Start back when you are very young; before there are any memories. The only memories that you have are what your mom and dad told you that day you sat at the dinning room table in the fall of seventh grade. Start when they told you about when you were eleven months and you had your right testicle removed because of cancer. And then remember how you went to the biggest high school football game in the history of your town with Dave Cagwin and his family, and even after they scored the un-fucking-believable, still legendary in your small Ohio hometown, last second touchdown, how when everyone was jumping up and down and you were hugging them, mostly you thought:

I had cancer. I only have one. I am different.

Then, eighth grade, and ninth grade, and all of high school, and you are careful getting in the showers after football and basketball games, but no one really notices, and so long as you don't get with a girl all through high school, no one will ever know.

And, by the time college rolls around, and you are bored of jerking off, you tell your first girlfriend, and amazingly, she likes you enough that she doesn't even care. She doesn't care! She's even had sex before with guys with TWO balls, and she doesn't care, and she reaches down and grabs your cock, and one night she yanks it, and another night she sucks it, and then when you are 19 she rides it, and that night as she coos into your ear "You sure you've never done that before?" you know that you are the last of the great lovers. You are the long sought offspring of Don Juan and Cleopatra, the man whose sole and long unrecognized purpose on earth was to spread joy through your cock.

The next morning she asks if you are okay, and of course you smile and say, "Yeah." And she jokes, "Great. Welcome to the sexual world. Now, let's start getting you fucked up." Looking back, you note that it is the most prescient moment of your whole life.



It was 6:30 in the morning on Saturday, May 12, 2001, and I was sitting with that same girl, though now she had been my ex-girlfriend since the previous July. We were watching the sunrise from her roof as my two friends from home were behind us, ten feet above us, spilling beers, wrestling, and shouting at the "Great orb of fire!" to "Bestow its light!" She sat next to me wearing her same old pajama pants, pilly white with the sheep on them, and a grey hoody that hung too loose on her body. The sunrise seemed to stretch the horizon from this small upstate town across Massachusetts, the grey oceanic sky stretching into the crashing waves of light. Our eyes burned from lack of sleep, smoke, and beer. She turned to me and before she said anything, I blurted out:

"You remember that day last winter when you asked me to have sex with you and I wouldn't?" We both knew the answer.

"Of course I do. Asshole. What was your problem? I mean--"

"Sarah." I said, cutting her off, "I couldn't. I was impotent. I had a prostate infection, and basically my dick didn't work."

"Oh."

A light, relevatory silence settled over us, until a beer can went arching over our heads onto the porch below. My friends climbed down to our level.

"Do you want to get some breakfast?" She asked.



You noticed a problem in December. Your 21-year-old cock had suddenly seemed dead, cold and shriveled, like a grape into a raisin. You had been treated for prostatitis before, but it had only meant frequent and painful urination, never this. This was new; frightening. You had just started dating a new girl, and she was beautiful, and she had business cards and worked at a high profile magazine in New York. And, for whatever reason, she seemed to like you, and she knew everyone and went to crazy parties and premieres, and you just wanted to have sex with her and walk hand in hand through New York looking beautiful.

Instead, you would dread her visits. You would drink too much hoping to give yourself a case of whisky dick and therefore avoid the embarrassment of actually telling her what the problem was. Until, one night, she would mount you, and expecting to feel your youth and virility, she would feel a mushy pile of tapioca pudding. And, the lustful expressions on her face and the rhythmic grinding of her hips would fade and slow, and the bullet would shoot up from your crotch, up your spine, and ring the bell in your brain, as there in the dark you would say.

"I have a prostate infection. It means I have a swollen prostate, and I can't get it up."

"Oh." she said. Followed by "-------."

Then, you would blurt out, staring at the ceiling, listening to honks of St. Mark's Place: "It's caused by too much drinking, or not enough sex, or bacteria. There are a lot of causes. I have an especially severe case."

She would say: "----uh----."

"I'm going to go see someone. I don't know what to do; I guess I'm stuck between a rock and a not-so-hard place."

And she would laugh at that -- because she had always liked your self-deprecating humor -- and that was good. Because, really that was all that you had by now.



By January, that last scene had played out, and I was pretty much at a loss as to how to go on with my life. I had been sober for over a month, trying to treat the problem with healthy eating and water. When that didn't work, I went the opposite route. I was 21 with the prostate of a 50-year-old, and started trying to put my liver in a similar place. The normal concerns of a 21-year-old, such as the short term worries of getting drunk and laid, and longer term concerns of getting a job to get paid, seemed so inconceivable to me that I may as well have been considering the equally unlikely possibility of a career in porn.

