This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  This ridiculous train of thought was finally derailed when I had to flip the cassette and adjust myself because my boner was killing me. I’d been able to ignore the discomfort by keeping my entire focus on tenderizing that ’giner meat. Once my concentration was broken, all that extra blood my brain was using flooded down to my pecker until it felt like it might break off inside my pants if I didn’t do something. So I let the python out of the terrarium and guided Allie’s hand to it like I was teaching Helen Keller her first braille lesson.

  It’s still one of the most reckless and courageous moments of my romantic life—right up there with saying “I love you” and “I do.” So many things could have gone wrong in that moment. She could have slapped me. She could have recoiled and jumped out of the car and run home to tell her daddy. She could have told everyone at school that it was small or weird or ugly. Instead, thank the Lord, Allie started tugging on it, and I instantly relaxed into the seat. My hands went to my sides, my head tilted back, I was a puddle of flesh. It felt like the only bone left in my body was the one in her hand.

  Allie took this reclined pose to mean that I wanted her to give me a blow job. Now I did, no question, but I wasn’t yet at the point in my crusade to give zero fucks that I had the balls to tell a girl, “Hey, why don’t you suck my dick.” And that’s not what I was trying to indicate by leaning back into the seat. It was just a natural reaction. Being only seventeen herself, Allie hadn’t learned yet that when you start jerking off a guy, it’s like pulling out the king stud from a load-bearing wall: it’s only a matter of time before everything around it collapses in on itself. Her response to my posture was equally naïve.

  “Um, I just want you to know that I would totally suck your dick right now, but um, I just don’t like the taste of dick.”

  Maybe naïve isn’t the right word, because the first place my mind went was not to sympathy, but to the scoreboard. How many wieners had this girl tasted? It had to be numerous wieners for her to have such a strong opinion on their taste. She must be a cock connoisseur. My mind was spinning. I was almost offended. If this girl had already touched all this penis meat, didn’t that mean I should have touched way more ’giner meat by now? Did I miss some kind of mini–sexual revolution while I was in the hospital? Maybe I was the naïve one here. It took another second to collect myself and get my wits about me.

  “I’ve got an idea,” I announced to Allie with phony authority. “Put your pants on.”

  I folded up my boner and drove us to the convenience store inside a Dodge’s Fried Chicken shop about a quarter mile from the park. God bless the South, I tell you, because only in the Bible Belt would the good Lord Jesus make a store that could give you a three-piece dark-meat combo for $3 on one side and the Pepto-Bismol to keep it down on the other. I pulled into the first spot I saw and threw the car into park.

  “I’ll be right back. Want anything?”

  If she did, I didn’t hear it. I had a one-track mind, and the end of the line was Blow Job Town. The only stop on the way was the candy aisle. I made a beeline for it and found what I was looking for: Fun Dip.

  Remember Fun Dip? Two candy Lik-A-Stix and three pouches of flavored sugar powder—cherry, lime, and grape—to dip the sticks into after you wet them in your mouth. If Fun Dip powder worked to change the flavor of the Lik-A-Stix, I reasoned, it should work to change the flavor of my wiener too. To my mind, this made perfect sense. Granted, it wasn’t my mind that was doing the thinking in that moment, but the heart wants what the heart wants, dammit!

  “What’d you get?” Allie asked me as I hopped back in the car.

  “Do you like Fun Dip?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your favorite flavor?” It was the gentlemanly question to ask.

  “Grape, I guess.”

  “Well then, grape it is.”

  We drove right back to Cline Park and picked up where we left off. Partly because Allie was hot, but mostly because I was a seventeen-year-old male, I was just as hard as when we left. So I undid my belt like it was the drawbridge into Blow Job Town, spit on my hand, wiped it all over, and dipped the head of my wiener into the grape Fun Dip packet. As I sat there with the Fun Dip pack in one hand and my wiener in the other, Allie gave me this confusing little look. I couldn’t tell if she was put off by my presumptuousness or turned on by my ingenuity.

