The Matter in Hand
Sooner or later it happens. They exert their charms; persuade you that your Hole needs their Eminence. Or if not quite that, they prove indispensable to your feeling more vivid and less alone, no longer adrift in the vastness of the world but grounded in the snug fit of the erotic moment. In my case, the pivotal “Aha!” arrived, in the manner of many belated recognitions, with a compensatory force, so that for a while in the latter half of my twenties I found myself walking around in a haze of penis longing. After holding on to my virginity until the age of twenty-five with a slightly deranged fervor indicative of equal parts fear and desire, I acted as though I had awakened to a new morning. The world seemed charged not with the grandeur of God, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had it, but with the grandeur of erections. I liked the feel of a penis growing firm in my hand (it would take years before I felt truly comfortable with a penis in my mouth), and I loved the feel of an urgent penis inside me, pushing through beyond my usual barriers to the hopelessly receptive Lady Chatterley core of me. I thought they—the confederacy of penises—were close to amazing in their ability to change shape in so dramatic a way. I imagined it to be a special effect that kept happening just for me, over and over again. It was hard for me to believe that other women—scads of other women—could produce this same result.
The penises I became acquainted with were uniformly circumcised—I had wandered away from my religiously observant upbringing, but not that far—and early on I noticed small differences between one circumcised penis and another that turned out not to be so small. There were a few times I got out of bed midway because the penis in question was too big or too stocky or hazardously curved, like a scimitar. Once I fled the Plaza Hotel because a minor movie producer with a legendary reputation as a cocksman appeared not only to be hung like the proverbial horse but had a slightly glazed look in his eye, which, together with his musings on the wonders of anal sex, scared me back into my clothes. Several years later, when this same man and I went to bed in a hotel in Beverly Hills, I felt appreciative of the vigor with which he made love, his penis no longer striking me as gargantuan but rather as generous.
I remember watching afterward as he sat naked on the edge of the capacious hotel bed, singing some ditty he had learned in military school decades earlier. He began to get dressed by pulling on a pair of red socks and for a moment, before he put on the rest of his clothes, I felt a great sense of loss. He was leaving me in my expensive room—taking his penis, which I had become fond of, with him. For a moment, I thought of asking him to stay, or of asking him to leave me his penis as a memento. We women become quite attached, you know, which is both our triumph and our defeat. If I had to make a guess as to what it is that we become attached to I would end up fumbling for the right words, talking in slightly abject terms about the feeling of being filled, which sounds suspiciously as though I believed in Flaubert’s antiphonal Holes and Eminences, when what I really believe in is something vaguer, something along the lines of a certain kind of need being met by a certain kind of virile understanding. Not to get too Lawrentian about it, I suppose I might say that we are all composed of psychological Holes and Eminences and that sometimes a man comes along wearing the red socks—or maybe it’s really the penis by way of the red socks—you’ve been looking for all these years. At which point you’re a goner and his penis, whatever its reality, looks like the very model you’ve been lusting after without even knowing it.
Sex Is the Most Stressful Thing in the Universe
Dan Vebber
When I was a child, sex was awesome. Of course, when I was a child, I didn’t have to deal with it. Sex was what Dan of the Future would one day enjoy, and I saw no reason to obsess about it any more than Present-Day Dan obsesses with…what’s something old people enjoy? Nice breezes. Let’s say nice breezes.
In fact, I never beat off as a kid. I didn’t beat off thinking about girls, I didn’t beat off thinking about boys, I didn’t even beat off thinking about spaceships. (This is the point at which people quote me HILARIOUS statistics along the lines of “99 percent of teenage boys masturbate, and 1 percent are liars!” HA! Thank you for your opinion, please return to hosting your Morning Zoo program.) The fact is, not once during my outwardly normal adolescence could I dupe my machinery into getting physically aroused by the mere thought of sex, the touch of my own hand, or porn. (Not every guy has a longstanding and storied relationship with porn. Some of us honestly don’t find it interesting enough to warrant looking past the girls’ bad teeth.)
