James stopped at the head of the basement stairs, surprised to find the light on. He knew he turned it off, he always turned it off. Carefully, he crept down the stairs and peered over the banister.
Cooley looked up from the bench. She was working on the shop class clock, its parts already spread out in a systematic mess. A mess James recognized; she learned it from him.
He didn’t say anything, but settled down to work next to her.
It only took an hour or so and then James closed the little door on the back of the miniature mantel clock. Resting his hand on its smooth upward curve, he felt the steady ticking. The beat of Diana’s heart.
James held his hand there for a minute and closed his eyes. He remembered the moments after lovemaking, the only time he could get Diana to hold still. She folded herself against him, her back to his chest, and he threw his arm over her and cupped her breast. He felt the life thrumming in her then and he felt her now. Warm. And alive. And right here beside him.
Tears threatened again, so James cleared his throat and looked over at Cooley. She sat quietly, her chin propped in her hand, as she studied all the parts in front of her. James felt sorry for the shop class clock, sitting there, gutted. “Rest the clock on some lamb’s wool,” he said. “Give it a safe place to be while you work on its insides.”
Cooley rolled her eyes, but she got out a lamb’s wool cloth and carefully settled the clock in it. James cradled the miniature mantel in his hand and started for the stairs. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “Get there soon yourself.”
She didn’t say anything, but James knew she nodded. For the first time, he left the light on in the workroom when he went upstairs to bed. It felt odd, knowing someone was down there working, someone else besides him.
But it felt good too.
James set Diana’s clock on his bedside table, in front of his mother’s anniversary clock. After he turned out the light, he reached out and cupped the clock, feeling again the warmth of Diana’s breast, the rhythm of her heart. It didn’t take long to fall asleep.
I
t was a tough time to be named Ernesto Viagrasa. It started in kindergarten, where the teacher immediately shortened my name to Ernie and the freckled boy next to me heckled, “Hey, Ernie, where’s Bert?” Thus began several years of gay Sesame Street jokes that we were too young to understand, but everyone laughed and repeated them anyway. Why do Ernie and Bert have it in their will that whomever dies first will be buried butt up? So that the one who is left can pop in for a cold one whenever he’s up for it. What’s Ernie and Bert’s favorite part of playing pirates? Swabbing out the poop deck. Ernie and Bert are relaxing in the bathtub with Rubber Ducky. Suddenly, sperm floats to the top of the water. “Hey,” Bert yells. “Stop farting, Ernie!”
I learned to walk with my head down. A sympathetic gym teacher called it counting my footsteps. He counted my footsteps into his office one day after school where he got too sympathetic, encouraging me to spill my guts about how hard it was to be Ernesto Viagrasa. When I did, sobbing until my body shook, it took me a few minutes to realize he was no longer patting my hand or rubbing my back. He was stroking my balls and I was already hard. It was scary, but it was the first bit of pleasure I got out of life and so I let him console me through the remaining six years of elementary school. His comfort went deeper and deeper.
Middle school was a two-year blur of being shut in lockers, once breaking my wrist when I tried to block the olive green metal door from slamming on my face. Ducking under the bleachers at the end of gym class and then dashing in at the last minute to change, so I wouldn’t have to shower in front of the other boys. Being tailed all the way home as kids made their first attempts at alliteration: “Hey, faggot-fart! Hey, fairy-face! Hey, fag-fucker!”
It was with some relief that I made my way to high school. The school was bigger, it presumably had more places where I could hide. At the orientation at the end of eighth grade, I already tagged several spots: behind the stage in the auditorium, a back hallway with a door leading only to a janitor’s room, a spot just outside the school at the top of a wooded hill. And in some distant part of me, that I barely listened to, I knew there was a hope that in a bigger school, there might be more like me. A Bert to my Ernie. Or at least a Rubber Ducky. Someone to just be friends with.
But on the first morning, as I sat in homeroom with all the other squirming freshmen, the teacher taking roll called out, “Ernesto Viagra…sa?”
The room fell into one long peal of laughter. A guy in the front row, a bigger, uglier, more freckled version of my kindergarten heckler, turned and yelled, “Hey, Viagra! What’s up?”
