This little age of innocence, in some ways the happiest time of my life, ended in the last two weeks of my freshman year, when a woman I'd been seeing, off and on, suggested in a friendly way that we might do it. If I didn't mind making her my first (how had she guessed?!), she'd be more than happy to — well! It was only two blocks to the nearest convenience store.
     That afternoon in my upper bunk bed she explained to me, gently, that you couldn't just stuff yourself into a condom like sausage meat; you had to get it up first. Then she actually gave me a blowjob! To no avail. I kept waiting to see what would happen. This, she reassured me, happened all the time.
     I took her at her word. I'd read about the jitters and performance anxiety, and I imagined that, outside movies and novels, these were afflictions from which pretty much everyone suffered in silence — if I didn't feel especially anxious, just excited and curious, with my dick in her mouth, I figured I probably just wasn't introspecting deeply enough.
     It wasn't until a week later, once we'd gone our separate ways, that my complacency suffered a blow at the hands of a woman I hardly knew. She asked me to walk her home after a party. As soon as we walked through her door, she lifted her dress over her head, slipped her hand into my jeans (I remember that spring as unusually warm) and, before I could pull away, groaned that I was "too good." It took me a minute or two to figure out that she suspected me of fidelity. At which moment, sadly and manfully taking my faithful leave, I understood that I had been misjudged, drastically, twice in one week. That night I decided to visit a doctor.

I spent the summer after my freshman year taking my first battery of tests. These lasted through most of my sophomore year. Then there were blood tests and psychological questionnaires and months of injections to test my performance, each one requiring an overnight visit to Boston, to a surgeon who specialized in treating impotence. I liked Harry, the nurse who administered the injections, a balding army veteran who wore power ties and thick rings and had the kind of thick, train-conductor mustache that you see a lot in Boston for some reason. Harry's office was decorated with posters of fighter planes. He would inject a needle carrying a kind of proto-Viagra into the large blue vein on top of my penis, then I'd pull up my trousers, walk through the waiting room full of gray-haired guys in suits and jack off in the men's room until I came and go back to tell Harry what happened. "Did you get a chubby?" Harry would ask, taking notes. "To the best of your knowledge" — Harry knew I was a virgin — "could you have successfully completed intercourse?"
     Now that I understood, to my own satisfaction, how sex was supposed to work, I spent a lot of time imagining a life without it. Like most big fears, the fear that I was untreatable came embedded with a little virus of shame that made it impossible to ask about it. By the time I took my final test — which involved hooking my penis to a stereolike pump, flowing radioactive fluid through my cock, then taking an X-ray of the blood vessels — I had well-developed fantasies of lifelong celibacy. I stumbled around the literature of impotence: Leon Edel's Henry James: A Life, Phillip Roth's Counterlife, J. K. Huysmans' A Rebours, Wallace Stevens' "Auroras of Autumn." I actually turned Harry on to The Sun Also Rises. Neither he nor the surgeon had ever heard of The Sun Also Rises!
     I envisioned a life of study and solitary, aesthetic pleasures-in-the-moment (I'd take up fishing!) and was only slightly embarrassed and puzzled that in the meantime I spent most of my free time trying to get into bed with women, with no hope of their giving me an orgasm. Until I met Miss X toward the middle of my sophomore year, I wouldn't let anyone touch me. When a woman took me home, depending on how much I trusted her or whether I thought I might see her again, I would either avoid the issue by keeping my clothes on or I would tell her about my condition; over time I found myself fessing up earlier and earlier. Soon all it took was a kiss, and I sang like a canary. Outside the secret society of lovers, I felt ridiculous discussing what was wrong with me.
     In the end, oddly, I was relieved when none of the shots helped. I'd tried to imagine ways of making shots seem sexy in a debauched sort of way (old-fashioned steel syringes, a silver case slipped out of a silk dressing gown) and failed. I was even more intensely relieved that the problem wasn't psychological, which would have made it seem both hopeless and hopelessly embarrassing. And I felt guilty because I was supposed to want to get better — instead, what I wanted most of all was an airtight excuse for being the way I had always been.
     That was where, near the end of my sophomore year, Miss X came in, arguing vehemently against the one option the doctors finally offered me; when that one failed, she considered the second pure folly. Sometimes I agreed with her that partial success ought to be enough, that to ask for more than partial was absurd, an act of poisonous self-dissatisfaction, like nosejobs or fancy cars. A harder hard-on? On the one hand, I weighed what seemed to me the great lesson of all this penis meshugas — that our desires outstrip our physical limitations and always will — and, on the other, simple vanity. And vanity, as it tends to do, won out.

©2000 John Blum and Nerve.com, Inc.