The Late Bloomer (22 page)

Early on in our therapy, Frank asked me if my penis problems
could be physical. “No way,” I insisted. “I'm in great shape. I haven't had to see a doctor for anything since I was a little kid.” The only physical problems I have been having are headaches, which come and go and are probably the result of stress or allergies. My problem, I insist, is in my head.

“You have spent your entire life trying to control everything—your dad's opinion of you, your hockey ability, even the cleanliness of your messy childhood home. Now that your penis is out of your control, you don't know what to do. The last time you felt so out of control of things, back at Colgate, you developed a phobia over not being able to control whether elevators would get stuck. And now you have a phobia about your inability to have sex. But it's irrational, Ken. You are a healthy young man. You just need to let go.”

He makes sense. I have just been emotionally traumatized by a lover, I am uptight about successfully completing graduate school and now my father is dying of cancer. Even so, all of the Zen meditation and psychoanalysis in the world doesn't seem to be helping me overcome my problem. I don't even masturbate anymore; I don't want to be reminded that I even have a penis, let alone that it doesn't work.

At my wit's end, Frank then recommends I stop thinking about my father, stop thinking about Claudia, stop fearing performance anxiety and, for the first time in my life, just go out to a bar, pick up a girl and have sex with her. He clearly is trying to light a fire under my ass. “Maybe you just have to prove to yourself that you can have sex,” the Ph.D. says. “You just need to learn how to enjoy your body.”

Yeah, maybe, Doc. But I am never going to set myself up for a sexual fall ever again. Never again.

I write him a sixty-dollar check and never return.

—

I am in journalism school, learning the art of interviewing, the craft of probing, of figuring out people that aren't Ken Baker. Some of the best interviewers in the news business—Dan Rather, Terry Anderson, Tom
Brokaw, Terry Gross—make the pilgrimage up Broadway to the journalism school and impart their wisdom. I soak it up, loving every minute. It's nice to experience joy, even though it's not of the sexual variety. Journalism is my feel-good tonic, and I am good at it. I may even be better at it than I was at hockey.

I even start feeling more confident when dealing with the brazen teens at Ice Hockey in Harlem. When they start talking over me in class, I sternly tell them to “shut the fuck up.” I am not afraid to kick kids out of class and suspend them from playing hockey that week if they don't do their assignments. Whenever I need to use what Dad used to call “tough love,” I just pretend I am my father, circa 1982, when he kicked Kevin out of our house every other night for doing drugs. Deep down, though, I know that I am only acting the part of the tough guy, but my “sensitive guy” approach is outdone by the freight train that is their hormonal might.

The Monday-night classes at P.S. 72 also remind me that, no matter how tough I had it as a kid, no matter how distressing my petty little insecurities, these kids
really
have it rough. And there are times when I see sensitive cracks in the hardened armor of their male egos.

My student Lydell, for example, can't remember ever meeting his father.

One night after class I ask Lydell, who was acting uncharacteristically glum, how his father died.

“My mother don't want to tell me,” he says.

“Why not?” I ask.

“I guess it's bad. He had a disease or somethin'. I don't know.”

“Do you ever miss him?”

His brown eyes glisten with tears as he mumbles, “I don't know.”

—

For the first few weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer, Dad was too depressed, and drugged up, to talk on the phone. Eventually, though, he emerged from his haze and now he wants to chat all the time.

The diagnosis has changed him. Unlike his past illnesses, which he has always blown off with a joke and halfhearted promises to his doctor that he will do better, this one has shaken him. It's terminal, and he knows it. So do I, which is why I return to my dank apartment and call him once a day.

Most often, our conversations are his bitch sessions. He bitches about how Green Card is an asshole. He bitches about the hospice nurses who insist he keep an oxygen tank in the living room. He complains that he doesn't like to be touched because it hurts too much. Even when someone gently rubs his leg, the pain is unbearable. For the first time in his life, he has begun being honest with his feelings.

“I was an awful father,” he tells me near the end of one of our conversations. If he is crying, he's masking it over the phone. “There were so many things I would do differently if I had the chance.”

“Well, for what it's worth, I think you were a damn good father,” I say. “Nobody's perfect. I wouldn't want anyone else as a father. I mean that.”

I interpret his silence as acknowledgment.

