The Toy Boat and the Bicycle Horn

It was 1961, and I was 13 years old, and there was scarce a kid named Jennifer or Kimberly or Jason or Joshua or Cody, and not a Courtney nor Kelly nor Brittany was there to be found.

The known world, or at the very least Detroit, Michigan, was populated by Lindas and Eleanors and Marilyns, by Johns and Toms and Garys and Michaels, by Louises and Pamelas, by Barrys and Alans. Sam and Alex and Cameron were boys' names: no question, no ambiguity.

In 1961 everyday pieces of candy were still to be had two for a penny at a dingy, creaky floored corner store called Rosie's, Rosie being the short, swarthy, taciturn and probably Syrian or Lebanese proprietress whose fascinating black, kinky hairline was as low as the price of her dry goods. You could get odd cans of foods and a loaf of Schaefer's or a pint bottle of Twin Pines at Rosie's, but we kids went there for the soft and sticky multi-colored candy in the shapes of stars and moons and leaves and flowers and eccentric, deformed animals. Some liked the Pixy Stix and jawbreakers and Boston Baked Beans and black licorice in whips and lumps. We bought little wax bottles and barrels filled with a cloyingly sweet syrup. Some crude kids would chew and swallow them, wax and all. There were candy tobacco pipes and cigarettes for the junior sophisticates among us. There were broad ribbons of paper to which were glued pink and white buttons of hard sugar. You would bite them off, and they’d come away with a thin scrap of the paper stuck to them. You’d chew up the candy and spit out a small wad of paper. I loved the three-cent, red boxes of Indian brand pumpkin seeds. They were coated with such a thick layer of salt that, half-way through eating a boxful, my tongue would acquire the corrugated texture of a Sicilian cured olive. All these treats were wonderfully cheap, though that would soon change, for we had not Alan Greenspan to protect us.

In 1961 telephones were basically home appliances and were firmly rooted and immobile. Telephone numbers were prefixed by staid but memorable nouns such as Pingree, Dunkirk, Tuller, Diamond, Vinewood, Drexel, Tuxedo, Cadillac, or University, and when the phone rang, which was seldom, you could bet your last dollar that it wasn’t for me.

In 1961 you could get 12 greasy-bunned, onion-flecked burgers, that the vulgar called "sliders", for 96 cents at the White Castle. On Catholic Fridays, when your dad could put up no longer with your mom's insipid fish sticks, he could get, for the pittance of a dollar at a drive-in called Andy Panda’s, a basket with enough shrimp and fries to feed a family of three.

In 1961 there was something like 50,000 Mexicans and Chicanos living in Detroit, but whereas this Mexican numeric presence would be striking and obvious in most other fair-to-middling sized towns, that same number in a metropolis of four million was next to nil. Mexicans were virtually invisible save for one neighborhood—old Corktown. And one street in particular, Bagley Avenue—"la Bagley" to the denizens of that barrio—teemed with the children of Cortéz and La Malinche. There were restaurants serving enchiladas and tamales; there was a busy, noisy tortilla factory, and there was Tenorio’s Market, to which my parents would go on pilgrimage every other week or so for foodstuffs one could not find at Kroger’s or the A&P. Also in Corktown, primordial ghetto of the Irish in 19th Century Detroit, could be found Tiger Stadium, which in 1961 was called no such thing. It was Briggs, Briggs Stadium, the home of my fabulous ball club.

In 1961 the Tigers made a valiant run at the pennant but faded down the stretch and gave up first place to the damned Yankees. A magnificently dreadful game that my father took me to in a green green stadium on a green day late in June lives in my memory with the lasting bitter beauty of a great disappointment. The Yankees beat my Tigers that day ten to nothing, treating Frank Lary the Yankee killer with contempt, as Whitey Ford pitched a one-hitter, my hero, Al Kaline, getting that one hopeless hit. I saw Maris hit one of his 61 homeruns, late in the game. Johnny Blanchard hit two homers. But the one I won't forget was Moose Skowron's.

It came in the second. It was first blood. No one on base. Skowron walked up to the plate primitive and murderous, and my dad shook his head at an uncanny similarity. "My god! He looks just like King Kong Keller up there!" My dad had been a Yankee fan as a boy. On the first pitch, Skowron, with his ugly, graceless swing, lunged forward like a hungry Cro-Magnon clubbing a wounded aurochs, and the ball fairly whistled in its golf-like flight in the gasping hush, heading in a rising line toward the upper deck in left center where it disappeared in the white-shirted crowd.

"Look at that!" My father laughed, "He hits just like Keller!"

