Attempting Normal (18 page)

I’m not sure there is such a thing as erectile dysfunction. It seems concocted as a means to an end to sell the stuff. Everyone has their ups and downs. Viagra is about an erectile guarantee. That’s what you are paying for. In the emotional state that I was in it was perfect. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t marketing the drug to people in my situation. I pictured the ad campaign.

Viagra was amazing. At that point in my life, I’d progressed to being the sort of guy who has to be turned on and deeply attracted to a woman to enjoy sex. I didn’t just like to fuck. I liked to fuck souls. I liked to have the kind of sex that is so good that in middle of it you are thinking, “One of us is going to die.” That is hard to come by but with Viagra it’s right there, always. I didn’t have to be sexually attracted to or even like the other person to achieve a triumphant erection—with the drug I just needed to feel a dull spark and before I knew it, I was wrestling with an angry arm in my pants.

The first time I took it I felt estranged from my penis. There were moments when I was having sex on Viagra and I looked
down at my dick and thought, “It doesn’t even need me.” I wished in that moment I could astral-project out of my body and sit on the other side of the room masturbating to me fucking. That’s how good I was doing. I was my own porn movie. If you have any sensitivity at all sexually you will see God in the bed when you’re using Viagra. After sex on that stuff it’s like nodding off on heroin. And that’s exactly what I wanted. Why would you ever want to be emotionally engaged, intimate, obsessed, or in love with someone ever again? With Viagra you can shield your heart with your cock and everyone is satisfied.

It was insane. And addictive. In the end, Viagra revealed itself to be the greatest antidepressant created. I realized just how much relationships are built around sexual idiosyncrasies, insecurities, fears, and the coddling of those things between people. Viagra obliterated all that. It is also a lie. One I could live with for a bit. It was saving my life. I was a triumphant fraud with an angry Jew cock out to get some payback. Viagra helped me fuck my wife out of my heart and mind, which I think is a valid therapeutic approach to healing heartbreak.

If you want to fuck away your problems as deeply as possible, here’s what I recommend: Order yourself some Indian Viagra. That’s right, just answer one of those spam emails and within a week or two you will be sent an exotic parcel in a brown wrapper. You will open it to find a package with some sleazy artwork that looks like something you would get out of a machine in a men’s room at a truck stop. This is your medicine. It is cheap, probably bad for you, and effective. Then get out there, tiger.

But it’s not all breeze-triggered hard-ons and monster orgasms. There’s a dark side to Viagra and it’s this: The drug makes your
dick a liar. Taking it and not copping to it makes
you
a liar. So you are a lying dick with a lying dick and that has its consequences. The sex is Olympian, but fraudulent. Like porn. After a while, I had to wean myself back to the land of emotion. And that meant that I also had to reassess my relationship with porn.

Porn is a drug, and like any other drug it can ruin your mind and life, especially if you don’t realize you’re addicted. Sexuality has been unleashed and demystified by things like pornography and Viagra, but I don’t think this was Wilhelm Reich’s vision of what would happen if repression were destroyed. Sexual freedom has not obliterated neurosis. There are just a whole lot of new neuroses and issues that come from completely untethered sex. Repression might now be the healthier choice—when you deny yourself easy sex, you allow sex to retain its function as a vehicle for intimacy and love as opposed to some kind of athletic pastime with a sure win at the end.

This is coming from a guy who watches porn, occasionally, sometimes compulsively. Just be aware. If you are ever rubbing your hands with excitement and looking forward to your porn time you might be too far gone. I think when you are about to watch porn you should probably be working on something else: your job, a novel, a screenplay, your taxes. When that moment hits you when you say to yourself, “What’s the point. This sucks. I suck. It’s all bullshit. I’m fucked,” then you click over to the porn. When you are falling down the pit of self and the only thing you can do to stop your fall is grab hold of your cock, that’s when you should watch porn.

Don’t be afraid to let your higher self rise up and out of your body and look down on you and say, “Look at you, sad little man. Locked in a cage of self. Hitting a button for pleasure like a rodent. You should be ashamed of yourself, tragic human.” Then let
your lower self look up at it, dick in hand, and say, “Fuck you! I’m doing this now. Leave me alone. I’ll meet you later and we’ll discuss.” Just make sure both selves are in attendance to keep your humility in check.

The other thing that worries me about watching porn is that I don’t think our brains are built to handle that much fucking. If you sit down and watch porn for a half hour you can see at least fifteen different sexual situations with any number of people involved. How are our brains able to process that? It’s complete overload. Picture it like this. You’re standing at the end of a hallway. It looks like a hotel hallway. There are fifteen doors along this hallway. All of them are open. You start masturbating at the end of the hallway and start walking. In every room there is some kind of sex going on. You just move from door to door, masturbating. At the end of the hallway you come. If that happened, you would never forget that day for the rest of your life. Now you can do that at home, in front of your computer, in a half hour. That has to be fucking with your head, literally.