When I was seventeen, I started dating Molly Malone. I’ve changed her name here, but not her full-blooded Irish ethnicity or any of the attendant baggage that implies. Catholic? Check. Shocking red hair and freckles? Check. Overbearing, shillelagh-waving father? Double check. Our senior year of high school, Molly and I were inseparable, and at least as far as the sex thing went, we were perfect for each other: She didn’t want to lose her virginity because of her Catholic guilt, and my retarded libido wasn’t compelling me to pressure her into it. She was my first real love, breaking through my veneer of irony and cynicism to the point where I actually enjoyed squiring her to a prom with the odious theme “Knights in White Satin.”
Molly was a brilliant girl, and translated that brilliance into acceptance to no less of a prominent Ivy League institution than Havrard University. (I have flipped the third and fourth letters of the school’s name to further protect identity.) This is where things started to fall apart, as Molly became increasingly obsessed with the notion that she, with her love of deconstructing wordplay in French poetry, was much smarter than me, with my love of deconstructing the comedic premise behind David Letterman wearing a suit made of Alka-Seltzer. One night we were making out and listening to XTC’s “The Mayor of Simpleton,” the lyrics of which are a plea from an idiot to a brainy girl along the lines of “I may not be well versed in any topics that would gain me admiration among the intelligentsia, but the one thing I DO know is that I love you.” Delighted, Molly pointed out to me, “Aww, it’s a song about us!”At the time I took the comment in the spirit of playfulness that was likely intended. But years later, looking back…Jesus! What the fuck was that? More importantly, what the fuck was wrong with ME that I was so wiling to put up with a girlfriend who repeatedly hammered into my head that I was a dumbass?
Being a brainless troglodyte, I ended up in Madison at the University of Wisconsin. My existence became an endless blur of dorm-room keggers, advocacy journalism, and focusing my abnormally large reserves of vitriol on fellow students dumb enough to be vexed by the question, “But is it art?” Clarity only seemed possible during the times when Molly and I would visit each other. As these dorm-room visits were the first time we had access to unsupervised beds, we’d spend a lot of time sleeping together. Though for us “sleeping together” was merely the next logical step on our path toward sexual intercourse, as opposed to a euphemism for it. The mere insertion of parts into other parts would have seemed anticlimactic after an evening spent solving the Gordian knot of balancing two sleeping bodies on a single mattress, waking up with severely restricted blood flow in at least one limb, and overlooking each other’s post-Chinese-food morning breath.
As magical as those visits with Molly were, the time spent apart from her became that much more unbearable. This wasn’t helped by the fact that Molly was acting totally unreasonably at her new school, engaging in conversations with guys who weren’t me and attempting to join social groups that weren’t made up of me, me, and me. On some Friday nights she would even choose to attend a book club or act in a play rather than sit alone by her phone waiting for my sobbing call. How could one girl be so heartless?
Our dance of dysfunction and lack of sex continued throughout our freshman and sophomore years. We called the whole thing off more times than I can remember, and usually for reasons that were entirely my fault. The ratio of time spent long-distance dating to time spent long-distance broken up gradually decreased, u
ntil we agreed to acknowledge what geography had been screaming at us for months: we were no longer together.
The spring of 1991, my junior year, was an exciting time. I had a dorm room to myself, I was drawing a well-regarded daily comic strip for my school paper, and Our Troops had just finished kicking Saddam’s ass in the first Gulf War, setting the stage for the peace in the Middle East we enjoy to this day. I had moved on from Molly and was a better man for it, though my inexperience with sex was starting to be a problem. The girls I dated wanted more than a smooch and a boob kneading to top off their night. “We should wait until we’re ready,” I’d declare, usually succeeding in convincing potential partners that I was a sensitive and decent man as opposed to a tragically repressed and inexperienced boy. The problem with this tactic was that a girl, once flattened by my tsunami of sensitive decency, would fall for me even harder, making it that much more difficult to dump her when my well of excuses for putting off sex finally ran dry. Their faces haunt me to this day: the suburban punker who worked the counter at the record store, the doe-eyed lifeguard certified in massage, the perky art chick who scraped up roadkill and used it in an installation piece… They were nerdy goddesses all, but I could never make a relationship with them last more than a couple weeks, and I was starting to hate myself for it. Such was my state of mind when Molly called me out of nowhere and requested I fly to Boston for the express purpose of having sex.
