Man Stuff: Stories from a Life

By L.A. Robinson

In the end, there is no accurate portrait of a human life. There is a coming and going, a squawking arrival and an unknown unavoidable departure. But there is no rational passage from point A to point B, and eventually, point Z. Life is a turbulent journey that produces a blurred and disorienting picture to any objective observer.

But we do have our stories and that’s what this book is about. These are the stories of Thomas Kemera. They are stories told by him and told about him by another. They reflect the silliness, the confusion, the longing for love, the fear of physical and emotional harm, and the desire to claim his own purpose and demand recognition of his own presence in a mysterious universe that is his life.

The stories should hold their own individually. There is no need to read them sequentially, other than the fact that it might be more convenient to do so. But together, they should present a portrait of this man, Kemera. It won’t be complete. More may be added as time passes. But the pictures should be something that you can recognize and, hopefully, like.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648015328

L.A. Robinson

L.A. Robinson is a full-time working mom of two beautiful kids, and whose childhood dream to be an author of children's books is coming to light with this series about her daughter's daily adventures.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Fight

It shouldn’t have happened.

I blurted out the first words that came into my mind. They meant nothing. But my words were misinterpreted. Unimportant words that were supposed to fill space were suddenly filled with all sorts of unanticipated meaning and were misinterpreted by so many people. And the full force of a violent chaotic universe descended upon me.

Growing up really sucked.

*****

I was in eighth grade.

This was a big deal. My life was in a state of transition. I, Thomas Kemera, was taking my initial steps into manhood. My social position and its associated responsibilities had changed. My body was changing. My sense of self-awareness was more acute. And my sense of confusion was overwhelming at times.

I had reached the age of thirteen when people expected me to begin taking on adult responsibilities. My parents expected me to get a job. Some of the kids at school had fathers who had their own businesses and they were put to work at gas stations, hardware stores, drugstores, grocery stores. They had no problem with finding a job. But the rest of us had fathers who worked for someone else. And we had to find our own way.

My father was a banker.

I didn’t know what to make of that. It didn’t really seem like much of a job to me. I mean, banks were places where people went to put their money so it was in a safe place until they needed to use it. That’s all I knew. You put your money in a bank and then the bank gave you checks so you could pay your bills.

Of course, there had to be more to it than that. Taking people’s money and putting it in a safe didn’t seem all that difficult. I figured an idiot could do that. And my father was much smarter than an idiot. So there had to be something else that went on. But I didn’t know what it was.

And I really didn’t care.

I only knew that I couldn’t get a job at the bank. So I had to go outside the family trade and do something else. I got a job delivering The Evening Bulletin seven days a week. And I took my job seriously.

I could go on about how I perfected the wrapping of each paper so that I could toss it from anywhere in the street as I rode past on my bike and it would always, always land softly on the driveway; or how I never missed a day of delivery, even when I wasn’t really feeling that well, or how proud I felt bringing my mother the five dollars I had earned each week and giving it to her. And I could tell you that I was intensely loyal to the Bulletin and considered the Inquirer a piece of crap and would never read it. But that would be missing the point I’m trying to make here.

The point is that I was at an age where society expected me to begin acting like an adult. It meant I was changing. I was moving forward in life.

It was the same at school. Being in eighth grade meant you were at the top of the food chain. There wasn’t any higher position that could be achieved in grade school, at least as far as being a kid was concerned.

Of course, we really weren’t at the top of the food chain. In Catholic school, the nuns were the real meat-eaters in our jungle. They were the primary predators. They ran the show. Even the parish priests, who supposedly had ultimate authority, didn’t mess with the nuns. They were a tough bunch and made little room for nuance and subtlety. Like the outfits they wore, the world was black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. Believe me, they were not a group you wanted to tangle with.

But even they treated the eighth graders like we were borderline adults and not just kids. Eighth graders got their own lockers. And the nuns would choose some of us to perform responsible tasks, like monitoring the first and second-grade kids during recess or watching over a class when one of the teachers was sick and another teacher or adult was unavailable. They mostly chose girls because they clearly trusted the girls more. But they picked me sometimes. I guess that meant they trusted me.

And that was the point about me back then. My teachers, my friend’s parents, and my parents’ adult friends all used the same word to describe me. I was mature. And so I was, if by maturity you meant someone who had a grasp of social rules and could function comfortably within their restrictions.

I didn’t have a problem with rules.

Now my older brother, Jake, had a problem with rules.