After that first score, the game became one dreary humiliation after another for the Detroit nine. And though they would win 101 games that year and would stay in first place well into August, they looked at that moment, very much like the second-best team in the league.

"Do you think the Tigers have a chance this year, dad?"

"What!? A chance!? Get out of here!! Maybe they’d have a chance if they were in the National League. Those are the Yankees out there, buddy!"

Those were the Yankees out there, a force, a power natural and unquestioned with which one inevitably had to contend.

In 1961 the Yankees were a power as overwhelming as guilt, regret, envy or hatred, a power as formative as the oppressive inheritance of culture and custom, a power as weighted with want as the demons of thirst, hunger, love and sex.

By 1961, I had begun to think less of two-for-a-penny candy and more about the female form…I mean, women’s bodies. So obsessive was this fascination with breasts, thighs, and buttocks, that these became near abstractions practically divorced from any real feminine humanity. In spite of my obsession and the incipient desire behind it, I had not yet masturbated to conclusion. I still felt the oppression of my Catholic education, still did not want to disappoint Sister Rose Anne Liam. Masturbation to orgasm would happen almost a year later, happen again and again and again with a Portnoy-like vengeance. For the time being, I busied myself with catching a fortuitous glimpse of flesh from below as girls in skirts ascended staircases at school or by skulking into the magazine aisle of Cunningham’s Drugstore to surreptitiously leaf through a "gents’" review (I believe there actually was a magazine called "Gent").

"Hey kid! This ain’t no library, and you’re too young to buy…So get lost!

It so happened on a day in July in 1961 that Harvey Levine and I were loitering on the playing field of Fitzgerald Elementary, bats and mitts in hand, waiting for others to show up for a game, when two men emerged from the brick power house that supplied steam heat and energy to Fitzgerald and Loren Post Junior High and walked casually by us, indifferent to our juvenile presence. One was tall, fair and pot-bellied, the other short and dark. Both were grimy with coal dust and oil.

The tall one said:
"You shoulda seen this woman I was with last night. She was beautiful! And man, was she stacked!"

"Oh yeah?" said the short one, "So howdja make out?"

"How’d I make out?" rejoined the tall one, "I’ll tell ya how I made out—she gave me a blow job!!"

Profane congratulations were offered up by the short one, and they passed, with many a rudely descriptive gesture of hand and hip, out of our earshot.

I had never heard the term "blow job" before but surmised from the context that it had something to do with sex.

I have always been proud of the fact that I’ve never been hesitant to own up to my ignorance, no matter the subject, no matter the prospect of ridicule.

"Hey, Harvey, what is a blow job, anyway?"

"Don’t you know, you dumbass?"

"If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking."

"A blow job is when a girl puts your dick in her mouth and blows."

"Blows?"

"Yeah. Blows!"

"And that’s supposed to feel good?"

"You really are dumb, aren’t you? Yeah, it feels good."

"Why would that feel good?"

"Just take my word for it. IT FEELS GOOD!"

"Take your word for it? So you’re talking from experience?"

"I sure am."

"Oh, yeah? What girl gave you a blow job?"

"You’ll have a hard time believing me if I tell you."

"Try me."

"It was…It was Edith Stegmöller."

He was right. I had a hard time believing him. I mean, why would…how could!... shy, skinny, milk-white little Edith Stegmöller do something like that? With Harvey Levine no less!! What in the world would poor Edith get out of it, other than Harvey Levine’s gratitude?

But I reflected on how I had already come to the conclusion that there was no fathoming what girls like and why they do what they do and had to admit the possibility that Edith Stegmöller would take Harvey Levine’s penis into her mouth and give him indescribable pleasure by puffing out her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie and blowing.

In 1961 we lived on Cloverlawn Street where, in the basement, I still maintained my neglected but unforgotten toys in an old, splintering wooden trunk. I would open the big blue box and take out the intact, broken and incomplete remainders of my recent childhood and wonder at how charming they all once seemed.

I descended the stairs from the kitchen, opened the trunk and looked at my toys with eyes and a mind alive to possible purposes to which they could be put, purposes that I theretofore had not dreamed of.

I knew that if my experiment were to be successful, I would need an appropriate device, something capable of delivering a sufficiently forceful and concentrated gust of air into a small aperture.

I considered taking a bicycle pump and needle that I employed to inflate my basketball, considered inserting the needle into the meatus of my penis and then leaning into the handle of pump, but I dismissed this idea out of hand because I was too afraid of inserting anything into my penis, such a thing seeming to me to be an unnatural act.