  I got my answer when she leaned over and sucked off all the purple powder. We went dip-and-suck like that until we reached the bottom of the grape packet. When we were plum out, I tried to open another packet while she kept on sucking, because in America we finish the jobs we start! I ended up cumming in her mouth a few moments later, which she was kind of pissed about because I didn’t let her know beforehand that I was close. I didn’t know that’s what you were supposed to do. In pornos it’s always the woman who tells you you’re ready. She leans back, opens her mouth, and unhinges her jaws like she’s trying to catch a flying Junior Mint. Not until I was older did I learn about the head tap. And even if I knew about it, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was full of Budweiser and weed. I’m lucky I knew where I was.

  Allie was a trouper, bless her heart. I sparked up the last of the second Joel Penny joint, and she quickly forgave me. We drank and smoked and finger blasted some more, then I took her home.

  The night was nearly perfect. The only thing I would have changed was the flavor of the Fun Dip, because grape turned my wiener into an eggplant emoji. In retrospect, my preference would have been to use lime, since cherry would have made it look like I fucked a period monster, but the last thing you want to do to a classmate who was just giving you head is leave her with a sour taste in her mouth. They say a rumor travels around the world in the time it takes the truth to put its shoes on. Imagine how fast rumors of my sour penis would have traveled in a tiny high school where everyone knew each other’s business? I could kiss my newly minted finger-blasting reputation good-bye if that happened.

  * * *

  The next day was Sunday, the Lord’s day. I went to church with my mom like usual, and afterward, while our parents had coffee and cake down in the church basement, I lied to my buddies about having sex with Allie. I also told them she blew me, and how amazing it was—which wasn’t a lie—though I left out the part about the Fun Dip. That felt like maybe a little too much sin for a house of worship.

  I woke up Monday morning with a spring in my step and a fire in my belly. Sure, my penis was still purple, but I had a white-hot zeal for life. Nothing was going to slow me down … except maybe the low-grade fever and extremely painful urination I woke up to the following morning. It turns out one night of purple penis is a neat party trick. A whole day is a cool war story. But two days? That’s a medical condition.

  Clearly something was seriously wrong, but I was so ignorant about sex and anatomy at that age, I had no idea what it was. I thought maybe I’d caught AIDS or come down with some exotic purple version of gangrene. The only thing I knew for certain was that my dick wasn’t working right and I needed to see a doctor.

  When you’re still technically a minor, going to the doctor is easier said than done. No one blinks when you file for a hardship license that lets you drive unsupervised at fourteen, but an unsupervised penis evaluation at seventeen, that raises all sorts of flags. If I had no other option, I would have bitten the bullet and gone to my pediatrician, Dr. Clyde Underwood, but that would have been one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life. Dr. Underwood had known me since we moved back to Clarksville when I was three years old. He’d known my mom even longer than that. They exchanged Christmas cards. The idea of explaining to him what I had done, in an exam room covered in fire-truck wallpaper? No, sir.

  Thankfully I had a car, which meant I had options. Before I left for school Tuesday morning, I called a walk-in clinic in Fort Smith and made an appointment for 4:30 p.m. That gave me enough time after school to gather together some gas money and make the sixty-mile drive west.

  The doctor on
call at the clinic that day was a Vietnamese man named Dr. Nguyen. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about that, except you didn’t see a lot of Vietnamese people in those parts, so I had some doubts about his credentials. He could sense my skepticism too once we got into the exam room and he asked me to stick out my tongue and say “Aah.”

  “Don’t worry, Mis-tah May, I bác sĩ.”

  What the fuck was a bocksee? He repeated himself, with emphasis, like now I was going to understand him.

  “Bác sĩ … ‘doctor’?”

  “Uh, ok.”

  “He’s a real doctor,” the nurse who was taking my vitals finally chimed in. It sounded like a routine they had rehearsed, and it did not inspire confidence.

  “What wrong wit you today, Mis-tah May?”

  “Uh, Doctor, I’ve got something wrong with my dick.”

  “Ohhhhh? What wrong wit you di—?” He dropped the ck because I lived inside a racial stereotype. I don’t know what else to tell you.

