Chapter 42: A life continuing to unravel
The third and fourth year after I was fired seemed to last interminably. I was beginning to know I’d never find another job. Nobody was hiring — at least nobody was hiring me.
When my Manhattan editor sent a full-color proof of my new book’s cover, by a top cover illustrator, I stood by my mailbox looking at it and realized the depth of my depression.
My agent had secured a two-book deal because my editor wanted a sequel with the same characters. The perfectly realized rendition of those characters on the cover gave me no sense of accomplishment. A stark contrast to my euphoria at my first book cover when I was twenty. My present darkness tainted even that happy memory: I was a young idiot to think I’d done something special.
Given my working-class roots, a single book cover could not offset the worthlessness of being unemployed. It’s a cliche your male-hood is tied to work. Cliches get that way because they’re true. I’d put fifteen hard years into a career for which I had no particular fondness because that’s a man’s job, to suck it up and “make a living” for your family. By that standard I was no longer a man. The other standard of manhood, virility, already had flagged. Unemployment spiked it good and proper.
I took the mail inside, glumly thinking about my decade of marital fidelity before I was fired, when conflicting schedules frustrated an over-active libido. My secret sophomoric answer had been pornography. Advent of portable VCR players and a curtained “adult” skin-flick alcove in every video store enabled me to rent a room and exhaust myself, like a virginal teenager reading Peyton Place in the bathroom. My old man, the fireman, had counseled me as a teen never to waste a hard-on. I had wasted scores.
And it came home to roost after being fired. Ironically, about the time Chloe suddenly was the one initiating sex again. I was at home when she got home from work and there were four hours till her usual bedtime, so no more schedule conflict. We were largely “empty nesters,” the kids often away. She said I could turn on my CPAP afterwards. With Imitrex syringes to allay fear of migraine, she expected my reciprocal response. And she got it — minus reliable erections.
After my neurologist concluded I had a psychological problem, not a medical one, Chloe insisted I seek therapy. Her instructions to the first shrink were succinct: something is wrong with this husband of mine; fix him. He was more concerned about clinical depression than ED, and prescribed antidepressants. Might as well have been sugar pills — and worsened ED. He shrugged: mood first, fucking later. Chloe found another shrink.
This one disagreed with her that my online activity was sexual — Chloe had started blaming it for my ED — and said I was just avoiding the hard work of authoring a book under deadline by writing for “one reader at a time.” Chloe really didn’t like that. She found a female “sex therapist.”
This woman began by saying men are so involved in penile gratification they don’t pay homage to a woman’s erogenous zones:there are many ways to please a woman…
My wife interrupted: “That isn’t the issue, he does all that. The issue is he cannot sustain an erection. Period!” Therapist: He does…this, and that?“Yes.” You achieve orgasm?
Impatiently:”Yes, of course!” Therapist to me:Do you resent doing those things? Me:“You kidding? I love it!”
Chloe, triumphant: “See! See the problem now?” Therapist:most women would feel fortunate. Don’t think I can help you…
The therapist had two recommendations. First, a plastic tube with a suction pump to draw engorging blood into the phallus, a cock ring to prevent deflation. It was painful. It was humiliating. It was the antithesis of anything remotely emotional. It didn’t work.
Second, she referred us to a university sex-study. A young female psychology professor talked to us together. I solidified Chloe’s fury about the internet by being too candid about online encounters where ED never “came up.” But the professor was sympathetic: cybersex as a way to feel sexual without performance anxiety.
The university wanted to rule out any physical cause. A university urologist suppliedruled a “penis cuff” to wear all night; it recorded nocturnal erections. I had expected none. Where the hell were they when I needed them?
The urologist put me naked on a table, wired to monitors. He numbed my groin and syringed a drug into my dick. John Thomas unfurled to full glory. I couldn’t feel a thing. His nurse took hold — and produced a ruler! I flashed on the matriarch measuring my father’s “hammer” for my doubting mother before I was born.
The urologist studied readouts.“Unusual. BP perfectly quiet. Most men’s go quite high with the stress of this test.” It felt good to laugh. “A giant hard-on — in a good-looking woman’s hand? What stress?” She let go as if scorched.
It was miraculous as Imitrex for migraines,but! But I could trigger a spring-loaded Imitrex syringe into my quad while, with my fear of needles, injecting my dick was out of the question. He said pills were due in a year or so. I’d wait!
