With graduation party season in full swing, I thought I would share an excerpt from my recently released memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. The excerpt covers the time period after I graduated high school from Rome Free Academy in my hometown of Rome, New York, and prepared to enter my freshman year of college. Warning: Adult content follows.

From Chapter Ten:

I graduated high school in June 1987 as a shy, sexless adolescent unprepared for the social landscape of college life. Decked out in my cap and gown, I stood a half head shorter than my mother and sister as we posed for a picture in our backyard on graduation day.

And here’s a catalog, a list of experiences I failed to check off before finishing high school, departing Rome, and heading to the campus of St. John Fisher College, a small, liberal arts college (now renamed St. John Fisher University) in Pittsford, New York, a suburb of Rochester:

I never went on any one-on-one dates.
I never bought flowers for a girl (except for one Valentine’s Day in elementary school).
I never drove a car to a girl’s house to pick her up and meet her parents—getting their permission to take her out for the night.
I never had a serious girlfriend.
I never put my arm around a girl at an RFA football game or held hands in a darkened movie
theater.
I never kissed a girl on the lips.
No fumbling with bra straps in the backseat of a car or feeling a warm breast while sitting on a couch at a house party.
I never made love in a girl’s bedroom while her parents were out of the house.

And at age eighteen, even if a girl had offered me the opportunity to have sex, I would not have known for sure where to put my penis during intercourse.

My inexperience with the opposite sex weighed on me as I spent my final summer at home. During one weekend in late August, my friend Billy and I went to McDonald’s to hang out in the Uptown area (a section of Rome where teens congregated).

On a warm, humid night, we stood in the deserted parking lot under the glow of the illuminated golden arches, talking with our friend Chad, who had ridden his bike to the area from east Rome. He was leaning on his handlebars, dressed in a white concert T-shirt, and we were talking about me going away to school. I said, “I’m a little nervous. I don’t know how it’s gonna be. I don’t know if I’ll fit in.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it, Franny,” Chad said. “You’ll get your helmet polished by the girls there.”

I had a sense he was referring to blow jobs, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. I gave a good laugh to cover my lack of knowledge, and said, “Thanks, Chad, I hope you’re right.”

From Chapter Eleven:

Although my parents must have sensed my unease about attending college while looking like a fourteen-year-old boy, my father offered me no advice on how to deal with it, and my mother lacked empathy for my situation. She told me to stop being sensitive when other people questioned my age. In conversations with family members, co-workers, and restaurant servers, she would say, “He gets so upset if someone asks him about his age. He has to learn to accept it.” But Mom exhibited compassion through her actions by taking me shopping in New Hartford and buying me sheets, towels, toiletries, and other essentials for college life. She taught me how to do laundry, informing me about the basics of temperature cycles and the importance of separating colors from whites, and she also made sure my financial aid paperwork was submitted on time.

As I made my final preparations before departing Rome for the fall semester in 1987, my sister Lisa allayed my fears with sage advice based on her experience as a student at Hartwick College in Oneonta. When I told her how I knew the other kids would question me because I looked so young for my age, she said, “What you have to realize about college is that everyone has something that they don’t like about themselves, something they want to hide. Some girls are fat. Some guys have acne all over their faces, or they sound effeminate. Everyone has something. You look young for your age, but so what? Don’t think you’re the only one who is different.”

It was exactly what I needed to hear. She also told me, “You’ll be fine once you make a few friends.”

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