“You cannot afford to screw up,” his mother said. “Do you understand that? Those other boys have parents, fathers, who can get them out of trouble. They have money. All you have is a mother who works as the office manager for a pediatrician.”
“Jeez, Mom, I didn’t even do anything.”
“You drank beer! You got into a car with other boys who had been drinking beer. You could have been killed.”
“Maybe if Alex drove a piece of shit car like this we would have been hurt. He has a Mercedes; you could T-bone that thing and walk away without a scratch. If the battery cable hadn’t popped, we wouldn’t have ended up at the police station.”
His mother carefully checked her blind spots, pulled over to the shoulder, and slapped Gerry hard enough that he saw strange lights around his eyes. So that’s what was meant by seeing stars. They weren’t stars, not exactly, but—
“Apply yourself and maybe one day you can buy yourself a Mercedes. If you care about such silly, empty things. But you’ll have to work, and work hard, for any money you get. That’s how life is going to be for you. It’s not fair and it’s not right. But it’s not fair to me, either, and you don’t hear me complaining.”
Gerry started to cry.
“I’ll be good, Mama, I promise I’ll be good. And I’ll buy you a Mercedes. I swear I will.”
“Just be a good man, Gerry. That’s all I’m asking. Be a good man.”
“I will. I will.”
February 22
IT TURNS OUT that “scrubbing” one’s penis from the Internet is a thing. Of course it is. There is an entire industry designed to help people manage how they appear in online searches. But trying to delete a mention of one’s penis from Twitter is something else entirely—and more complicated.
“You’re not understanding me. I did not send anyone a ‘dick pic,’” Gerry tells Thiru. “I have never even taken a selfie, or allowed anyone to make a video, a sex tape, of me. I don’t know what this ‘woman’ is talking about. And let me remind you, no photograph has been posted. She’s just, um, claiming to know something about my personal anatomy.”
He can’t believe he even has to say these words—dick pic, selfie, sex tape. To utter them is an affront to his dignity. He has been assiduous about not cluttering his mind, his work, his life with this silly digital world, and here it is, dragging him in, like some whirlpool or abyss. Then again, it wasn’t that long ago that a porn star told the world a sitting president has a penis shaped like a mushroom. The claim about Gerry is not only preposterous, it’s derivative.
“But you are not, in fact, circumcised?”
“Thiru.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that’s what she—”
“If it is, in fact, a she. I have my doubts.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think young women are that vulgar.” Gerry may have doubts about the gender, but he assumes everyone on Twitter is young.
“Gerry, do you know any young women? Our firm signed a memoir by a twenty-seven-year-old the other day who could make Norman Mailer’s testicles retract in a casual conversation. You would not believe what these young women are willing to—”
“Thiru, let’s not get sidetracked. What can be done about this?”
“Not much. She didn’t violate the TOS.”
“The what?”
“Terms of service. She didn’t threaten you, she didn’t post a photo, she didn’t defame you. I mean, I don’t think it’s defamation to say that a man has an unattractive penis. Rude, subjective, but not defamatory.”
Gerry wants to weep, literally. He has lived too long—and he’s only sixty-one! Did the world feel this way to his mother, his father, like some science fiction film in which everything jumps to warp speed? He had wondered, frequently, if the affair that led to his father’s second marriage was a reaction to the changing mores of the early 1960s, to the sense that the world was moving rapidly and Gerald Andersen Sr. had just missed the party.
But that was part of his father’s myth-making, that he had met wife number two in an airport bar the week after Kennedy was shot, or maybe it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Something Kennedy-adjacent. Gerald Andersen Sr. wasn’t a run-of-the-mill horndog cheater, he was a man who believed himself on the brink of annihilation. They had been married by some local yokel justice of the peace who had asked for no proof of anything. And what proof would Gerald Senior have been forced to provide? As Gerry came to learn, to his great sorrow, proof is required if one remarries after a divorce. Much less paperwork is needed if one has not shed one’s current spouse. Of course, he married her a second time, once he was divorced from Gerry’s mother. He sent a postcard from their honeymoon.