Leg, p.6
Leg, page 6
“Yo yo yo,” they’d say when I came downstairs. “It’s Marshall’s bro bro bro.”
What united these disparate groups of guys was the buzzing appliance from Brookstone with the flat round head. It wasn’t just my brother and Paul and Raf and me retiring to the guest room anymore. There was a line.
The Back Massager Club didn’t last long. My inchoate sex life was not to be one of boys clasping sticky hands as their bodies contorted in ecstasy. Still, for a few months, the basement became a jungle of jocks in basketball shorts playing pinball or whacking ping-pong balls at each other’s bare backs as they waited their turn to get off.
Chip was grounded from our house for two weeks after his mom spotted fat, round welts going from his shoulders to just above his toweled butt when he came out of the shower. Considering that he would go on to describe barebacking an entire junior high worth of seventh graders, it was a light punishment.
There’s a time, as boys, when we’re all in the closet: sneaking, sniffing, logging on, trying it with Icy Hot. It’s a closet not because it has anything to do with being gay but because it’s made out of a shared secret. The question is how long you stay there. How long before you venture out or get caught.
In spite of getting grilled about the debauchery going on in the Marshall basement, Chip remained mum on the vibrator and even found one of his own among the Coca-Cola memorabilia at his grandparents’ house. It had a red handle and looked like a curling iron from the eighties, but Chip swore it worked.
For those two weeks, I felt Chip’s malodorous exile more acutely than I would have thought. Even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, I must have known that my brother’s friends, or guys like them, would come to reject me one day or, worse, not acknowledge me at all. If you want to find a person who had almost no homosexual experiences growing up, find a gay guy who was a kid in the nineties. Double points if he’s disabled. If he’s lucky, he’ll tell you what I’m about to, that he was a bystander and not a victim, that no one ever humped him like a dog or pantsed him, that he never woke up with colorful dicks drawn on his face.
A musky boy-mist hung beneath the basement’s fluorescent lights, airborne puberty. I’d come down to find five or six guys roughhousing in the guest room. Once they reached a certain level of arousal, they had no choice but to keep going. It didn’t matter what they were thinking or who else happened to be around—it was automatic, like an eggbeater. That’s what I liked about it. Nothing to figure out or screw up, no physical test unsteady hands could fail. Just an on switch to bliss. “Dude, Brandon is using it bare dick!” I’d hear. “He doesn’t even have underwear on.”
And silently, from the bottom of the stairs, I’d thank God.
My elementary school held a maturation program for the fifth grade that fall. Since I had an older brother, and a vibrator, I’d been looking forward to snarking my way through this charade. When it came to sex, I had the answers in the back of the book.
That sense of casual superiority evaporated when I learned that the maturation program was not coed. We arrived at school that evening, congregating near the front office, and were divided. The girls, my natural foils and allies, went off with their moms to learn about pubic hair and tampons, and the boys were marched with our dads into a small classroom off the multipurpose room that doubled as a PE supply closet.
Squirming in a folding chair next to Dad, among cages of kick-balls, bats, and clubs, we pondered our dads’ Adam’s apples and were asked to describe how they smelled when they came in from working in the yard. We learned about deodorant and that it was called a scrotum, not a ball sack. “Is that where jizz comes from?” Chip asked courteously. I knew he was up to no good. He’d slicked his hair down with water from the drinking fountain to try to look older and he was wearing a clean shirt. Even when he didn’t smell, he smelled like his house.
Just when I thought the evening couldn’t become more mortifying, Rory Shuman was called to the front to demonstrate the small differences between the sexes, like how boys carry books at our sides whereas girls cradle them on their hips like babies. If one of our friends “experienced” an erection, we should ignore it. If we got one, we should think of our mothers or baseball. “When I was your age our anatomy was a toolbox. That’s it. That’s what we called it,” the doctor concluded. “I hope if nothing else we can be more mature than that.”
I clutched my stomach and rocked in my chair, letting out a stream of giggles. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I had cramps.
Dad told me to cool it, Greggo. Just cool it.
Not long after maturation, Oozy attempted to escape. He scampered into the hallway, took a chunk out of Danny’s index finger, and scuttled over the banister at the top of the stairs. Ricocheting discordantly off the piano a story below, he hit the carpet like a dropped toy.
True to his demon nature, Oozy survived the fall. What he couldn’t survive was the subsequent blow to his reputation, not with Danny sobbing as he held his bloody finger at the top of the stairs. Mom took him in for a tetanus shot and then she swept Oozy into his cat cage with a dustbin and returned him to PetSmart for no refund.
For as imperfect as Oozy may have been for a couple of massager-obsessed boys, I was sorry to see Stana and Dad haul the UVB light and heated rock and glass enclosure to the trash cans in the driveway. It meant Danny and I weren’t going to share a bed anymore. With Oozy out of the picture, my brother had his room back and I was the one in exile, stuck with a tankful of dead fish. No more sleepovers or passing the massager back and forth, talking about the swimsuit issue.
“But you can have your poster back,” Danny said. He’d lost the election to a Mormon kid. Even the vibrator had its limits.
“Wow. Thanks,” I said.
Somehow, bullets bouncing off Superman’s bulging pecs weren’t a turn-on with my brother’s yearbook picture on top. For as much as I would’ve liked to rip it out, how could I without hurting Danny’s feelings? Super Dan went up right over my bed. When that proved untenable after a day or two, I rolled up the poster and stuck it in the closet with my old shoes, the ones that had holes in the toes.
The first time a sticky, clear substance squirted out of me was during a humping session that summer. I didn’t bother to hide my boxers under my dresser, like Danny did, and let the stain stay there on my Looney Tunes pillow, daring Stana to ask about it as she changed my sheets.
Week after week, she made my bed and arranged my pillows without ever bothering the stain. It stayed right where it was, on Tweety Bird’s cheek.
How’s that for boyhood? We built a closet in the basement with a Brookstone back massager. Eventually, as we got older, we each came out of it. Even me.
IF I ONLY HAD A LEG
Up With Kids started as an unofficial offshoot of Up With People, the 1970s show choir now notorious for its ties to an evangelical cult, the Nixon administration, and Halliburton.
Our director Bonnie’s salad days were touring with the group, which she referred to simply as People. It took a real insider to drop two prepositions. So much projecting over the years had left her vocal cords frayed and full of benign polyps. Now in her forties, an Up With Kids T-shirt plunging from her chest and a wad of nicotine gum in one cheek, she suffered from a permanent case of laryngitis. Looking back, this was probably due to her having been a smoker, but as Bonnie reenacted long-lost Super Bowl halftime shows in the Presbyterian church where we rehearsed, squeezing out notes like the debarked corgi on our block, it was like music itself had worn her out. I couldn’t imagine a better life.
I could still remember the bleak afternoon of yore when Bonnie had burst into Mrs. Gardner’s first-grade classroom with a neon flyer for her Musical Theatre and Motion Picture Academy: TRAINING YOUNG ACTORS FOR STAGE AND FILM. AGES 4–15. *NO AUDITIONS. It’s hard to say if it was her white jean shorts and matching Payless shoes or her big, white teeth, but I knew from the moment I saw her that I’d found my People. It took courage to be that overcaffeinated in front of children.
I suspect it was different elsewhere, but in Utah there was only one reason to introduce young people to the performing arts, and that was because they couldn’t play sports. Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, my Up With Kids crew turned out to be in no better shape than the population I hung out with at physical therapy. Bonnie’s daughter, for one, had Down syndrome. Another boy pushed a walker around stage. Most of us Kids were damaged in more minor but no less noticeable ways: chronic pink eye, early-onset facial hair. One girl with the last name Wood insisted we call her Holly Wood even though her real name was something like Sarah.
My own eccentricities were enough to leave my parents scratching their heads. Imagination was survival mode. For me, there was no place like home, and no place but home to express my essential weirdness. I routinely broke into song, wore a witch hat recreationally around the house, and instead of calling my mom “mom,” I invented monikers for her—Kiss of Africa, Ariel of Sun Ray, Duke of Chutney—that my older siblings would only have conceived after whiffing rubber cement.
That’s where Bonnie came in. She set my every whim to music.
With her, we were encouraged to act out, unclasp our prim choir hands, and beatbox our way through record-scratching remixes of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Bonnie gave us free rein to affect accents and devise fictional alter egos. My raspy-voiced friend Maren arrived each week in the sophisticated tartan skirt and beret her mom had carefully laid out for her that morning. She morphed into a horse the moment she stepped through the door and spent the hour galloping around the room, neighing. The older kids in class spoke assuredly of future careers in movies when all they had to look forward to was acne and, after that, acne scars.
Soon enough, my preemie sister, Moe, joined our ranks and we went on tour.
Every summer my family took a trip with Up With Kids and patiently watched me scream “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” into a microphone on the boardwalk outside Universal Studios or snap and twirl through a Beach Boys medley, a plastic lei flying around my ears. Outside a tank of honking sea lions, we beamed that SeaWorld (not the more traditional choice, Disneyland) was the happiest place in the U-S-A, and at an America Sings Summit in Washington, D.C., Moe and I didn’t worry that we weren’t good enough for anyone else to hear, we just sang, sang a song, like the Carpenters.
“Do you want to tell Bonnie about the massager or should I?” Danny asked when I came off our small side stage on the National Mall. We’d just finished our D.C. run in style with a rendition of our almost-eponymous showstopper “Up With People.” (“If more people were for people . . .”). Bonnie claimed it was so good it gave her goose-bumps. Never mind that we were only singing along to a track we’d pre-recorded at her house.
Refusing to let my brother’s perverted question burst my squeaky-clean bubble, I assured him I didn’t have a clue what a massager was, this as the color rose in my face and the faucets in my pits turned on again. If my earnest public persona was at odds with masturbating in the basement, I never showed it. My brother scratched at his smile. “Gregor, no offense, but you are the worst actor alive.”
Dragged to all of our cheesy performances, Danny called Up With Kids the Special Olympics of acting, which was fine with me. Sparkling in a loose-fitting gold lamé shirt while Moe was trapped in a puckering leotard of the same material, I was the actor among social rejects. If anything, my brother’s mockery made me feel superior to my castmates. I honestly couldn’t see that I had much in common with them. Self-hatred would have been one thing, but this was closer to full-blown denial, the way I could disappear into a TV show or play. I was in Up With Kids because I was a rising star, not because something was wrong with me.
My leg presented mild challenges in terms of choreography (it could be like waltzing with a small, invisible dresser), but I was still oblivious to the fact of my diagnosable disability. As was Danny. He might imitate my thwacking footfall to remind me to walk flat after a long day of seeing the sights, but my loud chew at breakfast bugged him far more than my limp.
If, on my most inquisitive days, I wondered aloud how my dancing compared to, say, that of Christian, the boy with the walker, Mom would threaten to beat me with the wooden spoon she kept on the dashboard of the Suburban. “You stop that kind of talk right now, you hear me?” she’d say. “That is not how a star behaves. To think your tight tendons are in the same league as what that little handicapped boy has to deal with is just terrible. If I hear you talk like that again, I’m going to have Bonnie give him your lines.”
It was all just an act: the wooden spoon, my mom’s scolding. She’d never have me give up lines. She wanted me to be a celebrity as much as I did. In reality, she was only doing what any manager might, telling me exactly what I wanted to hear.
“What do we always say, Greg?” she’d ask. I’d aim the air-conditioning vent at my face, hoping to preempt any tears, and softly tender our creed. “True talent rises to the top.”
“Damn right it does. And don’t you go forgetting it, kid.”
I wonder if my leg let me get away with being a ham. For most kids, acting was shorthand for acting gay. Christian and I were exceptions. Anyone who saw me lip-sync an Elvis tune as I did my labored version of his hip-shake probably assumed I was there because of brain damage. My outlet, they would have called it. Rather than an abomination, I was an inspiration. It’s the kind of camouflage my leg provides to this day: people assume I’m more wholesome than I am. Years before I had any conception of my disability as such, I felt responsible for shaping how others saw me, which is, essentially, the job description of an actor.
That didn’t always mean hiding my leg onstage, not when I could use it as a prop. I may not have uttered the words “cerebral palsy” back then, but as I gained experience as a performer I didn’t downplay my condition, either. In Up With Kids I found not just a fun after-school activity but also a place where dragging my right foot and having my right arm creep up my side when I wasn’t paying attention were not necessarily detrimental. It would be an overstatement to say I used my limp to get plum roles, just that, in retrospect, they all fell into a certain pattern. I sat on thrones or made pronouncements from center stage, blowing kisses and doing small claps. No one could stand quite like I could. Pelvis thrust forward, my right foot dangled off my slender ankle so that my legs, in princely tights, formed a jaunty lowercase k.
By far my best role with Up With Kids was also, fittingly, my last. In the fifth grade, when I was twelve, Bonnie cast me as Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. It was my best role, I should say, because I had always loved Oz. This was my excuse, with the help of the hobby shop in the basement of Cottonwood Mall, to live over the rainbow. Before I’d even highlighted my lines, the merch began pouring in: an Emerald City snow globe, an accent pillow of Scarecrow’s face, a Toto stuffed animal. While my brother bought the latest Beckett in the card shop upstairs, tracking the value of his Shaq and Michael Jordan rookie cards like they were blue-chip stocks, I hauled out to the parking lot a life-size cardboard cutout of Scarecrow, the Wizard, and Tin Man and propped it at the foot of my bed to block out the sports wallpaper.
For a kid with a limp, it was easy to see Dorothy’s plight as orthopedic. She had to navigate all kinds of uneven terrain: brick roads, poppy fields, hot air balloon platforms, stairs—and in sequined kitten heels. Skipping as best I could, I’d struck out on the replica of the Yellow Brick Road at MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Waiting in line for the Great Movie Ride in Orlando, I’d saluted those uncomfortable-looking ruby slippers by trying to click the heels of my own battered sneakers. The way they shimmered in their glass case gave me new insight into their allure. Through my toddler years, I’d preferred, like Dorothy, never to take off my shoes, even when I slept. It felt better to keep my feet encased in a little magic. (This magic did not extend to the ankle-foot orthosis shoved into my shoe, but with socks on I could survive the rubbing.)
Following surgeries in the third grade, I made sure my cast was as close to emerald as fiberglass could get. Even the braces and elastics in my mouth were green. My parents drew the line at green sunglasses, saying they would attract the wrong kind of people.
Sure, I knew that if Glinda could have popped onto the pilled carpet of Cottonwood Presbyterian she would have told me, in her airheaded way, I needed look no farther than my own two feet. This had never stopped me from daydreaming. Tin Man needed a heart, Cowardly Lion needed some nerve, and I needed a new leg, one that wasn’t short and small in circumference around the calf and ankle; one that wasn’t zipped up the back with scars; one that didn’t need to be taught how to skip.
Whether in a cast or not, I never stopped thinking about my leg. Part of my brain was always sending stray signals to the tips of my toes, making me feel mildly electrocuted. What I loved about the stage was that self-consciousness was a given and it was against the rules to walk and talk at the same time, which I can’t do anyway. It wasn’t a matter of forgetting about how my knee pointed inward or my right heel floated off the ground. It was about all of us feeling awkward together.
As our first Oz extravaganza neared, Bonnie crowded the stage with as many farmhands, crows, talking trees, flying monkeys, winkies, and munchkins as there were cleared checks. She threw emerald smocks over the denizens of Oz and a gold tiara on the busty blonde giant playing Glinda. Mona and the other munchkins wore ruffled sleeves and scrunchies that even I had to admit were pretty cute. Being a munchkin was perfect for my little sister. She leapt around the stage like a replaceable idiot while I carried the show with my natural stage presence.
The same show business philosophy that led Bonnie to book our summer stock at amusement parks led her to schedule one early Oz performance in a homeless shelter in downtown Salt Lake, Bonnie’s philosophy being that a captive audience is better than one composed exclusively of parents and relatives. Only those too sick or stoned stayed for the duration, their faces dirty and drawn, a bunch of Aunt Ems and Uncle Henrys doing their best to ignore the spectacle of Bonnie crouched in the center aisle, mouthing along to the action onstage, fleeing an invisible twister.
