Thomas Pitilli
I have three natural talents. 1) I’m a good Windex-er. 2) I’m good at imitating Tina Turner. 3) I’m good at sniffing out potential partners. I can spot a gent from across a crowded room and know instantly whether or not I stand a chance. And this is how and why when I met Randall Buckwald in 1996, I correctly sensed an end to my tween through teenage loneliness.
Randall, a recent transfer to my midwestern high school from his native Hawaii, was five-foot-four and an aspiring ballet dancer.The first time I saw him he was on the lawn near the high school’s baseball diamond performing a series of ballet stretches, and all I thought was, “He will have you. Make him yours.”
I accomplished this task easily enough through a series of cafeteria lunches in which we sat side by side at an otherwise empty table.We discussed ballet, the virtues of Alanis Morisette and, eventually, whether or not we ought to have sex.We were both virgins, but with different attitudes towards sex: Randall wanted it, I did not. Not not in general, just not with Randall. Short as he was, he had feet long as a baby and wide as a paper-back book, and suffice it to say that when he—at 5-foot-4—disrobed, he looked like the front-half of an elephant: two legs, one trunk.
“Oh, please,” he’d beg.
“I just don’t know,” I’d answer back.“What you’ve got there looks so… suspicious.”
The only reason I ever capitulated was because Randall got Don Juan-y on my ass, treating me to Korean BBQ and a showing of Jerry McGuire. The movie was romantic, there were constant shots of Cuba Gooding’s peach-shaped rump, and Randall begged with fresh conviction. “Oh, please,” he’d said. “You look real pretty tonight.”
I finally said yes, and what followed was disastrous. After we got down to business, Randall worked with alarming speed, exercising less control than an incontinent infant until I lost all feeling in my lower half and, eventually, control of my bladder.
You’d think relieving yourself on another person’s pubic hair would free you from the responsibility of having to have sex with him again, but no. Randall was 16 and determined. “Let’s just try it one more time,” he’d plead. “Just once. I’ll be quick, I swear.”
“I know you will,” I said, “but speed is not the issue. The issue is that now when I pee, it feels like a colony of fire ants have built a village in my crotch.”
I thought my answer was wonderfully clever but Randall only found it irritating. One month later he dumped me for a sophomore named Lillian Freebaum, a colossus of a dame with hips of such impressive girth, they could’ve stopped traffic. (And more to the point, harbored a vagina the size of a land-fill.) It hurt to see him move along so quickly, but it also got the wheels turning: I’d learned real-life sex was as much fun as a staph infection. So what was I to do? Hungry people eat. Tired people sleep. And in a manner as instinctive, a young lady in my position intuits that what she ought to do is take matters into her own hands.
I masturbated so excessively for seven days that on the eighth I awoke to find my right hand paralyzed. Palsy-like. It was stuck in the pose one might strike to hold a grapefruit flat against her gut. It should’ve worried me but didn’t, informed as I was about the reason why.
It was my mother who got scared. She noticed me fumble my cereal spoon over breakfast.
“You’re eating like a baby,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
My mother is a diagnosable hypochondriac who perceives any changes in her body and the bodies of those around her as the obvious onset of cancer. Maybe AIDS. In describing physical symptoms to her, you must choose your words carefully lest she fly off the handle and rush you through a biopsy or MRI.
“I’m fine,” I said. “My wrist just hurts a little.”
“Move it.”
“What?”
“Move your wrist. Move it around.”
When I told her I couldn’t, all color drained from her face. She ordered me into the car. “Then you’re going to the hospital!
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s possible you had a stroke!”
With saddlebag arms and a wispy, postpubescent mustache, I must’ve looked like the most likely candidate in the world for chronic masturbation.
Dr. Rasheedwa must have known the score, but that didn’t mean he’d want to talk about it. Not with me, and not with my mother.
So he started throwing bones. “Do you play tetherball?” he asked, “Or piano? Do you do a lot of typing?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Typing!”This option sounded plausible. “I do a lot of typing!”
Dr. Rasheedwa nodded happily along and diagnosed me with Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Then he fit me for a wrist brace and told me to wear it for a month.
To quote my friend Jim, a morbidly obese aspiring opera singer I’d meet years later waiting tables, “once you go whack, you never go back.”
Once one knows how to masturbate, one must masturbate.
I, for one, could not agree more. If you’re like me and don’t figure out masturbation until you’re 17, the discovery is a revolutionary and spectacular gift. So to have it suddenly ripped away care of a debilitating wrist brace is horribly traumatic. Like giving a six-yearold a puppy, then shooting said puppy in the face. It’s awful. And unfair.
Over the course of the month that I had to wear the wrist brace, I became so unimaginably irritable that my parents chose to stage an intervention.
“You’re so angry!” cried my dad. “Just talk to us! Please! Just tell us what’s wrong!”
“Is it drugs?” my mother overlapped. “Pot? Something worse? Are you projecting your anger at Randall onto us?”
“No!” I finally cracked. My number one priority was to get her off my case. “I can’t masturbate when I have this wrist brace on, OK?” I brandished it at her. “Jesus. Just leave me alone.”
“Oh,” said my dad.
“Well,” said my mom.
We sat in awkward silence for a moment. We left it to my mom to be the one to cut it. “At least none of us have cancer,” she said finally.
This much was true. Just a horribly awkward dinner ahead of us.
Adapted from People Are Unappealing: Even Me, (c) 2009 by Sara Barron. Published by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random
House, Inc.
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