THE GREATEST VIRGINITY STORY EVER TOLD
August 26, 2010 Leave a comment
Two young men are traveling through the American Southwest.
As with many an odyssey that leads to Clark County, Nevada, the purpose of this journey is also a classic one. The purpose is to score. Well, one of the men has no particular interest in scoring. His name is Bill McMullen. Bill is a 28-year-old Buddhist vegetarian who is devoted to Holly, his girlfriend back home in England. Handsome but modestly so—with no apparent sparks of narcissism—Bill doesn’t seem to carry much with him other than a kind of otherworldly silence. He sits in the back seat and stares at the clouds.
Think of Bill as a guide, a consigliere, to his companion, who is wearing a black cowboy hat and sitting in the front passenger seat with his bare feet up on the dashboard and his fingers constantly cranking up the volume on Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile.” This man, also from England, has long black sideburns, a soul patch, black eyeglasses, and a Noel Gallagher–style bowl cut. His name is Otto Baxter. He is 21, and he is a virgin.
It is not uncommon for young men to think relentlessly about sex, but in Otto Baxter’s case that tendency is especially pronounced. Sometimes it is the only thing Otto wants to talk about, and when he does talk about it, his stream-of-consciousness effusions are surreal and explicit enough to make Henry Miller blush. Right now, in fact, while I chauffeur the duo through the desert, Otto is discussing his fondness for strippers.
“They pin me on the wall,” he says. “They kiss me right on the neck. I unbutton my shirt. It feels very nice. I had a girl. She was on my willy. She jumped on my willy. It’s wicked. It feels nice. I have a huge boner. Straight up. It feels lovely. Yep. I want to do it again. She also put her boobs in my face. One of the strippers grabbed my glasses and put them on her nipple. ‘Are you naughty?’ ‘Oh, yes, I’m very naughty.’ ‘Come on, big boy! Let’s take it down to your trousers! Unfasten your belt and let me pull it down and suck on it!’”
Bill listens to these soliloquies from the back seat and responds, now and then, with a gently corrective laugh or a barely perceptible sigh. “Otto, they didn’t do that, did they?” he says finally. “Your imagination runs wild, doesn’t it.”
“Oh, yeah!” Otto says.
Tumbleweeds skitter across the road. Otto shows no signs of tapering off.
“I like their boobs,” he continues. “Yeah. Lovely nipples. Perfect breasts. They’re like chicken breasts.”
“You’ve got a tendency to compare things to food, haven’t you, Otto?” Bill says.
“Yeah,” Otto says. “Burgers with boobs. Stick in an olive—it’s like a nipple. And they have legs like bacon. And their bottom is like a steak. And they also have eyes like round biscuits. Actually, their whole body’s like a biscuit. I’m hungry for a stripper.”
This is Otto’s first trip to America, where he is unknown, but back in the U.K. he is an object of public fascination. Drawn to the unusual circumstances of his life when he was a child, BBC TV crews have documented aspects of his upbringing, and a few weeks ago his mother, Lucy Baxter, touched off something of a media cyclone in England when she went public about a topic of great delicacy, telling reporters that she wanted her son to find a woman who would introduce him to the pleasures of sexual congress—and saying that she would go so far as to help him track one down. That would strike most of us as little more than a curiosity, a rather drastic case of helicopter parenting, were it not for one simple fact: Otto has Down syndrome.
2.
When Lucy Baxter was a teenage art student, she volunteered with a program for disabled people who were housed in an institution down the road from her school. “I was expecting people who would all be the same and would just be ‘vegetables,’ which is the term that people use, but they weren’t,” she says. “They were all much more individual than the rest of us, who have all gone through a bit of a sausage machine.”
It galled her that these people, some of whom had Down syndrome and many of whom she befriended, had been forced into limited lives and locked out of public view. “I felt very let down by society,” she says. “There were people I got very, very fond of who were shut away 24 hours a day in this institution, and they haunt me. They were just so deprived—socially, culturally, materially. It’s a bit like the Holocaust: I don’t want that to happen again, and I will do anything I can do to stop it.”
The evidence of her mission can be found all over her house in Steventon, a picturesque village not far from Oxford. There she lives with four adopted sons, each with Down syndrome: James, 27; Otto, 21; Titus, 13; and Raphael, 5. People often say that such a family must make for a crazy household (for a while the boys were joined by their 85-year-old grandmother, who was struggling with dementia), but Baxter says that “ordinary people are much more difficult.” She wants each of her sons to flourish in the way that’s right for him, and she wants all of them to be exposed as much as possible to mainstream life.
Of the four, Otto stands out as Mr. Popularity. Although his face and his voice bear the obvious signs of Down syndrome, he can read and write, he can be fluid and witty in conversation, and he’s wired like a frat boy, with a passion for Jackass, video games, fast food, classic rock, and beer. “He’s always been incredibly outgoing,” Lucy says. “He loves other people, and he wants to be in the middle of things. And that’s been the thing—to try and keep him in the middle of things when the world is trying to put him off to one side. I brought Otto up to have no limits.”
