Ghost Factory

The windows from Mrs. Wilcox’s fifth-grade classroom looked out on the back parking lot where the environmental club had painted a mural of a humpback whale over the four-square court. I dragged Tom and Zach back to the water fountain under those windows to talk privately. It was near where we hung our backpacks, and while conferencing we could dig through our coat pockets and lunch bags as if we had some other purpose. It was important to me that no one else hear what we were talking about, particularly Alex Silva and Matt Handy, the boys in the cluster of desks next to Tom’s, Zack’s and mine. Matt and Alex were both on the soccer team; they wore their muddy Sambas to class everyday like a badge of honor. If they heard something, everyone else heard it too.

“I have hair,” I mumbled.

Tom and Zach both gave me blank stares. Of course I have hair. Everyone knew me because of my hair. Huge, thick, red hair that fell all over my face and didn’t grow down as much as it did out, like a jungle or a forest fire, or an overdrawn bath. Zach’s face was so blank, I could see each and every one of the millions of his freckles rise and fall with the bored sigh he breathed out.

“Yeah?” Tom asked, starting to laugh.

We were in our first weeks of actual sex-ed. Mrs. Toumey, our school nurse, dragged an overhead projector into our classroom every afternoon and gave us embarrassed, over-rehearsed lectures about our penises and our vaginas. Our organs were now neatly diagramed and correctly labeled. With her as our guide, they would never smell or hurt or surprise us.

* * *

“You are going to start growing hair around your private parts. It is natural to have hair. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about it. Your parents have hair there and so do I.” She paused and looked up towards the florescent lights in the ceiling. Her hands were clenched in loose fists.

Mr.s Toumey always wore coordinated outfits. Usually with pants that swooshed around her ankles and long vests with gold chain necklaces that swung to her waist. She looked like someone’s grandmother, which was nice when you had a fever or a stomach ache, but not all that comforting when she was telling you about your hairy dick.

She held a pen over a transparency of the male genitalia and suddenly thrust it erect, almost perpendicular to the sagging curvature of the flaccid diagram, casting a narrow silhouette that extended past the overhead screen and onto the chalkboard.

“This is an erection. Boys get erections when they are excited about sex. It is a very natural thing and hard for them to control.” I looked at the pencil in my hand with its chewed over eraser and nubbin tip and thought of the demanding hardness in between my legs. I didn’t make the connection. I glanced carefully around the room, suddenly immensely curious about who else was hiding their hard-on beneath their desk. I caught Zach’s stare. Bug-eyed, we both darted our heads away from each other without saying a word.

The entire room was silent. Tristan, the one boy who had giggled the day before as Mrs. Toumey explained fallopian tubes, was sent to stand out in the hallway for the rest of her lesson. He started crying. But he always cried. His snot covered face didn’t make Mrs. Toumey very sympathetic. He had a rat-tail that came down past his collar and always wore shorts that showed too much of his thighs when he sat on the floor during social studies.

I remember thinking that he was unfairly missing out. For the rest of his life he would have no idea what girls were really like.

***

“I have hair...there.” I pointed quickly, shoving my crotch in front of me. Tom and Zach were silent, exchanging a glance between them that horrified me and filled me with the realization that I shouldn’t have said a thing. I wonder now if my brazen confession was delivered with the hope they would ask me to prove it. Hold me down right there in the back of the classroom and pull my cock out for everyone to see. They never did.

It almost happened, I think, at a sleepover a few weeks later, but I had to finish the fantasy myself once I got home.

* * *

The fan of the overhead projector purred dust clouds beneath Mrs. Toumey’s lecture. Besides her creaky voice it was the only sound in the room.

“When a boy has an erection he will not be able to pee. An erection is for the release of sperm.”

If that was actually true, I don’t know if I would have been able to pee once in the fifth-grade. It certainly requires a different approach, but she made it sound like it was biologically impossible. The next morning, when I was leaning over the toilet with one hand on the wall, painfully aiming right for the center of the tank, I started to wonder if maybe there was something wrong with me. Was I the only one that could do this?

Tristan whispered something to Alex but Mrs. Toumey overheard. Sobbing, Tristan was sent outside into the hallway. Pent up tension was peeling off the walls like dry heat. I swear it was visible to me, to all of us, staring up at that back-lit outline of “Male Genitalia, Side A” pen still in place—Mrs. Toumey must have been humiliated by these lectures. If she acknowledged even for a second our discomfort her own would have been exposed tenfold. If Tristan was in the fifth-grade today I can only imagine the litany of specialists and prescriptions he would have had with him at all times. Crybabies with divorced parents and strange haircuts are given special attention now. They receive therapy and a gentle hand. In 1995, however, the solution was to send him out into the hallway until he stopped crying. He would sulk back in later and find his desk (which was magically always right by the door year after year) and remain sniffling until lunch.