  “Well, it burns pretty bad and it’s hard to pee without it hurting.”

  “How rong rike dis?”

  “It started yesterday, but it got worse today.”

  “You have unprotected sex?” That was a tough one. In that part of the country, sex education was still pretty primitive. I wasn’t completely sure what defined sex, medically or otherwise.

  “I guess I kind of was.…”

  “Hmmmm.” Dr. Nguyen pondered. I don’t think his English was good enough to decode my totally evasive, contradictory, unhelpful answer.

  “Hypothetically, what could someone catch if, to get a blow job, they dipped their wiener into a Fun Dip pouch over and over again in order to make it taste good?”

  “Ahhh—”

  “Grape flavor if that matters.”

  This was when the nurse left the room. I heard her whispering with the other nurses behind the intake desk out in the hall. Then they broke into a chorus of laughter. So much for patient privacy.

  Dr. Nguyen didn’t answer my question right away. He quietly made some notes on my chart; probably just a personal reminder to tell his entire family the story of the big white boy with the itchy purple penis.

  “Okay, Mis-tah May, we tess foh STD.” Then he ordered a scope of my urethra and left the room.

  The nurse who talked all sorts of shit to her other nurse friends did the scope—a procedure she performed with a little too much glee if you ask me. With that flexible little cystoscope in her hands, STD should stand for “sexual torture device,” because that was about as close to death as I had come since my accident.

  When the test results came back, they revealed that I didn’t have a sexually transmitted disease, but I did have a urinary-tract infection. Some of the Fun Dip powder had gotten into my urethra. Not a surprise, really. Allie and I had absorbed an entire packet between us—me up my pee hole, she down her piehole. That’s sixteen grams of sugary powder, if you believe the nutritional-facts panel on the back of the Fun Dip package. Sixteen grams doesn’t seem like that much when you say it out loud, but sixteen grams of cocaine (by way of comparison) is like four teaspoons worth of nose candy. You could kill a Colombian with that. And while Fun Dip powder isn’t nose candy, it’s not like it’s made out of cotton balls and butterfly kisses either. Put that stuff under a microscope and it looks like angry daggers made out of broken glass. Imagine that up your pee hole. No amount above zero is “not that much Fun Dip” in your urethra. Dr. Nguyen prescribed me some antibiotics, sent me on my way, and a few days later it cleared right up.

  That should have been the end of it. There was no reason for anyone to ask questions about my drive out to Fort Smith. No one should have been the wiser. But then I got really high at a bonfire in the woods a couple months later and told the story to all my buddies. The more they laughed, the more details I divulged. I painted such a picture for them, they should have called me Rembrandt. Instead, they decided to call me Sweet Dick. For the rest of senior year my nickname at school was Sweet Dick, or SD if a teacher was within earshot. Finger blasting stopped being my thing almost overnight. I was Sweet Dick now—that was my thing.

  * * *

  Sweet Dick didn’t die when I finally left Clarksville. He came with me wherever I went well into my twenties. I was the one who brought him. You could hardly ask for a better alter ego. I used that story all through my twenties to get girls. I would have friends call me Sweet Dick in mixed company out at bars or parties, trying to get at least one of the women in the group to wonder if maybe I’d got something going on that she hadn’t figured from looking at me, and that she might want to find out about. One girl in the group would always bite, her curiosity getting the better of her.

  “Why do they call you Sweet Dick?”

  Man, was I ready for that question. In the brief moment just after she finished talking, it felt like fishing with a pulley rig. She clamped down on the bait and the rig yanked her right out of the water. All I had to do was bring her into the boat.

  “I’m glad you asked. They call me that because my dick’s so sweet it’ll give you cavities.”

  “If your drink ain’t sweet enough, I can just drop my dick on in there and sweeten it up a little bit for you.”

  One time I said, “My dick’s so sweet you won’t get any S-T-Ds but it might give you di-a-be-tes.”

  It was so stupid, but I got a ridiculous amount of mileage out of my secret identity because the whole notion was hilarious, and I was hilarious for going all-in with it.

