BEWARE OF VERY ROUGH FIRST DRAFTS. Don't expect anything too pretty or polished. I'm simply trying to squeeze out some rough ideas across the face of this blog. These musings may or may not find their way to the pages of my book. But as you will see, I'm taking certain liberties in voice and style that deviate from my published writings. I hope you enjoy, in spite of all of that.
Monday, February 27, 2006
In fourth grade I wrote a long letter to Ronald Reagan, telling him that, among other things, he was a great man and a “turifeck prezidunt.” I also informed him that if all went according to plan, in the year 2012, I would be elected President, too. That’s when I turned thirty-five, and therefore was the first year that I’d be eligible to run. A few months later I received a letter and a photograph with a blue signature that wouldn’t smear even if you licked your finger and rubbed. I made it a point to personally write back everyone when I was President, especially future presidents like myself.
It never occurred to me, not even once, that I wouldn’t someday be in charge of the United States. This was in part because Mom always told me that I could become anything I wanted, anything at all. Most of my peers wanted to be astronauts or doctors or sports heroes, and while these would surely be fun and important lives to live, nothing caught my imagination quite like the Presidency. Helicopters and jets and secret service men with guns were all a part of a day’s work, although the fame was much of the appeal. The president made big important speeches on the television and next to the old Russian man with the brown spot smattered across his forehead, he was the most recognizable face in the world. According to my mother, I was everything the country needed. I was smart and easy on the eyes, with broad shoulders and something called gumption, which sounded pretty good.
For my birthday I received a book called The Presidents: From Washington to Reagan. The cover featured a painting of our first and fortieth presidents, until I cut and pasted my name and class photo over Ronnie’s. The book, now titled, The Presidents: From Washington to Keneally, was a testament to my destiny. Mom couldn’t have been more pleased with my ambition as it made her parenting duties a little mas facil. She never had to twist my arm to study, because after all, “Do you really think the people would ever elect someone who skidded by with a B average?”
Absolutely not, and that’s why I mostly got A’s on my report cards. Going to Harvard or Yale was almost a prerequisite to the presidency and besides, Mom and Dad offered to buy me anything at all if I earned an academic scholarship. It made learning fun as every ‘A’ was one step closer to that new bulletproof Ferrari or a fridge full of soda in my bedroom.
But grAdes-schmAdes; I knew that I’d never get ahead if I weren’t well-rounded in other areas. In high school I joined lots of clubs and teams and groups and programs and service organizations and stretched myself razor thin. After all, as Mom said, “Nobody wants a president who doesn’t care about others.” By the end of my junior year, all the tutoring and soup kitchens and A’s and my astonishing first place in the NJ Physics Olympics egg-drop contest had paid big dividends. I was selected as a delegate for American Legion New Jersey Boys’ State, a prestigious politics-oriented summer camp.
Every year, kids from every state save Hawaii are plucked from the crowd for their “outstanding qualities of leadership, character, scholarship, loyalty and service to their schools and community.” Mom beamed like a solar flare when I broke the news. She was on the phone with her friends in seconds flat.
“You won’t believe it!”
Mom tracked my movements for all of her friends, family and acquaintances. Whether or not they cared was irrelevant as she boasted to this aunt or that friend about what this teacher or that said about me. No small feat: neither PSAT scores nor report card comments, went unnoticed, unreported, unannounced. I know this because she kept me abreast of it all. “So I was telling Aunt Shiela what your English professor said about your latest book report and, boy, she is so impressed.” Sure, I was a little embarrassed by all the attention, but mostly I craved the validation.
According to Mom, everyone around me saw my star power. Not just she and my father and teachers and friends, but everyone. “Even people in passing cars,” she promised. Why else would my school have nominated me for this distinct honor? And best of all, having this on my resume would surely grease my college application.
The weeklong Boys’ State summer program was essentially a political camp teaching “future leaders” first hand about the mechanisms of state, county and local government. In mock legislative sessions the kids who were elected to the House or Senate drafted bills and acts and amendments that were debated and enacted or rejected or debated more. And if somehow, at the end of the week I distinguished myself enough to be one of the two kids chosen to go to Boys’ Nation in Washington, D.C., I’d get to meet Bill Clinton in the flesh. Back in the early 60s, Slick Willy himself was a former Boys’ Nation pick and had a picture of his brush with JFK to prove it. While I hadn’t a clue how to rise to the top of the 750 others, I had set my sights on the Rose Garden.
Throughout that week at Trenton State College, we were packed into a series of dorms named after different towns in New Jersey. We held municipal elections and I ran for mayor of Jackson Township, while other kids ran for other posts like police or fire chief or city clerk or councilman. During the campaigning we each proposed solutions to the various hypothetical crises facing our city. In my mayoral run I called for the legalization of prostitution and proposed AIDS-safe brothels. I won in a landslide. I also won the next election and the one after that and that, and by the end of the week I was the President of the Senate – the second highest elected official. I was one of seven kids interviewed for Boys’ Nation and got to meet Governor Christie Todd Whitman.
As the top dog in the Senate, I moderated the floor of this branch. And I wasn’t shy about the perks, swiveling in my leather chair with my legs propped up on a burly oak desk, while the twenty other less decorated senators sat in plastic folding chairs. I even sent my Sergeant-at-Arms off to fetch me a Snapple or a snack while I tried looking presidential. While they debated things like the abolishment of teachers’ tenure or handing out free prophylactics in high school, I mostly thought about what I’d say to Bill Clinton next month. I’d talk to him about my letter to Reagan and his own childhood encounter with Kennedy, and he’d wink and teach me a secret handshake that someday I’d pass along to someone else.
Sometimes the debates were fiery and impassioned but if anyone got out of line, I flexed my muscles and whacked my mallet.