Jake just didn’t get it. He had an unyielding sense of personal freedom and justice. I didn’t know where that came from or why he had that problem. In his worldview, every rule that my parents, the teachers, or the church made was a frontal assault against him and his freedom to live his life. He fought restrictions of any and every type all the time. Telling him what he could and couldn’t do drove him crazy. I mean, he’d do what he was told to do most of the time. He wasn’t a sociopath or anything like that. He was just angry that people thought they had the right to tell him what he could and could not do. And he was always getting punished for it.

I tried to talk to him. They were just rules, I told him. It was like playing a game. A game had rules. You couldn’t double dribble in basketball. You couldn’t line up offside in football. You couldn’t just do what you wanted to do. If you break a rule in a game, you get penalized. If you don’t play by any rules, then no one will let you play the game.

What the hell do games have to do with anything? he demanded, looking at me like I was an idiot.

It’s the same thing, I responded. Mom and Dad have rules…even if they’re stupid rules. We follow the rules and we get to play. We break the rules and we get punished. That’s it. It’s their game. It’s their rules.

What the hell are you talking about? he shouted, clearly confused and frustrated by my explanation. I was sitting downstairs, watching the television, and then she (my sister Rose) comes down and switches the channel like she owns the damn place. And who gets punished? Me!

But you’re being punished because you pushed her down and she got hurt. And what’s Dad’s biggest rule? We’re not allowed to hit the girls.

I didn’t hit her.

But you pushed her down.

She started hitting me when I got up and turned the channel back to my show.

And what if you had just gone upstairs and told them that you were watching a show and Rose came down and changed the channel and was fighting you when you tried to change it back?

Why would I do that?

Because then they would have supported you.

No, they wouldn’t. They let her get away with everything.

No, they don’t, I said with confidence. They would have called her upstairs and told her that she had no right to change the channel and that you could watch what you were watching.

He looked at me like I had two heads. I know I had the right to watch what I was watching. I didn’t have to ask them. She was the one who started the whole thing. She was the one who was wrong. And she got away with it and I’m being punished. Now get out of here and leave me alone.

That’s the way it always seemed to go when he and I talked. And it was frustrating for me. Why wasn’t I getting through to him? It all seemed very clear to me. Life was an orderly process. If you did what your parents told you to do, life could be easy. If you followed the rules in school and did your homework and studied, you got good grades and everyone was happy. If you followed all the rules that the church laid out for you, you went to heaven.

Life didn’t seem like much of a problem to me. I mean, you were bound to screw up sometimes. Everyone did that. But for the most part, it all seemed manageable.

And then, I found out that that wasn’t true.

A new element, an unmanageable unyielding force, appeared out of nowhere. It turned my world upside down and had me doing things that I didn’t want to do. It forced me into situations that my rational mind was screaming for me to avoid, and it made me realize that sometimes, there is no controlling the world and sometimes there are no rules to fall back on and that everything I thought I knew was nothing more than a stinking chaotic mess.

It was time for Mr. Rule-boy, Mr. Smart-ass to learn a lesson.

*****

So let’s take a moment and talk about my dick.

There were a number of things I knew were going to happen to me when I entered puberty. After all, I had seen what happened to Jake. I wasn’t surprised when my voice began to change. I was embarrassed but I wasn’t surprised. And I tried to take it in stride when my voice would crack and tweak and sound like a squealing pig being smacked by a terrified bullfrog, then dive deeper for a few bass notes, and then squeak back into a girlish soprano. I knew that was coming. I didn’t like it but I also knew that it would eventually pass.

I knew that I would be growing facial hair too. I was looking forward to that actually. A beard was a clear indication to everyone that I was entering manhood. My beard began to grow near the end of seventh grade. During the summer, my father took me into the bathroom and demonstrated how I was to perform the daily ritual of shaving. I learned how to wield a two-edged Gillette razor, and I was provided with my own styptic stick and plenty of toilet paper to congeal the blood from the wounds that it left behind.

I knew that hair would grow in other places too. The three boys, Jake, Greg, and I, shared one communal bedroom in the upper level of our house. Privacy was a luxury that was unaffordable in a middle-class home filled with six kids and two adults. The year before, when Jake began to change, he seemed to take every opportunity to parade around the bedroom naked—a proud peacock displaying the full grandeur of his hairy majesty before a couple of less noble hairless chicks.

So when my turn came, I was prepared for the change. At least, I was prepared for that part of the change. The real change, the significant change came as a complete surprise.

