Endless Blind Passions - Chapter 6
“Bet mine’s bigger than yours,” says the curly-brown-haired boy nuzzling up close to Monty. “My name’s Jay, what’s yours?”Monty had arrived moments before for his first day in kindergarten after walking a half mile with his mother from home, a long walk by LA standards. Here everyone except the poor takes their car just to go around the block.
But Sarah hasn’t learned to drive yet because she’s afraid. And because Leo is short tempered when he tries to teach her. “No, don’t step on the brake. Step on the clutch. No, don’t slow down out of the curve. Watch out for that car!” Driving will have to wait a few more years until she gives in and takes private lessons.
Sarah leaves Monty sitting on the terra-cotta steps leading to the front door of the Spanish colonial revival school building. She’s a touch dismayed, though she wouldn’t admit it, that her beautiful towheaded boy isn’t hiding in the folds of her red skirt and bawling like the other children being dropped off by their mothers for their first day of school.
Monty’s thrilled to be on his own. And he’s even more thrilled by the olive-complexioned boy sitting next to him. The tingling feel of Jay’s fleecy cotton flannel shirt brushing against his bare wrist gives him the goose bumps. He can feel the boy’s radiating body heat and smell his shirt’s freshly laundered soapy scent of Oxydol. The boy’s probably Sephardic, though Monty doesn’t have a clue what that is, nor for that matter Ashkenazi, which clearly he himself is, with his platinum hair and grayish-blue hazel eyes, possibly the genetic remnants of a pogrom attacker raping a female somewhere back in his genetic lineage.
The only blond in his extended family, except for an adopted second cousin, Monty is often teased by his brother. “You were adopted like Sammy,” Dave tells him so often Monty comes to suspect it’s true. He has doubts even after Sarah shows him a photo of herself hugely pregnant with him, sitting on a log in the snow up at Big Bear Lake. How can he be sure it’s him and not Dave?
“How big is your thing?” the boy asks him.
Thing? What thing? Does he mean my weenie?
Monty’s embarrassed, but he wishes they could take theirs out and compare. He’d love to see Jay’s penis. Maybe touch it, like he’s been touching his own at night before going to sleep, holding on to it like he used to hold on to his treasured blue blanket, his “bubank,” while sucking his thumb.
“I like you,” the brown-haired boy says, snuggling up closer.
Monty can smell his fresh boy smell. The smell of the first day of school before anyone rolls on the grass and picks up things they shouldn’t. There’s another scent, too: something exotic, unfamiliar, and tempting—a kind of soap, maybe—creamy, warm, and a touch spicy.
Monty likes the boy, but he’s too shy to say anything. And he never gets to see Jay’s “thing” nor that of any other boys, not until he gets into junior high school and tries to hide his wandering gaze in the gym’s dressing room and communal showers.
Two years later Monty develops a crush on Cubby, one of the vaguely seductive boy Mouseketeers starring in The Mickey Mouse Club, Walt Disney’s premier TV series. I bet Cubby’s right here in Los Angeles, thinks Monty. Somewhere close by.
Growing up in LA, you feel an intimate connection to the newly unfolding televised reality. Did anything exist before me and television? Monty knows instinctively that time and space, life itself, arose concurrently with his own existence, and it will come to an end with his death—not that he wants to think about that. Death isn’t something you learn about from watching The Howdy Doody Show, Roy Rogers, or any of the other fantasy versions of reality produced for children.
Soaking these shows up hour after hour, you might think nothing is real, merely an illusion like television or the movies, most of which are filmed or processed in nearby Hollywood, or in the opposite direction, in the more prosaic-sounding Culver City. Monty grows up amid the artificial world LA epitomizes, where life is a two-dimensional screen sitting in your living room, and your whole mind is glued to it like a sticky Band-Aid on a sore thumb.
Naturally, then, he feels as if Cubby the Mouseketeer is part of his own private world, like he could reach out and touch him, touch him anywhere he wants. Like he could have reached out and touched Jay, the boy who sat next to him on the kindergarten steps. Except he didn’t.
For now Monty is limited to his mother’s touch, and he relishes it. He loves lying on his back on the living room sofa, his feet resting on Sarah’s lap while she meticulously cuts his toenails with a curved scissors, careful not to pierce his delicate skin.
“Please tickle my feet,” he begs after she finishes. Tickling the bottom of his feet has become a routine, and she, too, enjoys every opportunity, while she has it, for intimacy with her little boy.
“Okay, but just this once,” she answers, realizing full well she’ll indulge his desires for as long as she lives. “But how can you stand it?” she asks as he lies still while she glides the backs of her fingernails over his skin.
