Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Author:Michael Chabon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins US

When I was fifteen, I slept with this woman I knew. I’m not sure how old she was at the time; probably not over thirty-five. She was a friend of my mother’s, and I have never known, then or to this day, what was in it for her. I was a newly thin, undistinguished-looking kid with acne and aviator glasses. My long hair was cut and styled in the “wings” that render hilarious contemporary photographs of Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. Though I was smart, verbal, and took an interest in the world around me—and had recently felt stirrings of some kind of new grasp on the nature of my life to come, derived from reading The World According to Garp and watching Annie Hall—that interest still quickened most keenly in proximity to things like Dune, Jim Starlin’s Warlock, and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I have devoted many passing moments over the intervening years to observing interactions between thirty-five-year-old women and fifteen-year-old boys, and I have found that all the mystery in the business lies on the older and wiser side of things.

My mother threw a party, and there was dancing that ran late into the evening, with the tempos slowing as the night wore on until, in the end, my mother and her boyfriend went off someplace to do whatever they did, and I found myself alone in the arms of this woman—divorced, single, sweet-smelling—subject to her languid, teasing conversation, to the pressure of her belly against my hips, and to the tender mercies of Willie Nelson singing “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

Maybe the solution to all the mystery lies in the title and lyrics of that song—and in the ache of the voice that was singing it. I am certain the woman was pretty drunk.

“Are you a virgin?” she said in an offhand tone.

“No,” I said. I was happy to see that my reply surprised her. It was the truth, and I was hoping it would be enough to persuade her to extend the invitation that I thought she might be contemplating.

“Does your mother know that?”

“Well, I didn’t tell her,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so, either,” said my mother’s friend.

My virginity had been no particular encumbrance to me, and it had not lingered very long beyond the time that I started hankering to be rid of it. I was in the tenth grade, a year younger than most of my fellow sophomores, and the girl who had done me the favor was a senior: a sophisticate of seventeen, in possession of a keen mind and a tremendous American automobile of the period (an LTD? an Olds ’88?) that she used to drive herself responsibly to museums, film retrospectives, and concerts. She was a serious reader (I still have her paperback copy of The Wreckage of Agathon, and I plan to read it someday), a musician, an artist; an incipient adult, embarked on a history of unfolding adventure, both intellectual and physical, in which I was to rate barely a footnote.

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.