When he laments how not working and having grown kids makes him feel useless, I ask him for advice. I don't let on to my confusion and pain over Claudia, but I do tell him I'm bummed out about not having a girlfriend, to which he replies, “Don't worry about the broads. They'll always be there. For now, you just need to focus on your career. All that stuff will take care of itself.”

Although he has never uttered the three-word phrase, I tell him over the phone, “I love you, Dad.”

“I know,” he says abruptly.

—

Following graduation from my one-year master's program, I say goodbye to my tiny apartment and to my Harlem kids and move back to Buffalo for a three-month paid internship as a city reporter for the newspaper I delivered as a kid,
The Buffalo News.
My plan is to gather
some much-needed experience and clips that I can send out at the end of the summer to newspapers looking for new reporters. I also want to spend as much time with L.B. as I can.

He undergoes several chemo treatments, although he knows deep down that it isn't going to cure him. After work I sit in the backyard on a lawn chair, telling him about the stories I covered that day: the fires, the murders, the train wreck story on the front page. For the first time since I quit hockey, Dad can relate to what I'm doing. Whenever my byline appears, he calls all my brothers, and their wives and girlfriends, to alert them. He cuts out the articles with scissors, not always very well due to his rapidly deteriorating muscle strength.

In August, I land a feature-writing job at
The Daily Press
, a small but respected newspaper in Newport News, Virginia. They need someone to cover the local church community and to write general-interest feature stories. Every week, I cut out my stories and send them to Dad in a manila envelope with a little note. Kris tells me that, besides his monthly Social Security disability check, it is only thing in the mail that makes him happy.

The happy moments are rarer and rarer. The cancer has spread to his stomach and the tumor in his chest is pressing against his aorta, sapping his heart of the blood it needs to pump. The doctors say he isn't strong enough to survive surgery. A twenty-yard walk from the car to the pharmacy counter puts him out of breath.

In reply to my weekly mailings, he scribbles me notes. It's obvious from the almost illegible handwriting that he is quickly losing control of his hands, which are now so numb he says he could stick a pin in his palm and not feel it.

10-24-94

Hi Kenny
—

I've been worse lately. Pain + shortness of breath is beginning to be critical. I have a call in to my doctor for Rx to help me breathe. Last night was the worst I've had. I don't want to suffer. Make sure
that Marcia takes care of Kris. Without me he will feel lost and alone.

See ya

Dad

At my request, the American Cancer Society sends me reams of information on chemotherapy, which Dad has ceased undergoing because it made him so sick. I want to confirm what I already suspect about his decision: It will kill him. On page thirteen of a pamphlet, it says, “Some people believe cancer treatment is worse than the disease itself. This is a very dangerous idea, since the cancer that is not treated places you in far more danger than a cancer that is treated. If you do not treat a tumor it will grow and hinder other body functions. It will be very hard to manage.”

Down in Virginia, a day's drive from Buffalo, I focus on my newspaper writing and reporting. I attend church every Sunday. Ostensibly, my churchgoing is so I can meet the leaders of the church community as part of my duties as a religion writer. While there, I close my eyes and pray for a miracle.

By the time my plane lands in Buffalo, everyone has returned home from the hospital. Mom picks me up and drops me off at Dad's duplex. I run inside, down the stairs to the basement, and find Kris curled up on his bed crying.

“Tell me everything,” I say.

“It all happened so quick, Kenny,” Kris begins, sitting up. “I woke up around nine and went upstairs to take a shower and he was sitting in the living room sticking the oxygen tube into his mouth and freaking out. His eyes were popped open real wide. He was all disoriented and didn't know what was going on. He was trying to say things, but it was like he was too out of breath to get the words out. He was speaking like he had just run a mile. I don't know if he was hallucinating or what, but he didn't even know who I was. He kept turning his head and, like he was seeing people walk by that weren't there, he would say stuff like, ‘Kenny, what are you doing here?' Then it was just gibberish. Nothing made sense. He was done, man. He was on his way out. It was like his organs were shutting down.

“I called the hospice nurse, then I called Kevin and Keith. That's when I called you, too, and said, ‘You better fly home fast.'

“While I was calling everyone, he got up and walked to the bathroom, still holding the oxygen tube in his mouth, and he sat down
to take a shit. He kept moaning and saying he had to take a shit real bad, so I told him to just do it and then go lay down. But he kept saying, ‘I can't go, I can't go,' and all of a sudden he stood up and walked back to the living room with his pants around his ankles. I don't even think he realized his pants were down, man. He was just totally out of it.

