Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Proof: the volume (in terabytes) of porn he consumed, and the volume (in quarts) of semen he disseminated. Under their noses might be an unfortunate turn of phrase, but how could so-called parents be so completely oblivious to the mass grave being dug and filled with sperm in their own backyard?

The shiva reminded him of many things — the mortality of his grandparents and parents, his own mortality and Argus’s, how undeniably comforting it can be to perform rituals you don’t understand — but nothing more than the first time he jerked off, also at a shiva. It was his great-aunt Doris’s funeral reception. Though they referred to her as Great-Aunt Doris, her relationship was more distant, involving at least some once-removed s. (And it had been suggested, by his grandfather, after a few glasses of very expensive vodka, that she wasn’t a blood relative at all.) Whatever the case, she’d never married, and had no children, and flaunted her loneliness to sidle up closer to the trunk of the family tree.

The familiar gathering of unfamiliar family noshed away, and like Moses receiving the call to a needy bush, Sam galloped to his bathroom. Somehow he understood it was the moment, even if he didn’t understand the method. He used hair gel that day, because it was nearby and viscous. The more he slid his fist up and down his shaft, the stronger was his suspicion that something of genuine significance was happening — not just pleasurable, but mystical. It felt better and better, he squeezed harder, and then it felt even better, and then, with one small thrust for man, mankind leaped giantly across the canyon separating crappy, pathetic, inauthentic life from the unself-conscious, unangry, unawkward realm he wanted to spend the rest of his days and nights on earth inhabiting. Out of his penis gushed a substance he would have to admit he loved more than he loved any person in his life, more than any idea, loved so much that it became his enemy. Sometimes, in less proud moments, he would even talk to his sperm as his semen congealed in his belly button. Sometimes he would look it in the hundred million eyes and say simply: “Enemies.”

The first time was a revelation. The first several thousand times. He jerked off again that afternoon, and again and again that night. He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure. He used hair gel every time, never questioning the potential dermatological effects of repeatedly applying to his penis a substance intended to sculpt hair. By the third day, his pubes were pipe cleaners and his shaft was leprous.

So he started jerking off with aloe. But the green was cognitively dissonant, made him feel like he was fucking an alien, but in a bad way. So he switched to moisturizer.

He was a mad-scientist masturbator, always searching for ways to make his hand more like a vagina. It would have helped to have had a bona fide experience with a bona fide vagina, but his inability not to hear “boner fide” made the chances of that as nugatory as did his use of the word nugatory . Anyway, the Internet was nothing if not a gynecological resource, and anyway, there were things one knew without having had a way to know, like how babies won’t crawl off a cliff — a fact he was ninety-five percent sure of. When, five infinitely and cosmically unjustly long years later, he had his first sexual experience with a corporeal female — not Billie, tragically, but someone merely nice and smart and pretty — he was surprised by just how accurate his imaginings had been. He’d known all along, he’d known everything. Perhaps if he’d known that he’d known, those years would have been slightly easier to endure.

He used his dry fist, his fist lubricated with: honey, or shampoo, or Vaseline, or shaving cream, or rice pudding, or toothpaste (only once), or the remnants of the tube of A&D that his parents couldn’t bring themselves to throw away, despite being able to throw away everything that actually mattered. He made an artificial vagina out of a toilet paper roll, covering one end with Saran wrap (held down with rubber bands), filling the tube with maple syrup, then covering the other end with Saran wrap (and more rubber bands) and giving it a slit. He fucked pillows, blankets, swimming pool vacuums, stuffed animals. He jerked off to the Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and the back-page ads in the City Paper , and JCPenney bra advertisements in Parade magazine, and basically anything that could, with the far reaches of his all-powerful and highly motivated imagination, be construed to be an asshole, vagina, nipple, or mouth (in that order). Of course, he had unlimited access to more free porn than could be watched over the course of the lifetimes of every citizen of China, but even an anus-crazed twelve-year-old appreciates the correlation between the mental work required and the magnitude of the nut, hence his ultimate fantasy of intercepting some Arab virgin on her way to get fucked by an actual martyr, tucking his head under her burka, and, in that deep-space, sensory-deprived blackness, licking orbits around Heranus. Would anyone ever believe that this had nothing to do with religion, or ethnicity, or even taboo?

He tied rubber bands around his wrist — rubber bands being to masturbation what flour is to baking — to make his fingers go numb so he would no longer recognize them as his own. It worked terrifically well, and he almost lost his hand. He angled mirrors in such a way as to see his asshole without the rest of his body, and was able to convince himself that it was the asshole of a woman who wanted him in her asshole. He masturbated with his dominant and his recessive hand — his intact and his mangled hand — and rubbed Indian burns into his shaft with both hands at once. For several months he favored what he called — called to no one, of course — the “Roger Ebert grip”: a half twist of the wrist, so that the thumb was pointing down. (For reasons he didn’t understand, and felt no need to understand, this also gave the impression of his hand being someone else’s hand.) He closed his eyes and held his breath until he started to black out. He fucked the soles of his feet like some kind of horndog maharishi. If he were actually trying to detach his penis from his body, he couldn’t have squeezed or pulled it any harder, and it’s a miracle he never actually hurt himself, although even when he was pleasuring himself, he felt that, in some deep and irreparable way, he was hurting himself, that it had to be so, and that that was another elemental bit of knowledge with which he was born.

He masturbated in Amtrak bathrooms, plane bathrooms, the bathrooms of his school and Hebrew school, bookstore bathrooms, Gap and Zara and H&M bathrooms, restaurant bathrooms, the bathrooms of every house he’d been in since gaining the ability to come into a toilet. If it flushed, he fucked it.

How many times did he try to suck his own dick? (Like Tantalus, as he reached, so did the fruit pull away.) He tried to fuck his own asshole, but that required pushing his boner in the direction it most didn’t want to go, like a drawbridge being forced to touch the water. He was able to rub his scrotum around his asshole, but that only made him melancholy.

He once stumbled upon a sufficiently compelling argument, in an analingus community, for sticking his finger into his butt while jerking off. Once he’d trained his sphincter to stop reflexively impersonating a Chinese finger trap, it felt pretty good, if pretty strange. It felt like being a bowl whose rim was being wiped clean of cookie batter by the finger of someone — namely: him —who couldn’t wait. He was, indeed, able to find his prostate, and as promised, he saw through walls when he came. But there was nothing to see except the next crappy room. It was the removal of his finger that ruined everything. First of all, immediately after coming, everything that seemed not only good but logical, necessary, and inevitable before coming instantly seems inexplicable, deranged, and repugnant. It’s possible to play down, or even deny, almost anything you just said or did, but a finger in one’s butthole cannot be played down or denied. It can only be left there or removed. And it cannot be left there.