Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad by Dan Bucatinsky Read Free Book Online Page B

trip with precision and detail—the way one might pull off a heist at, say, Van Cleef & Arpels, complete with fake IDs and disguises. Philip would wear a hat. I’d wear a jacket and tie. And smoke. Well, I’d try. I’d pull a few half butts out of the ashtray of my dad’s Buick Skylark and save them for such missions. According to our plan, we’d try and get the newsstand guys to think we were commuters: Oh, here come a couple of Dapper Dans just off work at the firm and on their way to Grand Central to catch the 7:25 back home to their wives . I looked thirteen well into my twenties; whenI was thirteen, I looked nine. I was short. Had rosy cheeks. Lots of freckles. Philip looked maybe a year older but he had braces, the perfect touch—if we wanted to look like we were on our way to our bar mitzvahs. We thought we looked at least twenty.
    Suffice it to say, we always got the porn. I’m sure the vendors laughed, but hey, a sale is a sale, right? Not only that, but we’d often stop at the Grey Car Lounge at Grand Central Station for a cocktail before we boarded our train home to our “wives.” I’m sure we were completely inconspicuous: two pubescent nerds in hats and jackets ordering Amaretto Sours with extra cherries. Yeah, right.
    It was on one of these secret missions to New York where I got my first close-up view of an actual lady vagina. And I’m not talking about some “tasteful” arty spread in Playboy with their modesty poses and dainty trimming. No. These publications, like one called ClimaXXX , were considered hard-core, so the women were always spread-eagle, with long painted fingernails helping to lead the way. And naked guys too . . . which was clearly the real motivation behind the pleading looks to vendors on these long, convoluted treks into the city.
    We’d get on the train and look for two seats together as far away from other commuters as possible. The magazines were in a paper bag we’d put behind one of our backs. We’d sit quietly as the train started moving. We wouldn’t even look at each other. This was all part of the routine. We’d pretend to be two commuters who didn’t know each other, heading home after work. It would take eight minutes for the train to come out of the long tunnel of Grand Central Station and into daylight. The conductor would always takeour tickets just before the first stop at 125th Street. After the doors closed, we knew we had a good long stretch with no chance of anyone coming by.
    We’d slouch really low in our seats and slide a magazine out of the paper bag. Philip would flip through the whole thing fast as sort of a preview. Then we’d go through it again, more slowly, to analyze the photos. That’s when I saw it: my first grown-up vagina. I looked at Philip to see what he thought. I remember he seemed like he’d seen it all before. I couldn’t hide the fact I hadn’t.
    “Where do they pee? Where’s the hole? Do you see a hole? There’s no hole!” I was desperate to understand.
    “Stop saying ‘hole,’” he said, before taking me through the ins and outs (so to speak) of the female anatomy. He was suspiciously confident in explaining what he himself didn’t understand. Because to us, they were like the mouths of caves. One even seemed to be in 3D—a coral reef, glistening with sea life.
    “Oh my God!” I said once, a little too loudly on a particularly crowded train. “That looks like it could stick to the shower wall like a shampoo caddy.” We both burst out laughing. Not surprisingly, we are both now married to men .
    For so many of our peers, gaining access to a vagina was a full-time preoccupation. Guys would talk for hours, speculating about rolling around with Erica or Debbie or Nancy or that girl, I think her name was Sapna—a buxom Indian girl who had her first period during a third-period health class all about periods. Sapna is probably a drug addict now. Some things you don’t recover from.
    I, on the other hand, didn’t