About the Author
Paul Feig is the two-time Emmy-nominated creator of Freaks and Geeks, the author of Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence, the director of episodes of Arrested Development, and the writer and director of the feature film I Am David. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Bliss Interrupted
Let's face it. Masturbation has never been a proud activity. It's very seldom that people will brag about the fact that they have masturbated. You don't often hear the response to the question "What did you do today?" being, "Oh, ran a few errands, paid my bills, masturbated, made dinner." It's just not an activity you really want to brag about. Or speak about. Or even admit to yourself that you do. When your body decides that it yet again wants to engage in a little round of onanism and your brain gives in like a beleaguered mother acquiescing to her child's incessant demands for candy, your brain still won't really let itself admit what's about to happen. The walk to whatever place has been decided upon as the conjugal site is usually filled less with thoughts of "Man, it's really great that I'm going to do this" than "This isn't right" and "I wonder if I have a problem?"
Or at least it has been for me.
The "problem" started when I was a kid. I was raised as a Christian Scientist, which is the religion that is mostly known as the one that tells its followers not to go to doctors when they get sick. The whole faith is based on not giving power to the physical world, the idea being that you can avoid sickness and bad things happening to you by basically keeping your thoughts and desires above the realm of the body and earthly entanglements. And so this means that you're really not supposed to think about things like sex and bodily pleasures. And this is all well and good if you can turn your libido on and off like a light switch. But if you're a normal, healthy human being who has the genetic code of the Homo sapiens in his or her DNA, then it's a little hard to deny your body what it wants, especially when you're going through the ravages of puberty.
Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I discovered masturbation at a very early age. After climbing the ropes in gym class during the second grade, I had unwittingly experienced my first orgasm. This then led to me figuring out how to re-create this experience in the privacy of my own bedroom and in the bathroom I shared with my parents (but not while they were in there, obviously). This intensely pleasurable act, which I referred to back then as "the rope feeling," was something I wasn't really even sure was sexual at the time. I knew that it felt great and made me very happy, but so did the act of eating a box of day-old Peeps. And so I merrily engaged in this self-pleasing act for several years, happily unaware that what I was doing might be considered wrong by some segments of the community. No, except for the occasional rubbed-raw spots that resulted from periodic overuse, my early years spent with the rope feeling were painless, carefree, and blissful.
The salad days of self-love, if you will.
It wasn't until I was on a vacation with my parents at a budget hotel in the Caribbean when I was twelve years old that my orgasmic little world was shattered permanently. We were in our room after a fun-filled day at the pool, and my dad was listening to the radio. A local call-in show was on, and it had a very religious bent to it. The heavily accented Jamaican deejay was taking phone calls on the topic of morality and behavior. As I sat on the bed playing a game of solitaire, a woman caller phoned in and started talking about masturbation, saying she had recently caught her son in the act and was wondering what she should do to keep him from doing it again. This sent the deejay into a long tirade about how God doesn't approve of masturbation and what a major sin it was in His eyes. Feeling a hot flash run up the back of my neck, I tried desperately not to look up at the radio, for fear that my father and mother, who were lounging in chairs by the window, might see my reaction and realize that I too had been indulging in this forbidden act. As I listened on in horror, eyes fixed solidly on the cards in front of me, the deejay uttered the following sentence:
"Besides, everyone knows that each time you masturbate, God takes one day off of your life."
All the blood rushed out of my head and I felt like I was going to faint. Everyone knew this? Nobody told me about it. I remember my father throwing a look at my mother and making a concerned face, but I couldn't tell what the face meant. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure it was a mixture of "Turn that garbage off" and "I don't think it's good for Paul to be hearing superstitious nonsense like this." But, of course, I at the time interpreted it as, "See, I TOLD you that a boy loses a day off of his life every time he masturbates."
The wheels in my brain started spinning like a game of Battling Tops. How many times had I done what I now knew the Lord was willing to kill me to stop doing? How many days had I lopped off my life so far? I was in an absolute silent panic, like a person who'd just discovered he'd eaten poisoned food. But it was too late for me to throw the poison back up, because what was done was done. Those days were lost. And now I knew only one thing:
I had to stop doing it immediately.
To save my life.
I was suddenly filled with anger. How could the rope feeling have done this to me? What just a few minutes earlier had been my closest friend and comforter was now revealed to have been the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The rope feeling had unwittingly gotten me to eat its apple and was now mocking me for each day of my life that I had sacrificed to it. Why didn't you keep a record of how many times you did it?! I yelled at myself. People always say life's too short. Well, now you've made it even shorter.
I immediately refrained from subtracting any more days off my life for the rest of our vacation and, once I returned home, vowed to keep myself distracted by other activities. The rope feeling wasn't going to knock me off before I had lived what was now left of my life. Besides, I had plenty of other things with which to distract myself—all my hobbies, like my guitar, my magic tricks, the TV, spending time with my next-door neighbors, sending my G.I. Joes into imaginary battles, mastering the recipes in my Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls. Why, an enterprising young man like myself would have plenty to keep his mind busy and off thoughts of anything that God didn't want him to do. I was going to get myself off of His hit list for good. Things were going to be A-OK.