I slumped lower in my chair and again recounted the number of hiding places as the teacher attempted to regain control. But she never did and I knew why. The whole time she demanded silence, for the kids to leave me alone, she was smiling.
That night at dinner, my mother asked me how my first day of high school was. I responded by asking her if I could change my name. She looked at me, her eyebrows bumping into each other above her nose. “Ernesto Viagrasa,” she said, rolling the r’s, filling my name with that fine virile feeling that only her deep voice could give it. I felt regal when she said it, proud, like a large man standing on the edge of a cliff, his hairy muscular arms crossed over his massive hairier chest. “It is a fine name,” she said. “Why change it? What would you change Ernesto to? The kids, the teachers, are they calling you Ernie again?” After that first awful day at kindergarten, my mother went on an annual phone-calling campaign, notifying the teacher, the secretaries, the assistant principal, the principal, that her son’s name was Ernesto, not Ernie. But she could do nothing about the kids on the playground. And even the teachers slipped, sending home progress notes that always began, “Ernie is having difficulty finishing his assignments on time,” and sometimes calling me Ernie right in front of her at conferences. Though it was kind of a relief then; she would fly into such a rage that the bad grades would be forgotten.
“It’s not just the Ernesto, Mom,” I said. She looked at me, chewing, and she waved her hand, willing me to continue. “It’s the Viagrasa.”
“The Viagrasa? But why—”
“It sounds like Viagra, Mom,” I said and blushed.
When she put down her pork chop, I knew the light bulb had gone off. “Oh, dear,” she said. “It looks like another round of phone calls.”
I sighed and covered my face with my hands. It was a pose that often got me what I wanted. I heard my mother push out of her chair and then she stood behind me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, nesting her face in my hair.
“Changing your name isn’t for me to decide, Ernesto,” she said softly. “You would have to ask your father. It is his name.”
My mother resumed her maiden name after she divorced my father. My name was indeed his and it was one small golden goose egg that she never insisted on sending the Junior in my name to school with me.
I helped with the clearing of the dishes, then went to the hall phone to call my father. Although his one-bedroom apartment was on the other side of the state, his voice was always so loud on the phone, it was like he was still there with us. I waited for the usual “how are you” and “how is your mother” to pass before I told him I wanted to change my name. Especially my last name.
He was silent for a moment, then said, “You don’t wish to be related to me anymore?”
“No, Dad,” I said. “It’s not that. It’s just …Viagrasa sounds a lot like Viagra. To high school kids, anyway.”
He immediately launched into a speech about how the Viagrasa Men were the most manly of men, well-hung, fertile, producing millions of sperm each day and impregnating any woman the magic wand caught in its spell. Each and every time.
Even though he produced only one son. One child.
When the rant was done, I hung up the phone and disappeared into my room. It looked like, “Hey, Viagra, what’s up?” was going to be tattooed to my ass for the next four years.
A
nd then hell got hotter. About three weeks after school started, my guidance counselor called me in. She said that I wasn’t really supposed to have three study halls, that through some fluke mistake, the two study halls I was to have per year, one each semester, got shoved into one semester, and then somehow a third study hall got thrown into the mix as well. Those study halls were my reprieve, my chance to hide in the boys’ bathroom behind the music department, doing homework or reading or simply leaning against a stall with my eyes closed, in my mind hearing a deep voice say, “Ernesto” in a way that was a caress. I was horrified to learn that I was going to have only one study hall from that day on, even more horrified when she dumped me into a gym class, and completely undone when she said with a smile, “Oh, and a shop class too. You’ll like that.” My immediate tears must have clued her in that I wouldn’t like it, not a bit, because she said, “Now, Ernie. All boys like shop class. You’ll get to play with tools.” And then she blushed a deep scarlet while I sobbed harder.
