Two Years of the Hand
I’ll go ahead and come clean: I’ve had a dry spell for the last two years. Pussy left my life the morning the Columbia blew up. I was fucking the girl, in fact, when her great aunt called and said, Doreen, have you watched the news?
Pounding away at her, the joy of unprotected sex, that great feeling building in me, about to totally pop and fill her up with Nacho batter, she cradled the phone between her ear and her shoulder and said, “Huh? No.” Then calmly reached over for the remote control and flicked on the TV. Popping another bon-bon, she patted me with her other hand and mumbled, “Keep going darling,” then watched CNN’s coverage
I came, we broke apart, we watched the news, and that was it.
I didn’t realize that I was entering a dry period when we went our separate ways. I figured it was just an extended masturbation experiment sent by some dark and evil god. Even when I did start to feel dry, I didn’t think two years would be possible, which is the time that went between the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Discovery launch in 1988, coincidentally. Back then, of course, the only woman I really cared about was P.J. Peduto and, even if I had managed to go out with her, I wouldn’t know what to do with her. Though rumor has it that Julie Haire and Kate Glassman were putting out at that time, and I also had a crush on them. Those two got transferred to a school for crackhead 14 year old prostitutes during 8th grade, if I recall correctly. My big chance for $20 crackhead sex and I was blowing my money on cassette tapes that are totally useless to me today.
When I became sexually active, it was a Space Shuttle zoo. Discovery, Columbia, Endeavour and the occasional mystery Atlantis mission were going up so often that people didn’t really pay attention anymore. While Atlantis was docking with Mir I was playing house with a little slip of a girl who confessed her belief that ancient witches from Italy were coming to kill her. That’s the sort of mid relationship confessionals I get. It’s never “I had an abortion when I was 15” or “my uncle Tony molested me,” it’s always chased by witches, hunted by a ghost, possessed by a previous life that only comes out at night while I’m sleeping and eats all the fucking Ghirardellibrownies. Right… Chased by witches was better. You ate all the brownies, you bitch. Say it! You sat in there at 3am and ate a whole tray of brownies and then obsessed about your hips and cried hysterically, punching at your thighs.
I had hit my stride. I was fucking a lunatic redhead in the ass while three space shuttles were launching within a month of each other, I moved on to a slippery little brunette who lost her mind and tore her clothes off if you poked the back of her neck. Through her, I had crazed orgies with Japanese girls, high class hooker-style redheads, chubby little blonde freaks and librarians.
The shuttles were going strong when I kicked her out and moved on to married women, recovering Catholics and Wiccans-in-training. I graduated and moved into a Bethesda apartment building where I promptly met my neighbor, a 37 year old sex-addict.
It was a charmed life. I figured that nothing would go wrong. I didn’t draw the shuttle conclusion. Like most Americans, I didn’t pay attention to what the Space Shuttle was doing. I went along with my life, I worked a soulless job for the press, I had sex with loose women who seemed to tumble through my door whenever I opened it, I drank dessert wine and cooking wine to kill the depression from my 13 hour a day, no holidays (not even Christmas morning) job and I spent all of my paychecks on regular living expenses. Which is probably why I was drinking cooking wine.
But overworked, underpaid depression isn’t as lonely and painful if your next door neighbor is a fantastic looking, workout-obsessed anal slut who comes hammering on the door as soon as you get home. Trust me. Better than head pills. Would you like Effexor…or a painfully horny 30-something neighbor who compulsively works out and wants to reenact every scene from your porno tapes?
Effexor. No! Wait! What was the other one?
Too late, you said Effexor.
I had moved from slut neighbors to more established girlfriends and luck was a horny lady until the Columbia blew. January 16th, 2003. As the shuttle broke apart on reentry, the affair with the women beneath me also broke up. I returned home on the 17th and got right to work on the life around me, certain that another woman would tumble through my door. There was always a replacement, always a backup, always some lightning strike anal slut who moved in next door and asked me for a cup of…oohhh, can you come over and help me fix my exercycle?
It didn’t happen. Months passed and, as my masturbation cycle increased, I began to wistfully stare out into my backyard and watch for wood nymphs or…anything. Anything I could go put a fishing net around and have sex with. My neighbor’s dog, maybe. Shut up the barking for a few hours.
I hit the year mark and it started to dawn on me: I had a problem. That was the first time I related the Columbia disaster to my dry period. The 21st Century. Too Much Tragedy. That must have driven the crazed women underground. Burned the experimental sex out of them.
Taking pity on me, my friends tried to set me up. I dated food allergy freaks, pill poppers, fervent Bush haters, complainers, lost souls. Nothing ever happened because I just had to kill all of them and bury them with 60 years worth of my grandmother’s cats in the backyard.
I turned to my own devices and, eventually, began dating again. I started with an Asian girl who didn’t put out because she couldn’t understand me when I said “Take off your shirt and show me those little ladyboy titties!” I’ve moved on to other, more comprehending women from there. And, as I have tentatively put my sex life back together, it coincides with a renewed Shuttle program. The first launch since the Columbia is planned to go up as soon as weather allows. It’s not lost on me that, as the Discovery prepares for launch, I start getting laid again. How in the world could my cock be so in tune to those silly orbiters? And it is, too, because there’s another, even more terrible problem. Performance.
When the time came to have sex again, I was more than ready. I went right into “receive my giant, throbbing manroot!” phase and hopped around like an extra from Quest for Fire. My monkey is upsetting his cage, why don’t you do something about it Dr. Vagina?
So I moved in, bravely knowing that I was going to release two years of explosive boy-power on my target and then run around with no pants cheering and hugging people. It was about then that I discovered something startling: I had gotten used to my hand. I had fallen so far out of practice using condoms, assuming the correct positions and getting into the rhythm that the whole thing went wrong. Two years of chronic masturbation – three to five times a day – combined with increasingly bizarre fantasies and about 300 gigs of downloaded porn, all lovingly burnt on CD’s and labeled by actress. In the mood for Tory Lane today? Who the fuck isn’t?
After all that time, and all that self-stimulation, getting inside a woman and then getting into the groove had become a mystery. It felt like starting over. I was a virgin, touched for the very… Okay, sorry.
So, now, I have a serious issue to face. A woman has re-entered my life and I’m weak sexually. She’s patient and understanding. I’ve told her about Tory Lane, and Piper, and Gauge and Aurora and Bambi and Vanessa Blue and Michelle Wild and…
It still weighs on me, though. I want to launch back into the groove comfortably and properly. So am I, truly, a ruined man? Destroyed, quite literally, by my own hands? Or is this early, clumsy phase, returning to sexual activity, only difficult because the Discovery launch has been delayed? Once the tropical storm weather clears and the Discovery hits orbit, will I suddenly snap back into the world I knew before the Columbia broke-up? And why is my life in tune with shuttle disasters? Because Julie Haire and Kate Glassman were sent away after the Challenger blew up and, I’m sure, if they had stuck around snorting crank and fucking 50 year old guys in the school parking lot, I would have eventually decided to pay them the $20 and do without a couple of They Might Be Giants cassettes.