I was going through a hard time, and taking huge doses of a medication that had been prescribed not for me, but for my Irish Setter. My Setter was going through a hard time too. We were both a mess. She was old, older in dog years than any human has ever lived. She reeked of chronically infected urine. I spent so much time taking care of her that I exuded the same foul odor. I'd let my hair grow, chin and scalp. My hair was all over the place. I was such a mess that the first thing my public defender said to me when we met was that I'd have to clean up before she put me in front of a jury. It was also the last thing she said to me. I don't think she remembered that she had said it at the beginning.

The medication I was sharing with my Setter was supposed to help her sleep. It helped me to sleep, too.

As a side effect, it also removed practically all my interest in sex. But my life was in such chaos that sex was a low priority anyway. In any case, I went from sixty thoughts of sex an hour to near zero in just a month. I sat in my cubicle from dusk to dawn (I'd been put on the night shift after I became unkempt) and sex was the furthest thing from my mind. For the first time in my life I was getting almost no spontaneous hard-ons: a whole night would go by without a good, strong, out-of-the blue erection. I worried that I was damaging my virility, so I'd force myself to jack off every so often as a safety precaution. It was tough going, jacking off. Often I'd lose interest and fall asleep before I finished. And when I came, after a week of not jacking off, all I produced was a dribble and a little puddle. I would have asked my doctor about that, if I'd had a doctor.

Then I got a new public defender. My first PD handed me off to someone less likely to be repulsed by an addict in need of shearing. My new public defender — I couldn't believe my eyes — was a dead ringer for Georgette Eastburn. Georgette was the daughter of the police chief when I was growing up, and my sexual obsession from grades eight through eleven. The constant hard-on I had during those four years was due almost entirely to Georgette Eastburn. Georgette sat next to me in French class; every single essay I wrote incorporated her in one way or another. Madame Pfeiffer warned me that she would grade me down if I didn't get myself untracked, but Georgette was my muse. Madame couldn't grade me down because my French was as impeccable as my Georgette-inspired hard-on was perpetual.

I had no case. This was the good news from my new PD, but it swept right past me. My PD was giving me a hard-on! I watched her lips move, but I didn't hear a word. Georgette Eastburn's lips: in eleventh grade, Georgette would pout and I and half the class would spurt. A zillion fantasies came flooding back while I pretended to pay attention to the hopeless facts of my case. If fate could provide me with a public defender whom I'd had wet dreams about on a weekly basis for four years running, there was hope in the world.