this quote: As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world,
usually our mothers’ fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the
world, are grasping us, and have been all along. Borges? Yes, it might have been
Borges. Or it might have been Márquez. That I don’t remember. I just know I got her
air conditioner running, and when cool air started blowing out of the convector, it lit
up her whole face. I also know it’s true, that thing about how perception switches
around and we come to realize that the things we thought we were holding are
actually holding us. Keeping us prisoner, perhaps—Thoreau certainly thought so—but
also holding us in place. That’s the trade-off. And no matter what Thoreau might have
thought, I believe the trade is mostly a fair one. Or I did then; now, I’m not so sure.
And I know these things happened in late August of 2002, not quite a year after a
piece of the sky fell down and everything changed for all of us.
On an afternoon about a week after Sir Scott Staley donned his Good Samaritan armor
and successfully battled the fearsome air conditioner, I took my afternoon walk to the
Staples on 83rd Street to get a box of Zip discs and a ream of paper. I owed a fellow
forty pages of background on the development of the Polaroid camera (which is more
interesting a story than you might think). When I got back to my apartment, there was
a pair of sunglasses with red frames and very distinctive lenses on the little table in
the foyer where I keep bills that need to be paid, claim checks, overdue-book notices,
and things of that nature. I recognized the glasses at once, and all the strength went
out of me. I didn’t fall, but I dropped my packages on the floor and leaned against the
side of the door, trying to catch my breath and staring at those sunglasses. If there had
been nothing to lean against, I believe I would have swooned like a miss in a
Victorian novel—one of those where the lustful vampire appears at the stroke of
midnight.
Two related but distinct emotional waves struck me. The first was that sense of
horrified shame you feel when you know you’re about to be caught in some act you
will never be able to explain. The memory that comes to mind in this regard is of a
thing that happened to me—or almost happened—when I was sixteen.
My mother and sister had gone shopping in Portland and I supposedly had the house
to myself until evening. I was reclining naked on my bed with a pair of my sister’s
underpants wrapped around my cock. The bed was scattered with pictures I’d clipped
from magazines I’d found in the back of the garage—the previous owner’s stash of
Penthouse and Gallery magazines, very likely. I heard a car come crunching into the driveway. No mistaking the sound of that motor; it was my mother and sister. Peg had
come down with some sort of flu bug and started vomiting out the window. They’d
gotten as far as Poland Springs and turned around.
I looked at the pictures scattered all over the bed, my clothes scattered all over the
floor, and the foam of pink rayon in my left hand. I remember how the strength
flowed out of my body, and the terrible sense of lassitude that came in its place. My
mother was yelling for me—“Scott, Scott, come down and help me with your sister,
she’s sick”—and I remember thinking, “What’s the use? I’m caught. I might as well
accept it, I’m caught and this is the first thing they’ll think of when they think about
me for the rest of my life: Scott, the jerk-off artist.”
But more often than not a kind of survival overdrive kicks in at such moments. That’s
what happened to me. I might go down, I decided, but I wouldn’t do so without at
least an effort to save my dignity. I threw the pictures and the panties under the bed.
Then I jumped into my clothes, moving with numb but sure-fingered speed, all the