Rules of the Game (60 page)

Later in the day, while I'm watching
South Park
on Comedy Central, an advertisement for
Girls Gone Wild
flashes across the screen. This is my first exposure to anything even resembling porn during the Experiment, and, in my weakened state, the montage of censored breasts and college girls making out seems like the greatest filmed entertainment our culture has ever produced.

I press the back button on the TiVo, and watch the commercial again, pausing to admire a few choice Mardi Gras revelers. As my hand slips under my belt, I have an epiphany: When I touch myself but don't ejaculate, I don't feel guilty or unclean. This means that I never had masturbation guilt; it was ejaculation
guilt the whole time. And this makes sense. The trope that every sperm is sacred is hammered into childrens' heads, by everything from the Bible to Monty Python. Even in the second century, the philosopher Clement of Alexandria warned would-be auto-eroticists, “Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted.”

So I'm not crazy: By wasting a load of sperm, I'm harming the future of my species. Or maybe I'm helping it. Depends on who you ask.

Thirty push-ups.

South Park
is back on and I'm safe. The kids are on a road trip with Cartman's mother. And Cartman is calling his mom a slut and a whore.

I look at her, all crudely drawn circles and rectangles, and think that it would be awesome to sleep with her.

My hand is down my pants. I think I'm losing it: I'm getting turned on by Cartman's mom, or at least the demographic of desperate housewives that she represents.

Thirty push-ups. I'm going to be buff in no time.

Then Kimberly calls. She is drunk. She says she misses me. I miss her, too, and we've never even met. We have phone sex until every nerve in my body is tense and ready to explode. I start imagining what it would be like to pull out of her and just spray all over like a tube of toothpaste hit by a hammer.

I apologize for the simile. But I keep teasing my body and it's taking its revenge on my mind.

More push-ups. Until I can't do any more.

I can't go on like this.

Perhaps it's not enough to simply swap habits. The entire concept of the Experiment could be a misunderstanding of the wisdom of Rivers Cuomo. Maybe the magic energy shift happens not through refraining from shooting out a milky white fluid, but from actually being desireless. This is, after all, what most great spiritual disciplines advise. To paraphrase the Buddha, craving leads to suffering. And I am definitely suffering, which is pathetic considering that it's only been six days.

Crystal calls and updates me on her first day of self-restraint. Unlike me, she did due diligence. With Google on her side, she discovered a spiritual backbone to the Experiment that I've completely neglected—more out of laziness than ignorance.

“You're just withholding and that's not healthy,” she says.

“I know. It hurts when I sit now. I'm worried that I'm going to get prostate cancer or something.”

“See,” she says self-righteously. “You're supposed to take the life energy and, instead of holding it back like a dam, circulate it through your body.”

“And how does that work exactly?”

“It's supposed to be done with a partner,” she hints.

She sends me links to Taoist and Tantric Websites with information about sexual gurus like Mantak Chia, Stephen Chang, and Alice Bunker Stockham. From Stockham's research, I learn a new phrase: “coitus reservatus”—sex without ejaculation. From Mantak Chia, I learn that it's possible to have an orgasm without actually ejaculating. And from Stephen Chang, I learn the deer exercise, which is based on ancient Taoist monks' observations of the potent, long-living deer, specifically the way it wiggles its tail to exercise its butt muscles. The ritual is supposed to spread semen from the prostate to other parts of the body. I need to do this immediately.

I sit on the toilet with my laptop computer open at my feet and follow the directions, rubbing my hands together to generate heat, then cupping my balls. I place my other hand just below my navel and move it in slow circles. Then I switch positions and repeat. For some reason, I can't imagine a deer doing this.

For part two of the exercise, I tighten my butt muscles, imagining air being drawn up my rectum, and hold it. Then I relax and repeat. It is sort of like doing butt push-ups.

The pain persists, but now it's mingled with embarrassment. I'd rather get caught masturbating than doing butt push-ups.

Before going to sleep, I call Kimberly and attempt Mantak Chia's method of orgasm without ejaculation, hoping it will provide some relief.

When she pulls a dildo out of her bedside table and narrates its next moves in graphic detail, I can't take it anymore. I press on my perineum, tighten my
PC muscle, and do a butt push-up. It just barely holds back the flood. However, I don't have a dry orgasm, either.

“Oh my God, I just came so hard, baby,” Kimberly gasps. “Did you come?”

“I can't yet.” All I've done is make the pain worse. Why do I keep doing this to myself?

There is silence on the other end. It is not a comfortable silence.

“I'll tell you what,” I decide. “When I see you in New York in four days, I'll really come. I think it would be amazing to end this experiment with you.”

“But what about the thirty days?” she asks, more relieved than concerned.

Fuck the thirty days. I am willing to fail this experiment for what may be love. In fact, any excuse to end it will suffice.

As I attempt another of Crystal's ridiculous exercises—the straw meditation, which involves imagining the orgasmic energy being sucked up my spine and into my head—I remember the night I learned to masturbate.

I was at overnight camp in Wisconsin, and for some reason I will never comprehend, the two cool kids in my cabin decided to show everyone how to beat off.

I lay in my top bunk bed and watched as Alan snuck into the counselor's area and returned with a red can of Gillette shaving foam. He stood in the center of the room in his blue camp shirt and dirty white briefs, as if performing theater in the round, and addressed the nine other pubescent boys of the Axeman 2 cabin.

