Amateur by Thomas Page McBee

Author:Thomas Page McBee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Why Won’t Anyone Touch Me?

* * *

I came home late with bruised eyes and ribs and crawled into Epsom-salt baths. I came home late, mealymouthed, and hung my damp hand wraps over the shower and my sweat-soaked shirts and shorts and socks and even underwear all over the apartment. I came home late and made protein shakes and egg sandwiches and rejoiced in the sweetness of the present moment: the vibrant green of the plants, the feel of the mattress on my back, the sandalwood incense that clung to the sheets.

I made boxing my church, and it calmed me.

Jess said boxing made me less volatile, which surprised me because I hadn’t realized she knew I had been so angry in the first place, but I thought with regret back to that day on Orchard Street, and the fights she and I’d had since my mom died—the sort of shadowy events where my maleness translated in a way I didn’t understand.

The rules had changed, and so had I. Before, I was a softie, quick to apologize, generally more concerned with keeping the peace than proving a point. Now, I had to work harder to not take things personally, mostly because the translation of hurt or fear or anger through my new body created an impression that often baffled me.

Nowhere were the limits of masculinity more apparent to me than in my most intimate relationships. My abiding fear remained for years after I began injecting testosterone that I would be made strange, and that in my strangeness, I would not be loved.

Though I had been supported by friends and family, something had indeed dimmed. Pretty much everyone treated my body as if it were radioactive. It was easy to blame it on repressed or explicit homophobia in men, or straight women friends’ latent concerns about sending the wrong signals in our suddenly cross-gender friendships, but that didn’t explain the family members who did not hug me after my mom died, or why, in boxing, guys I barely knew swatted my ass, or draped an arm around my shoulders for minutes at a time. The code of how and why I was and wasn’t touched was a mystery to me.

My interest in being held hadn’t waned. I couldn’t make sense of what lack of touch had to do with gender. It seemed, to me, a core hunger of being human.

• • •

Of course, that hunger wasn’t about physical touch exactly—nor was it unique to me. But it was still stunning to discover that boys are not always starved for it.

In Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, a book by researcher Niobe Way based on her decades of work with adolescent boys, a fifteen-year-old boy describes his best friend with the flowery language often associated with teenage girls: “You have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect, and love for each other.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.