“Order!” I’d bang, bang, bang, like Morris Code mapping the frequency of my power trip. There would be no speaking out of turn, or passing notes or nodding off. Like a cat spraying the room with Machiavellian madness, I had no problem letting everyone know that “I’m in charge here!” or “It’s my show!” I exacerbated one kid so much he flung a fistful of papers in the air. His insubordination was met with my orders to have the Sergeant-at-Arms evacuate him from the premises, pronto.
The next morning, the senators rewarded my tyranny in their own special way.
I was impeached.
By an “overwhelming majority.”
In the program’s forty-eight-year history, dating back to 1946, I was the first Statesman ever impeached.
And just like in a game of Chutes-and-Ladders, the beeline from grace to disgrace was fast and slippery, cold and unsympathetic. There would be no brush with Bill, only an airbrush from afar. During the closing ceremony I sat on the side of the stage with the other, less decorated senators, as the new president, my evacuee, gave a speech about his experience as the President of the Senate. Although he had only been in that role for a few hours compared to the two days of my regime, luckily he didn’t mention the fresh coup. And as two thousand fellow Statesmen and parents and others clapped in unison, I chewed on my hubris for a moment.
I couldn’t help but think about how quickly power and ego colluded to corrupt me. Within hours of my presidential post, as I rocked in my leather chair and ordered Snapple and snacks and silence, these kids had already pictured me with the brown spot smattered on my forehead, or perhaps with a little black moustache over my lip. I took it as a warning sign and promptly removed myself from consideration for 2012.
Fortunately Mom was supportive when I tuned out the voices that pushed me toward the presidency. In all honesty, she said, “Anyone who wants all the pressure of running the world must be nuts.” I was happy to hear that and for the first time in my life, I exhaled.
I still went to a fairly selective school and had dreams of success, but my goals had since shifted. For a while, I entertained the idea of becoming a dentist like my Dad or marine biologist or a yuppie, before settling on something decidedly less ambitious.
When I told Mom that I’d like to live in a VW bus and tour with Phish, selling hemp necklaces and grilled cheese and slogan tee shirts in the parking lot, it was immediately apparent that she had lied to me all those years. I couldn’t actually become anything I wanted.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 2:54 AM
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Meet Audrey from my next story...
posted by Scott Keneally @ 11:02 AM
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
This February, in a push to finish my book, I’ve inhabited a room near Aspen, Colorado. My friends, Deric and Audrey, and their Bernese Mountain Dog, Sierra, have been kind enough to welcome me into their home for the month. By almost any standards, that’s a long time to impose on a young married couple, but they are gone most of the day. If they aren’t at work they're downward dogging or taking notes at a think tank seminar about flu pandemics or global warming. I have eight or twelve hours to myself everyday, and a bedroom to call my own. It’s a nearly perfect arrangement.
Two years ago, we were neighbors in Venice Beach. We lived on a block of bungalows and had private backyards that drained into a common backyard. I breached the borders nightly and slid in the backdoor as the scent of lentil soup or veggie chili wafted my way. I crashed their dinners as often as I was around, which would have been fine except when clean up came I’d always receive an important “work call” and retreat to my bungalow. They called me Kramer.
Luckily, I won a few points back with all the love and attention, walks and hikes that I gave their dog while they were at work. Of course, I used Sierra. The black and brown beauty was like chick bait on a leash. I’d parade her around the Venice Beach boardwalk like a proud dog owner and when the beach bunnies inevitably inquired about her breed, I’d unwittingly tell them that she was a Bernese Mountain Lion. My connection with their dog is probably why we stayed so close long after our paths diverged.
I moved to the NorCal Redwoods for solitude and a certain Ms. Brilliant and they moved to Colorado for work and snowboarding, and things like compost consciousness and sociological seminars. Last winter when I visited them for a long weekend, I half-joked about wanting to spend an entire month here. I wanted to write and write and read and write and snowboard when it snowed, and they said “Sure!”
They probably didn’t think I’d take them up on the offer. After all, at our stage in life, most people have sedentary careers without the flexibility to dart from this place or that like an electron. But with the help of the Internet and a cell phone, I eat off my laptop (a detail that compromises approximately 96% of why I wanted to be a “freelance writer” in the first place). Oddly, I’ve been creatively stifled in my cabin and needed to get away from my getaway, so I called them. “Make the bed! I’m coming to Aspen for February!”
“Oh… That’s great,” Audrey said. Clearing her throat, “Did you say the whole month?” Her voice trailed off as she calculated the days, surely praying this wasn’t a leap year. Vaguely satisfied that I was welcome, I subletted my cabin on Craig’s List and headed for the CO.
Never before have I been so hyperaware of my footprint on a living space. Partly because I’ve been terribly productive here and I don’t want them to shoo me away. Partly because they’ve seen the Encino me. Needless to say, I’ve been under intense scrutiny from Audrey’s leery eye. Every time I wipe the dinner table down, I can feel the gravity of her expectance of falling crumbs.
Luckily, for the past two years my girlfriend has been “training” me, as she likes to call it. Naomi is a few years older, a winery owner, a MILF, a cynic, and so, so much more mature. From the get-go I’ve known that I needed to ripen into an adult lickity split. As a result I’ve evolved eons in a short period of time. I no longer place my sneakers on the couch or spit out my toenails on the carpet.
While I have clearly made strides since Kramer left Venice, by no means am I batting a thousand in Colorado. We share different philosophies. Apparently, in their cosmology, dipping your tortilla chip directly in the jar of salsa is a no-no. Fingers in the peanut butter? Flagrant foul.
Picky fucks.
Of course, they have their own share of stuff that annoys me too, mind you. For one, their refrigerator is packed with yogurt and cottage cheese and other sorts of random containers that moonlight on the Tupperware circuit. You never know if you are getting organic sour cream or leftover brussel sprouts. But perhaps most egregiously, they are dirty rotten Scrabble players. Maybe you know the type, the cheapskates who turn two letters like ‘JO’ or ‘XI,’ into sixty-three-point bonanzas. Who even knew they were words?
