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posted by Scott Keneally @ 12:00 PM
The following words are excerpted from my new story, "NEUROTIC." Sorry I had to censor the photo, but I didn't want to scare anyone.
Playing college football didn’t exactly boost my self-image, either. Not just because the locker room was packed with annoyingly fit guys but mainly because of the communal shower. For most of my life I had purposely avoided communal showers. I was young and homophobic and rather repulsed by the idea of being around other men’s naked penises. But on day one of winter camp I was forced into it. Everyone showered. I stood at my locker looking down, terrified and trying not to see the shadows, the shadows of men dangling as they strolled past. I wasn’t ready to make my entrance.
"Come on," I told it. "Give me something." I was, of course, talking to my penis, coaching it to spare me a couple more inches. It’s not that I had a small penis, it’s that when flaccid I had a diminutive penis. Sometimes when I step into the shower my girlfriend stares at it and says, “Awe,” as if it were a baby spider monkey. I was what some people liked to call a grower, not a shower.
"Come on, plllllease," I begged. No luck. If anything, it was retracting. So I took to casually sweeping my towel across it. "Finally," I thought, and walked to the shower with a very small handful of dignity that quickly circled the drain. I just wasn’t prepared for the extent of other men’s endowments. Granted, these athletes were taller, stronger and just plain bigger than most anyone and so their penis should be to scale and reflect that. But I was very tall and wore big gloves and shoes too, why wasn’t I to scale? Even though I was a bit over the six-inch average when fully erect, "a bit over the average" looks shockingly small on a guy of my height.
Penis problems and paranoia? Check.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 12:58 AM
One summer while in college I answered a classified ad for a painter. I didn’t have a lick experience but the ad promised that it wasn’t necessary. For the next month, under the supervision of my boss, I learned the ins and outs of painting and power washing for eight bucks an hour.
I was a pretty quick understudy and before long he left me alone to work one site while he worked another. I scraped and prepped and painted an entire house for four hundred bucks while he popped in at the end to inspect and collect thousands. That’s when I decided to go into business for myself.
I printed a stack of salmon and lilac and baby blue fliers that I stuffed in mailboxes around town. The flier featured Tony the Tiger declaring, “Precision Painting & Power Washing is Grrrrrrreat!” Later that evening my brand new company pager was beeping and flashing with numbers and promise. One man asked for references but went quiet as I cheerily explained, “Actually, you see, Precision is a new company that recently branched off from a more established one.” I’m not sure at what point he hung up. The other caller wanted to know if I was bond insured. Days passed before I finally tucked my Tony Tiger tail between my legs and cold called my parent’s friends and my friends’ parents.
I’m not sure if it was the tinge of desperation in my pitch to clean out their gutters or wash their windows, but I quickly lined up a summer of work and made a fortune. I went back to the well summer after summer until graduation approached and it was time to get a “real job.” Dad said he didn’t send me to Boston College to throw my life away, “If that was a $120,000 vo-tech, you had better be designing spaceships by this time next year.” Shortly thereafter, I told them I was moving to California “to become a writer.” Needless to say, they weren’t smiling in my rearview mirror.
By happenstance, I did start making a decent living writing storylines, or treatments, for music videos and commercials. And for the past six years I’ve worked on projects like Paris Hilton’s burger commercial or videos for Jessica Simpson and Madonna and even a promo for Six Feet Under. I’m paid a small, nearly invisible pittance in proportion to the directors I work with, but it’s enough for me to get by in my cabin in the Redwoods.
Like most every writer I know, I could always make more money so last week, when dining at my girlfriend’s parents’ house, I said, “Looks like your deck could use a little power washing.” Naomi’s father, Tom, said that a contractor gave him a bid a couple months ago but hasn’t returned any calls since. “I’ll do it for less,” I declared, before relaying the details of my entrepreneurial past. He kind of just shrugged and said, “Okay.”
On the car ride home my girlfriend was aghast, appalled. “You twisted his arm,” she said. “You better do it for half price.” The next day I called and apologized for my nepotistic approach and he said it was fine and asked if I could start over Memorial Day weekend while he was out of town.
I bought a power washer and began blasting three years of mold and dirt off of their enormous deck. When I was finished the wood looked young and tan and rosy like a newborn’s lips. Before Tom left town he said he wanted me to use a semi-transparent Redwood stain. I suggested the Behr brand and the uber-organized former professor pulled out the Home Depot color chart. He pointed to the one marked: 502 - REDWOOD.
I took his pamphlet into Home Depot and bought a five-gallon drum of “Wood-Tone no. 502 REDWOOD.” But when I started pump spraying it on his deck, it was much, much darker than I imagined a semi-transparent to be. I crosschecked the color chart with my drum of paint. Redwood number 502, just like he said. Kimmie said that it did in fact look different than expected, but that “it looks fine.”
When I returned to the paint store the next day to buy more stain, I noticed a nearly identical type of stain: “Semi-Transparent Redwood Naturaltone no. 534.” I fucked up. Sure, he had the number wrong, but regardless of what the color chart said, he was clear that he wanted semi-transparent stain. Not that opaque, wood-toned type.
I bought three more gallons of the wrong stain and raced to Naomi’s parents’ house. When I arrived the deck looked worse than expected - a deep, guilty, shameful shade of “Code Red no. 911.” It wasn’t so bad from the deck but from the backyard, it was apparent that the backs of the spindles and long posts and 2x12 runners were a different color altogether. It was more of an un-power washed, moldy tint of brown.
Even worse, because their second-floor deck wraps around their house and is approximately one mile long and with parts inaccessible from the steep backyard, it would be impossible to achieve any measure of visual uniformity. It wasn’t just a fuckup, but an irreversible one. Before I began, Kimmie had said not to worry about power washing or staining the backside, figuring they would more or less blend in. But now it was just too obvious to ignore the startling two-toned look. I sought counseling from Naomi who only offered, “Don’t worry, my dad is used to getting screwed over.”
After I finished, Kimmie returned home to catch me packing up in a panic. I was sure she would say something snide, that she knew I was a screwball all along, but she didn’t.
Frankly, she’s never this nice to me so I assume it was because she just wanted me to finish and leave her in peace. She had alluded to that days earlier when popping Alleve and griping about how the power washer was “scaring away the birds and butterflies and deer,” and that the rearranging of the deck furniture was “disrupting the lifestyle” of her beloved pug, Marvin. Even after I pointed out the two-tone terror she said, “It’s fine. It will all look the same next year. Bye now.”
On the ride home, I thought about my last work crisis in college. I was painting my neighbor’s trim when I accidentally knocked over a full gallon of white paint on the street side of their roof. As the white wave slowly crested towards the gutter I nearly fainted down into the flowerbed. The Enlows were due to return home soon and in an attempt to cover my tracks I began pressure washing their roof. One by one the black tar shingles ripped off and dropped down to the yard below. It was only getting worse. In the end, I resorted to spray painting black over the white.
As I cringed at the memory, it suddenly hit me.
I really should just stick to writing.
I rolled my power washer into the store with my receipt in hand. “It doesn’t have enough pressure,” I complained, adding that, “I’d like to save up for the better one.” But in reality, I’m retiring. At least until tomorrow, when Tom returns and likely makes me start all over again.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 3:12 PM