He’s trained himself not to flinch or pull his feet away, savoring the chill the tickling sends up his legs and through his body. And his mother is compliant, as if giving pleasure to her son were her sole function in life. Which is exactly how he sees it, content with the pampering.
Years later, when Monty turns aloof toward his parents, flaunting his gay otherness and pompous sophistication, Sarah will long for the lost intimacy, looking up at her son with her sad dark almond-shaped eyes, silently seeking tenderness that no longer comes. Only after her death will Monty feel remorse for having spurned her unconditional love. It will hurt to realize he could have reached out and held her quietly, soothing her anxieties in the face of a cruel world.
Throughout his youth his mother suffers ailments of one kind or another—sacroiliac pain, an autoimmune disorder that leaves painful purple blotches on her legs, a chronic sore throat. “What now?” asks Leo, having long ago dismissed her habitual complaints. “Why don’t you work out more, like me?” She’d enrolled in several exercise programs but gave up; similarly with diets, always trying to lose excess weight.
Though Monty is more sensitive, his detachment differs little from that of his stoic father, whose unsentimental outlook on life permeates the household. Monty never once sees his parents kiss or embrace. Whatever physical intimacy transpires between them happens in their bedroom, behind a closed door, neither seen nor heard, nor imagined. No moaning, no sounds of play or pleasure. Sex is unspoken, the subject itself a dirty word.
“Don’t you think it’s time he learns the facts of life?” Monty overhears his mother say to his father one day during the summer break between kindergarten and first grade.
Facts of life? he wonders. What are they?“No one ever explained it to me,” replies Leo. “What am I supposed to do, have a talk with him or something? Like today, right this moment?”
“Well, you could get him a book to read and look it over with him.”
“I don’t have time. You do it. I promised the guys I’d meet them for tennis.”
Sarah goes out herself and finds a rudimentary book at a nearby dime store, about “the birds and the bees.”
“Here, Monty, this is something for you to look at,” she says, handing him the book. “You can ask your father if you have any questions.”
Okay, thinks Monty after he’s looked over the pages and read the simplified text several times. So when they grow up, boys make these itty-bitty tiny fish called sperm, and girls make these gigantic circles called eggs that fill up the whole page of the book. I guess they’re like chicken eggs, with a hard shell, but round and huge. And the daddy’s sperm mixes with the mommy’s egg to make a baby. Which is kind of weird. But how does the sperm find its way? He imagines the tiny fish traveling in a line, like a line of ants, traveling across the bed sheet from one parent to the other. They must have eyes so they know where to go, and sharp teeth so they can break through the egg’s shell.
A year later, given a more advanced book, he reads that when a man and a woman love each other—only then, mind you—the daddy’s sperm get inside the mommy when he puts his penis into her vagina. Okay, I know what a penis is. A weenie. But what’s a vagina? Some kind of hole Mommy has where her penis should be? More like a slit than a hole.He saw one once when his family went to visit cousins in the Valley who’d recently had a baby girl, and she was lying naked on a table before having her diaper put on. Did the slit go this way or that way? He tries to remember, picturing the opening in his mind.
So did Daddy put his penis into Mommy’s hole like that to make me? Monty squirms, imagining the act. Ick. I wouldn’t ever want to do that. What if it got stuck? And who knows what’s inside that hole? It’s probably smelly. At least penises you can see. You can touch them. Boys touching each other, that’s natural. But people with different stuff? Yuck.That’s too creepy to imagine at seven years of age, let alone that holes can also be touched and explored, or that some people might find penises yucky and smelly. And besides, the book his mom gives him doesn’t show actual intercourse, not between human penises and vaginas. Only between birds and insects. They must have incredibly tiny penises, he figures, so I guess they can fit inside okay. I wish I could ask Dave about all this stuff; he probably knows it all. But he won’t have anything to do with me. He always walks away if I get near him at school. I hate him. I’m glad he’s moving to junior high next year.
Maybe I could ask Aunt Beatrice about this birds-and-bees stuff.
Though his aunt rarely leaves her tiny two-and-a-half-room apartment, crowded with knickknacks and reeking of stale sweat and cigarette smoke, Beatrice seems to understand everything and everybody, like a sage of antiquity. It’s she, not his parents, he seeks for answers and solace.
Beatrice: Latin for “she who brings joy”—the heroine of Dante’s fourteenth-century Italian classic Divine Comedy, who guides the author to heaven out of hell. And the name of Monty’s beloved hunchbacked dwarf aunt, with her lumpy obese body, oversize head, bulging eyes, sparse kinky red-and-gray hair, and left leg three and a half inches shorter than the other.