P Shy

November 11, 2012

Trying to Be Honest

Puberty came late, at age fourteen.  Whether or not this shame of the past plays a role in my present writing I leave to readers. 

The personal authenticity I saw taking shape in my junior-high and high-school peers--their burgeoning adult traits, wrung from rites-of-passage happening all around me--were part of normal human growth.  However, such growth in me was squelched by an all-pervading sense of gender-shame that I kept hidden.  It never left me.

I was a  "pee-shy"  teenage wimp, to put it plainly; and my education, citizenship, and social relations were ever-undone (or at least knocked for a cockeyed loop) by the daily dilemma of tragically disordered toileting.  I could not make water in the presence of other junior high boys, yet a benighted fear--of public humiliation, should anybody else learn of it--prevented me from doing anything about it, or even owning up to the problem.  What a coward!

I couldn't engage in pissing contests, and despised myself for that, as ridiculous as that may sound.  At times I got so phobic that I couldn't release under any circumstance.  More generally, I could not prove my manhood, so I went to great lengths to conceal what I considered its absence, believing that nobody else had ever suffered my emasculating torment, because never had I heard the problem discussed or even mentioned.  Despite considerable research, I could find no trace or reference to the phenomenon anywhere.

My first attempt at suicide was botched at age fourteen, in early 1967.  It was the first of many such half-hearted efforts--for as much as I detested my hidden problems, I wanted to live.

In Phillip Roth's 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, the lead character confides, "I have never urinated in the presence of another man."  Thereafter, I counted Phil as a fellow-sufferer.  How else could he know about such things?  Further, this discovery may have influenced me to turn to writing.

It was not until the mid-1990's that I discovered pee-shyness was experienced not only by me and possibly Phillip Roth, but also by 20-30 million (apparently reticent) Americans.  It even has a medical name: avoidant paruresis.

My inability to deal with this awful, ever-recurring anxiety disorder shaped as could no other force the first 50 years of me; the irrational traits and habits of mind it trained in me permitted no authentic revelations or desirable universality in my music or my writing.

Ironically, a measure of teen celebrity came also at puberty.

At 14, I found myself the unlikely recipient of a teen celebrity that at times verged on adulation, for my glamour-spot in the band, the Wha?  Droves of teeny-bopping fans sought my autograph at events like Dick Clark's Carnaby Street, while some older (15+) girls sought more than an autograph at such venues as Detroit's Grande Ballroom.

Pretty teenage girls whom I had never even seen before showed up at the door of my parents' house, and I hadn't an inkling of what to do with them.  The old man I have become looks back at those free-love offerings by fresh-faced girls with a sense of opportunity squandered.  At the time, I could take no advantage, because not only did I know nothing of woman, I was scared to death of them, too, and physically, very shy.  My energy was spent binding up the ever-leaking psyche of the absurd young man I was--so, fourteen and incapable of realistic thought.

Thus and so I evolved into a sort of paradox--a self-loathing kid who covered up his emotional sickness with a lot of childish, self-aggrandizing nonsense.  My mental state had no realistic middle ground.  Consequently I developed no adult capacity to love, to learn, to give, to appreciate, or to exist anywhere except in my own dim world of hidden illness.

You can see that common sense was not part of my agenda.  It would not factor into my life for fifty years.  Read more . . .