First Chapter - The Union

I always wake up with an erection—most men do. The tough part is trying to hustle to the bathroom with the Chrysler building swinging from your hips. Fortunately, I've come up with a few full-proof methods of hiding the morning wood—a few simple ways of avoiding awkward moments with your mother, an estranged aunt, your girlfriend’s much younger sister, the dog, whoever. And these tricks aren’t relegated to hiding morning wood. They can be employed any time you’ve got an inconvenient hard-on: During communion, on a job interview, or even at an office luncheon.

The first method is called the Classic Lean, and simply involves bending the body forward over the groin in an attempt to lower the level of the erection. This move comes in real handy when you need to hide the wood in a hurry. Sometimes The Lean is more believable if you pretend to be stretching, grabbing something from the floor, or nursing a low-back injury.

The second technique is called the Waistline Shimmy. This 2-part move requires the man to first pull the erect penis up against the groin, then tuck the head in between the elastic of the boxers and the area just below the navel. The Shimmy demands stiff posture when walking, to keep the penis secure. If it falls, it will undoubtedly prove for an embarrassing situation—one that may provoke questions like, “is that a rocket in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

The third method is the most controversial. It’s been dubbed “The Butterfly” by my good friends and colleagues. I got the idea after watching Silence of the Lambs. There’s that disturbing scene when Clarice’s (Jody Foster) kidnapper is dressed up like a woman. He completes the disguise by folding his penis back under his legs right before he tells her to “put the lotion in the bastket.” Anyway, that’s the logic behind the “The Butterfly” move. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t extremely uncomfortable. And it can have long-lasting side effects if used too frequently. But it is the most reliable of the three tactics—ensuring that your arousal is kept secret. As a rule, it is a solid idea to position yourself for “The Butterfly” before slow-dancing with your mother-in-law, or making any kind of acceptance speech. You just never know when the blood’s gonna start flowing. And sometimes, it has a tendency to happen most when you want it to least.

After college I thought about patenting my methods, and even trying to work the concepts into a University Lecture Series. Then I stopped smoking pot, and applied for an internship at a New York City advertising agency. Quite a leap, I know. Anyway, my name is Steven Springfield, I’m twenty-two years old. I’m a copywriter at that very same advertising agency. I’m five feet ten inches tall, with shoes. I’m allergic to peanuts and I’m not a big sports fan. And though I told myself I’d never marry, I just got hitched to a girl I met at my birthday party last year.

I’m not one of those people who keep their birthday a secret, either; I’m not opposed to surprise parties and I love gifts. I love my birthday, because, in a world where everyone competes for everything, it’s the one thing that is mine all mine. Of course, my friend and I have the same birthday, so it’s his too. Go figure.

We usually throw a joint party, some of his friends and some of mine. To be quite honest, I figured this year would be much like the others—an array of college acquaintances, co-workers, the occasional cousin from Brooklyn or exchange student from Denmark. But right when I walked in, I noticed a lovely mystery girl on the far side of the room. I fell down the stairs while following the hemline of her skirt around her perfect ankles, up to her hips. I lost my balance and collapsed into a two-top, where a couple was feasting on a plate of Buffalo wings. I knocked over the table and covered the three of us in a wash of blue cheese and hot sauce.

I apologized—barely escaping a beating at the hands of the muscle-bound boyfriend—and dabbed at the sauce on my pants with a wet napkin as I made my way through the crowd. She was leaning against a column in the middle of the bar, tapping her high-heels to some 80’s cover that poured from the DJ’s speakers. The overhead lights turned her face an amber color, making her green eyes stand out more than green eyes already do. I tried to think of something witty to say, something unique. But my brain cells were all on strike. Maybe they wanted more oxygen, less smoke. It was hard to say. In the end, I fell back on a weak combination of one-syllable words that probably left her wondering whether I’d come on the “short bus.”

“Hi, how are you?” I sounded like a robot, or a foreign exchange student practicing his English. For some reason, she smiled. I could’ve sworn I heard a voice from a far corner of the room bellow, “lead us not into temptation.”

“Too late,” I thought. My heart was bouncing down the chutes where voles and gofers tunnel, through the deeper core samples of the earth’s crust, into the molten center where sins whirl in eddies of bright red and yellow.

“My name’s Steven,” I half-shouted over the music.
I remember trying to make it sound big, trying to make it sound important. Bottom line: There’s nothing big or important about it. Steven’s just an ordinary name, like Dave, Tom, Bob or Jim.
I repeated it again, hoping to give it more strength.
“Steven,” I watched the words come out of my mouth and fall straight to the ground. They shattered like the safety glass of a car windshield, and lay dead on the floor.
She leaned in, so she wouldn’t have to yell. “You shouldn’t be embarrassed. I like the name Steven.” I felt the warm breath from her words wash against my neck.
“My name is Holly, as in ‘deck the halls.’” She said with a smile as we shook hands.
Truth be told, all I could think about was decking her halls.

