As luck would have it, at nineteen I happened upon my first real girlfriend ( defined as “the kind you get to see naked. Totally naked. Sans fluffy turkish towel.”) and all my old self-inflicted conflicts high-tailed it out of my psyche to make room for an entirely new, upgraded set of college-level neuroses.
Lexi was a tall, thin blonde with the kind of ass a fella’ doesn’t even begin to truly appreciate until he’s at that age where he can’t get one anymore. ( At least not for free.) In the carnival funhouse mirror of her hang-ups and issues, my problems looked like a wet Maltese shivering next to Rosie O’Donnell after three weeks locked up in a cake shop. But who was I to complain? At least I’d found a willing and suitable lab partner for Organ-ic Chemistry 101.
Early in the relationship, it occurred to me that laying in bed and fondling a naked woman might eventually lead to intercourse. Armed with this brilliant insight I proceeded to research all the pitfalls, problems and medical conditions I would undoubtedly face. In a matter of days I became totally impotent, unbeknownst to my penis and my girlfriend. The hardware worked just fine, but the software developed a few glitches. I’d have to act quickly and decisively to cure my non-existent condition.
Lest I run into an acquaintance at a most innopportune moment, I sneaked out to an off campus bookstore one autumn evening to purchase several sexual self-help paperbacks. After a seeming eternity of anxious browsing, I sauntered anxiously down the aisle, painfully aware of the suspicion in the clerk’s glaring eyes. I plopped three “how to fix your wilted willy” manuals onto the counter. As a stutterer I generally avoided talking to strangers unless it was absolutely necessary; never had it been more necessary than at that moment. I had to throw the neandertal behind the counter off my scent.
“D-d-d-d-d-d-d-doing some r-r-r-research for a class,” I nervously sputtered.
The clerk, clearly a sadist of the first order, took her time in making me sweat. She peeled off her glasses to wipe off a few tiny bubbles of my saliva, unintentional escapees from my battle to liberate the “D” sound from behind my lips, and then cocked her head a bit forward and over the counter to give me the full up and down, head-to-toe assessment. Returning the glasses to their reluctant perch on her greasy beak, she pursed her lips, furrowed her protruding cro-magnon brow and with a glare fixated firmly upon my crotch, expelled an audible snicker, mockingly, bordering on contemptuous.
“N-n-n-no really. Sssss-Psychology,” I implored.
“I care. N-n-n-n-no really, I care. Nineteen forty-seven with tax. You need a bag, Ron Jeremy? Or you gonna’ haul your loot to the P-p-p-p-playboy mansion sans sack?”
Normally, making fun of my speech was an invitation to the mostest hostilest of hostile diatribes but this time I let it pass. I figured that my three-fold admission of impotence laying there on the counter would serve only to diminish the credibility of my wrath. I sneered at her, grabbed my books and muttered a low-key “Fuck you, you bug-eyed caveman fuck” under my breath and exited swiftly.
I hit the books as soon as I got home. Following instructions was never my forte so after skimming the pages I concluded that the cure for impotence was practice: a little couch hockey for one, punchin’ the munchkin’ as it were, only with focus, concentration and patience. Excellent! No significant disruption to my usual routine. This would be a cakewalk. Frosting and all.
The fateful day arrived and we found ourselves once again in Lexi’s dorm room. I’m not sure if it was the plush layer of her soft Gund teddy bears under my sweaty butt or merely the fact that I was a nineteen year old boy with a firm, horny, naked eighteen year old girl straddling his midsection, but getting an erection turned out to be the least of my problems. Rather, I found myself locked in a grueling battle with the bane of innocent boys everywhere, the cunning, insidious beast named Prematurus Ejaculatus.
The battle ended quickly.
My more-than-willing lab partner and I experimented with various techniques and without the aid of pop psychology, I eventually stumbled upon a weapon that warded off Prematurus Ejaculatus as effectively as making an honest living repels politicians. I discovered that a very brief mental image of my grandmother stepping out of the bathtub (a vague mental remnant of something my subconscious did me the great favor of burying deeply, but obviously not deeply enough) would launch the beast skulking back into the shadows and leave me with a few more minutes of arousal-reduced sex.
Brilliant, I know. But genius has its dark side. When it comes to images of naked grandmas dancing through one’s head, one traverses a wafer-thin line between postponed ejaculation and downright impotence. Not to mention incessant worries that I might be in desperate need of prolonged psychoanalysis. I had to find a better way, a more acceptable mental strategy that wouldn’t inadvertently, in some bizarre, twisted Skinnerian nightmare, result in unbridled lust for eighty year old women.
I practiced and toyed with various mental exercises, eventually settling on a fairly reliable technique. When things got a little too close to bingo I imagined I was straddling the nastiest girl I’d ever known in a dumpster behind the Kroger’s. You know, the sort of hairy-armed, heavy-browed girl whose mother gives her a boy’s name and then, realizing her error, adds an “A” to the end, hoping that this will assist his/her/its kindergarten teacher in directing his/her/it to the lavatory with the skirt-clad stick figure on the door. This technique worked for a while, but was a huge a turn-off for my girlfriend who objected to my newly-acquired habit of throwing up in my mouth a little during sex.
Finally I found my Excalibur, the magic sword that would help me yield my not-so-very-magic sword with style, finesse and longevity: Long division. When the tadpoles got too close to breaching the dam I’d try to mentally divide, for example, 9,472 into 587,543. That did the trick and aside from my girlfriend’s occasional “what the fuck are you babbling about NOW?” or “HEY! Hello? I’m down here. Pay attention!” when I’d mutter “carry the nine, subtract 47,320”, things went pretty well and side-effect free overall.
Through dogged persistence and diligent practice by the age of twenty I was finally able to declare myself a healthy, neuroses-free sexual being and a veritable idiot savant of long division. (Only without the savant.) Best of all I had pulled myself up by my own jockstraps, blazed my own trail through the steamy jungle of sexual discombobulation without the advantages of public school sex education. Confident of my skills and armed with one sizable and continually expanding notch in my bedpost, I confronted my mother about her lack of trust in my sexual enlightenment so many years ago. Turns out mom had simply made an error, checked off the wrong box on the permission slip. What began in error had resulted in a decade-long comedy of errors.
Bless her soul; I wouldn’t have had it, perhaps not even gotten it, any other way…