For the first six years of my life my dick was my pee-pee. It was a comfortable, reliable appendage, like an arm or a leg. I used it to pee and it worked just fine. I didn’t think much of it.

But when I entered first grade, I did discover something new about it. It had a different name. It was not my pee-pee. It was my dick. Why it was called that, I didn’t know. The fourth grader who provided this information didn’t know why it was called a dick. I pressed him for an explanation because a pee-pee kind of made sense. After all, that’s what it did. It peed. So when I asked him why it was called a dick, he didn’t know and he got angry because he didn’t want to look stupid in front of a first grader. It was a dick. A dick? That’s all there was to it. If I didn’t believe him, then I could ask someone else. And if I wanted to sound like a little baby for the rest of my life and call my dick a pee-pee, that was fine with him. But if I wanted to grow up and call things by their right names, then I would call it what it really was. It was a dick.

And there you have it.

I had a dick.

Boys had dicks. And girls didn’t. That’s what made them girls. Girls had something called a pussy.

And no one seemed to know what that was all about.

It was a mystery to me.

It still is a mystery to me.

*****

So where was I?

Ah yes, my dick.

The appearance of hair was the real change. The hair meant nothing in and of itself. But just as the hair that was growing on my face seemed to inspire a new sense of self-confidence and an awareness of my budding manhood, the hair growing down there, in the nether regions, seemed to have a similar effect on my blooming organ. The hair in my pants was something more than a primal decoration.

Until then, my dick had always belonged to me. It was part of my boyness. It was part of my body. It performed its one function and it did it well. And then my dick got a beard. My dick was growing up. And as time went on and despite my best efforts to control the little monster, it chose to rebel and began to assert itself and do things on its own.

I was plagued by boners.

I didn’t want to get boners, believe me.

I, the little kid with a pee-pee that became a dick, did not request boners. I didn’t even know such things existed. It was just something that suddenly began to appear. I was getting this thing that I had never known about and never requested, and I couldn’t make them go away.

I lost control of my body.

My dick was doing things that I couldn’t control, no matter how hard I tried. When my dick wanted to become a boner, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Now how can you explain this to a kid who was a firm believer in rules and order?

You can’t.

You couldn’t tell a kid like me that there was an order in the universe and that there were rules to be followed and then give him a dick that takes over his body and insinuates itself into nearly every thought.

Every rational thought I had crumbled beneath the relentless onslaught of this battering ram that kept popping up in my pants!

It was not a good time for me.

At least psychologically, it wasn’t a good time.

Physically, well, let’s just say I had my moments.

*****

I don’t know if my life would have changed if someone had explained what was going on. It probably would have eased some of the guilt I felt. And I would have been interested in understanding the physiological reasons for my condition. Maybe, maybe not.

I was a kid. I didn’t know anything. And I like remembering myself that way—just a dumbass kid with a boner.

The summer between seventh and eighth grade, while I was in the midst of my changes, I was with my friends at the playgrounds by the Little League fields. One of the kids had gone into his father’s bureau drawer and stolen one of the pictures that his father had hidden there. He told us that his father had been a photographer during the war and that he had taken pictures of all these naked women and that he could sneak them out any time, as long as he was careful, and that he had a picture of a guy and a woman doing it.

Doing what, I didn’t know. I didn’t ask. But the thought of seeing a naked woman certainly perked my interest. I had never seen a woman naked before. The closest thing I had to erotica was a picture I had ripped out of an old Sears Roebuck catalogue. She was really pretty, with long black hair and a beautiful smile, and she was wearing a piece of black strapless underwear that covered most of her beautiful round breasts and hugged tightly against the curves of her body and ended down there where it was smooth and round and mysterious between her legs. I kept her hidden from everyone else, pushed deep under my mattress, and I’d take her out and look at her as often as I could; and I’d lay there at night, dreaming of her, and then do a little more than dream once the boners started coming.

She was so beautiful. And I wanted to see another beautiful woman completely naked. I wanted to see the full mystery in a picture that I could capture in my mind and hold it there so she belonged to me alone. That she belonged to me alone. And I could whisper to her when I was alone in my bed at night.

And then the picture was being passed around. And there were a series of Wows and Oh, yeahs, and the picture changed hands and it came to me and I looked; and I voiced my appreciation, just like they did, and nodded my head and passed it along to the next guy. And I watched some more and listened some more, and all that time, I thought my head was going to explode.

What the hell was that? my brain was screaming.

