“I bet.” I offered him a tight-lipped smile. I was in way over my head.
“The black kids there used to pound on Jewish wussies like you for fun,” Mark said. “This one kid I knew, they stripped him naked, to see if he was cut.” I shook my head, not understanding. “You know, circumcised.” I said I didn’t believe in lumping people together like that based on skin color, but Mark replied, “Try saying that when they strip you naked. Anyway, they never touched me, or my brother.” I asked Mark why not, and he widened his eyes. “Because they knew if they bothered either one of us, I’d go Medieval on their asses. Want to see? Try to hit me.”
“No thank you.”
“Come on, hit me.” He leaped out of bed and put up his fists.
“I’m really not in the mood . . .” I was racking my brain for an excuse to leave but coming up empty. Meanwhile, he was moving his fists in tight circles, bouncing on his toes. I backed up toward the wall. “Please, stop.”
Mark broke out laughing. “Hey, dude, you don’t have to do everything I say,” he said when he’d recovered. “If I told you to strip naked right now, would you do it?”
“No,” I said.
“I think you would.” His eyes darkened. “Amazing.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said, but he didn’t believe me.
THE ACCIDENT
A YEAR AFTER MEETING MARK, MY life had changed entirely.
Mostly I stayed at home, going out only for karate classes and my Monday, Wednesday, Thursday appointments with Dr. Don, who came from Virginia and spoke with a slight Southern drawl that his time at N.Y.U. hadn’t quite erased. When I laughed at the way he talked, Don said that I and everyone else I knew spoke in a Midwestern accent that came out in words like “car” or “apple.” Horrified, I practiced my speech at home. I wanted to sound as if I’d been born on a coast.
“What do you feel like working with today?” asked Dr. Don after I’d been taking karate for a week. There wasn’t much improvement in sight.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe just pen and paper.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, settling back in his chair as I took out my sketchpad.
Dr. Don worked out of his back porch, which he’d converted into an office. In the waiting room, Mom chose the one seat that wasn’t broken or stained and sat there with her legs tightly crossed and her elbows pinned to her sides so they wouldn’t come into contact with the arms of the chair while she read about Princess Diana’s marital troubles, General Schwarzkopf’s private life, or Mike Tyson’s latest arrest, for rape. At the end of my appointments, I found her in the same place, sitting that same way.
Don’s office, with children’s drawings taped to the wood-paneled walls, looked nothing like Mom’s tidy studio. At the end of each day, she wiped her desk with glass cleaner and a soft rag, and checked the linoleum floors and the walls for stray flecks of paint. Don’s floors were a mess of splotches and streaks and in certain spots stuck to the soles of your shoes. His bookshelves were crammed with plastic bins of markers, pens, pencils, paints and brushes. His carpet was marked with dried blobs of Play-Doh and clay.
“Can I see what you’re working on?” Dr. Don asked me after a few minutes.
“It’s not ready yet.” In fact, it was just doodling. I marked my page with three heavy penstrokes, then flipped my sketchpad shut.
I disliked the idea of making pictures for him to analyze. You know, that blob’s really a vagina, and this one here’s a penis. I knew all about Freud and his tricks. But Don wasn’t as obvious as that. He preferred more open-ended questions like what’s that shape about? What’s going on in this picture? Can you tell me more?
Finally, I just straight up asked, “Don’t you want to hear about the accident?”
“Accident?” said Dr. Don.
“What?” I asked.
“You asked if I wanted to hear about the accident.”
“I didn’t say accident.”
“You did say it,” said Don. “It’s okay. We sometimes transpose words.”
“Well, I meant incident,” I said, but maybe I did mean accident. In my mind, that’s how I thought of it, like the car crash that had killed an older classmate of mine. His school picture, with its modest saintly smile, had been printed in the Jewish News. We paid for trees to be planted in his honor in the Negev desert. We congregated in the school parking lot to release blue and white balloons printed with his name.
But if the story of my “accident” had gotten out at Stern, I would not have earned balloons in the sky. Mine was the kind of misfortune you kept hidden, like an ugly rash, or the fact that I felt horny at times and did something about it at night.
No one noticed my absence from school except for Benji Pearlberg, who sat next to me in art and drew dwarves and aliens. He called once, but I wouldn’t come to the phone, so Mom said I wasn’t feeling well enough yet, wasn’t up to “full strength.”
That’s what I needed, strength. Full, half, even a quarter would have helped.
“Tell me more about karate,” Dr. Don said. “The teacher, and the other boys?”
I shivered. I didn’t like the word “boys.” “It’s fine,” I said.
“Last time, you said it made you uncomfortable.”
“No worse than coming here,” I shot back before I could stop myself. “I’m sorry,” I added. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Maybe you did mean it,” Don said. “You feel uncomfortable here at times.”
“Sometimes,” I admitted, squirming a bit in my chair.
“Especially when we talk about feeling horny.”
Dr. Don’s favorite topic: “feeling horny.” He kept pestering me about what I wanted and how I wanted it.
“These days, how often do you . . .” Here he paused, searching for just the right term, both direct in its meaning, yet not too unsettling in its rudeness. We’d begun with “masturbate”—too clinical. Moved on to “jerk off”—too violent. “Touch yourself” sounded mushy. So the search continued.
“Oh,” I said airily. “You know, the normal amount.”
And then he asked me, as he had two or maybe three times before, or maybe more, “When it happened, where was your head in that moment? What did you notice?”
“What do you mean?” I snapped. “I was trying not to get hurt. I was terrified.”
“Sure, of course,” said Don, “but was there any part of you that was curious?”
I wanted to please Dr. Don, to be the best patient in the history of therapy. And I wanted to get the hell out of that chair. Or maybe I wanted him to see me as a virtuous cherub-cheeked young man, still too young to shave, the type of boy who said please and thank you. Sex was the act of a bully, committed out of a forceful, driving need requiring a victim, who did not participate, but just lay there. A witness, not an accomplice.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ll think about it, but I don’t think so.”
“You want to think about it now?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I want to think about it later.”
WE JUST HAD TO HEAR YOU SAY THAT
THAT