One particular day a few weeks later, I decided that a little quality snooping-around-the-house time would be the perfect way to keep my mind off my ex-lover. Walking to my bedroom, I realized that the top shelf of our hall closet had never been properly explored. I opened the door and looked up. All that appeared to be up there was the punch bowl set my mother pulled down once a year when she would begrudgingly host Thanksgiving for our relatives. I went and got a stepladder out of the kitchen and climbed up to see what else was residing up there. I found a bunch of old party favors behind the punch bowl box, things like shiny toot horns and noisemakers and plastic leis, all the kind of stuff that I used to see revelers wearing and making noise with when my parents and I would watch the Guy Lombardo New Year's Eve specials. All my friends' parents would watch Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, but at my house, with parents who married at thirty-seven, conceived me when they were thirty-nine, and had both lived through World War II, Guy Lombardo was about as "rockin'" as our New Year's Eves would ever get. I put on the bright green lei, and then I made the noisemakers make their noises. But every sound they produced was loud and irritating, sounding more like Psychological Operations devices an army would use to drive a dictator out of his stronghold than something that was supposed to make a party sound fun. So I took off the lei and started to put the party favors back. It was then that I saw a shiny hat behind everything else. I pulled it out. It was a molded plastic bowler derby that was made more festive by a layer of green cellophane wrap covering it. I took down the hat and put it on my head. It was too big and fell over my eyes. Plus, it smelled a lot like mothballs. I removed the hat and was about to toss it back into the closet when I noticed something.
Something shocking.
On the top of the hat, glued beneath the clear green cellophane, was a picture of a topless woman. She was photographed from the waist up and had her hands over her head, laughing as she held the exact same hat as the one she was on, keeping it aloft over her hairdo.
And because her arms were up, her breasts were completely exposed, front and center.
I couldn't believe it. I suddenly experienced the strangest mix of surprise, excitement, and fear. The surprise and excitement were easy to explain, but the fear was there because it scared me that my dad had a picture of a naked woman in our house. Did he know it was up there in the top of the closet behind the punch bowl we drank out of on the holidays? He must, I thought. How can you have a hat with a naked woman on it in the house and not be aware of it? And even if for some reason he'd forgotten about it, it weirded me out to think that my dad had actually at one time looked at a picture of a naked woman. The thought of my parents doing or enjoying anything even remotely stimulating sexually was colossally upsetting to me. So, adding pornography to the mix was devastating, to say the least. And what about my mom? Did she know the naked lady hat was up there? I couldn't imagine my mother condoning it being in our house, knowing how religious she was. I mean, she used to get upset when Goldie Hawn would dance around in a bikini on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, but at least Goldie was dressed and covered with writing. The woman on the hat was completely nude.
My mind started to spin.
What if my mom did know about the hat with the picture on it? What if she thought it was okay? What if she bought it for my dad? Did she and my father have some strange other life filled with pictures of naked ladies and erotic party hats and sex dinners with other adults in our neighborhood? I was starting to feel angry at the hat for ever having come into our lives and tearing our happy home asunder when suddenly I got very nervous.
What would God have to say about all of this?
True, my parents were married, but I couldn't imagine that a picture of another woman without her clothes on could be viewed as anything but wrong in His eyes. I mean, the Guy knocked a day off your life
just for masturbating. Imagine what He'd think about a dirty picture.
I stared at the lady on the hat, wondering if my unearthing of her had alerted God to her presence in our house. Did I just get my parents in trouble with the Almighty? I mean, I knew He could see everywhere, but maybe even He hadn't bothered to check behind our punch bowl.
I suddenly began to feel strange. But not strange because I was afraid of what God was thinking.
It was more of a "rope feeling" strange.
I had always loved looking at pretty girls in school and at beautiful women on TV but had never seen any of them naked, save for the time I accidentally opened the door when my aunt Emma was getting out of the bathtub. But that had not been a pleasant experience by any means. In fact, it had caused me several weeks of nightmares in which my naked aunt would lock me in her bedroom and try to make me sleep with her. But now, as I stared at the naked breasts of the woman on the hat, I started to feel something else; something I had felt many times before but never in this context . . .
An overwhelming urge to visit with the rope feeling.
I was immediately thrown into crisis. Was it worth it to give away another day of my life just to succumb to the siren song of a party hat? And if God got mad when I indulged by myself, then how much madder would He be if He found out I was doing it with someone else, even though that someone was only a picture? My brain may have been telling me not to indulge, but my twelve-year-old libido simply had a louder voice.
I closed the closet door and snuck the hat into the bathroom.
The lady on the hat and I dated intensely for about a week. However, after this initial flurry, she very quickly began to lose her appeal. I think the problem was the slightly surrealistic quality of the picture itself, which had been tinted and airbrushed so that the woman had an almost cartoon-like appearance. On top of that, she simply wasn't my type. In her day, I knew she must have been the Belle of the Ball, but that was an era of lipstick and powder, of heavy makeup and excessive body weight. While her breasts were voluptuous, so was the rest of her body. Her arms were puffy like my friend Mike's mother's, and her shoulders and waist looked pretty doughy. She also seemed to have her gut sucked in, the way Captain Kirk used to do whenever he'd wind up in a fight with his shirt off. And on top of all this, her hair was in a beehive, a look that always made me think of the playground ladies at my school. It was the overweight women at our local bowling alley and the older ladies from our church who still found the stacked-up, impenetrable giant pinecone of hair to be attractive—not anyone under fifty, and certainly not the kid who thought Maryanne from Gilligan's Island was the sexiest woman on TV.
