When You Are Engulfed in Flames Read online

  “Would you like me to pull the string?” the booth owner asked. I said no, and as I hurried away I could swear I heard a small whiny voice saying something about a sleeping giant.

  Better the Glasses Than Sweaty Fake Asses

  Without a doubt, my best attributes are my calves. I don’t know if they’re earned or genetic, but they’re almost comically muscular, the equivalent of Popeye’s forearms. For years I was complimented on them. Strangers stopped me in the streets. But that all changed with the widespread availability of implants. Now when people look at my legs I sense them wondering why I didn’t have my ass done at the same time. It’s how women with naturally shapely breasts must feel — robbed and full of rage.

  In high school I bought a pair of platform shoes, partly because they were popular and partly because I wanted to be tall. I don’t mean that I prayed for height — it never occurred to me that an extra three inches would solve any of my problems. I was just curious. It’s like living on the ground floor and wondering what the view is like two stories up. The shoes I bought were red suede with a solid, slablike sole. I’d have looked less ridiculous with bricks tied to my feet, but of course I couldn’t see it back then. Other guys could get away with platforms, but on me they read as desperation. I wore them to my high school graduation and made a little deal with myself: if I could cross the stage and make it home without falling, I’d learn to accept myself and be happy with what I had. In children’s stories, such lessons are learned for life, but in the real world they usually need reinforcing every few years.

  Which takes us to the mid-1990s: my biggest physical gripe is not my height or the arrangement of my facial features, but the fact that I don’t have an ass. Others in my family fared pretty well in that department, but mine amounts to little more than a stunted peach. I’d pretty much resigned myself to long sport coats and untucked shirts when I came across an ad, the boldfaced headline reading, “Tired of Ill-Fitting Pants?” I don’t recall the product’s exact name, but it amounted to a fake padded butt, the shapely synthetic cheeks sewn into the lining of a generous brief. I put it on my Christmas list and was given a pair by my friend Jodi, who waited a few weeks before admitting she’d actually sent me a woman’s ass — in essence, a fanny.

  And so it was. But that didn’t stop me from wearing it. Though pear-shaped, my artificial bottom was not without its charms. It afforded me a confidence I hadn’t felt in years and gave me an excuse to buy flattering slacks and waist-length jackets. While walking to the grocery store or post office, I’d invariably find myself passed by a stranger who’d clearly thought he was following somebody else: Little Miss January, or Pamela Anderson’s stunt double.

  My fanny kept me warm in the winter and early spring, but come hot weather it turned on me. The problem was the nylon padding, which, when coupled with a high temperature, acted much like a heating pad, causing me to sweat away what little ass I’d had in the first place. Chafed and bony, by early June my natural bottom resembled a rusted coin slot.

  It was fun while it lasted, but unless I tore myself away, I knew I’d be relying on prosthetics for the rest of my life. After one last walk around the block, I retired my fanny to its box in the hall closet. There it called to me, sirenlike, until a houseguest arrived, a tall, forlorn-looking woman who compared her ass, and not too favorably, to a cast-iron skillet. “I’ve got just the thing for you,” I said. It wasn’t my intention to give it to her, but after she tried it on, and I saw how happy it made her, how could I not? The woman stayed with us for a week, and while I hated for her to leave, I sort of loved watching her go.

  The Feminine Mistake

  “Buy it.” This is my sister Amy’s advice in regard to everything, from a taxidermied horse head to a camouflage thong. “Just get it,” she says. “You’ll feel better.”

  Eye something closely or pick it up for further inspection, and she’ll move in to justify the cost. “It’s not really that expensive, and, besides, won’t you be getting a tax refund? Go on. Treat yourself.”

  The object in question may be completely wrong for me, but still she’ll push, effectively clouding my better instincts. She’s not intentionally evil, my sister, she just loves to see that moment, the split second when doubt is replaced by complete conviction. Yes, I’ll think. I have worked hard, and buying this will bring me the happiness I truly deserve. When handing over my money, I’m convinced that the purchase is not only right, but hard-won and necessary.