During the five years I lived in New York, I was limited to a pair of one-night stands. I did try on a few dozen other occasions to flirt my way onto a futon on the Lower East Side, or a trundle bed south of Houston. New York is just funny that way. There are over eight million people—many of them single, many of them lonely—roaming the clubs and catacombs at night in search of love. Unfortunately, the fear of disease and sex crimes, as well as the overall stand-off-attitude of the locals makes the process of meeting someone, certainly sleeping with someone, virtually impossible.

The first girl I went home with was an elementary school teacher. She moved to New York from Texas a few months before, and hadn’t been on the island long enough to become jaded. She wanted me to talk dirty to her, so I gave it my best shot. But after I called her a “redneck slut,” the whole thing fell apart.

“I said dirty, not mean.” She threw my shoes down the stairwell and slammed the door in my face.

Holly was the second. She said “I never do this, but there’s something so familiar about you, so comfortable.” We snuck up to the roof of her building and fooled around on a blanket under the starless New York sky, beside the air conditioning unit.

I woke up the next morning with pieces of tar stuck to my wrists and elbows. Holly was lying on top of me, resting her chin on my chest.

“I know you from somewhere.” She kissed me on the lips. “I just can’t remember where?”

“Past life?”

“Nope,” she kissed me again.

“Self-help group?”

“Don’t think so.” She scratched her head. “I’ll figure it out.”

Later that morning I jumped on a train from Grand Central Station to Westport, Connecticut, where my mother still lived in my childhood home. She was hosting another one of our infamous family reunions, where grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins repeatedly prove that alcohol and family gatherings don’t mix. The reunions take place in different locations every summer. I’ve seen 4th cousins once-removed swilling jugs of Boone’s Farms wine in West Virginia, before having an actual pissing contest behind the barn. Another year, I played 42 straight games of bingo in a VFW hall outside Buffalo New York, while my parents listened to some estranged great Uncle go on about the woes of living with a glass testicle. No matter how bad or boring the reunions were, they continued to gain popularity and consequently, larger crowds. This particular reunion, poised to be the biggest yet, was really important to my mom because her sister Ruby was coming for the first time in ten years. They’d had a falling out in the early 80’s, but apparently resolved their differences weeks before during a drunken, sobbing phone call.

I hadn’t seen my Aunt or her kids since a Halloween parade back in middle school. My mother was dressed as a flasher, with blacked-out teeth, a long cape and a rolling pin tied around her waist. The last thing I remember is her swinging the pin/penis at my aunt, and an outpouring of profanity that stopped the parade in its tracks. It took two Chewbachas and a Rocky Balboa to keep them apart.

I saw my mother’s blue Volvo wagon parked diagonally across not one, but two handicapped spots near the train station platform. As she popped out of the car to give me a hug, I asked why she always does that.

“What if someone needs to park here mom?” I gestured toward the handicap signs.

“Get real, Steven. Handicapped people don’t take the train. How would they get up to the platform?”

I stared at the enormous concrete access ramp as we drove away and was reminded my mother lives in her own little world—a sacred place without human rights progress or equal opportunity. She’s probably the only person in town, other than the ruthless elementary school kids, who still call physically challenged people “retarded.”

She almost poked me in the eye when she pointed to the shopping bag full of corn lying on the floor mat in front of me.

“You know what to do, kid. It’s what you’ve been training for. START SHUCKING!”

My mother knows how much I hate corn. I have hated it ever since I was 9 years old, when she won a lifetime supply of Green Giant canned corn in a supermarket raffle. Our basement looked like a fallout shelter as a result; cans lined the walls, the floors, filled workbenches, chairs, even closets. You can bet your sweet ass we had corn, or some corn derivative with every meal: Corn cakes, corn pudding, cornbread. One time she even made corn ice cream. It was just plain wrong.

About three years went by before a letter arrived from the Jolly Green Giant, claiming there’d been a mistake. The actual winner was a woman a few towns over; a clerical error was to blame. The Giant did point out that we’d enjoyed a surplus of product for years and should be thankful for that. My mother was outraged and stood squawking at the men who came into our house to remove the corn. She said she would take them to the People’s Court.

“Judge Wapner will side with me. Justice will prevail. You tell the Green Fuckin’ Giant he’s not so big!”

Of course there was nothing she could do legally, so instead, she vowed never to eat canned corn again. Hence the shucking.

“Couldn’t we have something other than corn for once, mom? It’s not even in season. Where the hell do you find it?”

She snapped at me, “Corn is always in season somewhere. You have such a piss-poor attitude Steven. And you wonder why you’re just a writer.”

“I’m a copywriter, mom.”

“Oh, even better, you copy other people’s writing. You were never original anyway.”

