Electroboy Read Online Free PDF Page A

George Washington Bridge thinking how silly this whole thing was because I knew why I was losing hair. The elderly doctor in his white lab coat and white hair examined the naked skin on my head and stared blankly at me. “Son, I don’t know what this is,” he said. “But I’ll give this a try.” He swabbed the patch with a solution that burned for hours. It was supposed to promote regrowth. It felt like I was being punished for ever pulling a single hair from my head. I was so frightened by the severity of the treatment that I never touched my hair again and probably replaced this habit with squeezing blackheads. Fifteen years later I learned that I had trichotillomania, a disorder in which one pulls hair from the scalp, eyelashes, or eyebrows and often plays with the root, to relieve tension. The act results in tremendous gratification and humiliation.
    My weirdness took many forms. I was obsessed with the scuffed soles of celebrity guests’ shoes on talk shows and riddled with fantasies of a half brother in Japan (my father had been stationedin Kyoto for two years). To test how long I could withstand extreme heat, I’d sit inside a car with the windows shut. On beautiful sunny days, I was in the dark basement mixing chemicals and powders from my Mr. Wizard chemistry set, hoping that by not following the directions I could create a disaster. My moods swung from happiness and pleasure to sadness and torment, and none of it was predictable. When I was about seven, my father caught me frantically cleaning my record collection with turpentine, and when I was about ten, he watched as I put lightbulbs in the dishwasher. He never yelled. I had no explanation for either act.
    Then, when I was about twelve, there was the special kind of crazies. Late one night, I accidentally discovered a huge burst of energy that I could access through my penis. It was tremendous. At first I was sure it was somehow connected to bedwetting. As a young child I had found the sensation of lying in a puddle of my own warm urine, feeling it on my genitals and thighs, to be very stimulating. Later I found out about pornography, coming across a stack of
Penthouse
and
Club
magazines atop my father’s closet.
Penthouse
was tame compared with
Club
, which featured pale British women, slutty Jackie Collins types, with bright cherry lipstick, big boobs, and garter belts, splayed out on deep velvet couches. I spent many afternoons and evenings studying these images, filing them in my memory and masturbating. I always returned them quickly to his closet when I was done with them, and replaced them exactly as I had found them. Soon I discovered that I was turned on by just about anything—I guess you could say that I was omnisexual from the very beginning. I was fascinated by looking at my own body in the mirror, at women’s bodies, men’s bodies, and particularly men’s and women’s bodies together. I had a recurring fantasy of a young woman in a sunny white bedroom undressing in front of a mirror, admiring her own body, with a stranger, sometimes a cowboy, watching from behind a half-open door. The woman touches her breasts, and finally he walks in and presses his body against her. She takes off his clothes and they lie naked in bed together. I imagine every possible positionthey can arrange themselves in, and they ultimately have sex. I enjoyed creating fantasies about friends, people I saw in magazines, on television or in the movies, or just strangers in the street. I was obsessed with this private little sex world I could create and keep secret.
    Toward the second semester of my senior year I was feeling miserable. On weekends I would sleep into the early afternoons, and I was eating more than usual. I desperately wanted to graduate from high school and get out of the house. My obsessive-compulsive thinking was exhausting me, and I wanted some relief. It distressed me that I couldn’t overcome it on my own. I was planning on going to college in