I tried to hide that afternoon in my stall in the restroom, but the counselor found me anyway. Apparently, she had experience finding kids who didn’t want to be found. She walked me to the shop class, her voice a soft drone of nonsensical phrases. I heard things like, “work with your hands” and “be with other boys” and “develop some self-esteem.” But I knew as soon as I walked into that room full of jocks and boneheads that nothing she said was true. She didn’t even follow me inside; she just closed the door firmly behind me.
There was one table of geeks and the shop teacher led me there. That helped me to relax a little bit. At least I was with others who didn’t know a hammer from a screwdriver. But even they laughed when from across the room, the Freckled Heckler yelled, “Hey, Viagra! What’s up?”
I braced my knuckles on the old wooden workbench and before I knew it, my mouth opened and I hollered back, “Fuck you, asshole!” Then I froze and so did everyone in the room. Although this seemed the place for language like that, with the nicked wood and the power tools and the smell of carpenter’s glue. But it was still school and in school, we only talked that way in the hallways, in crowds where we wouldn’t be detected. I cast a glance at the shop teacher, a man who looked the way my mother pronounced my name, and he grinned at me and shook his head.
“Way to fucking fight back, Ernie,” he said. Then he threw a book of wood patterns at me. “You missed the first project. Bookends. Now we’re making clocks. You’re about a week behind, so you’d better get to work.”
Freckled Heckler glared at me. “See if you can fucking catch up, fag dildo,” he said and I shook a bit. As I looked through the patterns, I planned how I would scoot out the door as fast as I could after class and then duck down less-traveled hallways from that moment forward. I debated whether I should fly home right after school, hoping to outrun Heckler and his gay-bashers, or if I should hang back, hide somewhere, until he’d given up and gone home.
Then the patterns for the clocks caught my attention and my concentration focused down. It was fascinating, really, a mathematical and artistic wonder, the way movements had to be made different ways to fit in different clocks, perform different functions.
The shop teacher stopped by and looked over my shoulder. He told me to pick the outside first, the type of clock I was going to make, then go for the inside. “Match the inside to the outside,” he said. “It’s easier that way.”
Freckled Heckler came by, supposedly to borrow a screwdriver. He grunted at me, “You should make a fag cuckoo clock, Viagra. Have the bird go in the back door.”
My entire table sighed and I looked away. We all knew what the jokes meant by now. We weren’t kids anymore.
I chose a mantel clock, admiring its smooth lines and reasoning that the long curve like a camel’s hump would be easier to do on a scroll saw than something with corners. Five lopsided attempts and one week later, I counted my fingers to make sure they were all still there, and then adapted the design. Straight lines were easier, even if it meant a corner, and so my mantel clock’s humpback became square, its edges sharp. No longer a humpback at all, it was a box on a narrow shelf. It was a freak and Freckled Heckler said I probably could identify with it and I didn’t fire back with what was now my trademark shop class, “Fuck you, asshole,” answer. Because I did identify with the clock. And because it took Freckled Hecker those two weeks to come up with a trademark answer to my trademark retort. “I don’t wanna fuck your asshole,” he snarled, before I even had a chance to clip the K in fuck, tongue the L in asshole.
But I could lose the Freckled Heckler in the movement of the clock. I put things together, took them apart, played with them, figured out formulas and timing mechanisms and thought about the timbre of sound. The other geeks stood around me and watched, their own simple circle wall clocks finished, as I added more and more functions to my square. I placed four knobs at each of the quarter hours. At the top of the hour, when the clock chimed, I only had to touch that knob over and over and the clock told me what time it was not only in Iowa, but it sang out eastern time, pacific time, mountain time. The other three knobs were fakes, just for show, for balance, as a single-knobbed clock would look stupid. I put in a second hand, a millisecond hand, a nanosecond hand that wasn’t very accurate, but it moved so quickly, you couldn’t really see it and I knew it was there. Because of my mother, I gave the clock electric sockets, wired it so that when it was plugged in, it could provide power to other appliances. My mother was always swearing at the limited number of outlets in our house, bitching as she had to unplug lamps to run the vacuum or unplug the toaster to turn on the mixer. When she used the bread machine, it sent her into a snarl that could last for hours. My mother would never again have to unplug to plug in. My clock was a power strip that could tell time.