Cheapskates, that’s who.
Despite our differences we’ve found a relatively easy harmony. Up until this morning that is when Audrey shrieked and screamed my name from the bathroom in bloody horror as if her fingers were caught in a meat grinder. I ran in to discover her pointing to the toilet bowl. Don’t you flush? she wanted to know. Yes, of course I flush, I told her. That time I even flushed twice.
“It’s just a little feedback,” I said.
A little?!!!
OK, a lot. I’m sorry, that will never happen again, I assured her. Damned straight she said, not in her bathroom anyway. And just like that there was a new rule against me using the upstairs bathroom. New house rules are never a good sign.
I fear I’ve overstayed my welcome. In fact, I think I have irrefutable evidence. Just a few moments ago I was carving turns behind them at the top of Snowmass Mountain when they raced ahead too far for me to follow. I must have made a wrong turn and now I’ve run out of intermediate trail and am staring down the barrel of a Double Black Diamond aptly named, Hanging Cliff Wall. At the bottom of lies a smattering of trees that poke out of the tundra like a bed of rusty nails. I’m literally paralyzed with fear, perched on the precipice of death with no way out except down or up, up, up and away in a rescue chopper, please!
Deric calls. He wants to know where I am.
Where am I? Where am I!?!
“!#&@! you, and !#&@ your mother in the @&&, too!”
Calm down, he tells me. You’re telling me to calm down?!? I’m so afraid to move an inch in any direction that I’m ready to blow chunks. If I slip, which by the way is a very high fucking probability since there’s no fucking nothing whatsoever to hold onto, an open casket seems unlikely.
Stop whining, he says, and slowly traverse back and forth with your heels against the mountain. “It’s not that scary.” Yeah, maybe not for expert snowboarders like yourselves, but I’m clearly an INTERMEDIATE, so unless you’ve got ropes and a harness so I can rappel down this hanging death wall, or Superman on the way, I’m not moving.
Click.
I’m alone up here for close to an hour screening out his incessant calls and wondering how long he’s been cooking up this plan. I keep coming back to earlier this morning and Audrey’s shriek and scream and the stray poop dissolving in their toilet. I can’t help but think this is Deric’s not-so-passive-aggressive revenge. Regardless, I’m getting cold and need to consider moving in some direction.
I gaze across the long Rocky horizon and ruminate about the lives of brave men like Lewis & Clark. This does nothing to summons my nerve, of course, but I rise to my feet nonetheless and begin my slow, but steady descent down the river Styx.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 12:56 PM
Saturday, February 18, 2006
This morning I kissed my girlfriend and just as our lips locked she yanked her head back and coughed and said, “Oh God, I’m going to throw up. Did you brush your teeth yet?”
I had, in fact, just brushed my teeth and my tongue, thank you very much. I even flossed. Flossed! I never floss. I reflexively cupped my hand over my mouth and siphoned my breath through my nose. It smells Aquafresh, it doesn’t get any fresher, I protested. But the lines in her forehead spelled Death Breath.
Granted, it’s hard to smell your own body odor or breath, but in all likelihood it wouldn’t have been so repellent to most noses. The problem is that Naomi doesn’t have most noses. She has supernatural scentsories. So much so that if more people had her olfactory setup, we could phase out K-9s at airports and border crossings and let dogs be dogs.
Women do in fact have more advanced sniffers than men and while some people may view such bionic senses as a blessing, she mostly picks up the fetid, the vile, the malodorous molecules choking the air. Things that I don’t even notice, or ever care to actually. The faintest hint of burning hair or B.O. or baby shit sends her into monosyllabic grunts like Eww! or Yuk! Out of nowhere, a vintage shop smells like wet ferret, or my burrito smells like rotting corpse. She paints a putrid portrait of this planet and looks to me for a solidarity that I simply cannot provide. “Stick your snout in here,” she says, her eyes watering as she points inside her son’s sneaker. I oblige, and of course, Justice’s footwear smells fresh and fine and like liquid Tide, as it should since it just went through a spin cycle. But somehow she snuffs straight through that façade to the fungus that inhabits the sole.
Overall, I prefer to be impervious to the slew of scents that scar her. Although, her beak does have some benefits - namely in the appreciation and understanding of the nuances of wine. Of course, since she is the heart, soul and brains behind Roshambo Winery, one would expect, or at least hope, that she grasps all the complexities of flavor that go into fine wine. Luckily, she has it in spades. Not that you’d ever hear her pontificating about a hint of honeydew or the flutter of fresh-cut lemongrass in a Sauvignon Blanc, but if you pressed her she could run circles around the tasting notes.
Me, on the other hand, different story. No matter how hard I try - even if I swirl and sniff and sip and swish the wine while reading about its dominant pear-essence – all I taste is fermented grape juice. Whenever the waiter passes me the wine list or splashes me a sample, I sheepishly slide it over to my girlfriend, mumbling something about how “she’s the expert.” This is greatly emasculating, as you might imagine, since men are supposed to hold the secret decoder ring for wine’s esoterica. But Naomi has a much more sophisticated palate and owns a winery for God’s sake. I’d rather swallow my pride than bluff my way through a corked bottle.
Sure, I’ve learned a lot about wine over the past two years with her. It’s become an integral element of my lifestyle. And while the hints and traces of this or that still don’t blip my sensory radar, I know which brands and varietals I savor. But I still wouldn’t know a tainted bottle if you squeezed the cork’s mold onto my tongue. This was evident during our recent Valentine’s dinner.
