Mat Johnson - Loving Day

I HAD POISON in my cock and I had to get it out. From age eleven until about seventeen, I could feel it in there, threatening to burst my testicles, pulsing my vas deferens. I tried to take care of this on my own, to remove the compound manually, nightly draining the malignant fluid under my blanket in my bed. And this did provide relief, but only for a few minutes, maybe an hour.

And over time the procedure became less effective. After a month, I could no longer go to sleep without performing the exorcism at least twice. It wasn’t long until mornings became the same way. And if I didn’t, the consequences were horrific. Not only would urges plague my mind throughout the school day, but uncontrollable erections, brazen and adamantium, would haunt me as well. Not even the fear of social humiliation could deflate my phallus.

Returning home meant a race to the bedroom to release the mental succubi eight hours in the School District of Philadelphia provided. Once every ninety minutes, for the rest of the night, the act was repeated. But it was release without liberation. Self-pleasure was a meager panacea in lieu of the exorcism of true intercourse. I knew what I needed. A girl. Any girl; I didn’t care about the specifics. Someone else to take my burden. I was desperate for the cure.

I didn’t care who removed the poison. I didn’t understand love or consequences. The only feelings I was concerned with emanated from my groin. I found a drunk girl at a house party in West Philly who was willing, after a twenty-minute introduction, to partner in intercourse in an upstairs study, but my strenuous masturbatory exercises left me numb to the real act, the latex condom I wore for her protection only making matters worse. Two weeks later, a casual encounter with a white girl at a hotel party downtown led to a week of phone conversations and then a meet up at a sweet sixteen at Society Hill Country Club. Intercourse was achieved, again drunkenly, in the laundry room, on a foldout table. One of the women working there, an older teen, maybe college-age, walked in on us and I leaped off, my shame hanging before me. The girl I’d found was amazed I’d disengaged so quickly, but in my fear and drunken stupor, my flaccid penis was no miracle.

The girl was Cindy, the last name was Jewish; that’s all I retained of her. Of her face I remember a field of small pink pimples on her chin and along the line of her brown hair, the talcum smell of pancake makeup. I don’t know when I found out she was fourteen, that she was just in eighth grade at a private elementary school. I was sixteen and in tenth grade, high school, and it was shameful and wrong. But I had been under this penile burden for years.

She said she was sick with a sore throat, home from school. I played hooky and came over. Her parents had money, a high-rise condo downtown, even if they only lived on the third floor. I don’t remember any conversation when I arrived. There must have been one; there must have been a pause. What I do remember: a car caught fire on the street below, not far from her bedroom window. I watched the smoke build on the hood until you could see the building inferno blacken its paint. The windows, rolled up, burst from the heat mounting inside the car. There was no explosion, just casual ruin. The car parked in front of it was charred all the way to the driver’s door. The car past that was still close enough that its wheels melted like in a Dalí painting. Even a parked car can be a disaster. From where we were, you couldn’t even touch the windowpanes we looked through. So we must of talked.

But I just remember lying on the mattress on the floor of her room. She took my penis in her mouth and when she lifted her head back up a line of saliva as thick as glue connected us, and I realized she really did have a cold. And then I was on top of her, feeling nothing once more but pumping away to find the pleasure I knew eluded me. The chance of an orgasm was an act of faith, until her wetness suddenly surrounded me, and I could feel my objective within reach. It was as if I was wandering blindly up a hill then stumbled upon its blissful peak. I arrived at the greatest three seconds of my young existence. And there was elation, until I rolled over and saw that my increased pleasure was caused by the fact that the condom had broken and rolled back over my cock like a rubber wedding ring.

Past the fire trucks that now surrounded the building, I pushed forth into the traffic of Walnut Street, pumping my skateboard toward something I couldn’t imagine. I had heard that there was a foam? That you could buy, that could kill sperm? But that was all I knew. No one else had heard of it though, at 7-Eleven or Wawa. I didn’t calm down until an hour later, when I decided that if she did get pregnant, I would call up Trojan and get them to pay for the abortion. My groan, though, was silent. I did feel the release. I was unburdened.

In the days after, she began calling me. And we talked. And it was okay at first, even though we had nothing to talk about. But she kept calling, several times a night. I would come back to Germantown, walk into my father’s latest renovation, and the phone would already be ringing and it would be her. After fifteen minutes of forced pleasantries, to get her off the line I told her I needed to get settled in, but if I didn’t call her back by dinnertime she would call again. My father, annoyed, would get rid of her this time for me. If I didn’t call her before I went to sleep, she would call late at night and I would pay the price for this piercing of my father’s solitude. She wanted something, something besides sex. It scared me, how badly she desired this unknown thing from me. I was too young to realize it was just friendship. It ended as childishly as it started: she wanted to get together on a Saturday; I said I was staying home. An hour later, two of her girlfriends saw me on a bus heading downtown to Love Park with my skateboard. A crying call from her that night let me be single again by Sunday. The phone rang when I came in the door from school until Wednesday, but when I didn’t answer it eventually I was rewarded with it going silent.

Sunday night, a week later, she called to tell me she was late. I didn’t know the meaning of the euphemism. The calls started back up again from there, surging past their original frequency. Her narrative started with the conflict that she might be pregnant, and every phone call was to discuss the possible repercussions. After two weeks she told me that she had taken a pregnancy test and it was positive. This revelation brought me a mortal fear I had never conceived of and bought her several extra minutes on the phone. Now that the pregnancy was real, she told me she needed an abortion, that she needed $340.

Petrified that my father would find out, I offered to pay half, stopped eating lunches, and started pocketing the twenty dollars a week my dad gave me for food. Then she told me there was a complication, that she needed a special abortion. That the cost would triple. That her mother demanded I pay half before she authorized the procedure. I told her I would send it. I stopped eating regularly altogether. I lost weight. I did even worse in school. The stress cured my sexual desire, but I still couldn’t sleep at night.

I could hear the phone ring even when it didn’t. I would be upstairs in my room at night, and there would be a call and my dad would pick up, and I would stand at the door listening to the pause after his “Hello” knowing that my ruin was upon me. That he was being informed of my sins, of the fact that my life was wasted. Eventually he would begin to talk and the call would be revealed as something totally unrelated but I knew my demise had only been delayed.

She phoned three months in, wanted to know where the money was. She called less often now and when she called she was just mad and didn’t try to keep me on the line like she used to. I had scrounged together 380 bucks doing some messenger work for Sirleaf Day, kept the cash in a shoe box that once held yellow and blue Air Jordans. But I had started to doubt, by this time. I had asked around at her school, had received the word that while the rumor was that she was pregnant, nobody noticed her actually getting bigger. Chubbier, baggier clothes, but not belly bigger. I decided I would offer her a check. If she told me I could make it out to her mother, I would send her the cash I saved. If she refused, told me to make the check out to her, then I would send her nothing.