“It was snowing, and it seemed like it took forever for everyone to get there. He didn't want to go to the hospital. We were trying to talk him into it, but he would just say NO. When the ambulance came, they gave him a shot of something and it settled him down. They put him on the stretcher and carried him outside. But it was so cold that they couldn't get the legs on the fucking stretcher to collapse. They had frozen stiff. Keith was yelling at the ambulance guy to put a blanket on Dad because he was trembling. Finally they got the stretcher to fold up and started pushing him into the ambulance. The last thing Dad said was ‘Nooo!'

“He didn't want to go, Kenny. And I didn't want him to go. But the lady kept saying, ‘He has to go. There's no choice.'

“We followed the ambulance to the hospital. We all sat there in his room with him for like an hour. His eyes were opened real wide, but he was barely breathing. His chest would just rise a little. He could hear us, though. When I would talk to him, tell him to hang in there and stuff, he would move his eyes from side to side. He knew what was going on. We agreed with the doctors to let him lay there without any machines, no oxygen mask or anything. It was no use.

“The priest came in a little while later and started reciting some prayers to him. The priest said something like, ‘You are forgiven for all your sins, Larry,' and Keith was like, ‘What sins? That's bullshit!' The priest calmed Keith down and told us, ‘Tell him to go. He is holding on for you. He is waiting for you to tell him to go.' So we told him to go, and he went.”

A father, I believe, is the single most important person in a male's life. Even to a guy who has never known his father, the absence of that male role model can define how he perceives his manhood.

For twenty-five years, I was lucky enough to have a father intimately involved in my life. He often didn't say or do the right things, but he always did what he thought was best for me, and now that he is gone forever, I realize that his trying was his most redeeming quality.

I miss him. Not a day passes when I don't feel the urge to pick up the phone and shoot the bull with him—about politics, the Bills, whatever. Since he was basically glued to the couch for the last few years, I could always count on him being home and wanting to chat. I suppose that his accessibility was the only good thing about his illness.

For so long I fretted over his dying and feared the moment when he would no longer be around. But now that he's gone, I actually feel more relief than grief. I no longer worry about him suffering all the time; the omnipresent reminder that, no matter how good I felt, my dad was dying a slow, torturous death has been lifted. I want to turn his death into an opportunity for me to move on, and I vow not to make the same mistakes he did. I don't want every woman I become involved with to become the embodiment of evil. I don't want my children to fear me so much that they end up disrespecting me when
they get older. Mostly, I just don't want to die sick and broke at age fifty-one.

Perhaps his death will free me to lead a healthy, normal sexual life too. Maybe Frank was right in observing that, out of some twisted form of codependent empathy, I had started taking on my father's impotence as my own illness. With him gone, I should be liberated from that mental bondage. And I just want to have fun for a change.

—

Two days after his funeral I am back in Hampton, Virginia, where I have been renting an upper apartment in a Cape Cod–style house two blocks from the Chesapeake Bay and a ten-minute drive in my Ford Festiva from the
Daily Press
newsroom. The southern pace and the weather of Hampton suits me better than the harshness of Buffalo. It rarely snows down here, just north of the North Carolina border, and there's something about a Southern drawl, which I have affected slightly to fit in, that makes the people seem nicer than Northerners. The local history alone (founded in 1610, it is the oldest continuously English-speaking settlement) is more appealing than Buffalo's blue-collar industrial historical backdrop. In Hampton, a Colonial-era capital for pirates, the freshly severed head of Blackbeard was displayed at the harbor entrance in 1718; during the Civil War, the battleships
Merrimack
and
Monitor
exchanged cannon fire in the bay: A historical marker at the end of my street, Shenandoah Avenue, tells me this. The quaint Victorian homes and the crab and lobster fishing boats that dominate the bayside landscape are a hell of a lot more pleasant to look at than The Buff's abandoned steel plants.

Not only am I distanced from the bleakness that Buffalo has represented for me, but my newspaper job, which entails writing general-interest feature stories and covering local religion news, infuses me with a sense of self worth and purpose that I have been lacking since quitting hockey almost three years ago.