I finally took the training wheels off and ordered a pricey bottle of Syrah, all by myself. Our waiter splashed a sample in my glass I swirled and sniffed and sipped and swished and swallowed and nodded yes, I love it! He poured a glass for Naomi, who swirled and sniffed and nearly vomited in the bowl of edamame. “You’re not serious,” she looked askew at me. “Can’t you smell the cork?” The gentleman sniffed apologized and brought us back a new bottle.
“How can you not smell that?”
All I could do was laugh at her dumb luck. Thank God I can’t smell that. After all, ignorance is bliss and I’m easy to please.
Now pass me that carton of supposedly sour milk.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 11:13 PM
Friday, February 17, 2006
CONTROVERSY BREWS IN THE WORLD OF ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS
ROSHAMBO WINERY CRIES SOUR GRAPES
Healdsburg, CA: Since its inception four years ago, Roshambo Winery has put the “sport” of Rock, Paper, Scissors at the very heart of its marketing campaign. Named after West Coast slang for the game, the irreverent winery has become well known for their annual RPS Championship. Last year’s tournament made the pages of Newsweek and was the biggest in U.S. history, as 200 competitors threw fists and fingers for the $1700 purse. It’s symbolic of their mission to make wine fun and accessible to the masses. Roshambo Winery has even gone so far as to create a tasty $10 screw-cap brand of wine called “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” which features graphics of a rock, paper and scissors on the snappy label. And they’ve taken their wines on the road promoting it at RPS tournaments in other cities and states. In partnership with Doug and Graham Walker, founders of the World RPS Society and authors of The Official Rock, Paper, Scissors Strategy Guide (Simon & Schuster), Roshambo Winery has played a key role in RPS’s pop cultural tipping point.
Cue DARTH VADER’S THEME SONG.
Enter ANHEUSER BUSCH.
In yet another example of David being bullied by Goliath, the Beer Titan is sponsoring a new USA RPS League and is hosting a $50,000 tournament this April – just over a month shy of Roshambo’s fourth annual championship in Healdsburg. Competitors in 500 markets nationwide are currently competing in this Bud Light promotion to win a trip to the finals in Vegas. Big Beer has slapped its name across the RPS Phenomenon, and predictably enough, they refuse to recognize the winery’s popular tournament or the World RPS Society itself. In essence, the pioneers of the popular modern sport have been shoved to the edge of irrelevance as Big Beer usurps the spotlight. Can you hear the sinister singsong of Beer flipping Wine yet another bird?
“One, two… Bud’s coming for you. Three, four… they’ll swipe what’s yours.”
But staying true to their mantra, “Fighting for Fun in a Winey World,” Roshambo isn’t going down without throwing a few fistfuls of Rocks. Naomi Brilliant, the winery’s eccentric 33-year-old President and self-proclaimed Wine Hero, is understandably vexed at what she considers the blatant misappropriation of her creative marketing efforts and years of blood, sweat and tears. “For another liquor company to run with RPS to promote its product should be a crime. We’re looking into that, actually.” What exactly she has up her sleeve, nobody knows, but she cryptically suggests, “You better believe Roshambo Winery will make its presence felt at the Bogus Beer Championship in Vegas.”
Needless to say, the winery will move forward with their 4th Annual World RPS Society-sanctioned Roshambo Tournament this June 3rd, 2006. And while she can’t offer $50,000 to the winner, Ms. Brilliant promises “lots of fun in the sun and the chance to walk away with next month’s rent in your pocket.”
For more info please visit www.roshambowinery.com, www.worldrps.com, and if you must, www.usarps.com.
Media Contact:
Scott Keneally
scott@scottkeneally.com
415.902.8175
posted by Scott Keneally @ 12:48 PM
Friday, February 10, 2006
My girlfriend and I recently attended a fancy pants Wine Country awards ceremony. Somehow we were stuck at a table of complete strangers twenty-five years our senior. Nice folks, but on this evening we chose not to engage in much small talk. Just a few pleasantries, nods, rubber smiles, you know. Anyways, after I had finished my plate of sautéed veggies my eyes drifted to my neighbor’s plate. This gentleman had polished off his filet mignon and left two small mounds of untouched garlic mashed potatoes. I love mashed potatoes, not the fingerlings like I had with my dinner, but real mashed potatoes. Real mashed potatoes with puddles of mushroom gravy that called me like cleavage. He put his fork down and wiped his face and turned to his wife, “Wow. Now that was some cut of meat.”
Hmmm, I thought. I waited until he was done commenting on the food and tapped him on the shoulder.
“So, uh, what’s up with your mashed potatoes?”
“Scott!” Naomi couldn’t believe it.
“What, I don’t think he’s going to eat them,” I explained.
“No, no, he’s right,” said the man. “I stay away from potatoes.”
Naomi’s scowl stood its ground.
Perfect. Now, how should we do this? Do you want to shovel them on my plate, no, no, we might knock over a wine glass, so here, why don’t you and I just swap plates, I suggest. Thanks. And oh my God they’re as good as they looked, thanks, thank you very much. As I inhaled the nice man’s mashed potatoes, Naomi whispered, “Have fun jerking off tonight.”
Apparently, if you ask people I eat with, this is not an isolated incident. Only a new low. Nobody ever wants to sit next to me at the dinner table. I’m a notorious food vulture. And it’s true. I’ll admit it. For some reason, the food on your plate is always more appealing than what’s on mine. Even if we are eating the same goddamned thing. Nobody finds this at all amusing or charming or cute or anything other than annoying, rude or unacceptable. And it makes liars out of all of them. If I ask what’s in their soup, or burrito or pasta sauce, they’ll say shrimp or beef or some meat I don’t eat.
My girlfriend suggests sending me to finishing school. And she thinks I should do it before her son picks up all of my bad habits. I guess there are other things I should shelter him from. Like biting my toenails, for instance. In a world replete with cheap tools for nail clipping, there really is no reason why I should ever, at the age of ten let alone twenty-nine, be twisted like a pretzel with my toes in my mouth.
