Attempting Normal (17 page)

Samantha was a punk rock girl who ate at the same dining hall as me in college. I was an aspiring pseudo-intellectual who wrote plays, acted, wore round glasses, and dressed in secondhand overcoats. You know the guy. That was me. She had dyed red hair and a shaved patch over her left ear. I just wanted her. It came from that strange combination of contempt and curiosity. Who the fuck does she think she is? That haircut is bullshit. What is she really like? I want that.

I started to perceive my obsession as love and put a lot of energy into following through on it. I was persistent, charming, intense,
and prone to writing poetry if necessary. Turned out she had just gotten out of a relationship with a woman and had a long sexual history going back to high school and a guitar player. I was completely threatened but focused. I would make her straight and erase the licks of her old boyfriend with my chaotic Jewish neediness, anger, and hypersensuality.

Well, I got her and thankfully learned how to fuck semi-well. I had a lot to prove. I was a half-impotent premature ejaculator who was now representing my gender with a bisexual woman who was fresh out of a lesbian relationship. I was not open-minded at the time. I just wanted to win. I learned the nuances of vaginas and how to treat them with my mouth. I figured out that when I make someone else come it turns me on more than anything so I started doing that first. In retrospect I think I was just covering my bases preemptively. Get her off at least once, then the pressure is off. It was touch-and-go but it certainly changed my life. Finally I knew the basics of actually having sex. I also learned that I was insanely possessive, insecure, jealous, and controlling. In other words she eventually ran away with me screaming behind her. She kept running till she was in another country.

That was the first heartbreak and I really got into it. I started drinking heavily. I decided my identity would revolve around booze, coke, anger, and fucking. So, that’s what I did. During that period I met Lisa the welder. She was amazing. I was drunk at a Steve Albini show at the Rathskeller in Kenmore Square. She was this tank of a girl in the crowd. Short, curvy, black jeans, and a big black Mohawk. She was sexually menacing, bordering on scary. I needed to have her.

We left the club and went to her house. She was an art student whose medium was metal. In her bedroom was a large emaciated female figure made out of welded steel, with a gaping vagina full of actual nails. How I didn’t read that as a sign to split I don’t know. Instead I was completely taken with her and we embarked
on a drunken journey to the heart of angry sex. I loved her but I couldn’t handle her.

Lisa filled in a large gap in my sexual education. Due to some abuse issues she was incapable of having an orgasm but she loved to fuck, for a long time, to make up for what she was missing in the orgasm department. I was not used to being unable to make a woman have an orgasm or to fucking for a long time. If I didn’t last as long as Lisa wanted she would get angry and her anger was scary. This is why I learned to fuck without coming: Lisa on top of me, looking me straight in the eyes, saying, “Don’t you fucking come. Don’t do it. I’m not done. Don’t fucking come.”

I was scared. Out of practicality and fear I had to learn how to have sex for as long as necessary. Once when she got worried I was going to come too quickly she wrapped a fake pearl necklace around my dick to the point of constriction and pain and sat on it and told me to wait to come until she was done. That did the trick. Lisa and I ended in booze, yelling, betrayal, a trip to Carlsbad Caverns in a rented Delta 88, and sadness.

With Samantha I was told by a girl who likes girls that I gave the best head, and I learned that turning someone else on is actually the biggest turn-on. With Lisa I learned a lifelong respect for truly creative women who can’t help but honor their imagination and I learned how to fuck for a long time. I’m still in touch with both of them. Lots of water under the bridge, and luckily I’m not under there with it fucking a blowup lady.

I have told these stories to somehow establish the unreasonable but maybe not uncommon importance I put on sex as something that defines me and my relationships. I worked hard at becoming good at it, probably harder than anything in my life other than comedy. Intimacy, trust, commitment, and all the other ideas and qualities that define a good relationship fell by the wayside while I was developing my sex juggernaut. I’m not bragging. I’ve realized that it’s shallow to allow sex to define a
relationship or to think that good sex will save it when the chips are down. It will not. Which brings us to Viagra.

