ADVENTURES IN ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION
Jared Jacang Maher
Her bathroom strikes me as strange.
The walls are colored a benign coat of beige and are not at all splattered with oozing stains or fist-size holes. The mirror is wholly absent of cracks and trauma. As for the lightbulb, it isn’t manically flickering like a slasher-film prop; rather, it glows with lucidity, sheathed in a standard glass fixture. On top of the toilet tank is a little bowl filled with pink-hued bath beads, the sight of which brings on memories from the late ’80s of my childhood babysitter. Bath beads were appropriate in Mrs. Thomson’s lavatory, given her frightening obsession with lawn ornaments and ceramic doohickeys. In Daphne’s bathroom, however, the small, rubbery, perfumed balls seem out of place and oddly perverse.
Then I notice that the toilet brush holder on the floor has been elaborately decorated with dozens of sinister-looking plastic skulls. Likewise, the shower curtain features a pattern of dancing skeletons. That’s more like it, I think, lifting the padded toilet seat.
The dingy Belgian pub we had just come from was having a special on a brew called “the Brutal Bitter.” They came in tall, outcurved glasses that looked like beakers in some blackhearted science experiment.
Feeling wobbly, I decide it is probably better to sit down to drain my aching bladder. I stare at the row of hand towels hanging on the rack across from me. I reach down by my ankles and fish around in my pants pockets for my wallet. I open it and Julie is there. The photo has been in the little clear holder for over a year, and it’s beginning to fade. She’s looking not at me, but at a book she was reading for a class. She is wearing small cotton shorts and a tank top, and her hair falls across her face and down the side of the bed in a way that used to make me feel warm. I poke my finger behind the picture until I feel a small, hard lump and I pull it out. I cradle the diamond-shaped blue pill in my palm and think about how much of it I should take. After calculating my level of drunkenness and the last time I jerked off, I bite the pill in half and stuff the remaining portion back into my wallet. The pill is bitter and chalky and the taste quickly fills my mouth. I wash all of it down with a highball of whisky and set the glass back down on the sink counter.
I stand, zip up, and look at myself in the mirror. I make my eyes big, then small, mimicking the bemused expression my friends made earlier when I told them I was going home with the six-foot-something dreadlocked woman (ten years my senior) with tattoos and steel-toe boots. They never asked her name. I splash water on my face, thinking that if I were to disappear tonight, no one would know where to look for me. On the other side of the door, I can hear Daphne. A drawer opens and closes. Ice cubes clink in a glass. Already, I can feel the tingling between my legs.
Rewind three months. I’m on the phone, asking about allergy medication. The nurse from the hospital hotline is helpful and sets me up with an appointment to see a doctor.
“Since I’ll already be there,” I say quickly, “I’d also like to talk with him about a problem I’m having with,” I search my brain for the medical term, “erectile dysfunction.”
“Okay,” she says. I can hear her clacking on a keyboard. “How long have you been experiencing this?” About six months, I tell her. She asks about rashes, sores, discomfort, oozing. No, no, no, and no, I reply. I wonder if she knows my age. Of course she does—my whole medical history is probably on the screen in front of her. “I don’t think it has to do with an STD or anything,” I explain. “I just haven’t been able to . . . ” There’s another word I’m looking for. (How does it go? Flashy commercial begins. Handsome, graying man on a mountain bike. A sea kayak and a sunset. The voice-over comes in.) “Perform,” I say into the receiver, “as consistently.”
It all feels like such a sick cliché. Perform. It’s like my penis is some third-rate dinner-theater thespian with stage fright. The nurse doesn’t ask any more questions; she simply gives me the date and time. One week later, I’m sitting in an exam room at my local HMO, waiting for Dr. Redmond. On the wall is a diagram of the human foot. Below the diagram is a small magazine rack with publications that range from Highlights for Children to O, The Oprah Magazine. I cross my legs and then uncross them. I worry that when he walks in, he’ll take one look and declare me a fraud.
But he wasn’t there for my final moment with Alice—a soul-searching hippie girl whom I had been courting lightly for a while—earlier in the month. We were naked and kissing on a mat in her meditation room, and had gone through all the stages of foreplay. She was moving to a different city in a few days, and it was clear she was ready for me to ram her chakra into the next life period. I was nervous. Not long before, a drunken one-night stand with a former coworker in the back of a newspaper delivery van had turned from passionate to pathetic when, midfuck, my dick deflated like a penis-shaped novelty balloon.
My ex-coworker looked upon me in the same way that Alice later looked upon me: with the face you make at a child who has fallen and gotten a boo-boo. “It’s no big deal, really,” they cooed. But I knew that beyond their sympathetic smiles, both were thinking about how quickly they could hustle me out the door. All I could do was shuffle home so I could jack off to a motherfucking photo in my wallet. I knew there was nothing wrong with me physically, that I just needed to get back in the game. But this wasn’t some game. And what if this wasn’t a phase?
The handle on the exam room door starts to jiggle, and I sit up straight but then relax my shoulders, trying to look as if impotence is but another casual detail in my extraordinary life. The doctor enters wearing spectacles, a stethoscope, and a white lab coat. But attached to the jacket is a name tag that says DR. SUSAN REDMOND. She makes chitchat about the high temperatures outside.
“But it’s not as hot as yesterday,” I reply, suddenly feeling sick.
After she looks at my file, we talk about allergy medication. She is tall and lanky, standing with a slight hunch, and looks to be in her mid-thirties. She glances at my file once more and the conversation turns toward my prick. I am asked to lie on the examination table and pull down my pants.