This limitlessness does not exclude sexuality, and that’s exactly what seems to make people nervous. “The old myth is still alive and well that people with Down syndrome are ‘eternal children’—they never really grow up,” says Karin Melberg Schwier, the coauthor of Sexuality: Your Sons and Daughters With Intellectual Disabilities and the mother of an adult son with Down syndrome. “I still bristle every time I see the media referring to a ‘child in an adult body.’”
Lucy Baxter’s point is that her sons are free to make their own decisions; she says she has no intention of becoming Otto’s sexual procurer. “I think it would be fairly sordid to go to a brothel,” she says. “I wouldn’t be all that happy about it. But if that’s what Otto wanted to do, I would certainly not stop him. There is a big difference between what I would like and what Otto would like and what I believe Otto has the right to have. I’ve been speaking about the rights of disabled people—the fact that he has the right to choose—and I won’t stop him in what he decides.”
What she really wants for Otto, she says, is what any mother would want for her child—a refuge from loneliness, a person to share moments with, a partner. “I would love for him to have a girlfriend and a wife,” she says. “And sex, as well, within that relationship. Just an ordinary fairy-tale relationship. It would make me happy because that’s what would make him happy.”
3.
“Hey, Bill,” Otto says.
“Hmmm,” Bill murmurs from the back seat of the car, where he’s staring at rock formations.
“Do you think that all the girls from all the strip clubs will scream for me on the telly?” Otto has an ongoing love affair with the camera. Besides his TV appearances, he scored a leading role in the indie film Love and Kisses, a 10-minute excerpt of which screened at the 2008 Raindance film festival in London. He is smitten with the idea of becoming a movie star.
“They might,” Bill says, “if they see you on TV.”
This triggers an avalanche of imagined dialogue. “‘Ahhhhh! There’s Otto! I want to have sex! Come on, girls, let’s find him! Ahhhh! We want to take his clothes off! Let’s shag him! You take his shoes off! You take his socks off! You take his trousers! Girls, unbutton his shirt! Take everything off! Let’s put his glasses on the table. Let’s snog him, touch him, lick him . . . ‘”
“Otto,” Bill intervenes, “don’t you want to keep this inside your head? I don’t want to hear all those things.”
There is something about Otto and Bill’s Route 66 bull sessions that calls to mind a running dialogue between the id and the super-ego, or maybe between the Marquis de Sade and Mister Rogers. Bill is a model of serenity and restraint, uttering barely a peep for miles. Otto is a one-man circus of burps, farts, howls, grunts, pranks, convoluted expressions of lust, snippets of rock anthems, scraps of action-movie dialogue, and hilarious but thoroughly inappropriate queries along the lines of “Are you gay?” and “Do you fancy Michael Jackson?” and “Does your wife have big boobies?” He has no filter. You might say he represents what a sizable majority of 21-year-old men would sound like if they had no filter.
“How long have you had sex with Holly?” Otto asks.
“Pardon?”
“How long have you had sex with Holly?”
“Do you mean how long does it last, or how long have we been doing it?”
“How long have you been doing it?” Otto clarifies.
“I’m not sure I want to answer that, Otto,” Bill says. “You’ve been asking a lot of very personal questions.”
Bill is by no means the only target of Otto’s Tourettic play-by-play. Somewhere near the border between Arizona and Nevada we pull into a roadside diner called Rosie’s. Within seconds of securing a stool at the counter, Otto has taken a fancy to a redhead who’s dashing here and there in the kitchen.
“Hottie, hottie! I’m gonna pay her to strip!” Otto says, well within hearing range of everyone in the greasy spoon. He wolf-whistles. He actually howls. “Aaaaaoooooowww!“
“You understand that not everyone’s there for you to shout comments at,” Bill says.
“It’s cool,” Otto says. “I like it.”
“It’s not cool,” Bill says. This leads to a brief debate about whether such overt, Austin Powers–ish methods of hubba-hubba courtship are, in the end, effective. “Well, have you pulled any girls yet?” Bill asks. “Have you? Have you got laid yet?”
Whatever. Otto’s attention has already shifted. There’s a large, sun-crisped maintenance guy a couple of stools away. He’s been listening to the conversation—it’s impossible not to—and by now Otto has introduced himself.
“I like the girls,” Otto says.
“So are you goin’ to Vegas to get laid?”
“Yes!”
“Niiiice, Cheers, buddy.”
Otto and the maintenance guy fist-bump. “There’s a delicious girl in there,” Otto says, nodding toward the kitchen. “Ginger biscuit!”
The maintenance guy smiles. “Hey, Red!” he shouts. The redhead walks over to the counter.
“What can I get for you, baby?” she asks.
The guy motions toward Otto. “He likes you,” he says.
“I think he’s cute!” the redhead says. “I like your hat. Where are you from, England? You like it here?”
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