Five Year Plan
5th April 2014, 03:49
My parents’ faith in me was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, they never felt the need to pry and snoop and try to micromanage my life. They always assumed I would make excellent grades, not get into trouble. In a way, I just blended into the background of their lives. As a teenager, I found this to be a godsend in one respect. I liked having control over the people that I talked to, the places that I went to. I liked being able to disappear into the evening, and not be probed with sharp questions upon my return. I liked the fact that one of my friends was a forty year old man who lived a couple of doors down, who introduced me to Pink Floyd’s music and Art Bell’s campy nuttiness, who played chess and trivial pursuit with me, who considered me his intellectual equal, all without raising any suspicion from my parents.
On the other hand, I really did desire to have a closer bond with my parents. Or with my friends. Or basically anybody. I’ve gone through my life with the feeling that I am encased in a hard membrane insulating my emotions from the outside world, while raising those emotions to an unbridled passion on the inside. Openings did present themselves for me to break through. When I was in middle school, I walked home with a friend of mine who lived nearby. About a quarter of mile from our homes, he decided he needed to take a piss. We happened to be passing by a recreation complex with baseball fields, flanked by tall towers for the scorekeepers to use. He went to one side of a tower, and I another. When I finished doing my business, I walked over to where he was, and found him looking directly at me, his dick in his hands, hard as a rock, while his blue eyes signaled the most vulnerable of desires. Clearly he wanted something, but I wasn’t prepared to give that thing to him. Afraid, I turned away and pretended outwardly that the previous five minutes hadn’t happened, even while spending the next couple of years imagining the possibilities in my sexual solitude.
College presented another opportunity. It was a large university in an otherwise small town, populated by people whose academic credentials far outstripped their small minds. The only person who seemed to be in tune with me was my freshman roommate. There we were, in the middle of nowhere, cooped up in a dormitory with cinderblock walls, communal showers, flickering fluorescent lights, and all the personality of a soviet public housing project under Stalin. My roommate was an attractive nineteen-year-old who resembled Mark Hamill from the original Star Wars movie. “If I fall asleep with the television on, just use the force to turn it off,” I joked with him my first night there.
As it turned out, I rarely fell asleep before he did.
On the other hand, I really did desire to have a closer bond with my parents. Or with my friends. Or basically anybody. I’ve gone through my life with the feeling that I am encased in a hard membrane insulating my emotions from the outside world, while raising those emotions to an unbridled passion on the inside. Openings did present themselves for me to break through. When I was in middle school, I walked home with a friend of mine who lived nearby. About a quarter of mile from our homes, he decided he needed to take a piss. We happened to be passing by a recreation complex with baseball fields, flanked by tall towers for the scorekeepers to use. He went to one side of a tower, and I another. When I finished doing my business, I walked over to where he was, and found him looking directly at me, his dick in his hands, hard as a rock, while his blue eyes signaled the most vulnerable of desires. Clearly he wanted something, but I wasn’t prepared to give that thing to him. Afraid, I turned away and pretended outwardly that the previous five minutes hadn’t happened, even while spending the next couple of years imagining the possibilities in my sexual solitude.
College presented another opportunity. It was a large university in an otherwise small town, populated by people whose academic credentials far outstripped their small minds. The only person who seemed to be in tune with me was my freshman roommate. There we were, in the middle of nowhere, cooped up in a dormitory with cinderblock walls, communal showers, flickering fluorescent lights, and all the personality of a soviet public housing project under Stalin. My roommate was an attractive nineteen-year-old who resembled Mark Hamill from the original Star Wars movie. “If I fall asleep with the television on, just use the force to turn it off,” I joked with him my first night there.
As it turned out, I rarely fell asleep before he did.