Massive Failure of Erection

[Part 1 of the "Voices of I" series]

He was thinking, or he feigned the whole process, but the way he did it did not impress her a bit; his chicanery bored her. He tried to gather his thoughts as if he was forcing the veins in his wide forehead to lacerate their way out of his skin. It could have been enough to make him shit his gallbladder while sitting right next to his stunning date. After nine shots of tequila and twelve cigarette sticks, he was speechless. It was infinitely worse than when he took his first swig of alcohol for the night. Perhaps there were not enough interesting things in his dictionary that he can say without simultaneously breathing into them an air of bravado, so he had to think of something.

It was getting late in the evening and his resolute attempts at intellectual masturbation were foiled from time to time by her sly remarks. He would fidget a bit before he would poke her attention with his words and gestures. To her mind, it was a sign of two things: he was still alive and, as a matter of sheer necessity, she still had a mission to accomplish. Nonetheless, it was a mission she was willing to fail if she felt like it. That Sunday night, she was determined to murder his every chance of nailing her. Had his mind been sharp enough, he would have easily felt that his situation was more miserable than being reincarnated as Patrick Ewing's foreskin left out to dry in the sun after circumcision. Unfortunately, his mind is obtuse. His brain, or head, is something else.

For her, the way his cerebrum protruded against his cranium is an anomaly, or a clear indication that God, or Allah, or Buddha, or Bathala, or Darwin's evolution, has a strange way of illustrating humor for posterity. If a picture paints a thousand words, his forehead easily qualifies as a library. Perhaps, she thought, it protruded for no apparent reason except to make the world a little less unforgiving, maybe even to make others feel good about their selves at his expense, which isn't exactly a detestable leisure. Or, the awkward anatomy of his head is his cerebrum's symbolic way of making its presence felt, as it unmistakably did when she told him ten minutes and four seconds ago that he could need an abacus for a brain. Are you still single? He asked her, his tone highly suggestive of how much he wanted to get into her pants later and get out of it first thing in the morning. You could need an abacus for a brain, she said. They weren't exactly a couple but they were the only pair, and an odd one at that, spending their time at the sulky bar before the bartender had to call it a night for the patrons.

Maybe she has a point. After all, he is a mere biped that can hardly claim ingenuity as his prime virtue. For him, he is just what he thinks he is—another mortal, the living and walking proof of his parents' carnal desires, the fruit of a sexual congress one damp and lazy afternoon, the only sperm ever to successfully race through that no-man's land called fallopian tubes, a forty-two-year-old fetus with hair on all the wrong parts of the body. But even this stubborn fact she still wanted to treat as a conundrum, one that has to be banished for the sake of womankind, with the only exception that she'll go the mile, or play the ground, if only he could exhibit a flicker of intelligence, even the artificial kind. She was a potential mate, a desirable creature from the world of vaginae, and he was just a thing, or something. An it. The polar opposite of all things beautiful, not even quaint.

The place was as dead as his toenail, and the throbbing pulse on his veins was not even considered by the foxy lady as a sign of life. These things did not excite her in any conceivable way. It took his neurons twenty minutes to phrase the question where do you work again?

At the plumber's shop. I'm a pipe vacuum, she said without hesitation. It was her vain attempt to spark his plug and, hopefully, fetch an ounce of his wit in the end. It was like she was milking a rock.

No response. By her standards, the conversation was a monologue; the monologue was onerous and real. He was lost and he could not find his self inside a small bar which he calls world, or universe, whichever suits his circumstance, after a day's worth of work as a clerk. The scent of the midnight's promise was already under his nose and yet he failed to pick it up and whisper an expletive in return if only to assert his lust in a gentle way, one which she was willing to listen to like gospel truth. A simple shit or fuck would have sealed the deal, but it turns out that four-letter words are too much for his brain, too much that it might suddenly have a massive hemorrhage even before it could finish forming the second letter.

His mind is not as sharp as his dick.




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