I started drinking every night. A fine solution, as it was one way to drastically exacerbate my problem. I started smoking. I quit doing laundry, I spent a month and a half sleeping on my blue mattress -- no pad, no sheets, just a vomit stain and a manufacturer's tag I wouldn't tear off. I started pissing off friends, I spit in one girl's face for no reason other than she was a girl and I hated everyone, I blacked out whole weeks, I puked, I took pills, and most of all, I didn't tell a soul. Not a friend, not a doctor, not a parent -- I had only told the girl in New York. I was drunkenly stringing two girls along, who were both wondering why a semi-attractive, funny guy and good kisser was so scared to take his pants off or go home with anyone.



The funniest part is that you were a senior in college, relatively popular and good looking, who was a chronic masturbator. And, not giving a fuck, you jerk off your three-quarters-hard-dick for 20 minutes, praying just to come. And you jizz into your socks, and you throw them in the dark at the foot of your bed, where they crystallize as they dry.

But, since you don't give enough of a shit to do laundry, you pick up these crusty wadded ankle socks, and uncrack them and slip them on, and they scrape your feet a little at first, but you get used to it.

In addition to your pride at not doing laundry, you cling to your pride that you haven't cried. You will tell someone and you will admit your problem to someone else before you cry, because crying would mean admitting to yourself that you had a problem.



By May, I had seen a doctor, and he had prescribed a round of antibiotics and given me a diet. But, as I was a senior in college, cutting out alcohol, caffeine, and spicy foods was not going to happen. I sought another, more immediate solution:

Horny Goat Weed or Herbal Viagra.

Oh yeah. I did it; I fell for it, I fell hard, and three times a day I would take these three vitamin pills along with a host of other herbal money wasters in order to beef up my sexuality.

Did it work? Sort of. They were chemicals, just like the antibiotics to treat the infection, so they might have done something. Were the effects psychosomatic? Highly possible. But, the point is that I had something of a short term solution.

It was that short term solution that I would put to use with Sarah, that same ex-girlfriend one night in July. I was still sort of involved with that disaster of a relationship with the girl in New York, but this was now, and I had a chance to get my dick up, and loyalty was secondary to immediate pleasure.

I was working as a baker at the time. The solitary nature of the work suited me, as did its nocturnal hours and the fact that it kept me fed and I could trade day-olds for drinks. I had just gotten off work and celebrated by splitting a bottle of whisky with a couple of friends. Sarah was working as a waitress, and when she too got off early, she celebrated by drinking at her bar. It was one of those pointless summer nights when menial labor gives way to unexpected young ignorant fun, and you never think the night will end.

We saw each other, and knew what was going to happen. But, in my state, I had to do one thing. So, with the sleaziest line ever, I lured her back to my house for a pastry, and while she was in the kitchen, I snuck into my room to grab six Horny Goat Weed Pills.

We went down to the bar and, just so I wouldn't be nervous, I drank myself into oblivion. I kept sneaking to the bathroom, popping a couple vita-viagras at a time, then going back to Sarah, and drinking, and popping pills, and drinking and popping and drink--

Until I woke up the next morning. She was naked. I wore nothing but my boxers and a hickey. Apparently, nothing had worked.

"We were so drunk," she said. I mumbled an agreement. She left, and I sat in my room, feeling desperate. So, I went to the corner store, bought three scratch off tickets and rubbed them off with the alcoholics at the picnic table in front.


You still can't cry, though. You really start to wonder if you'll ever cry again. You also wonder if you will ever realize your dreams of wife, kids, family, and home. Like that happy non-alcoholic home you grew up in. But, more than anything, you wonder if you will ever cry again. Maybe things have gone too far, and that part of you that is capable of crying has drowned in your river of alcohol, or shriveled in the acidic hate that has been your sense of humor for the last year.

You wonder this, and the holidays pass. You tried drying out, you dropped the vitamins and supplements, you ate every blueberry or every other wholistic food suggested for this problem, and nothing has worked with any consistency. Your parents ask what you want for Christmas, and you figure that even John Irving would edit out asking for "a penis." You get books and clothes, and you start working at a restaurant, and the waitresses start flirting with you, and since you can't forget that you can't get hard, you avoid them by working hard.

But, never forget you feel sorry for yourself, so you drink hard.

And never forget that you forget whole weeks and weekends, so what is forgetting one more Saturday. Until Sunday, when you wake up on some couch you don't know where, and you've already slept through your shift at one job. And, you are an hour late for your second.

And then you know you've done it. You have fucked up. You have forgotten work.

And you are a drunk who is trying to make a treatable condition permanent, for fear of admitting weakness.

And you go home, and see your father, and he says to you, "You're fucking up, Gar."

And then you cry! Oh god, you cry for hours. It is the orgasm, the release you have missed for the last year, and you can't stop. It just comes and comes, pouring out of you, staining his shirt and yours. You cry like that for hours and hours, and you laugh, and you hug your father and finally, fucking finally, you admit weakness. And that it might be time to change your life.