Leg, p.31
Leg, page 31
Oh, yes, soft touch. Soft touch for sure.
As for my own physical shortcomings, Lucas didn’t notice my leg until I pointed it out on our third date. “You limp?” he asked. I found his apparent absentmindedness charming.
Lucas may not have found everything I did charming, but he didn’t break up with me when I brought a Tupperware container of raw almonds to the Arbor rather than paying for popcorn. I started to fall for him when he agreed to walk out of The Tree of Life with Mary and me. He let me pluck his ears—I referred to the thatches of hair sprouting on either side of his head as his Princess Leia buns—and he was unfazed by the condom wrappers that crinkled underfoot when I at last let us graduate from making out on the couch to making out in the bedroom.
Long, painful experience had taught me to keep my jeans on during those make-out sessions and to put off sex for as long as possible under the guise of taking things slow. I could still hear my eighth-grade health teacher, Mrs. Shell, imploring me, in a coach’s weary bark, to keep buttons buttoned and zippers zipped and to stay vertical. Staying vertical was the whole problem. I still had some serious ED. Most guys I was with eventually wanted to bottom and when I couldn’t deliver, they would drift away. They never told me my lack of tumescence was the reason things didn’t work out between us—but of course they didn’t. They weren’t monsters. They were just a bunch of disappointed buttholes.
“I’m a slob, not a slut,” I told Lucas. “At least you know I practice safe sex.”
“A lot of it,” Lucas observed, peeling a condom wrapper off his foot.
“Practice” is the optimum word here because I had bought a box of Trojans in bulk and gotten a little carried away ripping them open and slipping them on, like a chaste teenager. I was practicing using condoms, not practicing safe sex, wanting to be prepared if a boner should ever accompany me in the presence of another human being.
The night we went up to my bedroom, I melodramatically confessed to Lucas I could never top him. My dick just didn’t work like that.
“I didn’t realize we were having sex this instant,” Lucas quipped, pulling down his madras shorts. From the look of it he was ready to go whenever.
Lucas spent so much time at my condo that summer we pretty much lived together. Back at the adorable house he rented a few blocks away, the one with the backyard grill, his best friend/roommate—whose last name, get this, is Jolly—put a clothing rack in his bedroom and turned it into a closet.
One night I came back from class to discover Lucas had cleaned my condo from top to bottom, picked up the paper explosion in the office and the condom wrappers in the bedroom.
That’s it, I thought. I have to fuck this guy.
That week we went into the county health clinic for a battery of STD tests, like a model couple. Our pipsqueak counselor had floppy bangs he kept pushing out of his face; Lucas was sure he was wearing a wig. The counselor asked us to evaluate our HIV risk on a scale of one to ten. I said seven. Lucas said one.
“One?” the counselor asked.
“It’s been a while,” Lucas deadpanned.
In the end he compromised. “You know what?” Lucas said. “Add a point-five just to be safe.”
The evaluation sheet the counselor gave Lucas after the appointment went under a koala magnet on the fridge, like an IOU for a cute picture of us. Under the “goals” section at the bottom, the counselor had written in the following for Lucas: “My new partner and I will continue to use condoms for anal sex and continue to talk about STDs.”
If only Lucas knew what he was signing up for. Being in a monogamous relationship didn’t turn off my hypochondria. STDs were still all I talked about. STDs and my mom.
On the first day of Christmas break that year, Lucas moved in officially. He spent the rest of the holiday with my family in Salt Lake. I was a little nervous bringing him home. My family isn’t a family. It’s a way of life, and a chaotic one at that. I shouldn’t have worried. Within a day, Lucas was crammed into a folding chair watching Moe play a candy cane in Cristóbal’s off-brand Nutcracker, and a day after that he was jingling down the stairs in a Santa Claus costume my mom had rented to entertain my nieces and nephews.
Santa Lucas wore cowboy boots and a fake white beard over his real one that made him so ticklish he had to keep pulling at it.
“A Jewish Santa!” mused Mitch’s husband.