The specific circumstances surrounding Molly’s offer of virginity loss are admittedly fuzzy, and largely rooted in emotion. But what I do remember with the clarity of tropical fish footage on a Best Buy showroom HDTV is that we were definitely, definitely not in love anymore. Knowing this, I was overcome with the absolute certainty that this “orgasm-or-bust” odyssey could not possibly end in anything but disaster and embarrassment for both of us. I bought the first plane ticket I could find.
Once I arrived at Havrard, Molly and I went straight to work constructing the infrastructure she deemed necessary for “safe sex.” This consisted of four forms of birth control, which, per Molly’s instructions, would need to be utilized simultaneously.
One: The Rhythm Method
There was a window of three or four days in Molly’s cycle that she had calculated to be “safe.” That window didn’t open until a couple days into my visit, so we killed time, probably walking the Freedom Trail or some shit.
Two: Condoms
We went to purchase these together, studying the boxes until we were confident we’d found the thickest, least comfortable, most spermicide-drenched contraceptives science could produce.
Three: The Sponge
I’m thirty-seven and I still don’t know quite how these are supposed to work. More on this later.
Four: The Number-One Rule
“DO NOT ejaculate while inside me! Pull out the second you think it’s getting dangerous.”
In retrospect, she may not have wanted to get pregnant.
Beginning with her phone call, and throughout our quest to purchase birth control, Molly’s constant mantra was, “We’ve got to get this over with.” Is there any sentence in the English language that conveys less passion or romance? Thanks to the last moments leading up to our attempt at sex, Molly provided me with at least one: “Just so you know, this is going to be really painful for me, and I’m probably going to be bleeding all over the place.”This final sweet nothing imparted, and the fortress of contraception having been built (including Molly’s mood-killing last-minute dash behind a closed bathroom door so she could have privacy as she put the sponge in), it was finally time for me to get a boner and fuck my way into adulthood. Three, two, one…go! Go! The light is green! The ref fired his starter pistol! Cut the yellow wire RIGHT NOW or the bomb goes off!
It didn’t take Molly long to notice something was up, or more accurately, wasn’t. After all, whenever we had gone at it with the unstated understanding that no sex was forthcoming, I’d grow a cop’s flashlight in my pants. (My point is not to imply that I have a particularly large penis, but simply to state via colorful metaphor that my boners came more easily when I wasn’t picturing Molly bleeding to death.) Molly’s reaction to my lack of stiffness was, at first, sympathetic, if confused (“It’s okay. Take your time…”), but quickly snowballed into impatient, nastier territory (“I’M doing everything right. What’s wrong with YOU?”). After a couple of futile hours of frustration, hair pulling, and being flat-out belittled by My Wild Irish Rose, I put on my clothes and exited Molly’s dorm room into the drizzly Havrard night, alone.
On that walk, I ate half a bag of white-cheddar popcorn and came to the conclusion that would screw me up forever: I was incapable of having sex. Never mind that no one but the randiest of porn stars would have been able to get it up amidst the shitstorm of stress, fear, and inexperience I was dealing with. Such logical explanations were obliterated by my feelings of failure and shame, compounded by Molly’s anger that her virginity problem wouldn’t be solved anytime soon.
