Read The Late Bloomer for Free Online

never tell my hockey pals this) that it just isn’t that difficult for me to abstain. First of all, Jenny’s concerns in many ways only reinforce what my dad has been telling me for years about girls: “Don’t knock one up. They’ll ruin your life.” That makes Jenny not only a celibate option but a safe one. The last thing I want to do is fuck up my life by creating Kenny Junior. And neither of us want—nor can pay for—Jenny to get an abortion if she got pregnant.
    I feel like I should have sex only because everyone else my age seems to be making such a big deal out of it. My Hamlet-esque quandary—to do it, or not to do it—only grows more and more vexing as, one by one, my buddies proclaim their “pipe-cleaning.”
    Guys on my hockey team have said they have dumped girls becausethey wouldn’t go all the way. One fellow has even boasted that he kicked a girl out of his car one night because she wouldn’t swallow. Most of them are probably lying in the way adolescent boys do about sex, but I don’t know this. Since I believe them, it seems like all of my friends are having sex, my older brothers are having sex and hardly a TV show or movie appears without people having sex. Message: Everyone is having sex. And so should I.
    To ward off any of my friends calling me a homo, I emit as much machismo as possible. I wear my baseball cap backwards. I listen to hard-rock music, like Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams and ZZ Top. I wear the coolest acid- and stone-washed jeans my mom can afford and don the white high-top Converse sneakers with the red, fat laces untied at the top. I preemptively combat their calling my masculinity into question by concocting fictional sexual encounters, plagiarizing material from what I can cobble together from my older brothers and stories I’ve been hearing older guys tell in the locker room since I was ten years old. Now, or so my fledgling male ego rationalizes, all I need to do is turn my creative tales into equally titillating nonfiction.
    Yet, behind all my bravado is the truth: My saccharine sex life, sadly, could appear uncensored on
The Facts of Life.
Jenny and I may make out on her parents’ couch for several hours into the night, until my lips are sore and my testicles ache, but, still, we never have sex. It doesn’t matter if my thirty-two-inch-waist jockey shorts lay crumpled around my ankles, she grabs my groping hand and breathlessly says, “No, not yet, Kenny.”
    Jenny fears that sexual intercourse will turn what she believes is our “special” relationship into nothing more than the kind of hedonistic humping that everyone else is doing. She thinks most relationships are about using, not loving, each other. Although I wouldn’t admit this to my friends, I agree with Jenny, and even though I can’t wait to get the having-sex thing over with, I really don’t mind keeping it in my pants.
    And the reason why I am not unzipping my pants enthusiastically to end my dry run is that if I have learned anything, it’s that reproducing, if not planned, can make for one big unhappy family of parents and children—in my case, two incompatible parents and, at times, four male monsters.

(PROLACTIN LEVEL: 10 NG/ML)
    â€œKevin, uh, Keith, Kyle, uh . . . K-K-K-Kenny! Come in here, will ya?”
    Penciling in newspaper crossword puzzles while sunken in her musty La-Z-Boy recliner, Gramma often will run through each of my brothers’ names before finally calling me to the living room to seek my help on a particularly troubling puzzle query.
    I am the fourth of the five Baker children—all boys—and for no apparent reason other than my parents, L arry and M arcia (go figure), like the eleventh letter of the alphabet, they have given each of us names starting with K. As a youngster, I learned that our overabundant Ks confuse my mother’s mom. Gramma is a caring woman who bakes me