Leaving his office with Chloe, I sported a dramatic bulge. It lingered fifty miles home, where I put it to good use. It was like the shot broke a log jam. For a blissful time Chloe was satisfied again. We found a third shrink. A quiet, perceptive woman whose approach to depression echoed cognitive-behavior research that inspired Lou Tice’s self-actualization teachings. I doubted I ever could reclaim that state, but her therapy model resonated.
A perceptive therapist, medicine to hold migraines at bay, and evidence of Priapic resurgence at home gave me cautious hope the worst was over. Mallard reports from my favorite reservoir East o’ Mountains were promising. Given satisfying sex, it was easier to persuade Chloe my five-thousand-dollar book advance gave us leeway to place our travel trailer there. She put in for vacation and went with me when I hitched the trailer to my old 4x4 pickup to brave the snowy Cascade pass.
We left the trailer with a space heater on low to keep it warm, came home for my sled, hitched it to my ’88 Bronco and started back. Within twenty miles the headlights dimmed. A gas-station guy said it’s the alternator, make it home while you can.
We did. I transferred gear and sled to the pickup — and we made the same twenty miles before the whole electric system went dead. A cop escorted us to a shopping center. Chloe used the cell phone she bitched about me buying for my east-coast trip to call for help. Our daughter came to take Chloe and my Lab, recovered from his injuries, home. Our son’s girlfriend’s dad came to tow the sled home. Our son arrived at midnight with our old Suburban’s alternator and installed it in my Chevy pickup.
A mechanic neighbor drove his shop-in-a-van over next day. The Bronco alternator was indeed dead. So was the one from the Suburban my son put in the truck. Three dead alternators in a day: unbelievable. The local shop bench-tested the only Bronco replacement in stock — and it was defective. The mechanic installed another sent out from the city. That worked, finally.
I insisted on going back to the lake. Chloe grumbled she only had a day left of vacation. And I will be damned if the outboard jet didn’t malfunction in the middle of the reservoir. A spark-plug wire had come loose. I reattached it. Finally we set out decoys. I shot a clean triple on greenwing teal with my BPS-10 and steel threes — and our pup ran away in panic. Like all my dogs I had conditioned him to gunfire with blanks at mealtime, then retrieving dummies, before the car hit him. But now he cowered.
I calmed him and sat in the blind. He bolted, yelping piteously, and ran in circles. It took forever to grasp that the button on his electronic-collar transmitter, in my coat, was mashed against the seat. My goddamn clumsy stupidity hurt him again. I gave up and took them home. Our vet said my collar idiocy was the final straw to his post-traumatic stress from being run over.. Loud noises or sudden movement — even trash blowing in the wind — would set him off now. The poor guy deserved a break. I left him home with Chloe.
She objected to my going back alone, said maybe I should admit this was not my year for ducks. But even depressed, I was stubborn. I went.
When I got up next morning an overnight blizzard had dumped heavy snow. On the beach my sled was packed gunn’l deep in snow, too heavy to budge. I spent frozen hours scooping handfuls of snow down to slushy snow-melt, to find the drain plug frozen in place. My Bronco was sole vehicle on snow-choked roads that night, driving to a farm town for a bilge pump and hose. The radio said I-90 was closed, scores of vehicles abandoned.
Next day I wired the pump to the jet’s battery and pumped gallons of slush, with pauses to thaw me. Huge icicles reached from the roof of my trailer to the snow. It took an hour with a propane heater to thaw the ice-plug in the holding-tank outlet so I could bathe. I jockeyed lights and space heaters to stop the circuit-breaker blowing. Cold cereal, then microwave sandwiches when the circuit held. I slept fully clothed in my sleeping bag and got up with daylight, determined to hunt.
Both the sled’s tilted motors had thick icicles to the ground that would not shatter when I tried to lower them. That big jet motor weighed 150 pounds! I had to chip ice away with a screwdriver.
Finally I put decoys out, only hunter on the lake, ducks few, noon high eight degrees. Two ducks I shot were frozen solid when I picked them up. The jet sucked a rock in the impeller.
When I tried to tilt the motor up to fix it, the weight pressed me into soft mud underwater. I flooded one hip boot. The auxiliary motor wouldn’t start. The usual fifteen-minute run to shore took an hour with the hobbled jet under a bitter moon, while the temperature slid to zero. Iced floorboards were a skating rink. The steering wheel was so iced I had to steer with the spokes. My wet leg had gone so numb it took an hour in front of a heater for painful pins and needles to signal restored circulation. The lake was beginning to freeze over. Mallards had vacated for southern climes.
