The Late Bloomer Read Free

dye-job blonde over there—Nina Blackwood?”
    â€œWho’s she?”
    â€œWho is Nina Blackwood? An old MTV veejay, dumb-ass.”
    Mental note: Write a “Where Are They Now?” piece on Nina Blackwood.
    But where is the hostess of the evening, the golden-blond goddess I’ve had a crush on since I was twelve, when her love for E.T. made me cry?
    Though only twenty-one, Drew is already a screen legend, and I have bitten raw the cuticles around my fingertips in nervous anticipation of this event. I am in awe of her vast life experiences: breast-reduction surgery, drug and alcohol addiction (since third grade), a suicide attempt, her own film-production company, a bare-ass-naked spread in
Playboy
, an autobiography (
Little Girl Lost
, ghost-written by my friend Todd, who has filled me in on Drew’s likes and dislikes). If all these accomplishments aren’t impressive enough, Drew haseven flashed her naked breasts on network television before an eye-popping David Letterman—and me, who was sitting at home desperately trying to recall the last time I had seen a woman’s bare breasts in person.
    So where the hell is she, anyway? Maybe she won’t show. Maybe she’s just another phony starlet who flirts with me during an interview, hoping I will tell millions of
People
readers how great and real and nice she is, but then, ten minutes after I leave, can’t even remember my name, let alone how sensitive and charming and what a good listener I am. Maybe our interview, in which she and I chatted for over an hour, wasn’t as meaningful to her as it was to me. Or maybe it’s just that I really do look like the dork that I feel like on the inside.
    This being a Hollywood party hosted by a Gen X icon, however, virtually everyone on the patio is young and attractive, with faces and bodies right out of a
Baywatch
episode or a Calvin Klein ad. Except, it seems, for me
 . . .
    A mini-skirted female server presents me with a tray of fried eggplant and saucy stabs of chicken satay. I decline, because, well, I think I’m too fat. I suppose
fat
isn’t the right word. I’m about five foot eleven and not even 175 pounds. On paper, it’s a respectable height-to-weight ratio, but I
feel
flabby, soft around the edges, not strong, unsolid—sort of gelatinous. I am puffy. Puffy face. Puffy chest. Puffy neck. Puffy stomach. No matter how much I rollerblade up and down the Venice Beach bike path, no matter how few calories I consume (usually about a thousand a day—no bread, no fried food, no sweets), no matter how much older I get, my body stubbornly refuses to harden into manhood. It’s depressing.
    I have been avoiding looking at my body in the mirror because my physique is a far cry from what I believe it should look like at my age, what with my athletic background and starvation diets and all. I want—no, I need!—a hard body . . . like that blond guy over there with the perma-tan and volleyball-guy broad shoulders who is standing sostudly surrounded by the ladies while I stand over here with Kelly like a loser.
    Stop whining like a little sissy.
    Why did I—
I said stop being a pussy-sissy-chicky-wimpy mutant!
—have to move to ground zero of a popular culture obsessed with accentuating the visual extremes of gender definition? Bulging biceps and tight butts. Big dicks and big boobs. Hard cocks and tight butts. Chiseled chests and hairless legs. Steroids. Liposuction. Pec implants. Dick implants. Personal trainers. Collagen injections. Boob jobs. Eye jobs. Dye jobs. Nose jobs. Ear jobs. Tummy tucks.
    I am ashamed of my manhood because my version of it doesn’t look or feel at all like the manhood my dad, brothers, hockey coaches, teammates, friends, girlfriends, or billboards, magazines, TV shows, movies—the entire goddamn popular culture—tells me is manly.
    I am supposedly in the prime of my life. Meanwhile,