It was a black-and-white photograph taken in a shabby bedroom. There was a bed. And on the bed was some guy’s naked hairy ass and hairy legs, and there was someone underneath him who I supposed was the woman; but all I could see of her was her legs raised up in the air, on either side of the hairy naked guy, and the rest was all dark and dirty-looking.

I had no idea how to interpret what I had just seen. I had no frame of reference. But whatever it was looked horrible. I knew nothing about sex. Even after my dick came to life and I started getting boners, I didn’t know that it had any purpose other than making me miserable and demanding that I pet it.

Guys didn’t talk to each other about such things. And no father that I knew ever had discussions with his sons. And no son I ever knew wanted to have such discussions with his father.

Guys are a secretive lot. Or maybe they’re not now. Maybe they’re more open now and talk about things like this. I doubt it. But I don’t know. I only know that much of my life has been secret and that I continue to keep things to myself. And maybe that’s wrong. And maybe it’s not.

And that’s what happens when you take a kid who thinks he’s got it all figured out and life comes in and smacks him around a few times, just to let him know who’s boss. You end up with someone who is more aware of what he doesn’t know than what he does.

*****

It was a beautiful late spring day. The sun was warm but caressingly so. There was a slight breeze but it did nothing to chill the air around us. It was only strong enough to carry the fragrance of newly mown grass and the nearly imperceptible tang of blossoming flowers and leaves and the aroma of an earth that was coming to life around the schoolyard.

Following the tradition that been handed down through generations of previous graduates, the eighth-grade boys were milling around in the corner of the playground that was farthest from the school building. There was a protocol that had to be followed. We were too old, too mature to join the younger male students as they ran around shouting and laughing, engaged in the clearly juvenile games of tag and buck buck and dodgeball.

That was kid stuff, and we didn’t know what we were. But we weren’t kids. We were kind of like adults but not really.

We were bored and trapped and irritable, actually. And since these were characteristics that we clearly associated with the adult world, we felt obligated to assume the uncomfortable demeanor of young men. This was what had to be. This was the tradition of the schoolyard.

Likewise the eighth-grade girls had their place. They gathered at the other end of the schoolyard that was closest to the school building. But in contrast to the boys, the girls appeared significantly more comfortable with their roles. They actually seemed organized. They’d gather into various groups and talk to each other. There was always chatter and hand gestures and head nodding and foot tapping. Sometimes conversations would start between groups and they would merge together to form a larger group, which would prattle away, and then they’d dissolve and reform in different formations.

Girls seemed born knowing how to talk and to socialize. And together, they were a formidable force. The boys, on the other hand, would wander around by themselves or stand silently and awkwardly near the other nitwits. Some stood in groups. But it was mostly a chaotic mess.

On this occasion, I was sitting on the blacktop with my back propped up against the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground. My closest friend, Stephen Aubrey, was sitting beside me. Neither of us was talking which wasn’t unusual. I mean, we did talk sometimes. But like most boys at that age, talk centered on some game or sport or other physical activity that engaged us. If you weren’t doing something together, then you really didn’t have much to talk about. And we weren’t doing anything. We were sitting with our backs up against the fence. So what the hell was there to talk about? I have no idea what was going on in his mind at that time but I clearly remember what was going on in my own.

Nothing.

I was staring at my white shirtsleeves. I was sitting. My feet were planted firmly on the ground. My knees were pulled up and my arms were propped up on my knees.

And I was looking at my shirtsleeves. I didn’t have any particular interest in my shirtsleeves. There weren’t any stains or tears or loose strings that would have attracted my attention and caused my brain to kick into action and contemplate the where, why, or how any of these things could have occurred. I was just looking at my shirtsleeves. I was perfectly content to do so. I was really quite comfortable having my mind go blank.

Everything was fine.

Then I raised my eyes, turned my head, looked innocently across the schoolyard in the direction of the eighth-grade girls, and right into the eyes of Catherine Walker. She was looking in my direction, our eyes locked for the briefest of moments, and then she turned her head and immediately started talking to the girl beside her.

I, on the other hand, was frozen in place. I had seen something. I had looked into her eyes, and she had looked into mine, and I had seen something. I held my gaze, not wanting to break away, not wanting to miss the possibility that she might look back. And then she did. Her head turned, she looked directly and deliberately into my eyes and held that gaze until I was ready to explode, and then she smiled and turned her back to me.

Holy crap—Catherine Walker.

She was…

She was…

She was everything.