“Just squirt some into your palm. Then you gotta move your hand like this.” He stuffed his fist into his underpants and began the demonstration. His loyal follower, Matt, hopped off his bunk bed, squished out some shaving cream, and joined him.

We were too young to know that masturbation was supposed to be a private act, its revelation to peers punishable by mockery and ostracism. In my pre-sexual brain, it was just another group activity, like archery or orienteering.

Hank, sickly and effeminate, rolled out of bed and distributed dollops of shaving cream to everyone else in the cabin. We all got to work.

The sight, in retrospect, was ridiculous. People often wish to be innocent
again, but there is no such thing as innocence. Only ignorance. And the ignorant are not blissful; they are the butt of a joke they're not even aware of.

I didn't come, or even feel much pleasure. I don't remember if anyone else came, either, but, according to Alan, that was the goal. It was a race and, after camp ended, Hank won: He wrote me a letter, excited because he'd masturbated and “a few drops of come even came out.”

Almost a year later, lying in bed at home, I began pulling at myself one night. I thought of a story a friend had told about going to the movies with a girl from school and getting a hand job. I extracted every detail from him: I'd never kissed a girl before, or even been within kissing range.

As I touched myself that night, I imagined it was me getting that hand job in the movie theater. Soon, pressure begin to build and I seemed to be separating from reality. My breath caught in my throat, my body was seized by what felt like rigor mortis, and then it happened. A small pool dribbled out of the tip. I reached over my head and turned on the reading lamp next to my bed, careful not to mess it up. Then I conducted an examination. Because of the way Hank had described his come, I thought it would be clear, like raindrops. But instead it was a little viscous puddle with swirls of cloudy white and a few transparent patches.

As I write this, I realize for the first time why my sexual fantasy is fooling around in public places like clubs, theaters, and parties, where no one can see what's going on, since that's the image to which I had my first orgasm.

“You have to check this out,” I told my nine-year-old brother the next day. “Follow me.”

He padded into the bathroom behind me. I stood on his toilet, dropped my shorts, and thrust my hips out so that when I came, it would dribble into the sink and not make a mess. Then I got to work.

Outside of sweat and tears, I'd never known my body to make a product that wasn't waste. I was proud. I was an adult now.

I wake up next to Gina. She'd stopped by after bartending the night before for a quickie. But it was 3:00 a.m., and in addition to being tired, I was desireless. She took it personally.

“You're over this, aren't you?” she asks in the morning.

“What do you mean?” I protest, though I know full well what she means. In addition to my new effort to limit my desire, ever since I'd started talking to Kimberly, I'd grown more distant. “Is this because I didn't have sex with you? In twenty-one days, everything will be back to normal.”

“It's not that. I love you, but I have to love myself enough to realize that you don't want this.”

Above my bed, there's a small painting she made for me in happier times. She takes it off the wall and lays it in her lap. I watch her, sitting upright in the bed, her hands shaking as she struggles to remove the backing on the frame. The latches holding it in are too small and stubborn for her trembling hand.

She eventually clicks them open and pulls off the back of the frame. Instead of removing the painting, she takes the backing, pinches the black paper on the inside, and tears it off. Beneath, there is a hidden note she'd evidently written when she first gave me the present. I never even knew it was there.

She throws the torn backing onto my chest, then walks out of the house. I pick it up and read:

“You will be a great husband one day when you are ready and find the one. You will be an amazing father to cute intelligent baby Neils. You are going to hurt me. But I will always love you.”

My face begins to swell, my eyes and nose feel warm and flushed, and suddenly tears begin leaking out.

I'm going to miss her. And I will always respect her: the picture frame gambit was the work of a true breakup artist.

Tomorrow, I'm finally going to see Kimberly. As my other relationships have fallen apart, she has remained loyal. I feel like we've met before, slept together before, pushed each other around in grocery carts before. There are moments when I actually think I love her, but I know it's just a combination of attraction, obsession, and curiosity. I'm sure she feels the same way about me.

That is, until she calls to tell me she has to take a last-minute job as a production assistant in Miami and won't be able to meet in New York.

“I don't have a choice,” she says. There is a hostile, self-defensive tone to her voice that I've never heard before. “I really need the money. I have like thirteen dollars in the bank right now.”

I'm crushed. I've been so fixated on meeting Kimberly in New York that I can't imagine being there without her. I start to tell her that.

“Don't,” she snaps. “There's nothing I can do.”

“I'm not upset,” I say, upset. “This is just really unexpected. But it's not the end of the world. Maybe I can visit you in Miami after New York.”

“I may have to disappear for a few days,” she says, her anger melting into tears. “I just need to think about us.”

The more we talk, the more emotional she gets. The more emotional she gets, the more she withdraws. “So you're not going to meet me in New York and you can't make a plan for Miami?” I feel like she's put a cigarette out in my heart. “I need to know that I'm going to see you.”

“You're making me cry.” She's yelling at me now. I'm dealing with emotions; my logic is useless, my anger counterproductive. All that's left is frustration, paranoia, and a sickness in every cell in my body that was anticipating the end of the 30 Day Experiment tomorrow and the beginning of a fairy-tale romance.

“If you have to disappear,” I press, “then first give me a time when I can see you, so I have something to look forward to. Otherwise, this has all just been a fantasy relationship.”

“A fantasy relationship?” Evidently, I've said the wrong thing again. “I wanted to see you so badly and you know that. I wanted to be your girlfriend.” She stops sobbing, then hits me where I'm weakest. “Don't blame this on me. You're the one who's impotent on the phone.”