Whenever I see him mimicking my lesser features, I sink three percent closer to hell. Luckily he is reasonable, but just when I talk him out of fleecing his nose in public, he starts twiddling his Twinkie. I can’t win. After just two years of observing me act like a chimp, the poor kid’s sponge holes are filling fast with my toxicity.
But it’s the farting that most worries me. You don’t need to look very far to find from whom he learned that ass gas was hilarious (which of course, it is). Now, whenever he farts he laughs and announces, “I farted.” I fear he may have picked up that from me.
While Naomi jokes about sending me to finishing school, my guess is that she secretly relishes in my immaturity. I’m five years younger and these idiosyncrasies are part of my boyish charm, I do hope. Not all of my bad habits, of course. Not the dirty dishes, nor the tornado that seems to follow my every step, and definitely not the turd that I left in her toilet right before we went to Hawaii for a week. But some of them are appreciated. Like how I always, without fail, pick off her plate, or order Justice some other meal that I want. ("What do you say Justice, that Penne Vodka looks pretty good, huh?") But Naomi would definitely prefer if I didn't snake off stranger's plates.
Earlier, at the Funky Monkey, a low-rent Chucky Cheese that we take Justice to from time to time, I spot four perfectly good slices of a cheese pizza on an empty table. I’m only a little hungry and FM only sells it by the pie and there’s really no reason to let all of that food go to waste. It’s not like it is drugged or poisoned because frankly, why bother wasting drugs or poison for the slim chance someone else will eat it. Who scavenges off dinner leftovers, while in the restaurant?
Naomi plays Skeeball with Justice and I move in for the kill. As I sneak my first bite a man walks up to me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I’m about to faint from embarrassment, that’s what I’m doing. Instead, I say, “Oh God. I thought you were gone.”
“Didn’t you notice our jackets or the purse on the bench?”
No, I didn’t, I’m terribly sorry. “Look, I’ll by you a whole new pizza, really,” I beg. “I just thought it was going to waste.”
He doesn’t want a whole new pizza from me. He just wants me to go away and to not come back or steal any more of his food, thank you, now shoo. He waves me off with the back of his hand and I slink back to Skeeball.
“What were you and that guy talking about?” she asks.
“Oh, nothing in particular. You know me.”
“Yeah, I do know you,” she says, pointing to a string of cheese hanging from my flavor savor. Her head shakes in disapproval, “Off someone else’s table, even?”
I nod in shame.
She finally cracks a smile. A smile that says you’re dangerous and unpredictable and sexy. A smile that says since I can’t take you out in public, not even to the Funky Monkey, we should just stay in bed and ravage each other like animals, like Chimps, like beasts. I’m aroused by that smile and the mischievous acknowledgement of my hunch, that she does find my bad habits amusing and charming and cute. And then her puffy, puffy pillow lips part for the words, “Have fun jerking off tonight.”
posted by Scott Keneally @ 3:26 PM
Thursday, February 09, 2006
My parents never told me about the birds and the bees. I can understand how they might have struggled with this. It’s an awkward conversation to have with your little “Scottyboy.” I can just see them, Mom and Dad, sitting on the couch with suspiciously stiff posture, asking me to take a seat or a sip of water or something. Just get comfortable, they’d say, we have something funny to tell you. “You see, the thing is, you didn’t actually come from a stork.”
In a way I’m glad my parents spared themselves that moment. I love them and want them to live forever and those are the kinds of conversations that snip a year or two off the end. Besides, with Madonna making her sultry splash on that new music television network, sex was becoming more ubiquitous. They could see the lipstick on the wall. It was only a matter of time before I’d figure it out on my own, which of course, I did. Everyone does. It’s just that some are a little slower on the uptake.
Take me for instance. It took a friend’s intervention in fourth grade to bring me up to speed on the logistics of childbirth. As I saw it, the doctor gives a woman a seed or pill and nine months later she’s eating macaroni and cheese and talking to her husband at the dinner table when suddenly she screams “I’m having a baby!” and they race out of the house. This is where the penis fits into the equation. At the hospital the woman strips naked and he gets a boner and slides it into her vagina hole. The baby instinctually grabs on and then he gently pulls his boner out. My friend looked at me in horror, as if I had just said the baby grabs onto the penis and is then pulled out. I was nine.
Soon after, I tried to redeem myself by spreading a juicy rumor I overheard. “Did you hear that Bon Jovi got a blowjob and now he has sperms?” My little cousin Pete hadn’t heard. We were riding in the back of his station wagon, when he called up to his parents and asked for a little clarity, “What are sperms?” Pete! Shhh. His mother’s head whipped around and she asked him to repeat the question.
“Scott said that Bon Jovi—”
NO PETE!
“That Bon Jovi what?” Aunt Mary wanted to know.
“That Bon Jovi got sperms and now has a blowjob.” Screeeeech!
The wagon skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder. A thick cloud of amber dust rose from hell, giving the sun an Apocalyptic tint. This was the eye of the storm before his father’s wrath —“Ahhhhhh.” The door swung open and an incredibly hulkish figure with veins crisscrossing his neck reached in for us. Uncle Pete, the former New York Jet looked like a green monster to me and in a single swoop yanked both of us out by our shirts. He bore down on me, Where did you hear that?, before ranting about sperms and sins and sacrilege, in no particular order. He asked if I even knew what a blowjob was, and I said no, of course, even though I was fairly certain it involved pointing a blow drier on your penis until you got sperms. Little Pete must have been nervous or scared or something because he kept asking his dad what blowjobs and sperms were. “What are you a frickin’ parrot? Get in the car!”