My first day back to work, my motherly editor, Marguerite, sheepishly
asks me to cover a breaking story in Virginia Beach at the headquarters of televangelist Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. There's a gay-rights protest being led by the Rev. Mel White, a former ghost writer for Robertson who is now demanding that the smiley TV preacher/politician meet with him to discuss “anti-gay” comments Robertson recently made on
The 700 Club.
Marguerite tells me that last week Robertson faxed a letter to the 54-year-old gay minister informing him, “I do not wish to meet to debate the merits of homosexuality. You have chosen your lifestyle, and I hope that God will reveal to you one day what His word says about it.”

Noticing that I have been sullen all day long, Marguerite adds, “It might be good for you to get out for a while and think about something else.”

I grab my spiral reporter's notebook and head across the bay. I pull into the parking lot that White and his supporters are using as a staging area. A steady drizzle has started falling, so I grab my umbrella and hustle over to White, who is wearing his white reverend's collar, and a crowd of about twenty mostly gay and lesbian supporters. They lock arms and start walking across the street onto the grounds of Christian Broadcasting Network, from which Robertson broadcasts his conservative brand of Christianizing. Not wanting to miss the showdown (and hoping to scoop all the other assembled media), I stuff my notebook into my pocket and scurry into the middle of the pack, locking arms with a couple of supporters. “Welcome aboard, my friend,” a skinny middle-aged man says with a smile. I smile back as we march past a wall of security guards warning us through their megaphones: “This is private property. You will be arrested.” I overhear White reply, “If I'm arrested, so be it.”

I look back and see that the dozen or so other news photographers, reporters and camera men covering the protest have stopped at the entrance gate. I am the only journalist; this will be a
Daily Press
exclusive.

About five minutes later the huddled group, surrounded by
Virginia Beach police officers and CBN security guards, reaches the steps outside of Robertson's office.

A stone-faced attorney, flanked by several other men in suits, is waiting for White at the base of CBN's steps.

“You have no business here,” the attorney tells White, explaining that Robertson is not going to meet with him today, tomorrow or any other day.

The protesters spontaneously start singing “We Shall Overcome” as a police officer locks handcuffs on White's wrists and shoves him into a police cruiser. “Go with God,” White says to his supporters as the cop shuts the car door.

The police inform the rest of us that the only way we can avoid arrest is to disperse and immediately vacate the “private property.” A few protesters sit down and are promptly arrested; the rest of us walk away peacefully.

I speed back to the
Daily Press
newsroom to write my breaking story—the headline:
GAY MINISTER ATTEMPTS TO CONFRONT ROBERTSON.

At Columbia, I was taught that a journalist must always remain impartial, an observer and dispassionate chronicler of people and events. In reality, a journalist is also human and sometimes can't help but become emotionally involved in a story. Later that night, I realize that I had just participated in my first act of civil disobedience, and that the issue—sexual identity—I was de-facto marching for was not entirely coincidental.

I won't reveal this to my friends and journalism colleagues, but the truth is that I can relate to White and his gay and lesbian followers, not to mention anyone else who has experienced the isolation of what it means to be a sexual “other” in our heterosexual, majority-rules culture of man-woman sexiness that pervades everything from television shows to movies to magazine covers. I am an alien confounded by the obsession these humans have with sex and skin and “better orgasms” and “how to please a woman.” My well-adjusted, Jimmy Olson
appearance belies the alienation that I feel from my own gender tribe. I spend a lot of weekends pondering my alienation. I watch this inane TV show
Studs.
I see a shirtless guy around my age—25—strutting in front of a gaggle of bikini-clad girls on a beach, trying to seduce them with his sweat-buttered biceps, square jaw and washboard abs. The studly sex toy sneaks up behind each of the cooing girls and rubs his manly paws on their backs. I cannot relate at all to any of these Gen X shenanigans.

All through college, I heard feminist professors lecturing on how the sexual objectification of women by men has oppressed women, forcing them to seek approval through their sexual attractiveness more than their intellectual aptitude. Although I agree that our society is overly sexualized, their argument lacks one-half its potency, for never have I heard a feminist concede that the same sexual objectification is practiced by women against men. Just look at
Studs.
You think those girls would be so hot and horny for Joe Stud if his pecs jiggled like Jell-O, or if they knew his dick couldn't get hard? I doubt it. I know from experience that there are a lot of women (and men) who like to intellectualize and politicize the nature of human mating. But, pardon my Buffalo English, these people are full of shit. The reality is that, from my perch of impotence and feminized malehood, I see men and women doing little more than engaging in a mating ritual of sexual selection in which the rules of attraction are hormonal, their behavior primal and too often brutal.