The next night we went to a party, where I embarrassed Molly by conversing with one of her more bearable friends about our shared obsession with the band Devo. “These people go to Havrard! They don’t want to talk about stupid shit like Devo!” Molly screamed. I, in turn, exploded at her flat-out wrong assessment of her friend’s degree of interest in Akron’s proudest sons, and suddenly we were in the fight that ended our relationship once and for all. We agreed to avoid each other over the six remaining days of my trip. (Why I didn’t just fly home on an earlier flight is lost to the mists of time, but knowing me, I probably didn’t want to inconvenience the airline.) I spent my nights freezing on Molly’s couch, and my days reading Vonnegut outside an Au Bon Pain. I think I may have had a nervous breakdown at some point, as I distinctly remember curling up next to Molly’s dorm-room fireplace, sobbing uncontrollably about nothing and everything. (And what kind of bullshit dorm room has a fireplace in it, anyway? Fuck Havrard.)
In the end, after all we went through, the most enduring lesson I learned from Molly is that regardless of whether or not my parts work on a given try, sex is always the most stressful thing in the history of the universe.After (and because of) our failed attempt at Sin, it took me three more years to officially lose my virginity. And to this day, despite being blissfully married and having fathered a kick-ass son, I consider myself a victim of Post-Traumatic Sex Disorder. (If I’ve inadvertently stolen this from a struggling stand-up comedian, I humbly apologize.) Every single sexual encounter of my life has been preceded by feelings of overwhelming dread, because no matter how many hundreds of times I’ve hardened up and rocked it in there, part of me is still that confused twenty-year-old, staring at my flaccid shame, getting berated for being defective. Worse still, the mere whiff of white-cheddar popcorn still brings back all the hopeless feelings I went through in the rain that night almost twenty years ago. And I used to love that shit!
I did, however, learn to masturbate at age twenty-four, making me the only man on Earth to lose his virginity to a girl before losing it to himself.And if that fact doesn’t bring a tear of hope to your eye, then I’m sorry, but you simply aren’t human.
Silver-Balling
Stacey D’Erasmo
So Beth and I are lying around in bed one morning, next to the computer. We get an email from our friend Troy that reads, in part, St. James will be at the party if he isn’t too busy silver-balling his hot new boyfriend.
Beth and I look at each other. “What’s silver-balling?” I say.
She says, “I don’t know. Something with Christmas ornaments?”
We go out to dinner with Paul and George. Before the appetizers arrive, I say, “Hey.What’s silver-balling?”
Paul looks abashed. “Silver-balling? Silver-balling?”
“I’ve never heard of that,” says George.
Paul says, “I think it’s when you’re old and you have sex. Like having sex with silver foxes.”
“What are silver foxes?” Beth asks.
Beth shakes her head.
“Hmm,” says George.
“It’s being old,” says Paul. “And having sex with men.”
“You’re lying,” I say. “You don’t know what silver-balling is.”
“Do, too,” says Paul.
I write our friends Katie and Liz and Jill with the subject heading “silver-balling.” Katie writes back, What the fuck is that? You dip them in silver? Who would do that?
I ask my friend Adrian when she comes back from her date with the Frenchman. She says confidently, “Oh, it’s ben wa balls. Definitely. You know, those balls you insert and then pull out slowly? They’re silver.That’s silver-balling.”
“Does it matter where you insert them?” I ask.
“Nope,” she says.
I ask my friend Linda if she knows what silver-balling is. I’m trying to figure out if I’ve done it, she writes back. Have I? Have you?
I’m not sure. I Google it. One definition appears to be “killing people”—i.e., shooting them. The term also turns up in a porn DVD description of something done in a “stall.” A horse stall? A bathroom stall? The urban slang dictionary offers that it means: when you skeet skeet skeet in your girlfriend’s mouth and she spits it on your balls. Okay, possible, though not, perhaps, the last word. All other uses of the word have to do with jewelry. Perhaps it means hanging jewelry all over someone in a horse stall and then shooting that person? Or “shooting” on that person? I know James only slightly, but I can’t quite see him doing that. Also, he doesn’t have a horse, or a horse stall, as far as I know.
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