“Do you feel it,” Pete asked, pulling back the mid-century-Danish kitchen chair. Despite my permanent cynicism, I had to admit there was something there. Sweat? Embarrassment? Suddenly, I was back in my room, pants down to my knees, tissues in one hand and the Playboy I stole from my father’s bedside table in the other, opened to Miss May. My father didn’t think to knock. He just stood in the hallway; hand on the knob with a look halfway between fury and shame.
“I call it: ‘Mom? Dad? I’m gay,’ because that is what happened in that chair twelve years ago. Sit in it and you will feel like you are six inches tall. That’s what so special about this museum. It is not visual; it’s experiential.
I met Pete in sixth grade. He was the middle child of a divorced mother who moved him to Chicago to be near her family and as far away as possible from his father. A shy, freckled kid who grew up on an Iowa farm, never seeing anyone not pale. He looked at the class of African Americans, Latinos, Japanese, Chinese and white kids watching him find his seat in the back, behind mine. Once the teacher returned to the blackboard, there was a tap on my shoulder and I turned to come face to cake with a chocolate cupcake.
“50 cents,” Pete mouthed. I was a pudgy kid with a health food freak for a mother. Nothing in our house had added sugar and dessert was either a piece of overripe fruit or moldered cheese.
I shook my head and Pete pushed it closer. “Come on,” he whispered, “you know you want it.” We completed the deal in the hallway as soon as class was over. The change was out of my pocket and I inhaled the cupcake. “Plenty more where that came from.”
That was always Pete’s genius; always selling the last thing someone would admit they needed. “He frowned at Vince Santavasi who sold pot behind the dumpster as lacking in imagination. “Anyone can sell pot. Who doesn’t want to get high?” Pete specialized in servicing the subconscious. He sold Dodie Williams tissue paper to stuff her bras. He sold Bob Ferry travel-sized bottles of Head and Shoulder’s shampoo to arrest the dandruff that piled on his shoulders.
“Try this one on,” he said, slipping something around my neck. Why did I hear ticking?
“This was your grandfather’s,” my mother said, dangling an antique pocket watch in front of me as if she were trying to hypnotize me. “He wore it every day he was in court. He was the genuine self-made man. Came from nothing made something out of himself.” What she did not say, but need not was: “And look how quickly you unmade it.”
My mother, who was frustrated in pretty much everything, childhood, marriage, housewivery, and the slow and futile fight of stage IV breast cancer. Knowing I was less accomplished in math than language, my life was papered with virtual highway signs telling me of all the benefits I would reap when I graduated law school; among the booty was my grandfather’s watch.
The irony was my mother hated lawyers. She spent most of her life missing her father who preferred the office, court and his club to spending time with his only daughter. But should she have been so disappointed that I ended up with a degree in creative writing and in the Development Department of a small Midwestern college? Every so often, she retrieved my grandfather’s watch and sighed as if it was a miscarried child with oh so much more potential than me.
“You feel don’t you? The disappointment of a father physician who just learned his son just quit pre-med to major in dance. I’m telling you, this one gets to me. You know my Dad dealt pills and went to his grave disappointed that I was doing nothing. To him, what’s the point of doing it if anyone can? Any one can, no one else does. What a prick. Sometimes, I put on the stethoscope and I want to hang myself. And then I wish my father was still alive so I could hang him.”
All I wanted was to leave the museum gulp the winter air and vomit; throw up until there was nothing left in my stomach.
But Pete had other ideas. He sidled up way too close and put his arm around my neck. His breath smelled of pepperoni and conspiracy. “There is one more thing I want to show you. I don’t usually share it with anyone; it is not only priceless, there will never ever be its like.”
He beckoned me to a small office in the back that contained a metal desk and a small gray filing cabinet. He fished keys from his pocket and unlocked the second from the top drawer. He withdrew a package, about the size of a medium pumpkin, wrapped in multiple layers of bubble wrap. He motioned me back as if it was explosive.
Pete treated me to something that was between an autopsy and a striptease. Under the bubble wrap was butcher paper and under that was a gallon freezer bag that contained a battered Lucite box, the kind used for displaying baseballs. But inside was no baseball.
“Here, put these on,” he said, handing me a pair of insulated lineman gloves. “It will burn your skin right off.”
“It is best if you don’t look at directly. Look around it. Not at it.” He reached over for a pair of tongs and pulled the top off. “Hold out your hands. There,” he said, pulling the tongs back.
All I could feel was the racing of my pulse in my fingertips. It was maybe two inches across. Shriveled with a small stem sticking out of the top. On either side there were two small holes, maybe ¾ of an inch across and ¼ deep as whoever bit into knew they were doing wrong.
“Helen. Lithe. Beautiful. Unobtainable. Font of my desire during my college years. Long blonde hair. Almond-shaped brown eyes. A figure carved by Pygmalion. Since we met at orientation at college, she was all I thought about. But I possessed neither the language nor the courage to approach her.
Three beers followed by two shots of vodka, a hunk of my mother’s dense apple cake, and my stomach felt inundated by a tsunami. The nausea allowed me just twenty-five feet from my dorm room door. Dressed only in mostly-clean white briefs, I sprinted down the hall. Vomit spewed like Vesuvius. I slipped in my sick, landing with an embarrassing splurch. There was raucous laughter, but I heard Helen’s voice saying gross. Not ideal timing, but my alcohol-figured brain told me better now than ever.
Pulling myself up from the vomit, I wobbled towards her, hand extended. “I’m Stuart. I love you.”
Like a pyrite miner, I panned for pleasure on her face, but found only revulsion. “Your thing is showing,” she said, pointing at my crotch. I looked down and saw my penis, like a sick worm, peeping out of the flap. “Gross,” she said, walking forever out of my life.
I was undulating in the middle of the ocean slowly being pulled down. I must have swooned as Pete was suddenly behind, holding me up. “Careful there, cowboy. Don’t drop the apple.”
“Apple,” I asked him, seeing nothing but fog.
“Not just an apple. The apple. He reached up and pointed at one side and then the other. “Adam. Eve. The birth of embarrassment. Imagine that conversation.”