Lucas hadn’t grown up celebrating Christmas and didn’t know the first thing about it: the names of the reindeer, say, or whether Mrs. Claus was Santa’s wife or his mother. I was happy to educate him, knowing he’d love the songs. “Round yon virgin,” I’d say, “not young virgin. Like, ‘See that virgin over yonder? Go gather round her.’”
When it came to exchanging gifts, Lucas gave me a pair of expensive tweezers with my name inscribed on them, both a tribute to my skills plucking his ears and an indictment of them. Greg Marshall, TWEEZERMAN. “Don’t you get it?” Lucas said. “Tweezerman is the name of the brand and that’s your name. You’re Tweezerman!”
I had to admit it was a genius gift. In return, I gave him a Norelco nose hair trimmer.
“What’s up with you two and plucking hairs?” Danny asked, popping a pimple on Moe’s back as she screamed.
“If you ever break up with him, we’re taking him and not you,” my mom told me before we left for the airport after the new year.
Two Christmases later, in 2013, we were once again in Salt Lake when a district court overturned Prop 3, the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, the one I’d fought against for Don’t Amend the summer after freshman year of college. For a few weeks, before a higher court put a stay on the order, gay couples could tie the knot in Utah. In less than a decade, Don’t Amend had gone from fringe to status quo. I thought about my dad telling me at the end of that discouraging summer that I’d find someone special and that we’d get married. That everything would turn out Gina Jones. Even platitudes sound prophetic when they come from your dying dad, especially when they take years to become reality.
It was too early for marriage talk with Lucas. We’d been together only two years and I was still waiting for his schizophrenic break or for his wife to turn up on our doorstep, something. There was just no way someone this untroubled could like me. When we fought, I had to tell Lucas to be more of an asshole, like my mom used to do to my dad. We concluded that a Yuletide courthouse wedding was out but a dress rehearsal wouldn’t hurt. I pulled out my yellow XXL Don’t Amend shirt from the closet and made Lucas take a selfie of us kissing in front of the Temple. “Merry Equality Christmas!” I posted on Facebook. It got eight likes. Equality Christmas never became a thing, no matter how hard I tried to make it one.
I had always told myself that if I didn’t have tight tendons I’d have no problem getting any guy I wanted. It turned out I just needed Lucas. Flings and one-night stands were the opposite of enjoyable. It took the patience and trust of a long-term partner, experimenting with different positions, to figure out what put the least strain on my legs, and my ego. We didn’t have a bad sex life, Lucas and I, just one with constraints.
Occasionally I tried to top, piling more pillows under my ass than The Princess and the Pea. I’d end up feeling like buttered linguini, my trembling right leg straight out in front, my left leg bent, a finger doing the work the rest of me couldn’t. I was like the world’s most incompetent proctologist, a doorbell ditcher who’d lost the will to run, one who just kept pressing and pressing. “Is that your dick?” Lucas would say from on top of me. “Is that your dick?”
Sex is more delicious and complicated than being a top or bottom, a pitcher or a catcher, and I learned to enjoy playing ball, even if I couldn’t compete in every position. At the same time, I’m a guy. I suspected that if I could top, even just once, I would stop worrying about it.
This is where my mom’s Viagra comes in.
Shortly after my dad died, she had gone on a trip with Moe and Tiffany to Costa Rica and visited a local pharmacy, the kind where you didn’t need a prescription to get painkillers. I’m not sure if it was the language barrier or what, but she’d gotten nervous at the last minute and accidentally scored Viagra instead of Vicodin.
Years later, she presented the sorry story to me as a joke, playing it for laughs. I saw it more as a bawdy fairy tale about a drooping, uncut beanstalk, the Jack in the story a gay man named Greg, his magic beans arriving not via witch but via widow.
“Doesn’t that just figure? I got the one drug I have no interest in using,” Mom said.
“I’ll take the Viagra, Mom,” I said. “Really.”
“Don’t be silly, honey. You are your father’s son. You don’t need Viagra.”
Mom deflected and demurred and “lost” the Viagra for months in her jumbled medicine cabinet. “It’s expired. I need to ask Alice if it’d be OK to give to you,” she finally admitted.