  In the year 2000 I went on a diet and lost a little too much weight. Amy and I would go out shopping, and when nothing fit me in the men’s department she’d slowly guide me toward the women’s. “This is nice,” she’d say. “Why don’t you try it on?” Once it was a sweater with buttons running down the left side instead of the right. “Oh, come on,” she said. “Do you honestly think people pay attention to things like that?” It did seem unlikely that someone would notice the placement of a button. But what about the shoulder pads?

  “We can remove them,” she said. “Go ahead. Get it. It’ll look good on you.”

  Though she’d promised that no one would ever notice, you could always tell when I’d been clothes shopping with Amy. I was the guy at the crowded steak house, removing the jacket with a label reading Sassy Sport. That was me with the darts in his shirt, the fabric slack where it should be filled with breasts. I’d step up to the restroom urinal and remember that these particular pants zipped up the back. At this point, people noticed. Amy suggested that a calf-length vest would solve the problem, but I had a better idea. It was called the boy’s department.

  With a Pal Like This, Who Needs Enemies

  I’ve always liked the idea of accessories, those little pick-me-ups designed to invigorate what has come to feel drab and predictable. A woman might rejuvenate her outfit with a vintage Hermès scarf or jaunty rope belt, but the options for men aren’t nearly so interesting. I have no use for cuff links or suspenders, and while I’ll occasionally pick up a new tie it hardly leaves me feeling “kicky.” Hidden accessories can do the trick, but again they’re mainly the province of women. Garter belt and lingerie — yes. Sock garter and microbrief — no.

  It was my search for something discreet, masculine, and practical that led me to the Stadium Pal, an external catheter currently being marketed to sports fans, truck drivers, and anyone else who’s tired of searching for a bathroom. At first inspection, the device met all my criteria:

  Was it masculine? Yes, and proudly so. Knowing that no sensible female would ever voluntarily choose to pee in her pants, the manufacturers went ahead and designed the product exclusively for men. Unlike a regular catheter, which is inserted directly into the penis, the Stadium Pal connects by way of a self-adhesive condom, which is then attached to a flexible rubber tube. Urine flows through the tube and collects in the “freedom leg bag,” conveniently attached to the user’s calf. The bag can be emptied and reused up to twelve times, making it both disgusting and cost effective. And what could be manlier?

  Was it discreet? According to the brochure, unless you wore it with shorts, no one needed to know anything about it.

  Was it practical? At the time, yes. I don’t drive or attend football games, but I did have a book tour coming up, and the possibilities were endless. Five glasses of iced tea followed by a long public reading? Thanks, Stadium Pal! The window seat on an overbooked coast-to-coast flight? Don’t mind if I do!

  I ordered myself a Stadium Pal and realized that while it might make sense in a hospital, it really wasn’t very practical for day-to-day use. In an open-air sporting arena, a piping hot thirty-two-ounce bag of urine might go unnoticed, but not so in a stuffy airplane or small, crowded bookstore. An hour after christening it, I smelled like a nursing home. On top of that, I found that it was hard to pee and do other things at the same time. Reading out loud, discussing my beverage options with the flight attendant, checking into a fine hotel: each activity required its own separate form of concentration, and while no o
ne knew exactly what I was up to, it was pretty clear that something was going on. I think it was my face that gave me away. That and my oddly swollen calf.

  What ultimately did me in was the self-adhesive condom. Putting it on was no problem, but its removal qualified as what, in certain cultures, is known as a bris. Wear it once, and you’ll need a solid month to fully recover. It will likely be a month in which you’ll weigh the relative freedom of peeing in your pants against the unsightly discomfort of a scab-covered penis, ultimately realizing that, in terms of a convenient accessory, you’re better off with a new watchband.