“Thanks mom.”

“Let’s not fight. We’re not even home yet.” She dabbed her cheeks with rouge.

My mother always wears lots of makeup. Growing up, her mother, my grandmother, worked for Mary Kay. Nana actually drove a pink Caddy around town. She even tried to get some mascara on me once. So I suppose my mother’s fetish again affirms that children are a product of their environment. My mom used to get dolled up on a regular old Tuesday in June, when it was quite possible the only person she’d see other than my father and myself, was the mailman. So you can imagine all the brushes, all the cotton balls, the powders, the pencils and lipsticks required to get ready for a family reunion. Good Lord.

My mother said it was the stress of preparing for the reunion that “forced” her to take up smoking again. I had to grab the steering wheel three times while she lit her butts on our way home from the station. This alarmed me, not because she was smoking again, but because I was wondered who held the wheel for her when I wasn’t in the car. She was already a hazard on local roads—always changing the radio, or looking for something, often in the backseat. Before my dad left, he bought her a car that had the headlights on permanently. It was a new thing at the time, the way it is in most rental cars nowadays. But she seemed to never remember otherwise. I don’t want to say my mother was absent-minded. Her brain came to class, it just didn’t always participate.

“Steven Springfield! Heard you’re having some lady trouble!” My Uncle Marty yelled from the porch as I opened the car door. “The trouble being son, you don’t have one!” He laughed out loud. “Are you gay, Stevie? Your mother thinks you might be homosexual.”

“I do not,” my mother scoffed, flicking her cigarette butt into the garden.

“My mother thinks horsepower is a magical thing Marty. She thinks the automobile manufacturers have all harnessed some mythical force and blessed our engines with it.”

“Good point,” he ventured, reaching out his hand. “But you did kiss that boy down at the shore, right?”

Marty was referring to what my family has dubbed the “Gaycation” of 1984. We rented a house on the Jersey Shore for a week in July. It was the first vacation we’d been on since my brother died two years before. It was my parents’ way of trying to start fresh, of trying to do the things normal families do. I missed having my brother around to pick on and play with. But the first day on the beach I met a girl named Leslie from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We hit it off tremendously, and were inseparable for the rest of the week. Sure, I thought it was odd she had a thin mustache, no breasts, and was stronger than me, but I didn’t judge her. The day before we left, my mother found us kissing in my bedroom. She dropped the drink in her hand and screamed, “I knew it Dale. He is gay!”

I took a few steps back from Leslie, who was still holding my hand. “I am not mom.”

“Then why are you kissing a boy?” She looked down at the booze and ice cubes strewn across the floor. If there wasn’t broken glass everywhere, I’m sure she would have gotten down on all fours and sucked the alcohol from the carpet fibers.

I laughed. “Leslie’s not a boy mom.”

“I am Steven.” Leslie would not let go of my hand.

“Yes he is,” my mother affirmed.

I shook free. “Nooooo!”

“Yes,” Leslie said again.

“Yes,” my mother added.

“No,” I said one last time before running out the door.

I made my way into the family room. I hugged grandparents and aunts, little cousins, even petted my Uncle Sam’s golden retriever. I was pouring a drink at the bar when my mother rounded the corner, “you know you’re not supposed to use the crystal glasses, Steven.” She pulled it from my hand. “Sometimes I wonder if that college diploma of yours is real?” She dumped the contents into a red plastic cup and handed it to me. Then she wiped the crystal glass dry, kissed it, and gently placed it back on the shelf.

“If you can’t drink out of the crystal drinking glasses, then what are they for mother?” I asked.

She gazed at me like I’d fallen out of a tree, “they’re for looking at!” She fussed with the collar on my shirt. “You know this crystal collection has been in our family for three generations. Your great grandfather bought the first two champagne glasses in New York City, the day he and your great grandmother became US citizens. They couldn’t even afford any furniture for their apartment. Poppy secretly skipped lunch everyday for two months, and surprised Nanny with the glasses and a two-dollar bottle of champagne.” She licked her palm and matted my hair back. “So don’t touch, ‘kay.”

The doorbell rang and my mother floated away.

The whole place quieted down as Aunt Ruby shuffled her children through the door. She had three kids: Two girls and a boy. I hadn’t seen any of them in ten years, since the fateful Halloween parade.

Felix was the first of my cousins to appear before the group. He was dressed in a Dutch outfit, looking like one of those figurines who pops out of a cuckoo clock and dances around every hour, on the hour. Maryanne was next. I could tell by her mortified expression her mother had chosen the pink dress and matching shoes—an outfit obviously purchased before Maryanne matured from girl to woman. It appeared that a weak sneeze, even a cough, could split the thing wide open, exposing her new boobs for the world to see. Last through the door was the oldest daughter, who I remembered was closer to my age.