“So ask her,” I said. “Or I can give her a call.”
“Hi Greg,” Alice shouted in the background, busted. I knew I’d been on speakerphone. To be fair, Alice was probably tired of having a phone thrust in her face, answering urgent questions about my privates. She told me once she never would have imagined her life with my mom would involve so many dick pics. “I don’t think expired Viagra would do anything bad. The worst that’ll happen is that it won’t work.”
The crushed four-pack arrived a week later with a greeting card that swept aside Mom’s previous reservations. Thought you boys would have fun with these. I can’t use them. Ha! The price sticker was still on the box. Mom had shelled out 22,500 colónes, or about forty dollars, for these powder-blue, fifty-milligram pills, each shaped like a diamond. I put the box on the alarm clock on my nightstand and waited for the right time.
That March, Lucas and I went to a Renaissance festival about an hour outside of town. Sherwood Forest Faire, it’s called, off the whimsically named Old Potato Road.
It was one of those days when you feel dumb with love and vitamin D. We gnawed on turkey legs, sipped mead, threw knives, and even hyper-ticklish Lucas put on chainmail. When we got home, without saying anything, I punched out one of the boner pills and swallowed it down with an unromantic slurp of LaCroix. I figured it was a day for trying new things. It had been a decade since I’d lost my virginity in college, and here I was trying to lose it all over again, this time with nothing to hide.
Taking off his glasses, Lucas squinted at the long-past expiration date on the box. November 2009. Five years ago. “Where’d your mom get these again?” he asked.
“Who cares, too late,” I said. I stripped off my clothes and lay atop the comforter, like I was about to be sucked into a UFO.
Seconds passed, then minutes. I felt my heartbeat in my extremities and saw myself rise like a slowly inflating air dancer at a car dealership. We dizzily propped a pillow under my rear and scrolled to a Dave Matthews playlist. Lucas climbed on top. It took about an hour of trying. Then it was all me. I lasted about thirty halting, exhilarating seconds.
Afterward, I cried.
It wasn’t perfect. The first time never is.
You may be wondering why I didn’t just go to the doctor for Viagra if I wanted it so badly, but if I had been the sort of twenty-nine-year-old to go to the doctor for Viagra I probably would have been the sort to know I had cerebral palsy all along rather than finding out about it while applying for health insurance that fall. I suppose it was all mixed up with my leg, being terrified of illness and fallibility, avoiding any doctor who wasn’t a dermatologist or a cheery technician swabbing my throat for STDs I never had.
Mom did not handle getting caught lying to me about CP for nearly thirty years with a ton of magnanimity. (Remember the beginning of the book when she cursed my dead dad for making her handle this alone?) I knew that whatever I wanted to find out about my leg was up to me. In the days after that first marathon phone call in the fall of 2014, I made an appointment with a primary care physician at a community clinic in Austin, noting on my intake papers that I had cerebral palsy, drops of sweat splashing onto the page. The doctor was Southern and genteel with a gray goatee, like Colonel Sanders, and a propensity to sweat as much as I did. The heat and sweat and slowly churning desk fan gave our daytime confab a hard-boiled feel. He looked at me, wiped his brow, looked at my chart, looked back at me. “You have cerebral palsy?”
“I do.”
I half expected Frankie to jump out at me with a butcher knife, maybe take out the Colonel too, sobbing as she sliced at us, “I don’t! Believe! In labels!” The doctor wrote me a referral for an orthopedic surgeon and helped me down from the exam table, the paper under me sticking to my damp butt and legs like I’d had an accident. He scheduled a follow-up to check on my blood pressure.
I can’t say visiting the orthopedic surgeon did much to lower it. In cowboy boots and a snap-button shirt, he looked like he might be shooting a Chevy commercial. He tried to rotate my rigid right foot, moving it around like a stuck stick shift. “Sure is tight!” He spoke slowly and asked if I’d gone to college in that small-talky way of doctors. “Northwestern, wow! You must be real smart.” He had me walk for him in the hall and told me how lucky I was and to come back when I had hurt myself. “Whether it’s your knee or your hip we’ll fix ya right up. Can’t do much for you now, though. You’re walking pretty good.”