When my second wife left me I was a broken man on all levels, from the top floor to the subbasement where I kept all my childhood embarrassments. It crushed me. I was left feeling like a slug, incapable of charm, and even my anger had wilted to sadness. In other words, I was not feeling sexy. Still, I didn’t want to let my health go, so I made it a point to make my yearly physical. I have two doctors, one on each coast. I have Dr. Murray Heichman on the west coast, Dr. Jacob Metzger on the east. I only let old Jewish men finger-bang me. I had a bad experience with a young Asian doctor once. I don’t think it has anything to do with him being Asian.

I went to the Asian doctor that one time because I had changed insurance plans and he was the guy at the place. Prostate exams are obviously a vulnerable and uncomfortable situation, but you know it’s part of the gig. So I was bent over the examination table with my pants and my underwear pulled down. This new doctor put his finger in me. There are moments in life when you realize that your prostate might be fun, sexually speaking. The examination table with your doctor’s finger up your ass isn’t the right place for that realization. In the middle of the process, finger in my ass, this young Asian doctor in a slight accent of some kind says, “Oooh, smooth.”

I didn’t know what it meant. Was that good? Bad? Was it necessary for him to say that during the examination? I didn’t think so. As a doctor you should wait until you’re washing up to expound on the condition of the gland. Just saying “smooth” in the middle of the awkwardness gave me no other recourse but to turn my head around in slight panic and say, “Is that good? Am I okay?” Those words, spoken in that position, can only be humiliating. As he exited his finger from my ass he said, “Smooth, good.”

Having a prostate exam brings up some old weird memories around race and ass exams in general. These are memories from the subbasement. When I was ten my family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, from Anchorage, Alaska. My father was in the air force. He did his two years in Alaska and started his medical practice in New Mexico. We had been there maybe a few weeks when I started having bad abdominal pains, which in retrospect were probably just gas. What I went through for that gas was horrible. My father is and was both an overreactive hypochondriac and a physician, which is a bad combination. There were a lot of unorthodox examinations in the house, unorthodox in the sense that they were done at the house. I don’t think they were necessarily inappropriate procedures, but I do wonder. He was an orthopedic surgeon. He didn’t know everything.

When I had these pains my father decided to give me a rectal exam to determine whether I had appendicitis. He was a doctor and my dad and I was ten. I rode it out. It was uncomfortable but as the child of a physician there were times when you had to make that separation between dad and doctor. If your dad is finger-banging you in the bathroom, that is a bad thing. If a doctor is finger-banging you to determine whether you are sick, that is an appropriate thing. When the finger-banging is being done by your dad the doctor in the bathroom of your own house, lines start to feel a little blurred. On a lighter note, in these moments I had my father’s undivided attention, which was usually hard to come by.

Given that my father was not an internist, his examination yielded nothing that he could accurately diagnose. He then called the only other doctor he knew in this new town. Dr. Chester came over an hour or so later. It was at night. I was in pain. Dr. Chester was a tall, fat black man with a bald head and a Chester A. Arthur beard configuration. It looked like the mustache went under his nose, down his cheeks, and grew wider as it climbed up his fat face and tucked itself behind each ear.

Dr. Chester was the first black man I remember talking to. He was also the first black person I encountered in any way whose personality was different from the black people I had seen on television (or from my grandmother’s housekeeper, Mitt, the only other black person I knew). So his presence alone was noteworthy. I was naked and nervous and ten. I remember thinking that Dr. Chester was a whole person. He had his facial hair figured out. He was fat. He had a big personality. My parents had none of that. This guy was put together.

Chester was a nice enough guy but now I was standing in the bathroom of my new home in a new town and a large black man had me bent over the counter and was sticking his finger in my ass while my dad watched. I was crying. If you were a stranger and walked in on this scene you would have called the police immediately. If a cop were to barge into this scene, I’m sure my dad would have said, “It’s okay. That’s my son. We’re doctors.” And, oh yes, where was my mother during all this? Probably sucking one of a dozen daily cyclamated diet sodas through a straw, doing macramé, or lying on a bed trying to zip her pants up with a pair of pliers. I went to the hospital the next day and Dr. Chester removed my appendix, incorrectly. I have a horizontal scar as opposed to a diagonal one. I think it’s out. Who knows? Years later Dr. Chester got into trouble for doing dubious procedures. The whole episode was confusing and inappropriate and probably helped set the template for my relationship with the medical profession in general. My interactions with doctors have always been a little deeper emotionally than the situation calls for.