I guess what I’m saying is that you don’t want to get porn head. This is a psychological condition that is not permanent but happens when you watch too much porn, which detaches your body from your mind, or use drugs like Viagra that detach your mind from your body. The primary symptom is when you find yourself walking into a sexual situation with another human and you have a moment when you think, “Where’s the guy?”

Then you catch yourself and realize it’s you. You’re the guy. This is real life. Feel it.

  14  

I have moments where I literally ask myself, “Am I a good person? Really? Am I?”

Then I think, “Well, if I am a good person would I be asking myself that question? Don’t good people know that they are good people? If I have time to ruminate, make a list in my head of examples of my bad-personness, then maybe I’m not a good person. I’m not saying that I am a bad person, but why would I question myself?”

People have said: “I know Marc; he means well.” He means well? If I’m a good person why would I need this kind of moral interpretation? “Don’t mind him; he means well.”

But I do mean well.

In my mind I’m running a soup kitchen. I’m building Habitat for Humanity houses wherever they’re necessary, even in pestilential war zones. Sometimes I take side trips to Darfur to feed kids. I’m doing a lot of stuff in my head. Maybe I’m at In-N-Out
Burger sitting there stuffing my face. Do I take any actions that would justify me as a good person? Hold on a sec, let me just help this guy in his wheelchair to his table. He’s a vet.

“Are you okay, Red? All right, buddy. Well, I’ll just be up here at the counter if you need anything. If you want another roll let me know. Let’s not yell today. Okay, Captain?”

This is the sort of thing that happens in mind. In my mind, I transcend simple goodness and reach for the beatific. In my mind, I’m very busy with my good works. Not complaining, just busy. But what about real life? How am I measuring up?

I was recently walking down the street in San Francisco and I saw dozens of homeless people. I started to judge them. Who am I going to give money to? Limb missing? You get a dollar. Crack-head or drunk? A quarter. I won’t necessarily deny anyone, but I will judge their need based on my own moral compass. I have no consistent policy in place, aside from always giving people with missing limbs money.

I was standing on a subway in New York once when a guy with no legs was rolling his way through the car, low. He was asking for money. The guy standing next to me said, just under his breath, “I’m not giving that guy money. No fucking way.” This made me angry. I’m thinking, “What reason could you possibly have for not giving a guy with no legs money?” Is he thinking,
Oh, hell no. I’m not giving that guy money. He’s just going to take the money and cut his arms off. I’ve seen this before. He’ll be back next year with no limbs asking for money. I’m not falling for that twice
.

Sometimes I will deny a panhandler based on how many panhandlers I’ve already run into that day and how many I have given money to. My annoyance factor. As if when I deny someone a donation they know that I might have given someone else money yesterday. It doesn’t really matter to that person, but somehow in my head I have justified it.

Do I hold the door open for people? Sure, I do a little of that. Do I say thank you? I try to remember to say thank you. Sometimes I’ll go back and say thank you if I’ve forgotten or skipped out on a favor or act of kindness or service, which I do a lot. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but I kind of am. I’m already on to the next thing. I don’t think I have a bad heart, but I’m always wondering what’s next, what’s next? Me, me, me. Hang on a second.

Stop yelling. I am not the enemy. Now what is it you can’t eat again? What are you allergic to? Just peanut butter? All right, there are jelly sandwiches. Take one for later, too, because I know you don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight
.

There’s a lot of good stuff going on in my head.

I don’t give blood. Why don’t I give blood? I don’t know. I should give blood. That’s a good thing to do and you get a cookie afterward. Why don’t I do some of that?

Just take the hammer that’s on the thing. Yeah, the roof looks great. The people are going to be so happy. They are going to be so happy that they have a place to live. I am so proud of all of us for doing this and that God gave us this opportunity
.

Why don’t I spread some more money around? The Greenpeace people come up to me all the time. They have a real racket going. If you’re in a big city, like New York, especially, they hire some of the hottest girls to come up to you on the street.

“Do you care about the whales?”

“Whatever you want, I care about it very much right now. What’s your name? I already give to Greenpeace.”

I say that even though I stopped giving to them. Does that make me a bad person? Does it? Hold on a minute.

This is your new house. I want to cry, too! Look around; it’s yours. Yeah, we built it for you. Yeah. It’s yours
.

I have got to do better. I have got to get out of my head and get into the world and feed people.

I had a great real-life moment in San Francisco recently. I had gotten up early because I needed to go down to the ferry building where they have the high-end food mall. I wanted to pick up some
guanciale
at Boccalone, some cured pig jowls to make my
all’amatriciana
heart-attack pasta sauce. San Francisco is an odd place for me. With as much time as I have spent there I still don’t really have a feel for the streets. There are some dangerous-looking people who lurk around there. On this day, I saw some dude with a hoodie on literally a block away and my radar went off. I thought there was something menacing and troubled and bad about him. He had an energy coming off him that seemed chaotic, angry, needy, and intrusive. I could feel it from a block away.

I had passed the point where I could have casually shuffled across the street without making it seem like I was running away from whatever I thought he was going to do to me. I was locked in. This is the sort of language that was going on in my head: