When the vice president of the United States of America was a teenager, he also experimented.
My father stopped chewing and stared at me. I could see in his eyes that he knew exactly what I was trying to talk about. There is a certain dark and faraway look that fathers get in their eyes when their sons uncomfortably venture toward asking them questions about their penises and shit like that.
I could see that look right away.
“Um,” he said. “You mean, like in chemistry class?”
“Uh,” I said.
For the last few days in chemistry class at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, we had been making a slippery, gooey, milky white polymer from borax and some other shit.
A polymer is something that is heavy and thick, made up of lots of small molecules. The word polymer came from Greece.
The Greeks were good at making up words for shit.
Robby Brees was my partner in the lab.
Robby said the polymer we made in chemistry class looked and felt exactly like sperm. Everyone else in the class also thought it was exactly like sperm.
Actually, not everyone. Only the physically and spiritually weak boys who masturbated thought our polymer looked and felt exactly like sperm. That was every boy in the class, considering we were all in tenth grade and fifteen or sixteen years old, which made all us boys physically and spiritually weak masturbators who could never be relied on to effectively defend the United States against foreign invasions. Only a couple of the girls thought our borax polymer looked and felt exactly like sperm.
Shann did. But she sat beside me during the awkward eruption at Eden Five Needs You 4.
Mr. Duane Coventry, our chemistry teacher, got mad and embarrassed by the behavior of the boys in the class. He obviously thought the stuff was exactly like sperm, too. So Mr. Duane Coventry brought in small vials of blue food coloring and made us tint our borax-polymer sperm experiments, so they wouldn’t look so much like sperm.
“Yeah, Dad. In chemistry,” I said.
“I once made a battery with a lemon,” my father said.
“Uh. I did that, too, Dad,” I said. “Everyone does that shit when they’re kids.”
My father swabbed his Alaska fish stick through his puddle of Nebraska ketchup.
“Yes, Austin,” he said. “I did do experiments when I was your age.”
He said it with finality and relief.
That was the end of the history lesson about my dad and what he did when he was a teenager.
“Uh. Thanks, Dad. Well, good night.”
“Good night, son,” my father said.
I went to bed.
I realized that was the last time in my life I would ever attempt to speak to my father about sperm, or about my sexual curiosity and confused feelings. I’d be just as well served watching daytime television programs for women, or speaking to Ollie Jungfrau about those kinds of things. Or to any complete stranger sitting on a bus bench, for that matter.
In the morning chaos before school, my parents were up and speaking with two liaison officers in the kitchen when I came downstairs. That was the day they left Ealing to go to Germany and see my brother, Eric, who no longer had any balls. My mother and father both agreed it would be all right if I stayed in bed that day.
So I did not go to school.
MODERN-DAY NIGHTINGALES
KRZYS SZCZERBA STARTED a factory in Minnesota.
He manufactured urinals.
There is something grandly American in the story.
Krzys Szczerba came to America and earned a living by making things for guys to piss on. The urinals he made were big. They were shoulder height, spanning entire walls with thick porcelain backs and drainage gutters all along the floor where you would carefully distance the toes of your shoes.
Americans like big things to piss on.
In those days, guys didn’t feel the need for seclusion or personal space when they pissed. American men and boys lined up shoulder to shoulder and unashamedly pissed like a choreographed army on everything in front of them.
That was our day.
Krzys Szczerba’s urinals were big enough so a dozen or more guys could all piss on the same wall together, all at the same time.
We had a similarly designed group urinal at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. It was the one with images of disembodied praying hands hanging above it at eye level to remind us boys not to get any experimental ideas with our hands while they were holding our penises.
But the urinal at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was stainless steel and shaped like a knee-high watering trough for livestock. The urinal chimed a musical song whenever boys would piss down onto its flat metal bottom. And only four boys at a time could use it. More than that, and there would be some uneasy trespassing into your neighbor’s personal space.
We kept our eyes on the praying hands.
Besides freezing shit and making it food, pissing on things was something American boys have always been real dynamos at.
Krzys Szczerba called his urinals Nightingales, after his wife, Eva Nightingale, who, like the urinals Krzys made, was big, accommodating, and perfectly white.
There were birds with ribbons streaming from their happy beaks etched along the top rail of Krzys Szczerba’s Nightingale urinals.
It was a good name for a urinal, I thought.
Krzys Szczerba’s urinal factory went out of business during the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression, I think American boys pretty much pissed wherever they wanted to.
There was also a stainless steel trough urinal at Satan’s Pizza, but it was only wide enough for two guys to use at once. It was extremely awkward, being paired up with a complete stranger like that at a pizza place.
It was like being on a blind date.
Worse yet would be if I was standing there peeing, and then one other guy would come into the men’s room and stand beside me, unzip, and when I glanced over, it would be Louis, the cook from The Pancake House, or maybe Ollie Jungfrau or Pastor Roland Duff.
I always tried to hold my pee whenever I ate at Satan’s Pizza.
Sometimes, a guy just can’t, though.
There were old color photographs of Italy that hung behind glass-faced frames above the urinal at Satan’s Pizza. One of them showed the Coliseum in Rome, and the other showed Michelangelo’s statue of David.
You know what I mean.
What guy doesn’t like to think about Italy and civilization and shit like that when he is holding his penis and pissing into a steel trough?
I am the great-great-grandson of Krzys Szczerba, a man who made things for other guys to piss on.
My brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, got pissed on, too.
In a way, Krzys Szczerba made me and my brother. When you think about it, Krzys Szczerba’s factory was still in full operation, and we were his modern-day Nightingales.
Everyone at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy heard about what happened to Mr. Szerba’s son, Eric Szerba, who was in Afghanistan.
Robby did not go to school that day, either.
There was something wrong with both of us, but it was not something like what was happening to those Hoover Boys, although there was equally little Robby Brees or I could do about it.
SHANN, THE HORNY POLISH KID, AND SATAN
JOHNNY MCKEON CAME over to my house that afternoon. He said he wanted to check on me and see if I needed anything. There were lots of things I needed, but Johnny couldn’t give any of them to me.
I certainly couldn’t talk to Johnny McKeon about my confusion, or about what was happening between me and Robby; and between me and Shann.
“I came to see if you needed anything,” Johnny said when I opened the front door. He added, “You know, if I could do anything for you, Austin.”
I was still in my box
ers. I had not gotten out of bed all day. Ingrid squeezed between my legs and wriggled past Johnny out into the yard. The poor dog was about to explode.
I combed my fingers through my messed-up hair. I said, “Thanks, Johnny. I think I’m okay. I could use a cigarette, I think.”
“I brought some for you.” Johnny said, “They’re in my car. Hang on.”
“Watch out for dog shit, Johnny,” I said. “And, thank you.”
“If your mom or dad says anything about this, I’m telling them you stole them.”
Johnny always said that.
So Johnny McKeon stayed there with me on my front porch while I smoked a cigarette and talked to him. I’d forgotten all about my plan to look for the missing invisible McKeon silo with Shann. Everything had been such a nightmarish blur since Robby Brees and I had gotten beaten up for being queers by those four assholes in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.
It was like swimming through a big bowl of alphabet soup, where all the letters are alive and flash little dancing horror shows for you: grimacing lemurs, two-headed baby boys, accidental eruptions at the Waterloo Cinezaar, little blue kayaks, enormous green praying mantises, praying hands, the Tally-Ho!, my pissed-on brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, and my best friend, Robert Brees Jr., whom I loved very much and felt a terrible sadness for at the same time.
“You’re a good dog, Ingrid,” I said.
Ingrid lay beneath my bare feet and I sat on a wicker chair in my boxers and smoked a cigarette with Johnny McKeon in front of my house.
At that moment, my parents were on an airplane flying over Scotland.
“Why don’t you put some clothes on and I’ll take you and Shann out and get you pizza or something?” Johnny McKeon asked.
“You mean you don’t want to just take me to dinner in my underwear, Johnny?” I said.
Johnny shook his head gravely. For someone who was always in a good mood, Johnny McKeon never really knew when people were joking around with him.
“No, kid,” he said. “Put some trousers and a shirt on or I ain’t taking you anywhere.”
I waggled my Saint Kazimierz medal at Johnny and told him thanks, but I hoped he wasn’t planning on sitting in the middle, considering he was going to be chauffeuring his stepdaughter and me out on another date.
He didn’t get that, either.
Johnny said, “I’ll drop you two off, and come pick you up. But in Ealing, not Waterloo. Now go put some britches on, Austin.”
I found some 501s that weren’t too dirty. They were lying on my bedroom floor. I slipped into Robby’s Spam T-shirt. He’d left it there at my house the day we went up on the roof of the Ealing Mall. It still had a few faded bloodstains and it smelled like Robby, which kind of made me a little sad. I didn’t bother putting on any socks. I got the Adidas I’d loaned to Robby a few days earlier and slipped them on.
It made me feel lonely to wear Robby’s shirt.
I went to pee in the men’s room at Satan’s Pizza before our Stanpreme arrived at the table. It was taking a chance because the pizza place was unusually busy for a Wednesday evening.
Nobody came in to share the trough with me and the photos of Rome and naked David.
I sat beside Shann and we looked out the window, across Kimber Drive to Grasshopper Jungle, the Ealing Mall.
We talked.
At first it was almost as uncomfortable as standing next to Ollie Jungfrau at the little trough urinal in the back of Satan’s Pizza. I kept thinking about Robby. I felt so guilty about the things we did.
I do not lie, but I did not want to tell Shann about Robby, and I did not want to tell Robby about Shann, either.
So I sat there and thought about how I was ripping my own heart in half, ghettoizing it like Warsaw during the Second World War—this area for Shann; the other area for queer kids only—and wondering how it was possible to be sexually attracted and in love with my best friend, a boy, and my other best friend, a girl—two completely different people, at the same time.
I was so confused.
There had to be something wrong with me. I envied Shann and Robby both so much for being confident in who they were and what they felt, and for knowing what part of my ghettoized heart they lived in.
Eventually, Shann worked up the courage to talk to me about Eric.
We were eating our pizza by that time, and I had pushed all those thoughts about my brother into a dark place in my head. The pissed-on Polish boys’ ghetto. Now a light shined on them.
So I told her this:
Eric Christopher Szerba and I got pissed on. I could not remember any image of my brother where we were not boys together. Eric Christopher Szerba was still a boy. Eric Christopher Szerba was my big brother. Now he was ruined, destroyed. He would be somebody else the next time we talked. It would be awkward, like peeing next to a stranger. We got pissed on, Eric and me. Everyone did. Nobody was better off anywhere. Nobody learned a lesson. Nobody got saved.
I could not eat any more pizza after that.
I think I might have been crying.
I have to be honest. This is history. I was crying while I sat there at Satan’s Pizza, looking out the window at Grasshopper Jungle. I was crying, and it wasn’t only for Eric Christopher Szerba. It was for Robby Brees, my mother, my father, Robby’s mother, Krzys Szczerba, and for Saint Kazimierz, too.
Shann was crying. She put her face against my neck.
Shann said, “I’ve always been in love with you for how you say things, Austin. Ever since that day in eighth grade when we sat together and had Cokes and talked about The Chocolate War. Do you remember that?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s that book about the peacock who shits gumballs and Sugar Babies out of its ass, right?”
Shann laughed a little and we kissed.
And I told her: “Shann, sometimes I do really dumb things and I don’t think about the people I might be hurting. I want you to know that I love you, no matter how dumb I am. No matter what I do.”
I was trying to tell her the truth—my abbreviated truth—about me and Robby. Shann thought I was talking about the day before, at school, when I attempted to start a conversation involving the use of condoms.
Shann said, “You are not dumb, Austin. I love you very much. I was thinking about what you said, about . . . Um. You know. If you used a condom.”
I nearly fell off the bench at Satan’s Pizza when she said that.
I said, “You mean you would?”
I tried to devise a means of getting Shann Collins over to my empty house that night.
“Maybe we could try to do that sometime. When the time is right,” Shann said.
I thought the time was right.
Hearing her say the words do that made me very horny.
Shann tried changing the subject. She placed her purse on the table beside the remains of our Stanpreme. When she opened the purse, I hoped she was going to show me how she’d brought along a pack of condoms or shit like that. Not that I needed any. I had dozens of condoms from cleaning out the furniture for Johnny McKeon at From Attic to Seller Consignment Store.
I fought with myself.
There was rioting in the ghetto.
That is the truth.
I was being such an asshole to my two best friends.
I decided to shut up. Like Shann told me, she’d let me know when the time was right to try to do that, and that was much closer to a yes than a no.
Eden Five needed me.
Maybe I could prove something to myself, eventually, and watch how everything might fall perfectly into place for me.
Shann pulled a small black-and-white photograph out from her purse. It was the picture she’d gotten from the Ealing Registry of Historic Homes.
And, yes, I was disappointed, and very horny, too.
FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS
Here, our history looks at four photographs:
1. THIS IS THE MCKEON SILO.
In grainy black and white it looks like a galvanized steel penis with Saturn booster rockets, sitting on a launch pad a quarter mile behind Shann’s historic home, preparing to blast off for Eden Five.
“I found it,” Shann said.
2. THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF ME AND MY BROTHER, ERIC Christopher Szerba. The picture was taken when Eric was twelve years old. That would make me about five or six. In the picture, we are standing on the shore of Lake Minnewonka, in Canada. The sun is setting into our eyes. Our mother, Connie Szerba, was morbidly obsessed with having the sun shine in our white Polish faces whenever we posed for pictures.
In the photograph, my hair is messy, sticking up unevenly. It is also much lighter in color than my hair is now. I am wearing Velcro-laced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sneakers. They had lights along their soles and flashed when I walked. I loved those shoes.
Eric is tall and skinny. He wears a red plaid shirt, untucked, an Iowa boy after all. Eric also has on brand-new cuffed Levis. I can almost feel their stiffness in the photograph. His legs are like matchsticks in them. The jeans have not been washed yet. Eric Christopher Szerba has his arm around my shoulder, but the way he is standing is not the uncomfortable posture of a boy about to turn teenager who is coerced into hugging his little brother to falsely freeze a peaceful moment for a family snapshot while on vacation.
Both of us have those Polish Boy bags under our eyes.
Eric is very handsome. His hair is the color of maple syrup and he has a spray of freckles on his cheeks. The way he smiles, you can see his two big front teeth. His lips are wet. The shadow of my father stretches all the way past our ankles. You can see, in silhouette on the ground, how my father’s elbows point out like wings on a nightingale where he holds the camera up to his eyes.
3. NEITHER OF THE OTHER BOYS killed in the same explosion that removed both of Eric Christopher Szerba’s balls and one of his legs were younger than my brother. But they were boys, too. Julio Arguelles was thirty-four years old. There is a snapshot of him that was taken when he was six years old. He grew up in Brooklyn, and in the photograph he is standing in the driveway beside his family’s home. There is a low redbrick wall at the end of the driveway. On the other side of the wall, you can see the white T of a wood-framed laundry post sticking up. There are some white T-shirts and underwear hanging from the clotheslines. It appears there is no wind blowing. Julio is wearing a Superman T-shirt with a red-rimmed collar, the triangular S, and there are fierce abdominal muscles drawn onto the fabric that loosely drapes over Julio’s six-year-old chest. At the very bottom of the T-shirt is a band of yellow—Superman’s belt—and the red swath that marks the upper waist of his briefs. It is a funny shirt. I would have worn it when I was a kid. Julio Arguelles’s dark chocolate hair sweeps down over his forehead, and Julio is holding up a hand in a permanent Number One gesture. I can’t guess what question Julio was answering when that photograph was taken. Julio Arguelles has a faint orange Kool-Aid mustache. He is wearing blue sweat pants, but the legs are pulled up to his knees. He has black sneakers and no socks. Julio Arguelles had three daughters. The oldest of his girls was nine.