Ruby smiled proudly as she gave a little background. “Holly just moved to New York and is trying to become an actress. In the meantime, she’s cutting hair at a salon in the Village.”

“No way,” I thought, nudging one of my cousins to try and get a better view. It couldn’t be. I pushed my Uncle Marty aside.

It was her. I had sex with my own cousin.

I swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t go down.

“Darling, I think you know everyone.” Ruby pointed out a few select relatives. “Aunt Ginger. How are you dear? Uncle Marty.”

Holly’s eyes met mine as her mother said, “Steven, who could ever forget that charming face?”

Holly’s jaw dropped. I pretended to have a coughing attack and left the room. I left the house. I couldn’t seem to get far enough away from the thought of it.

I squeezed myself into one of the seats on the old swing set in the backyard. I was kicking the dirt where it had been worn underneath when Holly appeared from behind the garage. She had both hands in her pockets and walked towards me cautiously.

“So we’re cousins?” I asked.

“It appears that way,” she whispered, climbing into the seat next to me. “Now I know why you looked so familiar.”

I started swinging a bit, trying desperately to get away from the anxiety that clung to me like a tight pair of jeans.

She was swinging right in time with me. I wanted to be repulsed by her, by the fact that we were relatives. I could see the tiny red bruise on her lip where I’d bitten her the night before. I looked from freckle to freckle across her face and felt nothing but burning in my loins.

“So I guess our kids will have fins,” she smiled at me.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’re related, right? So genetically speaking, our kids are more likely to come out with an extra arm, or a dorsal fin?” She delivered the news so matter-of-factly.

“True,” I leaned over and kissed her.

When I pulled my lips away, after what seemed like hours, my cousin Simon was standing there gawking at us.

“That’s gross,” he said.

I panicked. “She had something stuck in her teeth. I was just trying to help.” It was a weak defense. It would never hold up in court; it certainly wouldn’t fly on the People’s Court.

Of course Simon was like the Doogie Howser of the family. He was only ten years old and in the eighth grade. He gazed at us for a minute, then asked, “isn’t that what toothpicks are for?”

Holly jumped off the swing; he skittered back a few steps. “Do you see any toothpicks out here Simon?”

“Nope.” He made his way around her and sat on the empty swing. “Push or I’ll tell.”

We were both a little dumbfounded. But Holly gave me the go-ahead nod. I began to push, Simon went higher and higher. He started panting and begged me to stop. Holly loomed in front of him.

“Simon. You promise you’ll never say anything, to anybody.”

“AaahahIah promise. Let me down!” he screamed.

To this day, I have no idea what came over me. I figured I’d give little Simon one more shove to clarify the deal—like a handshake. But when the swing reached the top it broke free of the set. He howled wildly as his spindly body sailed far out over the garden, landing in the mulch pile with a thud. He had finally shut up though—partly because he had a mouth full of twigs and leaves, partly because we made our point. Simon stood up slowly, brushed himself off and walked toward the house without saying another word. Holly and I laughed and kissed a little more—this time behind the shed. When we finally made our way back inside, all hell had broken loose.

My mother was swinging a poker from the fireplace at Aunt Ruby. “Well, if you hadn’t slept with my husband, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“You call this a conversation?” Ruby asked, brandishing tongs from the buffet. “Maybe if you had slept with your husband, he wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with me.”

Their war cries lasted half an hour. They raged on and on and on. My mother’s shrill voice drove the dogs from the living room. She and Ruby kept circling around the coffee table; Ruby clanking her tongs together and my mother grunting like a linebacker waiting for the ball to snap.

When they were done yelling, everyone within earshot knew why they hadn’t spoken for ten years.

During Ruby’s junior year of high school, she had seen her true love and my mother—who was a senior—flirting in the lunch line one day, then on the bus another. The following afternoon, she went rummaging through the boxes in my mother’s closet, trying to find a letter or photo that would confirm what she believed to be true. Little did she know indisputable proof was pulling in the driveway.

Ruby thought my mother was at cheerleading practice until five o’clock, which would’ve been the case, had she not faked menstrual cramps and snuck through the woods to a side road where Clyde Jensen was waiting in his bright red Jeep. And my mother thought Ruby was working at Ben Franklin’s until six o’clock, which she would have been, had they not closed to do quarterly inventory.

Ruby barely had time to shut herself in my mother’s closet before the two came fumbling up the stairs, landing on the bed in a whirl of flesh and saliva. Ruby was forced to watch through a few dusty half-inch door slats as her boyfriend and sister got low-down and dirty.

“So you figured that sleeping with my husband would make us even?” My mother yelled.

“Something like that,” Aunt Ruby smirked.

My mother slapped her so hard Ruby lost her balance. She stumbled for a second, then fell straight back into the cabinet behind the bar, sending the family crystal crashing to the floor.