SUPER SOAKER
One summer day, my sister Leah and I were at the Hollis’s house, playing in the yard with Stacie and Brandon. Brandon was two grades above me and several inches taller and even though he was only nine or ten you could already tell he’d grow up to be the kind of man who drove trucks and shot bucks. Brandon had never acknowledged me in school, but today he’d kicked a ball with me, showed me his Super Soaker, said my name. When he said he had to piss, I went with him. We stood under a pine tree, squirting the dirt like cowboys. I was staring straight ahead—everyone knew you didn’t watch another boy pee—so I jumped a little when I heard Brandon say, “What are you doing?”
I turned my little head.
Brandon’s pants were all the way up. He was doing it with one hand.
“Still pisses with his pants down,” Brandon said, shaking his head. He put his free hand in his hip pocket. Leaned back and sprayed his golden piss high and wide.
I looked down. Pee was dribbling from my wiener. My legs were cold. My butt was out.
“Pisses like a little boy,” Brandon said, as he zipped up and walked away.
I crouched down and tried to get hold of my pants. Some pee got on my hand.
By the time I finished peeing and pulled up my pants, Brandon was long gone, back at the swing set with the girls. They were all laughing. I knew he’d told him. He’d told them I wasn’t a man.
THE BLAHS
Last week, I got the stomach flu. The first day I had a hundred-degree fever, and the second day I had nonstop firehose diarrhea, and then, for the next several days, I was just tired, so tired. I’m between sessions of the classes I teach, fortunately, so I don’t have a whole lot to do every day besides write and think and write about thinking and think about writing. Still, that’s felt like a lot. I’ve needed at least one nap a day. I’ve moaned to my partner, Casey, about how tired I am of being tired. Today, I woke up with some sniffles and a sore throat. I’m fearing the worst.
Casey had mono in high school, and it never really went away. She now has chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition I’ve never fully understood because it’s hard to understand, and because I probably haven’t made enough of an effort to understand it. Some nights, Casey will collapse into bed immediately after getting home from work. She’ll lie there, eye mask on her forehead, maybe doing a few French lessons, maybe dangling a toy for the cat, maybe just staring at the ceiling. Then she’ll spend the whole night tossing and turning and soaking her sheets with sweat, and the next morning she’ll get back up and go to work and help other people with their chronic fatigue.
Sometimes this’ll happen at the same time she’s on her period.
I don’t understand that, either.
Whenever my dad gets sick, my mom will call me and say, “Your dad’s sick.” Then we’ll both pause, and I’ll smile and sigh and say, “I’m sorry,” and she’ll know I mean, for you.
I’ll get on the phone with Dad, and I’ll ask how he is, and invariably, using the voice most people use to deliver news about a death in the family, he’ll say, “Not great, Bri. I’ve got the blahs.”
“The blahs,” I’ll say, trying to keep the smile out of my voice. “That sucks, Dad.”
“Yeah,” he’ll say. “It does.”
Then he’ll force a cough, like a six-year-old boy hoping to stay home from school.
A few decades ago, when Dad was around the age I am now, he got in a terrible ski accident in Utah. He broke his femur, mangled his knee, sustained a compound fracture in his lower leg that left a foot-long scar that now looks like an undercooked flank steak. The doctors have told him, multiple times, that his leg injury is one of the worst they’ve seen. His femur and fibula have mostly healed, but his knee still hurts, all the time. He limps like he banged it on a chair five seconds ago. He winces whenever he stands up. If he sees you seeing him wincing, he’ll roll his eyes and force a smile. If you ask him if he’s in pain, he’ll say, “Oh yeah,” then shrug it off and change the subject.
I have never once heard him talk about his pain like he talks about the blahs.
When he’s in pain, he doesn’t sound like a six-year-old boy.
He sounds like a man.
On my ninth birthday, my parents offered to give me the deductible to our insurance policy if I made it a full year without going to the emergency room. I did indeed make it, but only because I didn’t tell them about slicing my foot open on a clay pigeon shard while wading in a lake. I didn’t learn anything. I am known, still, as an inveterate klutz, a walking, breathing disaster. I have gotten dozens of stitches. Sustained multiple concussions. Gotten hit by cars, fallen off of horses, sat on beehives.
You will never hear me talk about my pain like I talk about my head colds.
When I’m in pain, I sound like my dad.
When I’m sick, I sound like him, too.
Where does this come from? Why do men—most of us, at least—grin through our cracked teeth and dance on our broken ankles, but then crumble, just crumble, when our noses begin to drip? Why aren’t we more embarrassed to be seen being sick, chronically ill, unsensationally uncomfortable? Why aren’t we less embarrassed to be in serious pain?