Unlike me, though, Rev. White is brave enough not only to reveal his otherness but also to fight for its dignity.

For the next twenty-three days White sits in a orange jumpsuit in a five-foot-wide jail cell on a hunger strike that he refuses to end until Robertson agrees to meet with him to discuss his views on homosexuality. He could walk out by posting a thousand-dollar bond and promising not to trespass on CBN property. But White has become a prisoner of conscience—his own.

Just about every day I receive a collect call at my desk from the city
jail; it is White updating me on his condition. His fast—consisting of a carton of milk in the morning and a Tang-and-water mixture in the evening—has caused him to drop fourteen pounds from his six-foot frame. I tell him that a professor of internal medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School estimates he will die within four to six months if he keeps up his three-hundred-calorie-a-day diet.

“Ken,” White replies, “I believe with all my heart that gays and lesbians are worth dying for. I will not end my strike until Pat comes down here and meets with me.”

And I believe him.

Twenty-three days into his hunger strike, on a calm, cool Virginia evening shortly before eight o'clock, White is paid a visit by Pat Robertson, who simultaneously releases a letter he wrote White to the media. “You wanted a media circus to publicize your activities. I could not agree to be taken advantage of by you and your associates,” Robertson wrote. “No amount of marches or pickets or hunger strikes by you will force Almighty God to rescind his laws.”

My coverage of White's protest ends that day, but Robertson's words will echo inside my head with resonance for several more years to come. I end up thinking a lot about the laws of God of which Robertson had written and how those biblical laws may apply to me, a man who, judging by his thoughts and actions, is neither fully gay nor straight.

Yet, still acting very Larry Baker–like, I don't even seriously consider seeking help from another doctor or a psychologist. Instead, I try to be the Baker Stoic, that brand of man who solo retreats to a mountaintop in order to figure himself out.

There's no male equivalent to the Oprah Winfrey show, where men openly discuss their problems and after tears, an expert dishing out advice and a few hugs, all is well again. Men just don't talk about this stuff. Oh, they might make jokes about not getting it up, but it rarely ever has to do with them. And it's not like I can log into an America Online chat room especially targeted for impotent young guys who
have a depressed sex drive and milky nipples that are sensitive to the touch. Additionally, most of the literature I've read about erectile dysfunction makes it seem as if only old guys and diabetics suffer from it, not young, athletic men such as myself. I am at a loss.

But since part of my job is to write about religion, rarely does a day pass that I don't have to read a passage out of the Bible.

Under the ruse that I am writing a story on the Christian men's movement, I phone a local pastor named Tim. He's a young, hip kind of pastor, the kind of holy man that even kids think is cool. By the end of our conversation, it's obvious that my questions—What does the Bible say about single guys? What about celibacy?—are really for my benefit.

“Ken,” Tim levels with me. “Why don't we have coffee and talk about this stuff.”

After two cups of joe and much idle chatter, I confess to him that I have been celibate for almost two years and, before that period, I never have really wanted to go out and have sex like most guys. I tell him I have scoured the Bible looking for a passage that addresses what a man is to do if his penis doesn't work, but, alas, I haven't been able to find one.

“To be honest with you,” I say, “I feel like a mutant male.”

It's kind of embarrassing, but Tim's smile quells any of my fears that he will think I am a freak.

“If you're a mutant,” Tim says, “then you are a mutant in the most positive sense of the word. You are unlike most men your age, perhaps, but according to the Bible that makes you a very admirable, Christ-like person. Jesus never had sexual intercourse, and as a Christian I believe he is the greatest man ever to walk the planet. Celibacy is one of the highest Christian virtues. You shouldn't be ashamed of it.”

He opens his pocket Bible (young pastors always seem to have a copy on them) and reads from Romans 12:6: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to us. If a man's gift is prophesying, let
him use it in proportion to his faith. If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach.”

“Are you trying to say my not being a sex machine is a gift?”

“Well,” he says, laughing, “you can look at it that way if you want. I guess what I'm trying to say is that God has given you gifts, and, Ken, God has a plan for you. His gifts make up all of the person that you are, including your talent for writing, your sensitivity, your sense of humor, your not having sex just because everyone else might be doing it.”

“That's easy for you to say; you're married and doing”—I fashion my fore- and middle fingers into air quotes—“
‘
it.'
”