  Never Listen to My Father

  It was the weekend of my brother’s wedding, and my father was trying to talk me into a bow tie. “Come on,” he said. “Live a little!” Outside the window, waves pounded against the shore. Seabirds soared overhead screeching what sounded like “Queer, queer, queer.”

  When worn with a tuxedo, a bow tie makes a certain kind of sense, but with a suit I wasn’t sure I trusted it. The model my father chose was red-and-white-striped, the size of a luna moth, and as he advanced I backed toward the door.

  “It’s just a strip of cloth,” he said. “No different than a regular tie. Who the hell cares if it falls straight or swags from side to side?”

  My inner hobo begged me not to do it, but I foolishly caved in, thinking it couldn’t hurt to make an old man happy. Then again, maybe I was just tired and wanted to get through the evening saying as little as possible. The thing about a bow tie is that it does a lot of the talking for you. “Hey!” it shouts. “Look over here. I’m friendly, I’m interesting!” At least that’s what I thought it was saying. It was a great evening, and at the end of it I thanked my father for his recommendation. “I knew you’d like it,” he said. “A guy like you was made for a bow tie.”

  A short while after the wedding, while preparing for a monthlong cross-country trip, I bought one of my own and discovered that it said different things to different people. This bow tie was paisley, its dominant color a sort of midnight blue, and while a woman in Columbus thought it made me look scholarly, her neighbor in Cleveland suggested I might be happy selling popcorn.

  “Like what’s his name,” she said. “The dead guy.”

  “Paul Newman is dead?”

  “No,” she said. “That other one. Orville Redenbacher.”

  Name association was big, as were my presumed interests in vaudeville and politics. In St. Louis the bow tie was characterized as “very Charlie McCarthy,” while in Chicago a young man defined it as “the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party.” This sent the bow tie back into my suitcase, where it begged forgiveness, evoking the names of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Senator Paul Simon. “Oh come on,” it said. “They were Democrats. Please let me out.”

  Political affiliation aside, I know what the young Chicagoan had meant. It’s a pretty sorry world when wearing a bow tie amounts to being “out there.” I’m just not sure which is worse, the people who consider it out there that someone’s wearing a bow tie, or the person who thinks he’s out there for wearing it.

  I wore my bow tie to twenty-seven cities, and in each of them I found myself begging for affirmation. “Do you really think it looks OK? Really?” I simply could not tell whether it was right for me. Alone in an elevator I’d have moments of clarity, but just as I reached for the knot, I’d recall some compliment forced from a stranger. “Oh, but it looks so adorable, so cute! I just want to take you home!”

  I’m told by my father that when I was an infant, people would peek into my carriage and turn to my mother saying, “Goodness, what a . . . baby.” I’ve never been described as cute, so why now? What was the bow tie saying behind my back? And how could I put it in contact with twenty-year-old marines rather than seventy-year-old women?

  It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. “A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection.”

  And that is exactly what a bow tie says. Not that you’re powerless, but that you’re impotent. People offer to take you home not because you’re sexy but because you’re sexless, a neutered cat in need of a good stiff cuddle. This doesn’t mean that the bow tie is necessarily wrong for me, just that it’s a bit premature. When I explained this to my father, he rolled his eyes. Then he said that I had no personality. “You’re a lump.”

  He sees the bow tie, at least in my case, as a bright string wrapped around a run-of-the-mill gift. On opening the package, the receiver is bound to be disappointed, so why set yourself up? It’s a question my father answers in the pained, repetitive voice of a parole officer. According to him, you set yourself up in order to exceed those expectations. “You dress to give a hundred percent, and then you give a hundred and twenty. Jesus,” he says. “You’re a grown man. Haven’t we been through this?”

  Grown or not, I still feel best — more true to myself — when dressed like a hobo. The die was cast for me on Halloween, and though it has certainly not been proven, I think it’s this way for everyone. Look at my brother, who dressed as an ax murderer, and at my sister Amy, who went as a confused prostitute. As for the other kids in my neighborhood, the witches and ghosts, the vampires, robots, and, oh God, the mummies, I can only hope that, like me, they work at home.

