Impotent

I’m sorry.

I swear this never happens to me. Usually.

Look, just give it an hour or so and I should be ready to go. We could watch some TV, maybe. Did you bring a book in your purse?

I like to think that most problems can be escaped from with a good book, but damn if that works for impotence. Take any book with a male lead— so, you know, any good book— and tell me it isn’t peppered with metaphors of masculinity and virility. Okay, maybe the guy doesn’t get an actual sex scene with his buxom blonde, but you can bet there’ll be plenty of references to how hard his muiscled body is, or how forcefully he runs away from the bad guy, his turgid legs pushing off like pistons against the ground.

…Are legs “turgid”? Yeah, I guess I could google it, but I kind of don’t want that in my search history.

Or, hey, you’re a classy dame. You probably like Hemingway and that shit. He had a character that was impotent, too, although they only ever referred to it as his “war wound.” Jake, the impotent guy, he couldn’t even talk about his own dick without resorting to allusions and metaphor. What a wuss. You know the last scene in the book? He finally gets Brett—that’s a girl’s name, don’t look at me like that, baby—all up close to him in the backseat of a cab, and ta-dah, suddenly he’s watching some dude outside the cab “raising a baton”. Like we don’t know what that means.

You want to watch TV instead? TV is even worse! They’ve got a huge TV up in the break room at the bank, and it’s turned 24/7 to that stock ticker channel. You want to know what every single commercial on that channel is about? Penis. They won’t mention it by name, of course. Are your stocks not performing well? Maybe its low-T! Mid-life crisis not going so well? Ask your doctor if Viagra is right for you!

No, baby. I don’t need that stuff. My stocks are doing great.

Oh, come on, don’t go to bed yet. Actually, it’s the weirdest thing, but all this talk about dick has kind of got me revved up again. Want to give it another go?

Baby?