I knew she was thinking this about me. I just knew.
“Do you have any more Lexapro?” she asked.
“Not on me.”
“Damn, I could really use one right now,” she said. She took the hair clip off her pinkie and set it in front of me like she was placing a bet. “My psychiatrist usually prescribes me what I want, but sometimes it’s easier just to get it off the street. I swear that’s all psychiatrists are good for. I know what pills I need and when I need them.”
“Me too! I go on the Internet and research everything. It’s like a hobby. Sometimes I’ll find a pill on the ground—”
“—and you take it home and look it up on Pillfinder.com.”
“Pillfinder!!!”
We high-fived over the table.
I told her about the molecular structure of Gabapentin, also known as Neurontin, how it was basically a neurotransmitter in a pill. She explained the science behind hypnotics such as Ambien and Xanax, how they’re worthless in combating real anxiety unless used in combination with an antidepressant.
“It’s really fucked that I have to have a psychiatrist to give me pills. I know what pills I need, and I should be able to just go and buy them. Like Adderall. Adderall is a damn good reason to get up in the morning if you’re depressed,” she said.
“I love Adderall!” I enthused.
“For some reason, my psychiatrist lets me have an open prescription for Adderall, but I have to beg for the Lexapro,” she mused. “Doesn’t make sense.”
At this point, little orange bottles of pills were doing the Macarena, the hootchy-kootchy, and the bunny hop simultaneously in my head. Daphne must have known how much I wanted a pill, any pill. Still, she didn’t offer me any. If she was being intentionally sadistic, she hid it well. She was getting increasingly drunk on a third, then a fourth, Bushmills. She was slurring and going on about a person who was obsessed with her. The girl had made a collage out of her own dental records and mailed it to Daphne.
I ended up walking Daphne back to her apartment for the sole purpose of stealing her pills. I felt like a shithead. I mean, she was really crazy and I wasn’t. I was just playing with the stuff. I could leave it behind and still function. The image Daphne painted in my mind of what she would be like without pharmaceuticals was like artist Paul McCarthy in his “dirty Santa” phase meets a lobotomized manatee meets a generic cat lady. How could she not totally hate me?
We got to her apartment. I asked her if I could use her bathroom and she said yes. I stole four Adderalls, three Xanax, a Klonopin, and an Ambien from her medicine cabinet. I came back out and read her face for any sign that she was onto me. There were none. In fact, Daphne’s demeanor was so courteous and kind that it threw me off completely. I slipped an Adderall and swallowed it dry to meet the moment. She was obviously sleepy, but she took the time to show me books from her library, some of the more obscure Soft Skull paperbacks and a signed first edition of Philip K. Dick’s Valis.
“That book made me paranoid for a month. It didn’t help that I read it while on phentermine,” I said, secretly kicking myself. It wasn’t the time to talk about pills with the stolen ones in my pocket.
“Phentermine. Are you crazy?”
“It’s gross, I know.”
“I actually managed to read Valis without anything speedy. Not so with A Scanner Darkly. It didn’t help, though. I still couldn’t finish it.”
“I couldn’t finish it, either!”
In her apartment, Daphne made more sense to me. Her stuff domesticated her. She was way taller than me, and those breasts, they made me feel like a little kid. She was the top in our situation, and most people in the know could work that into something epic, but all I could think of was that she was the teacher and I was the student. I used the college spin-the-bottle game from the night before, and reversed the roles to fuel what I thought needed to happen. I had to have sex with Daphne because I had stolen her pills. It was only fair.
“You have great hands,” I said. She was flipping through a graphic novel.
“Thanks,” she said, and continued turning the pages. She didn’t get it. I got up and perused her bookshelf for a while. I went over and stood behind her and pulled her hair back off her shoulders.
“Do you want to move to the couch?” she said, and it was on. She yawned a lot. When we were making out, she would do these flourishes, like pull her hair back or her soccer sock up. The movements were sudden and sharp, and I couldn’t tell if the aggression coming off of her was hostility or exhaustion or even something as simple as a signature nervous tic, a label, the Daphne Flourish.
The sex was basic. I fucked her with some fingers; she did the same back. At some point I took my jeans off because I was afraid she’d want to feel my ass, and hence would feel the pills in my back pocket. It was a very out-of-body, I’m-watching-myself-as-if-I’mon-cable kind of sex—sex for the purpose of using the images later, writer sex, bad sex. I pretty much felt nothing, save the charge the fantasies in my own head were generating. I’m sure it didn’t help that she was continuing to get catatonically drunk on a leftover bottle of Myers’s rum just as my Adderall was seriously kicking in.
Afterward, we lay on opposite ends of the couch, facing each other. I put my pants back on. She checked her phone messages and looked remorseful that, with a guest, it would be too rude to call those people back until later. I talked a lot about what I was writing and other stuff I can’t remember. She fell asleep. Before leaving, I went back into the bathroom and stole a few more pills.
Needless to say, I feel bad about all of this and want to be a better person. Some people make themselves available as an audience for the worst version of another person. Daphne is one of those people. I took advantage of that opportunity to reveal my most monstrous self, thinking that doing so would change things, make something better, but it didn’t.
I tried writing about it the next day in a café, but it was all just notes and I crossed most of it out. I couldn’t write about what happened at all, only about feelings and general themes. These are the words beneath the crossed-out lines:Stop being hyperreligious when guilt arises. Avoid botánicas and Robert Johnson theories, etc. Avoid AA if possible. Remember J. G., former NA/AA Nazi, and her alleged bleeding-eyes night from bad E. If writing the pit bull rescue story, make it clear it’s an obvious attempt to absolve guilt. Theme of how we make animals metaphors and the morality or lack thereof in doing so. How getting drunk in the day is judged as being worse than getting drunk at night. Work ethic. Spoiled-girl issues. Themes leading back to Better-Known Writer and her whole working-class thing. Make a poem on my own self-loathing based on the Tibetan Blade Wheel—“In avoiding the judgment of others, I put my worst side forward so as to own all negativity regarding me in the domain of my own ego.”
I left the Bay Area, went on with my life, and got an email from a friend three months later. Apparently, this friend had access to Daphne’s private postings on her LiveJournal page. Here’s the forward:Fucked this writer chick last night for no reason other than she seemed to need it. Can somebody explain to me why I have sex with people I am in no way attracted to, in fact am even slightly repulsed by? Her face was too much the story of herself. Her whole writing thing is very much “Here I am in the rock ’n’ roll moment” sort of thing, and I can’t help but wonder why she needs to be this exaggerated person when she’s already traditionally attractive (yawn), rich, and from Santa Barbara. No, that doesn’t sum it up at all. I think she lies in ways I can’t even begin to put words to now. Still, maybe this post is my own way of saying I’ve made a new friend.
Ouch. Okay.
I thought for months about writing Daphne, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Plus, I wasn’t supposed to have read the post in the first place. The words were true and untrue in equal measure, existing lies I can’t undo.
After reading her post, I stopped drinking and taking pills for eight months.
I started up again at a countr
y-western bar in Pioneertown the night Dave Alvin showed up and played unannounced. He played “Dry River,” and I went up to the bar and ordered a double shot of Herradura Silver. There was no thought process involved. It was as instinctual as opening a door.
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 h
er 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.
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