  Road Trips

  The house I grew up in is located in a subdivision, and when my family first arrived the front yards were, if not completely bare, then at least close to it. It was my father who rallied the neighbors and initiated a campaign to plant maples along the side of the road. Holes were dug, saplings were delivered, and my sisters and I remarked that, with the exception of birds, trees were the only things on earth that weren’t cute when they were babies. They looked like branches stuck into the ground, and I remember thinking that by the time they were fully grown I would be old.

  And that’s pretty much what happened.

  Throughout my teens and early twenties, I’d wonder if my father hadn’t made a mistake and ordered pygmy maples, if such a thing exists. During my thirties, they grew maybe three feet, tops, but after that their development was astonishing. The last time I saw them, they were actual trees, so tall that the upper branches on the left side of the road mingled with those on the right, forming a solid canopy of shade. This was a few years ago. I was in Raleigh for the night, and my father took me to a party hosted by one of his neighbors. I used to know everyone on our street, but since I’d left there had been a lot of turnover. People die, or move into condominiums, and their homes are sold to young married couples who scrap the earth-toned carpets and build islands in the kitchens. The interiors of these houses used to look the same, and, eventually, as each is bought and remodeled, they’ll look the same again, but in a different way.

  The party was held at what I thought of as “the Rosens’ place,” though that was two owners ago. The hostess was one of the new people, as were her guests, and it surprised me that my dad knew everyone’s name. Here were Phil and Becky, Ashley and Dave, and a high-spirited fifteen-year-old, who threw himself onto the sofa with great flourish and referred to my father as a she, as in “Lou Sedaris, who invited her?”

  “My son is gay!” the boy’s mother announced, as if none of us had figured this out yet. He may have attended one of those magnet schools for the arts, but still it floored me that a ninth grader in Raleigh, North Carolina — on the street where I grew up — could comfortably identify himself as a homosexual. I felt like someone in a ten-pound leg brace meeting a beneficiary of the new polio vaccine. “She just happens to be my father, young man, and I’d appreciate it if you’d show her a little respect.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When I was this kid’s age, you’d be burned alive for such talk. Being a homosexual was unthinkable, and so you denied it, and found a girlfriend who was willing to settle for the sensitive type. On dates, you’d remind her that sex before marria
ge was just that, sex: what dogs did in the front yard. This as opposed to making love, which was more what you were about. A true union of souls could take anywhere from eight to ten years to properly establish, but you were willing to wait, and for this the mothers loved you. You sometimes discussed it with them over an iced tea, preferably on the back porch when your girlfriend’s brother was mowing the lawn with his shirt off.

  I kept my secret to myself until I was twenty years old, and I might have kept it even longer had a couple not picked me up when I was hitchhiking one night. It was 1:00 a.m., and the last thing I expected was a ride in a Cadillac. Stranger still was opening the back door and discovering that the people inside were old — my parents’ age, at least. The car smelled of hair tonic. A CB radio crackled from its berth beside the steering wheel, and I wondered who they could be talking to at this time of night. Then I noticed that the woman was wearing a negligee. She leaned forward to press the cigarette lighter, and I could see a tag the size of an index card showing through the sheer fabric at the back of her neck. We drove in silence for a mile or two before the man turned in his seat and asked, as if he were inquiring about my health, “How’d you like to eat my wife’s pussy?”

  Then the woman turned as well, and it was to her that I made my confession: “I’m a homosexual.” I’d been waiting to unload this for as long as I could remember, and, amid the screeching of tires and the violent swerve to the side of the road, I felt all the relief I’d imagined I would.

  A few months later I said the same thing to my best friend, Ronnie, who pretended to be surprised and then admitted that she’d known all along. “It’s the way you run,” she said. “You let your arms flop instead of holding them to your sides.”

  “Work on your run,” I wrote in my diary the following morning.

  At the age that many would consider their heyday, I had not had sex with anyone. My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company.