out at the dinner table. I was six years old and didn’t fully understand what all the shouting was about. Later on, Josephine explained that Uncle Sal was married once before to a woman who’d left him because he had a history of violence. Despite my mother’s protests, my uncle remarried and several months later, my aunt Olivia announced she was pregnant. On the drive home later that night, I remember my mother recited the rosary over and over while she sobbed.

  For many years, I enjoyed being the youngest and only grandson. When I turned seven years old, I was horrified when my aunt Olivia brought home that little brown creature in a blanket. That horror grew into an insane fascination once I realized how much attention my replacement was taking away from me.