  That, I realized, was actually my thing. It wasn’t my high-fructose-corn penis. It wasn’t my finger-blasting prowess. My thing was that I was funny. It always had been. Frankly, that’s why Allie went out with me. That’s why she gave the Fun Dip a shot. It was so ridiculously stupid as an idea that you had to see where it went, for the story. And what is comedy if not a series of stories condensed to their most potent, absurd form?

  Allie could have given a fuck about Mazzio’s Pizza or my 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. She went out with me because I was funny, and chicks love a guy who can make them laugh. If I could make her laugh enough to look past my Southern postaccident huskiness, what’s to say I couldn’t make whole rooms of people laugh and have them pay me for their pleasure? No matter what filthy hole they stuck me in.

  5.

  WHO NEEDS COLLEGE WHEN THERE’S LIFE?

  When my aunt took Granny down to Prattville, my mom blossomed like a flower that had been living under the canopy of a large tree. She finally had enough sunlight to grow. A sick mother no longer overshadowed her. A recovering son at least for a few months didn’t keep her rooted in place. And her other kids were old enough to do whatever the hell they wanted, so fuck them, frankly.

  Near the end of my sophomore year, just as I was getting the pins and screws taken out of my arms and legs, my mom dusted off her old teacher’s certificate and started applying for teaching jobs all across northwest Arkansas. That was my mama. You can’t hold a good woman down. Naturally, she got the first job she was up for—a high school home-economics position in a little town just south of Fayetteville called Winslow, twenty-five miles away.

  For the first time since I was five years old, I was going to be living some place other than Clarksville, Arkansas. Had my girlfriend not broken up with me, had I not gained a bunch of weight while I was in the wheelchair, and had Clarksville High not tried to butt-fuck me with their stupid rules, I might have been sad to leave. But Winslow represented the same kind of fresh start for me as it did for my mom.

  Tucked into the northern edge of the Ozark National Forest, Winslow is one of those towns that you search for on Google Maps and have to zoom in on five or six times before you can see anything. Once you do, all you see is the bare bones of what it takes to be called a town in the South: post office, high school, Baptist church, Methodist church, Pentecostal church, butane depot, gun shop.

  I thought I knew what it meant to live in a small town—it’s not like Clarks
ville is Gotham—but I was unprepared for just how small the high school where my mama was going to teach and where I would finish high school was going to be. My whole grade was nine people. Nine. That’s barely a baseball team. It’s hard enough to fit in at a new school as it is, but it’s even harder to fit in when your whole class can fit in your car. Even our mascot was small—the Fighting Squirrels.

  Before I had to worry about fighting or fitting in with my classmates, I had to deal with where I fit in with the school district. At least in the late 1980s, when you moved to a new county, you had to get retested on all the basic subjects so they could figure out where you placed in their system. This worried my mom a little. For most of my time in Clarksville, even before the accident, I was bad at school. I don’t mean I misbehaved, I mean I just wasn’t very good at it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved learning. I’d get A’s on most of my tests. But then every quarter I’d come home with C’s on my report card because homework is a bunch of bullshit, and in normal public schools homework is at least half your grade.

  This was a constant source of frustration for my mom. As a licensed educator, she knew that my refusal to do stupid busywork would reflect poorly on her with her new colleagues in the school district. But as a teacher, she also knew that homework was, in fact, total bullshit. She wanted me to do my homework, but what was she going to say? She couldn’t lie and pretend that it was important or real. She’d already tried that with Santa Claus, and that spiraled into a complete loss of faith in every social institution we have. If she’d tried the same thing with homework, God knows where I’d be right now.

  I didn’t suffer many consequences for my poor grades, ultimately. At a school that can’t even afford special-ed programs for a kid like Rusty Dugan, it’s not like they had programs for the gifted that poor grades would keep you out of (or cool, fun shit that good grades would get you into). Maybe there was an honor-roll pancake breakfast or something, but those activities always happened on a Saturday morning, and who the hell wants to get up early on the weekend to eat cafeteria pancakes?