I moved back east after my second divorce, so when it was time for my yearly exam, I went to see Dr. Metzger.

Metzger was then seventy-five years old. He was semi-retired,
teaching medicine and resting on his laurels, whatever they were. He looked like a well-worn piece of Semitic furniture. A little Jewish Buddha. I walked into his office and said, “How you doing, Dr. Metzger?”

“I’m seventy-five!” he said. “How do I look?”

That’s who he was. The guy who says that.

“You look good,” I said.

“I’m painting now. This is one of mine.”

He led me over to an absolutely horrible beach landscape. It was one of many horrible paintings in his office, all of which he obviously had done.

“Nice,” I said.

“I love it. It relaxes me,” he said, admiring his own work. “How are you, Marc?”

“Not great. My wife left me.…”

I sat there and told Dr. Metzger the whole long, sad story of my life at that moment. He listened with his hands crossed in front of him, nodded, looked concerned when my tone called for it, smiled supportively when he felt an opening to do so. When after about fifteen minutes I had outlined the general situation of my mental and emotional life, he looked at me, uncrossed his hands, opened them with a shrug, and said, “People make a mess.”

He then started talking about garbage and how much garbage we each generate. I think he may have been paraphrasing a Philip Roth novel, I’m not sure. It was clear that he was one of those parable-dispensing old Jewish men.
People make a mess
. It was clearly meant to be comforting in that detached, charming way narcissistic old Jewish men have. It wasn’t, but I felt like he listened as well as a semi-retired old Jewish doctor/amateur painter resting on his laurels could.

Then he examined me. It was quick, stealthy, detached. He had been sticking his rubber-glove-covered finger in asses for fifty years. He probably taught diagnostic finger-banging in a class,
the Metzger method: No talking. If it’s smooth, keep it to yourself till you’re washing up and can explain it.

Everything was fine. I was healthy. Metzger smiled, patted me on the back, and said, “At least you have your health.”

I thanked him. As I walked out of his office I thought of it as a mantra almost: “People make a mess. At least I have my health.” I repeated it a couple of times in my head. It actually helped. Just as I got out of his office into the reception area I heard Metzger call after me.

“Marc, come back in here.”

I walked back into the room.

People make a mess. At least I have my health
.

“Sit down for a minute,” he said, directing me back to the chair directly in front of his desk.

“Is there a problem, Dr. Metzger?”

“No. There is no problem.” He leaned a bit over his desk, pulled his glasses down a bit so his eyes were peering over the top of the frame, and said, “Have you tried Viagra?”

When you’re a man this is a loaded question. It implies something about your masculinity. At least in my mind it did.

“I don’t need Viagra,” I said.

Metzger’s face lit up. His being became illuminated. He smiled, grinned actually.

“It’s not about need! This is a great drug. It’s fun. There are no side effects. Let me give you some.”

Metzger explained that he used it and had become born-again hard. I had to picture that for a moment, sadly. A half-empty sack of flour with a protruding hungry nub. He kept extolling the virtues of Viagra, but I’m a drug guy so I didn’t need much pushing.

“Okay, give me a few.”

I thanked Metzger and left the office again.

People make a mess. At least I have my health and a handful of Viagra
.

I knew what Viagra was supposed to do but I had never taken it. When I got home I did some research. It amazed me how much money that drug made for Pfizer, like billions. What that meant to me was that everyone was taking it or at least had tried it. It wasn’t just those people you saw on commercials dancing in their living room, holding hands in bathtubs on mountains, or getting onto motorcycles with too much gear. No, the numbers implied that everyone was doing it. So why not me?