Tristan and I were friends, sort of. His house smelled like his father’s cigars and had a patina of the wispy white hairs his borzoi was always shedding. Standing on its hind-legs, that dog came face-to-face with Tristan’s father; each of its vertebrae protruding like rocks in a riverbed during a drought.

Tristan’s favorite pastime was cops and robbers. Under the diligent and protective watch of a rotating arsenal of Icelandic au pairs, Tristan, always the cop, would handcuff me to his bed or to this one chair in his sunroom that swallowed you whole, clamping you tighter than any plastic handcuffs could. He would interrogate me—threaten me with plastic machine guns, until I had submitted to whatever crime he said I had committed. Sometimes I would be locked up for an hour while he was in another room. Other times he really liked to punish me—knocking me around or letting his dog lick my face while I was helpless to defend myself. We were friends until the eighth-grade when finally I said, “I don’t want to hang out with you anymore.” And that was it. If only the men who would handcuff me in the years to come were as easy to get rid of.

* * *

After that lone declaration next to the water fountain I became intensely aware that, at twelve, I might have been the only boy with a raging bush between his legs. Within a year it was surging down my thighs, knees, and calves, under my arms and up my stomach. I started shaving in the seventh-grade. I had a full chest of hair by my freshman year of high school. As I fought my body’s descent into fur I started to become hyper aware of signs of similar growth in other boys; a glimpse of armpit hair when someone raised their hand in class, the endless parade of calves during the summer months, the pink cuts above an upper lip when someone else started shaving.

Silently, I kept track of who was growing what where. The breasts that were popping up around me, the awkward moments in class when a girl suddenly disappeared to the bathroom and then was sent home, none of that held my attention. It was the boys that I was studying. I needed to discover if I was the only one. My hair was my secret. My body was announcing to the world what was happening to me and I didn’t want it to. So I hid it.

* * *

Before I gained the courage to enter a salon for the pleasures of a back or chest wax, there were exasperating years of bathroom gymnastics in order to shave my back or ass. I would fight nausea as I swept up the piles of shavings off the tiled floor. These were not the tidy clumps of a quick trim. Let me be clear; I needed a broom, a dustpan. Repulsed every time I tossed a double-bagged tangle of hair in to the trash I would vow to be more diligent. The denser the pile, the smoother my body, the more frequent I shaved—the stronger my denial. If the hair was gone, I could believe it never existed in the first place. If there was no public exposure of the hair on my body, there could be no inroads to the confusion brewing within.

The years in high school where I kept a nearly perfect patch of smoothness on my chest in order to wear v-necks are funny now, but were hellish then. One red bump revealing an ingrown hair and I would be discovered, forced out. If anyone knew how much hair I had, or where it was, I would be over. I knew there weren’t any other boys dealing with this. I was watching every time a boy reached across a table and their shirt hiked up to expose a smooth navel, or yet another unblemished expanse of skin flashed in front of me in gym class. I knew these bodies and they were nothing like my own. More than that though, no one else seemed to be as guarded. No one else was watching me as I was watching them. I realize now I was searching for more than just hair. I was searching for a boy that noticed boys as much as I did.

* * *

At home it was no different. I would emerge from a shower fully dressed. I gave up swimming and shorts, too—for a whole summer. My twin brother Nick, on the other hand, was a different story. He is Autistic. Nick’s physical care was under the dedicated watch of my parents and as we got older; as we both entered puberty, it became very hard for me to stand by as they bathed or dressed him.

One night, as I passed the half-open bathroom door on the way to my bedroom, I saw my father toweling Nick off as he stood in the tub—red pubic hair, like mine, glistening with water, freely, unashamedly, visible. I closed the door to the bathroom as I went past.

“Give him some privacy!” I yelled, shutting myself off in my bedroom before I could hear my father’s reply. Really, I should have said, “Give me my privacy!” but I didn’t have those words then.

It was as if they were bathing me, dressing me, every time they tended to Nick. The stronghold I kept over my body was betrayed every time he sat in the bath. They had access to this bizarre mirror image of my body, bright red crotch and all. They knew. If they knew of my hair, they knew of something else. Something I didn’t even know about myself yet. They knew I was gay.

I didn’t tell them as much until I was eighteen. It was never a question of being kicked out of the house or disowned, but I spent my teenage years refusing to fess up to what everyone already knew. It would turn all those hours of shaving into a farce. On some level, admitting my sexuality to them will always feel like a defeat. A moment of weakness I can’t regret, necessarily, but one that I wish never needed to happen. It’s the same with my hair. It just kept growing, regardless of what I wanted or what would be more convenient. It kept coming back until finally I was able to view it not as an invasion but as part of my body. Now, my display has changed—I keep a beard and proudly leave the top button undone. I’ve traded that blotchy smoothness of the closet for hair. Hair that is coarse and dark and ready for a man’s hand to burrow through and rip it out.