Even now, in my forty-first year, when I’m home sick, my mom will ask, in dead seriousness, if I want her to fly out and help. I’ll tell her that, no, I’m okay, I’m just lying in bed, there’s nothing to help with. I’ll hang up the phone, and I’ll text my sister about how Mom is doing it again, babying me, treating me like I’m Dad. And then I’ll pull the covers higher, and I’ll wait for Casey to get back. She said she’d make chicken soup tonight. She’s buying popsicles on her way home from work.
I NEED TO TELL YOU SOMETHING
December 1994
Lacy Burkett and I have only been dating for three days, but I have loved her for at least a week. She’s way prettier than the five girls I went to elementary school with and I like how she smiles when she sings in church. I don’t know what it means when the guy in the song says all I wanna do zoom a zoom zoom zoom and a boom boom, but when my best friend Nick says I should write that to Lacy in a note, I do. The next day, Kelly Soff comes to my locker to tell me Lacy Burkett and I aren’t going out anymore. I go to my math desk and pretend to be sad about Kurt Cobain.
January 1995
I’m sitting in science when Missy Dreger tells me Denise Lorch is dumping me. I say, “Okay,” then look at my desk as Missy walks away. I don’t understand. Last Friday, Denise and I held hands during Beethoven. She rubbed her thumb on my palm. I’m not sure I love Denise, or even like her, but that’s not the point, the point is: I’ve been dumped four times in a month. Maybe it’s the acne? Are my hands too sweaty? Two days later, I ask Missy Dreger out. We kiss in the library and then she dumps me, too.
November 1997
When I call Amber Lapp’s house, her mom, who just last week frosted my hair, picks up. She sighs and says, “Hi, Brian,” then hands the phone to Amber, who needs to tell me something. I don’t hear what Amber says next, because I’m thinking about that day in her closet, when I touched her boobs and she touched my boobs and I went home and wrote about it in my Star Wars journal. I survive the call without crying, then retreat to my room, where I spend the next four months listening to Oasis and joylessly masturbating. Years later, when friends-with-benefits is my favorite word, my mom will tell me that, at some point, Amber’s mom told her that Amber hadn’t wanted to break up, had just wanted to slow down—but when she said so, I didn’t seem to hear her.
June 2000
Carly Boers and I decide it just doesn’t make sense anymore, since I’m going to Madison and she’s going to Minneapolis and anyway all we do is fight about how I need more affection and she is tired of me needing so much affection. We end it tearfully, spend the summer apart, then meet at a boat launch in August to say a few kind words and hug goodbye. I spend the next year begging her to take me back.
November 2007
Rachel Fiske stops me at a street corner to tell me she needs to tell me something. Three hours ago we had a tickle fight. In two days we’re supposed to go to the ocean. Now we walk home, and after she leaves, I watch myself cry in the mirror and for good measure clutch a throw pillow to my chest while sliding down the wall. For days, I keep up the grief theatrics, replaying the best memories, the ones where I’m wanting her and she’s hurting me. When I start seeing someone new, I tell her.
December 2016
Jo Faris and I break up in the middle of an ice storm. We’ve been together for two years, after a seven-year spell during which I seriously dated no one, a spell during which I was convinced I would never find love again. Then I found Jo Faris, and I fell for her as hard as I’d ever fallen for anyone, and two years later, here we are, standing silent at her door. As I bike home, I slip on the ice and fall, and the carton of egg nog she’d given back to me breaks open and soaks my bag. For the next month, I cocoon up in my room and cry until I can’t breathe. At some point, I remember I’d broken up with her.
July 2017
Casey Carpenter calls to tell me she needs to tell me something. I go to her place, where she tells me what Amber Lapp told me, about slowing down, and then what Carly Boers told me, about my suffocating needs, and then she lies there crying, like Jo Faris did, because she can tell I’m not hearing her. I leave her house and go sit on an urban volcano, where I listen to sad songs and meaningfully sob and feel like the victim I clearly am, until, on the seventh day, I stop crying and start thinking. I think about what all of these women have said to me, about me. I think about what I haven’t said, to anyone, about the women who don’t fit into this story, the women I left, women who maybe still don’t know why. I think about a thing I heard someone smart say, years ago, about boys, about how they love to be the one who is hurt, so as to ignore the hurt they cause, and I think of what I thought when I heard that, which was: I’m glad not a boy anymore. The next day, Casey Carpenter writes me a letter, saying she’d like to try again, but first she needs to tell me something. I go to her place and tell her, I’m listening.
