Stuck Moving by Peter Benson;

Author:Peter Benson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520388734
Publisher: University of California Press

Special Parts

“I’m like the kind of person who people don’t like.”

“You don’t even.”

“On the bleachers with Lucas.”

“Yeah, and that’s why Aaron.”

“I was the one kid who wanted to go in the water so bad.”

“Sitting on the side where those mattress things are.”

“There’s like this season where I have no friends.”

Trust me, Manny, I know. It’s not straight lines, no standard time. School days or days at camp that seem like seasons. These are the days that must happen to you.20

“Yeah, with Lucas.”

“Kind of good, kind of not good with Aaron.”

“One of the counselors threw a pass to some fourth graders, and I caught an interception.”

Parent-teacher conferences. Doctor’s office visits. Dinner-table chitchat. Bedtime tuck-ins. Boyhood glimpsed as snippets, reported speech, highlights, homecomings. Everything is “what else?” We surrender, barely grasp, intuit, and surely miss so much of the blacktop, cafeteria, classroom, and movie days.

Manny and I were in the car the other day, and he mentioned an impossible piece of trivia. I forget what it was. The factoid doesn’t matter. The point is that the data was, according to him, stored in his hippocampus. He evidently learned that big science term when his class completed a lesson about memory and the brain several months earlier—months, a season.

LOL. If he yada yadas the hippocampus, what else goes unmentioned?

He has a part that is regularly euphemized in society. The doctor refers to it as “boy parts” and annually instructs and reminds him that only Mommy and Daddy can touch boy parts. For his part, Manny has several words, presumably learned on the blacktop, such as “nuts,” “goodies,” and “balls.”

I do not remember seeing my father’s penis, or my brother’s, or my cousin’s. There are no lasting memories of these penises, although I must have seen them. The first other penis that I remember was a cliché penis. Schoolmates were flaunting early onset pubes in a middle school locker room. Then penises proliferated in porn. And there were basement scenarios. A friend and I would take off our pants and underwear, rub our dicks on pillows, jack off with each other, and jizz. That was the word we used. This was before I had done anything sexual with a girl. It was something I felt that I could not tell anyone else. I was scared and nervous. And into it. Down the stairs in a secure, finished room with carpeting and warm wood paneling, the door leading to the ground floor locked from the inside.

Society does not acknowledge things. Most things. But I don’t experience those days as having disappeared and been sublimated into a Hegelian higher identity. I never did anything like that again—getting with a guy. I do not have a solid explanation for why. Internalizations of shame run deep. But lingers live inside and underneath. Formations are knotted and not neat for me. The affects and desires of something that is mine, cherished, longed for, and genuine, a historical part of me stuck in the pines. Sometimes I wake up down in that basement.

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