“How’d it go?” Lucas asked when I got home.
“It was worthless,” I said, lobbing my keys onto the couch. “I can see why my mom lied to me about my leg. It’s not like any of these doctors can do anything about it.”
The growing pains related to my leg made me feel all the luckier to have ended up with Lucas. Our relationship has always smacked of serendipity. We know couples who waited years, decades even, to get legally married, with all the tax breaks and protections and nice dishes that come with it. My mom and Alice couldn’t have gotten married in Utah or Delaware back in the day, not even if they’d really wanted to. We were keenly aware that we had the kind of opportunities our forefathers and gay moms didn’t. As we were getting off the flight home from Costa Rica for Tiffany’s wedding, a woman stopped us out of the blue to say she hadn’t seen two people so in love in a long time. “Enjoy each other,” she said. We do. We know our luck.
We were going to get married at the moment and in the manner of our choosing, and I complained about it all: the catering misfires that sent us scrambling for the bathroom, the upset phone calls and Facebook messages from family friends who were or weren’t invited, who would or wouldn’t come. We had to devise a regular plan and a rain plan and put down deposits on both. Life bent toward convention. People who were scared of Zika or too chickenhearted to come to a gay wedding sent along beautiful geode bookends and hideous hot-pink champagne flutes with their regrets.
When it came to walking down the aisle, I was the biggest chicken of all. I planned to just wait for Lucas under the ancient pecan tree where we would recite our vows. The chandelier hanging from its branches would provide the only drama we needed.
“You little shit,” my mom said when I made my proclamation at the rehearsal. Mom poked me with her water bottle. “I didn’t survive a bazillion chemos and outlive your father so you could stand under a tree.”
With everyone in the wedding party fanning themselves and threatening to pass out in the heat, I finally caved. “Fine,” I told my mom, snatching her hand. “Let’s do it.”
Scraping my foot down the dirt aisle on our walkthrough, I tried to count the number of steps to the pecan tree but lost track when Mom dropped to her knees, wrapped her arms around my legs, and started fake sobbing. “I won’t give him up. I won’t!” Then, with considerably less alacrity, she climbed back onto her feet and brushed herself off. “I’ll give you up,” she told me, “but it’ll just be pretend.”
The phrase “in sickness and in health” kept kicking around my brain. At thirty-one, I was still young but my body would not age gracefully. I knew that. My back would only get sorer and more hunched, my hamstrings and shoulders tighter. My muscles would shrink and stiffen. My balance would deteriorate with my posture. I’d tire faster, be plagued with knee and hip problems in a losing battle with gravity.
Already, I’d made small adjustments. I’d given up running on the treadmill because of a gargantuan wart on the pad of my right big toe, the result of smacking with each step. Hesitantly, I’d traded in the runner’s high I craved, and my dad’s old Asics, for the lesser joys of the elliptical and the rowing machine. I couldn’t go around beating up my legs for sport anymore. A fall down the steps outside our condo left me with a bruised tailbone and hobbling around on a CVS cane for a couple of weeks. I learned to watch my step and check to make sure my foot had clearance at the top of every flight, like an amateur Euclid.
None of these coming attractions of aging were revelatory, exactly. What was new was that I wouldn’t make the passage alone. Lucas had taught me to find tranquility in my body and appreciate it for more than its hour of daily exercise, to notice it rather than always trying to fix it. Now when I pictured my bald, sagging future self, I could also picture my arm in Lucas’s, his crow’s feet no longer premature, his horn-rimmed Groucho glasses no longer the ironic look of an overworked teacher, his curly hair as white as baby powder. I’d walk through life on my own two feet but I’d be joined in matrimony. At the end of the aisle, I’d have Lucas.
We skipped the bachelor party but in the hotel the night before the wedding Tiffany slipped a bubblegum-colored sash over me. BACHELORETTE, it read in sparkly rhinestones, except Tiffany had picked out the ETTE, casting it in stubble. My sash had a five o’clock shadow.
