I want this, the worst piece I’ll ever post, to reach a wider readership.
I was chain-smoking cigarettes. I had just quit my job as a night-stocker at Hy-Vee. I had just seen Nick Young running with the University cross country team. It was 7 in the morning.
My car was parked on the street. I did not want my roommate to know I’d quit, not yet. I walked to my car, got in. Started it. Drove.
It was my high school coach’s birthday. “Happy Birthday, Coach,” I texted him. I drove. I drove to the pornographic bookstore on Kirkwood Blvd.
I’d never been there, just driven past. I’d never been to a place like that.
There were two people behind the counter: a portly twenty-something girl and a thin, sleazy-looking gent. The man asked to see my I.D. and I showed him. Then he asked what I was looking for.
“Uh, I don’t know, I’m just browsing.”
“Nope, you can’t be here.”
What? “Uh no, I mean, I’m not going to masturbate in here or anything,” I said, “I’ve just never been to a, uh, a place like this.”
I looked at the magazines. The magazines were expensive. I looked at the DVDs. Holy shit the DVDs were expensive. I looked at the magazines.
I deliberated for some time. A man, about 5 foot 3 with a fat face, a gut and no hair walked in through the side door. The man at the counter greeted him by name—a regular. The short man walked straight to the back of the store, behind a black curtain, below a sign, “for previews.”
I looked at a magazine called “Butt Man. BUTT MAN.
“I don’t know, I’m just really excited about this idea, I just want to write something...post it to my Blog, something that’s truthful, personal...but just borderline over-the-top. Something really sexual, you know, true...but disgusting. Something that maybe the Lindsey Taylors will see and say, ‘What the fuck, what a creep.’”
“I want complete freedom in everything I write and say.”
I held Butt Man in my right hand and a Playboy in my left. The Playboy featured some posthumous Vonnegut. I thought that was too-funny.
I bought the Vonnegut Playboy and a Penthouse with an article called “Salvia-The Legal LSD.” I said to the counter-people, “Have you ever read ‘Breakfast of Champions’?” They hadn’t, why? “Oh, I don’t know...I just think it’s funny to find Vonnegut here.”
I left, drove near my apartment, parked on the street and sat there with my new reading. I read the Vonnegut story, didn’t like it very much, read the salvia article, didn’t like it very much. Then I looked at the pictures.
You wouldn’t believe the compromising positions they put those young women in! I cringed at the blurbs and quotes, studied the pictures, the bodies...tried to get worked-up, but I couldn’t. I should have opted for Butt Man.
“Jeez...that’s terrible” I exhaled. I drove two blocks to my apartment lot, discarded the magazines in the dumpster, and went inside to catch some sleep.
I am a self-deprecating masturbator. I lie angled on my bed and look back and forth, back and forth, from the blonde supermodel with superhuman sexual features to my average white dick. I speak for both of them:
“Faster—no, bigger, just get bigger! Fuck, I’m bored by this.” And my average white dick looks around at the hills and valleys of cream and caramel and pink plumage and says “Jesus fuck oh my fuck” with a stupid look on his face, disbelieving, “you are the sexiest thing in the world, versed in techniques and secrets, given to love and sex and fortune...and I am down so low.”
And that’s enough talk out of him to illicit ejaculation, everywhere. I maneuver my weight awkwardly until I’m standing with my pants at my ankles, my body all but immobilized, thick semen matted in my pubic hair, dick going soft, searching desperately for Kleenex or loose paper or socks or my high school diploma...
I rung in 2007 alone in a Walgreen’s. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. My friends had made new friends—popular, well-adjusted friends—or found girlfriends—popular, physically attractive girlfriends. I hadn’t.
I have a self-destructive tendency to seek solitude when I’m down, and it just makes my condition worse, low-low-low. So I struck out in the cold and walked to that Walgreen’s.
I had short hair. I was six feet tall, 130 pounds—real skinny. I was wearing a dirty gray jacket that I wore in and outside of class, size 30-36 eBay jeans, penny loafers and plastic, half-turtle-shell-half-deep-blue Dolce & Gabbana glasses. I had tried to black-out the “D&G” logo; I found it embarrassing for some reason. I wasn’t doing well.
The cashier eyed me suspiciously—or maybe I projected that unto her. In retrospect she probably thought I was looking to steal alcohol, but alcohol wasn’t on my mind yet, and that’s a good thing.
I stole condoms. I didn’t take them out of the store. I took them to the bathroom, locked the door, sat in the stall and unwrapped one. I jogged my dick alive with thoughts of girls who hated me, got an erection. I rolled the condom on, struggling to stay hard. I’d never put on a condom, and why would I have? Sex was a far-away dream blown all out of proportion.
I thrust, I slapped my dick against my stomach, I thrust. I did not come; I had never come. WHY CAN’T I COME?
(Why couldn’t I come? Because my uncircumcised dick was rusted over with scar tissue, so I couldn’t retract my foreskin, so I couldn’t stimulate my glans. A simple snip-snip from Dr. Wahle and 15 dick-stitches were well worth the ability to climax and propagate my genes; my lousy-dick genes.)
I left the stall, looked at myself in the smudgy ill-lit mirror, and hated myself then. Why can’t you come...but more importantly, WHY ARE YOU HERE? Eleven-something P.M., December 31st, 2006 . Where is everyone else? At a house, with friends, celebrating, enjoying themselves...and what are you doing?
Well, not ejaculating...
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