I know their intentions were pure, but I think the adults of my family underestimated the power of their God-guilt. That stuff, especially of the Roman Catholic strain, can really keep a child in the dark about things like lust and evolution and the joys of the jerkstick. There’s a fine line between sheltering and censoring and that line wasn’t on their map. I remember going to the movies and seeing Harry meet Sally and Sally making loud, funny, screaming noises. Mom and Dad covered my ears and eyes and whisked me out of the theater for another popcorn. Moaning like Sally was obviously a bad thing. If it were up to them, I’d glide through this world never seeing, speaking or hearing any Evil.
They won, for a long while, too. By senior year the joke in the pre-Frat circle I spun in was that even if I could get a girl in bed I wouldn’t know where to put it. Whatever. My fingers had already mapped the terrains of four different girls and my tongue even briefly swept across one carpet. And I’d seen the “Wicked Game” video enough times to know how everything lined up.
It’s not that I never had the opportunity to have sex. But if I was going to commit a mortal sin, I reckoned, it couldn’t be with just anyone. It would have to be with a girl I could marry.
Lindsay Riley, the new girl who showed up senior year, she fit the bill. She had green eyes that made Ireland look grey. And those freckles, those freckles and her puffy, puffy pillow lips. I was all church bells and bagpipes. She was laughing and laughing and exuding molten warmth, and those legs, those legs that stretched for months. Ah! It was rumored that she liked me and I liked her so I asked her out and then the fun began. We ran circles around each other for week after week and month after month, exhausting all possibilities from zero to 69. She was fun and creative and the morning after we hit that mile marker I open my locker and am surprised to find that the books on the top shelf of my locker have been cleared to make room for Barbie and Ken’s fellatio-fest. Within this devilish diorama a thought bubble dangles over Barbie’s head, “What CUMS after 69?” CUMS, of course, is capitalized and sparkling in gold glitter with three underscores in case I miss the witty pun. I’ll tell you what comes next, Marriage! This sure as shit feels like that One that all the movies and songs and soaps keep talking about. I turn to God. Since I’m going to marry this girl anyways, I tell him, it’s not that big of a deal, right?
Tonight’s the night and we’re naked and nude and tonguing in a bedroom just down the hall from where Mom and Dad sleep and pray but not tonight because they’re in the city. She tells me to put it on and I know what she means so I slide my hand under her pillow and feel for the hidden condom. I’m smiling as she rolls it on me because I think my pillow-trick is pretty clever for a virgin. She lays back and parts her long leggy legs and counts out loud – seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two – and says that she had better be screaming before she hits one-hundred. I crawl over her like they do in the Red Shoe Diaries, slowly and seductively with my eyes locked on her green green eyes, and enter her. Her puffy lips puff hot hot breath into my ear and it feels so good that I start to moan and thrust faster until she finally says, “You don’t think you’re in, do you?” I look to find myself wet humping her meat curtains.
I lie and ask her if she likes to be teased and she says yes, but only until one hundred, and starts counting again, ninety-seven, ninety-eight…. and then a voice rings out from somewhere and it’s either Brian or Ricky or one of my friends saying that I wouldn’t even know how to put it in, and I wonder if Lindsay heard it even though I know it’s only in my head. Ninety-nine, she says, but I’m distracted and rapidly losing inches and I’m really sorry, but I need to run to the bathroom.
“Hold that thought!” I shout from the bathroom floor where I’m sprawled out, desperately wanking my withered wand. The loose latex is chafing my chop and I pull off the condom. Blood slowly filters back in and I feel relieved and like a sexual beast again before good old one-eye blinks and my bellybutton fills up with white sticky failure. “One-hundred!” she shouts. I’m coming, I say, and she says you better be, not knowing that I really just did. But I’m not even hard! I silently scold God, but I’ barking up the wrong tree because by now God is in stitches. On second thought, I tell her, I think my parents might be home soon and I’d rather save it for the woods or beach or anywhere other than right down the hall from where my parents sleep and pray and probably have sex. Rain check? I suggest. We kiss and dress each other and kiss some more and I tell her that next time she can start her count at one hundred. I think this is witty and sexy until the next day when I swing open my locker to find Ken and Barbie and the promise of glittering CUM has been replaced by an origami breakup note.
Once the pain and tears recede the shame sets in. I’m impotent, I think, although I’m not sure what that means. Impotence ads always run alongside ones for balding men in the sports pages so whatever it is I know I don’t want it. These are the good old days, of course, where information still comes from libraries and television and adults, and after being ripped out of the station wagon I’m not about to ask adults any adult questions.
Before I ever open my heart again, I vow to conquer my impotence. For once, there’s a pit in my stomach that weighs more than God-guilt and I decide that I just need to get this virginity thing over with. It doesn’t matter who or where.
It ends up being with a woman named Honey. Or at least that’s what she says her name is. I find her in the Yellow Pages or the Ottawa newspaper or some publication. I’m not sure. I made a lot of calls. The first girl who showed up to my hotel room didn’t make it through the door. My brother was in the lobby screening them. When the first one walked past him, Chris called up to the room and said, “Don’t open the door unless you want your dick to go limp again.” I blew out the candles in the room and hid in the dark as the door banged, banged, banged.
I called another one and now, when the phone rings, I hear my brother say, “The beaver has landed.” I floss one more time and brush my tongue before the door knocks. I take a peek through the peephole and Oh God! she’s not 21 or firm or fit and she certainly does not look like a young Farrah Fawcett.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“How old do you want me to be?”
Twenty-fucking-one! I want to scream. But I don’t.
I don’t say much of anything, except that I’m a virgin and nervous and just testing out my engine, so to speak. She puts her finger over my lips and lays me down on my back and tells me not to worry because Honey will take care of me. She slowly, seductively peels off her clothes like they do in the Red Shoe Diaries and I want to call Chris back and tell him that I don’t want to fuck a beaver. I want a 21-year-old Farrah Fawcett, like promised.
