By the time I was twelve, nine months or so after touching the penguins, I had begun to overflow with reaching, tapping, grabbing and kissing urges-those compulsions emerged first, while language for me was still trapped like a roiling ocean under a calm floe of ice, the way I’d been trapped in the underwater half of the penguin display, mute, beneath glass. I’d begun reaching for doorframes, kneeling to grab at skittering loosened sneaker laces (a recent fashion among the toughest boys at St. Vincent’s, unfortunately for me), incessantly tapping the metal-pipe legs of the schoolroom desks and chairs in search of certain ringing tones, and worst, grabbing and kissing my fellow Boys. I grew terrified of myself then, and burrowed deeper into the library, but was forced out for classes or meals or bedtime. Then it would happen. I’d lunge at someone, surround him with my arms, and kiss his cheek or neck or forehead, whatever I hit. Then, compulsion expelled, I’d be left to explain, defend myself, or flee. I kissed Greg Toon and Edwin Torres, whose eyes I’d never dared meet. I kissed Leshawn Montrose, who’d broken Mr. Voccaro’s arm with a chair. I kissed Tony Vermonte and Gilbert Coney and tried to kiss Danny Fantl. I kissed Steven Grossman, pathetically thankful he’d come along just then. I kissed my own counterparts, other sad invisible Boys working the margins at St. Vincent’s, just surviving, whose names I didn’t know. “It’s a game!” I’d say, pleadingly. “It’s a game.” That was my only defense, and since the most inexplicable things in our lives were games, with their ancient embedded rituals-British Bulldog, Ringolevio, Scully and Jinx-a mythos handed down to us orphans who-knew-how, it seemed possible I might persuade them this was another one, The Kissing Game. Just as important, I might persuade myself-wasn’t it something in a book I’d read, a game for fevered teenagers, perhaps Sadie Hawkins Day? Forget the absence of girls, didn’t we Boys deserve the same? That was it, then, I decided-I was single-handedly dragging the underprivileged into adolescence. I knew something they didn’t. “It’s a game,” I’d say desperately, sometimes as tears of pain ran down my face. “It’s a game.” Leshawn Montrose cracked my head against a porcelain water fountain, Greg Toon and Edwin Torres generously only shucked me off onto the floor. Tony Vermonte twisted my arm behind my back and forced me against a wall. “It’s a game,” I breathed. He released me and shook his head, full of pity. The result, oddly enough, was I was spared a few months’ worth of beatings at his hands-I was too pathetic and faggy to touch, might be better avoided. Danny Fantlher my move coming and faked me out as though I were a lead-footed defender, then vanished down a stairwell. Gilbert stood and glared, deeply unnerved due to our private history. “A game,” I reassured him. “It’s a game,” I told poor Steven Grossman and he believed me, just long enough to try kissing our mutual tormentor Tony, perhaps hoping it was a key to overturning the current order. He was not spared.
Meantime, beneath that frozen shell a sea of language was reaching full boil. It became harder and harder not to notice that when a television pitchman said
The kissing cycle was mercifully brief. I found other outlets, other obsessions. The pale thirteen-year-old that Mr. Kassel pulled out of the library and offered to Minna was prone to floor-tapping, whistling, tongue-clicking, winking, rapid head turns, and wall-stroking, anything but the direct utterances for which my particular Tourette’s brain most yearned. Language bubbled inside me now, the frozen sea melting, but it felt too dangerous to let out. Speech was intention, and I couldn’t let anyone else or myself know how intentional my craziness felt. Pratfalls, antics-those were accidental lunacy, and more or less forgivable. Practically speaking, it was one thing to stroke Leshawn Montrose’s arm, or even to kiss him, another entirely to walk up and call him Shefawn Mongoose, or Lefthand Moonprose, or Fuckyou Roseprawn. So, though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography.