She puts on rubber gloves and begins by feeling my stomach, then my groin area, putting pressure in the space below my scrotum. It all seems so sterile and professional that I almost forget about the fact that these are female hands breaching the pleasure zone.
“Most likely it’s a simply a phase,” she says, “and nothing to worry about.” Viagra is probably the way to go, she says. “The correct dose for you is about half a pill,” she continues. “So you can use a pill cutter and get a little more bang for your buck.” She lets out a small scoff, amused by her unwitting pun. I don’t laugh. Still, I thank her for her help. Downstairs, in the pharmacy, I pay fifty bucks for five pills.
Driving home, I decide to take half a pill to test its effectiveness. I drink water from a bottle and listen to the radio. Nothing feels different. It’s getting dark and I stop at a gas station to fill up. Stepping out of my car, I realize I am suddenly sporting a humongous, steel-rod hard-on. “Jesus,” I say. “Jesus!” The warning label says Viagra has been known to cause sudden loss of eyesight in some men, so I haul ass home and masturbate twice to Internet porn. In the middle of the night, I wake and run to the bathroom naked to look at myself in the mirror. My penis points back accusingly. Its little eye is narrow and spiteful. I stare back.
“Don’t blame me, peckerhead,” I say. “You brought this on yourself. If you had done your job like you’re supposed to, I wouldn’t have been forced to seek outside help.”
I lie back down in bed and eventually my dick lies down, too. I turn off the lights and think about Julie, how she never told anyone about us. How when she ended it, she ended it silently. And how I, as always, obeyed. I trace her form in the air, twisting my hair with my fist, pretending it’s her. Then I tell myself to quit being such a fucking sissy.
A week or so goes by and an old girlfriend from high school is in town, looking for requisite ex sex. I capitulate, pop half a blue diamond, and we make love in four different rooms of her dead father’s house. We go through a pack of condoms triumphantly. I am iron and she is oil, and together we fuck like a factory. The next morning I am lethargic, with a headache and slightly blurry vision, so I lay off the pills for a while.
Eventually, I start hooking up with a girl from the local roller derby league. She wears pigtails and schoolgirl outfits and enjoys sex more than anyone I have ever met. Half a pill, I learn, is generally too much, so I cut back to one-fourth. She is so loud that sometimes I am afraid neighbors will call the police. If sex were an Olympic sport, I think I would win a medal.
After a while, I stop calling her. I have no idea why. Maybe I’m over it all. Even before I swallow the pill, I have an erection, and the chalk of it stays in my mouth all night. When I fuck, it’s like someone else is doing it and I’m watching from the corner. I’m still in the alley, throwing sticks at Julie’s window, hoping tonight the door will open.
The first time I meet Daphne, she tells me that the only way to fight off a cold is with straight whiskey. So I go into a bar and drink myself stupid and wake up sicker.
The second time I meet her, she turns to me and asks, “So, are we going to fool around or what?” I think she is joking, but then I look up at her and realize she is expecting a response, so I say yes, like there is nothing I am more sure of in my life. The cab ride to her apartment is a blur, except for the turns and the streetlights. I put my hand on her knee and she smiles—it is all very proper. In her bathroom, I go through the medicine cabinet but then close the door without reading any of the prescription labels. We go into her bedroom and she apologizes for the mess, mostly clothes and crumpled paper. Lying in bed next to her with the lights off, I’m not sure what to do. I’m too tired for sleep and the room is twirling. I’ve gotten used to sleeping in strange beds in the three weeks I’ve been visiting San Francisco—fumbling with forgettable limbs and torsos beneath dense covers—but I cannot get comfortable in Daphne’s bed. I climb on top of her and start kissing her breasts. She brings her arms in close to her body, but I grab her wrists and pin them to the bed.
“Why are you here?” she asks.
I pry her legs open with my knee.
“You don’t belong here,” she tells me.
“I want to fuck you,” I whisper. I am thinking about skulls and dancing skeletons. But then I am thinking about the bath beads sitting in the little dish on her toilet. “I’m so hard.”
I remember how, when I was a boy, I stole bath beads from Mrs. Thomson and put them in my pocket. I would take them home, into my bathroom, and pop them with a pin, rubbing the oils on my soft penis. “Fuck,” I breathe, pushing inside her. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“You’re not here to fuck me,” Daphne sighs.
Before I know what’s happening, she’s on top of me. Her hands are around my neck, squeezing hard. I cannot breathe but I do not resist. I feel like she is telling me to lie down on the examination table and pull down my pants. She looks down at me without longing or pity as she chokes me. Her nails are digging into my skin but I don’t lift my arms. My body is useless. “There we go,” she says sweetly, sliding up and down on my rigid dick. “That’s a good little boy.”
From somewhere, maybe behind the bed, she pulls out this club-looking device. As far as dildos go, it looks archaic and heavy, mounted with a vibrating rubber doughnut. She turns it on and waves it in the air, and for a moment I think she’s going to bash my head in with it. I feel like I’m going to cry. And all night she rides me like a demon bitch from hell, screeching into the horrible darkness.
I wake up hours later. There is light coming through the window and pushing against my eyeballs. I blink hard and see Daphne lighting a cigarette. Smoke twists into the stale bedroom air and curls against the bare ceiling. She cocks her head tenderly.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she murmurs. “You know I won’t tell anyone.”
I can’t tell if she is looking at me with satisfaction or pity. All I know is, I’m off that fucking blue pill forever.