Somehow still, blood rushes to the right place and I’m ready. She rolls me safe and I close my eyes and she pulls me inside of her and I thrust my hips. We do this for about ten minutes until Honey starts screaming like Sally and then I’m finished and smiling. Finally, at the age of eighteen, I learn about the birds and the bees from a hooker named Honey.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 3:09 PM
“Go, go, go!” I yell. I’m watching the Super Bowl and Matt Hasselbeck is scrambling out of the pocket, racing downfield for a critical first down. As the Pittsburg linebacker closes in on him the suspense vacuum seals my body. I stop breathing until - “Woohoo!” - I spring off the couch like a Jock in the Box.
“What’s gotten into you?” my friends Deric and Audrey ask. They only know me as Guyliner, the black-clothed, faux-hawked, wannabe rock star that I have spent the better part of five years cultivating.
“But I know him,” I say, pointing to the Seahawks’ star quarterback. “I used to play football with him in college.”
This of course comes as a shock to my old Venice Beach neighbors. Audrey is stunned speechless, scanning me up and down, up and down until finally she points to my camouflage kilt and says, “You’re not serious.”
I am.
I first met Matt Hasselbeck during the summer of ’95, before my freshman year at Boston College. He was an orientation leader and I was an incoming freshman. Despite all of his success on the field, his head still fit in his helmet. Matt was bright, funny and easily accessible. He fired off self-deprecating stories like perfect spirals. “I always thought babies were born after six months of pregnancy,” he said. Since he entered the world exactly six months after his parents married, he imagined that he was conceived on their wedding night. It took an intervention by friends in eighth grade to sort that out. Don’t worry, I said, coughing up my own personal misunderstandings about childbirth. Up until fifth grade, I thought that in the delivery room, the baby held onto the penis and the man pulled the baby out. Besides both being a little slow on the uptake, we shared interest in football.
I’d been a BC Screaming Eagle since 1984 when Doug Flutie’s infamous “Hail Mary” beat the Miami Hurricanes in the Orange Bowl. During his Heisman Trophy winning season, I cut out every story about him that I could find and even wrote him a letter that included my picture, phone number, and instructions to call me between the hours of six and eight p.m., but not after eight because eight was my bedtime. A couple weeks later he sent me an autographed photo that said “Best Wishes, Doug Flutie,” which I thought was rather nice but not as nice as something like, "Nice picture, Scott! I just tried your house but the line was busy. You’ll be hearing from me soon. Best Wishes, Doug." Nonetheless, I had another Flutie flake.
When I told Matt that I had always dreamed of playing football at BC he told me to try out. Apparently, the team didn’t make any cuts so as long as I showed up to practice each day, I would “make” the team. That detail certainly worked in my favor as I had a rather unheralded high school career. Only one school, Brown University, recruited me. And I suspect the only reason I even blipped their radar was because they knew of my older brother, Chris, the 6’7”, 300 lbs lineman who would soon start as a rookie in the Canadian Football League. Whereas he had talent and instinct, I had potential and a pipedream.
One thing that’s striking about my college sports fantasies is the fact that when you really boil it down, I didn’t even like playing football. I liked looking like a football player. With the jersey and the elbow pads and helmet and lines of black face paint smeared under my eyes I felt tough as nails, until of course the whistle blew and the play started and my coach would scream, “Hey, Peter Pan! Quit pussyfooting around and hit like your brother, not your mother!” I didn’t have the mental or physical toughness that the sport demanded. I was soft, which was apparent at the age of two when I tripped over a Nerf football and broke my leg.
I guess my interest in Division 1 college football had more to do with salvaging pride than any actual love for the concussions and wind sprints and humiliation at the hands of the self-important men who orchestrated the whole affair. And since I couldn’t be cut (so long as I showed up), it’d be easy to earn respect from my friends, family and coaches back home. Everyone would simply assume that I had made the high-profile team, a technicality that I wouldn’t rush to clarify.
So with Hasselbeck’s push, I joined the Boston College football team after my first semester, in time for winter workouts. I knew I didn’t have a pedophile’s chance in prison of actually playing, so fitting in was enough for me. I had bulked up to 245 lbs and I blended in nicely right up until the equipment manager handed me my gym clothes and gear. Unlike the other 80 scholarship athletes, I wasn’t issued a number in the standard range of 0-99. There would be no chance for me to go unnoticed, because let’s be honest, nothing screams walk-on! quite like the number 104.
Three figures aside, even if I had managed something more nondescript I surely would have made a splash thanks to my foot speed. After running my best time ever in the 40-yard-dash, one coach screamed, “Jesus kid, we could clock you with a sundial.” Some of the guys got a good laugh out of that, and I can’t blame them. I had run alongside another tight end and by the time I finally crossed the line, the kid could have gotten an oil change.
This was just the beginning of the physical tests. The coaches wanted to know everything - what we could bench, curl, squat, jump over, you name it. If there was a muscle they were testing it, and surprise surprise, I was the weakest link. Somehow, I survived six or seven weeks of the grueling pre-dawn workouts, time trials, group showers and the shame of my scarlet number. And I stuck with the team long enough to say that I played football at Boston College without actually lying. But when spring practices and the full-contact hitting began, I said thanks but no thanks and handed back my helmet and shoulder pads and jersey.
Shortly after giving Rudy a rest, my interests unexpectedly veered left. I swapped religion for raves, frat parties for Phish shows and Sports Center for Yoga Centers. And friends like Deric and Audrey who only know this wannabe rocker side of me have a hard time connecting the dots to the J Crew jock.
I can’t say I ever look back at the guy I used to be with any degree of nostalgia or regret. But as I watch the Super Bowl halftime show, I can see ahead at the guy I don’t want to become. Dressed in shimmering black clothes and sparkling wristbands, Mick Jagger is prancing around stage, sashaying and swaying like a tone-deaf drag queen.
My friends are in stitches.
“Look at how his arm just flaps around.”
“Where's the hoola-hoop?”