She had the face of an angel. Her long blond hair glimmered with a celestial glow that seemed to radiate the entire essence of life. At that instant, everything and everyone else faded around her. I felt my soul drift away from me, rushing across the empty space between us, wrapping around her, caressing her with the sudden incomprehensible warmth of my love.

And then there was a pain in my pants and Boner Boy shouted in its horrifying, demanding voice, I want that!

I wanted to scream with anger. I wanted to take my fist and pound that son of a bitch into submission. That stupid dick had taken something beautiful and defiled it. It had defiled her! And I wanted to kill it.

I closed my eyes. My body tensed. Shut up, you filthy bastard, I demanded.

Her ass looks soft, my dick screamed, completely oblivious to anything I was saying. It didn’t care what I thought or what I wanted.

Stop it. I could hear myself weakening, pleading.

Rub me on her ass.

Are you okay?

This wasn’t me. This was an external voice. I opened my eyes and looked at Stevie Aubrey. He was looking at me with concern.

Yeah, I’m fine, I said.

You look like you have cramps, he said. Do you have to shit?

No, I’m fine.

Stevie shrugged. Okay. Then I watched him move. He placed his hands down on the ground and made a move to push himself up. Let’s walk around for a while. Just sitting here is a pain in the ass.

I was overwhelmed by panic. I couldn’t stand up. The pressure in my pants was becoming increasingly painful. My hardening, throbbing dick was trapped in my underpants and, unable to complete its upward mission where it would press tightly against my body and present a less obtrusive presence to the world around me, it was pushing and straining against my Jockey shorts and creating a pup tent out of my gray slacks. I needed time to maneuver myself into a position so I could reach down and discreetly tug my underpants and set my dick free.

No, I said. My voice sounded hollow, terrified.

What?

My father was made vice president of the bank, I said in a panic-stricken voice that came out louder than I had expected.

What?

Stevie was staring at me like I had two heads. But I saw his body rock backward. He sat back down.

My mother told us last night, I continued in a calmer, more subdued tone. She said he was the youngest vice president they’ve ever had.

Stevie, of course, had no idea how he was supposed to respond to this unexpected revelation. And I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have known what to say either. No kid talked about their parents. If they were mentioned at all, it was to complain about the fact that they had yelled at you or had smacked your ass. They were always doing that. And talking about that was an acceptable subject because that was something that affected you and was something that all kids understood.

But to talk about adults and stuff that meant something to them—why would any kid in his right mind talk about that? No kid understood what adults were doing. And no one cared. Adults were—well, they were boring actually. They did mundane tasks and made a big deal out of stupid things like cleaning the room or making the bed. They didn’t dream. They didn’t play. They didn’t grow in any way. They were static and predictable and they enforced the static and predictable.

So blurting this statement about my father and his promotion was not only unusual, it was embarrassing. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t even remember thinking about my father and his promotion. But desperation had dragged these words out of my head and exposed them to the world and now I had no alternative but to go with it.

I needed time to straighten my dick out.

So you think your father’s some kind of big shot now?

For a second, I was a surprised by this clearly confrontational response to my announcement and I stared at Stevie. But he was still looking at me with the same bewildered expression on his face. He hadn’t said anything. These words didn’t come from him.

I looked up and turned my head in the direction of three or four boys who were standing a few feet away from where Stevie and I were sitting. Frankie McNabb was looking directly at me. The kids who were with him looked as bewildered as I was and were looking down at the ground. But they weren’t looking at me.

What?

You heard me, Frankie said, taking a step closer to where we were sitting. I could hear the anger in his voice and I could see the belligerence in his posture. But I didn’t quite understand the reason for any of it and, for a moment, thought that what was taking place was simply a misunderstanding.

Now Frankie McNabb was not a close friend of mine. And by that, I mean that he wasn’t one of the guys with whom I constantly hung around. But we were friendly. We had gone to school together for nearly eight years. We would see each other often during the summer when most of us kids gathered together at the township park to play Little League Baseball. We played CYO basketball and football together for St. Ignatius grade school. And as far as I could remember, we had never exchanged an angry word to each other. We got along.

Frankie’s father, who was named Frank, owned the gas station and service center a half-block away from the school on Germantown Pike. My father often said that Mr. McNabb was a good mechanic and he always took our car there when it needed service. We always got our gas there too. I suspected that my father had the same relationship to Mr. McNabb as I had with Frankie, we were friendly and kind of liked each other.

So this sudden burst of anger and aggression took me by surprise. Besides Frankie was not a belligerent type of kid. He was as