The bicycle pump, however, led me to think of an object in my old toy box, a bicycle horn my father once bought me that I never bothered to attach to my handlebars. I examined the horn with its flaring, chromed tin bell and black rubber bulb and concluded that it could very well do the trick. It would be a gentle, non-invasive way of simulating the sort of ecstasy that presumably only girls like Edith Stegmöller could provide.

I took the bicycle horn up the stairs, careful, who knows why, to conceal it from my mother, and took it up another flight to our unfinished attic. I got on my knees, unzipped my pants, pulled out my penis and manipulated myself into an erection, which in those golden days took only a few seconds, and introduced myself into the horn.

In 1961 Bozo the Clown was syndicated on television throughout the Midwest. I loathed him, even as a little child, and preferred Detroit’s own tv clown, Milky, whose show, Milky’s Movie Party I watched every Saturday morning. I preferred Milky to Bozo because Bozo was clownish, and Milky was not.

I closed my eyes the better to see, in my mind’s eye, Brigitte Bardot’s red painted lips around my penis and squeezed the bulb of the horn.

The result was not what I expected. I was surprised and disgusted by a Bozo-like, ludicrous honk accompanied by a muffled farting noise as the air shot through the horn and passed around and over the skin and flesh of my glans penis. My member had made an imperfect plug in the bell of the horn, and no perceptible air was able to enter it.

I found this occurrence completely disenchanting and did not want to give the bicycle horn another chance. There was also the potential embarrassment of having to explain to my mother why I was honking a horn in the attic.

I didn’t go back to the drawing board. I went back to the toy box. I picked up a half-dozen things, was side-tracked for an hour into silly nostalgia by my collection of polyethylene army men, all 847 of them, and finally took in hand an old bathtub toy, a rubber boat modeled after a sporty Chris Craft, a toy boat that once floated and made a squeaking whistling noise when squeezed. I noticed that the boat had a small hole in its stern where the whistling instrument once was but now was gone.

If I had been a cartoon character, and, believe me, in 1961 I was very close to being just that, you might have seen an illumined light bulb appear in a cloud-shaped balloon directly above my head.

I immediately judged that the toy boat would be a perfect tool to accomplish the task at hand, so to speak. The hole in the boat was just the right size to fit over the hole in my penis.

I climbed to the attic once more. I assumed the position and readied myself. I placed the aperture of the boat over and against my own opening. I shut my eyes—this time it was Mamie VanDoren—and gave the toy boat a forceful squeeze.

In 1961 I had never heard of Jorge Luis Borges, let alone had read him. Some 25 years earlier Borges had published that stupendous collection of stories of his titled Historia Universal de Infamia. I have no doubt that, as young and unlettered as I was, I could have made a strong, inspired go at a compelling treatise…A Universal History of Pain, if you will…an encyclopaedic catalog and compendium of pain legendary, pain ancient and post-modern, pain immense and slight, pain imagined, pain unendurable, pain as love, pain as duty, pain as debt paid, phantom pain, pain suffered gladly, pain of retrospection, pain oracular, pain exquisite, and, yes, pain self-inflicted.

As soon as I squeezed the toy boat and the air entered my penis and violated and inflated my urethra, I was toppled from my knees and rolled on the floor, desperately trying to overcome the pain while trying madly, illogically, pointlessly to name it. The dynamic pain had several colors, many gradations, a multitude of accursed houses. Phosphenes were fired by the rods and cones of my retinas and flashed in green and red sheets of lightning on the dark cerebral seas of my closed eyes. I felt an acute, acid yellow pain deep within me as if small disembodied hands were grasping at and pulling at my bladder. My testicles ached with a profound blunt ache that I had never before suffered.

It was a frightening, memorial pain. It was my pain, a pain I prayed to never have again. It was the pain of the toy boat.

When the pain finally subsided, and I realized that I had not permanently damaged my penis, I took to wondering how anyone could think a blow job was a marvelous thing. I vowed then and there that if Edith Stegmöller ever accosted me on the street, genuflected before me and pleaded piteously to let her give me a blow job, I would rebuke her sharply and send her on her way.

It seemed insanity that any man should want such an horrific experience, but obviously some men did. Perhaps it was different for them. I considered the possibility that I perhaps was just not equipped for that kind of pleasure.

In 1961 there were yet many missteps ahead and many an unforeseen discovery. Blow jobs were definitely not for me. I would never experience that sexual joy…but in 1961 there was still Rosie’s; there was still two-for-a-penny candy, and I had dime in the pocket of my blue jeans to console me.



© Arturo Mantecón