“How old is he?”
Normally I’d be laughing too. Instead, I’m appalled. Not only do I dress like him with the skinny black clothes and shiny wristbands, I fear that I’m just as big of a spectacle. As I watch him waving his arms and hoola-hooping his hips, I see my own dance moves, the very dance moves that I thought were slicker than champagne, in a striking, new, unflattering light. I sway. I sashay. My arms even flap around like that. Do I really look this bad?
No, I don’t, I decide. There’s a difference. I’m young and embracing my youth. He’s old and clutching onto it. But I need to stay on my toes. I don’t want to wake up thirty years from now with mascara smeared across my wrinkled cheeks, and have to face the very caricature of a caricature that I loathe.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 12:02 PM
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Three years ago, almost to the day, I got my first call from Esther Haynes, writer/editor for JANE Magazine. She said she wanted to publish my misadventures in bedwetting. I played it cool for about five minutes, until we said goodbye. That's when the hooting and hollaring and howling began. I had spent the better part of a year pestering the magazine's extraordinarily funny editor, Jeff Johnson. Mostly because I believed JANE was my voice, my audience, my magazine. Perseverance finally paid off and he passed my story along to Esther for their "It Happened to Me" column. That was published in June/July of '03.
Luckily, she also found the humor in my tearjerk reaction to a Super Bowl commercial. That will be published in May '06.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 2:08 PM
Sunday, February 05, 2006
I know there's something wrong when I'm crying during the Super Bowl. Maybe not crying, but misting. Is it because one of the Pittsburgh running backs is capping his career with a championship ring in his hometown? Not so much. Is it because Seattle's star quarterback, a onetime teammate of mine at Boston College, is losing a winnable game? Nope.
No. I tear and mist or whatever when the Dove "Know Self-Esteem" ad runs. You may have seen it--the commercial features a montage of portraits of young girls, accompanied by superimposed tags. A redhead "hates her freckles," an Asian "wishes she were blonde," a thin girl is "afraid she's fat," and a mildly unattractive girl is "afraid she's ugly." Set to a choir of girls singing about seeing "true colors shining through," this campaignforrealbeauty.com is designed to pluck our heartstrings and stir memories of the flat girl from first period nicknamed Bug Bites or the big-nosed-boy who earned "Beak of the Week" honors. Everyone is scathed. And now that culture has ushered in things like face transplants and MTVeens selling themselves as wannabe pop stars to win dates, there's never a better time to hock inner beauty and self-esteem. I understand why Dove thinks "every girl deserves to feel good about herself," and why we all deserve that.
But is this why I'm crying? Not exactly. I'm crying because I always cry.
Just last week, as I lay in bed with a steady stream of tears rushing over my three-day stubble, my girlfriend, Naomi, swept into my room and asked what was wrong. I could feel the eyes of her disapproval clamping tightly around my neck. Crying was a sign of weakness in her dysfamily. As the product of a rather chilly Japanese mom and a somewhat bookish anthropology nerd, Naomi can be detached, distant and emotionally reticent at times. Sharks can express more empathy.
"What's up?" she repeated.
"You know what's up!" I wanted to scream. The glow of the television reflected off my face. "L...ll...llaw...lost."
"Why do you feel lost?" she asked, her pitch surprisingly curving toward compassion. "Look," she paused, "if this is about losing your--"
"N...no...." I pointed to the tube and repeated, "Lost." She had picked a bad time to barge in. My hero, Lost's Dr. Jack Shepard, just saved another life, and I had succumbed to the miracle, the moment and, more likely, the lilting strings of the show's dramatic score.
"You're kidding, right?" she asked. I shook my head, no. She shook her head, too. "I've never dated an emotional wreck before."
What can I say? I'm a tearjerk. And soundtracks make it so much worse. If a movie, television show or commercial has violins, cellos or a choir of insecure girls singing a poignant Cyndi Lauper song, there's a decent chance I'm paying the Kleenex kids' way through college. Naomi suspects that if Philip Glass wrote a score for the six o'clock news, I'd need to be tranquilized.
The first sign of trouble came when I was five. E.T. broke my seal. Ever since the blockbuster hit the theaters, I've been a one-man monsoon at the movies. I didn't cry just once during E.T., I cried throughout it.
When his finger first glowed? You betcha.
When the scientists were closing in? Of course!
And when his bike took flight? So help me God.
Not only did I cry. I shouted: "Bad men! Leave E.T. alone!" Mom's hand muffled my outbursts, but she couldn't stifle my tears. Not then, nor during Rocky, Teen Wolf, Guns & Roses' "November Rain" video, or even the Smurfs.
Perhaps I invest and indulge so fully in these characters because I have yet to personally experience the heart wrenching agony of sudden and irreversible loss. Knock on wood, but my close friends and family still have pulses. Hence, my cinema sobs could be my way of preparing for life's grim inevitabilities. This is probably why I watch Hillary Swank movies over and over. My sniffles, shrieks and snot bubbles are exercises in empathy. So if the day ever arrives where I need to euthanize a paraplegic friend, or if my sister ever straps one on, poses as a guy and is shot seven times, I will have a precedent for those emotions.
Or maybe I need not overanalyze this at all.
Just as I'm trying to shield my tears from my friends a different commercial comes on. One for Desperate Housewives. It features Shaquille O'Neal shooting free throws. He pauses, then turns to the camera, teary-eyed, and says, "I'm sad Gabriel lost her baby." And while Shaq's sniffles are scripted, the message is clear. Boys do cry. Big, big boys, like him and me.
Thanks to Shaq I'm no longer ashamed of being a cinematic sap. Perhaps it's time to start embracing the tears as part of what makes me a unique guy. I'm finally getting to Know Self-Esteem. (Cue "True Colors.")
Now, could you please pass me a Kleenex?
posted by Scott Keneally @ 10:03 PM
