I can’t get it up’
I’ve just bought a piano, and I can’t get it up the stairs. That was the weak back-up joke I had prepared if the person I was confiding in cracked up laughing. It’s not like I didn’t have time to think up a better one. For the past few weeks, this had been the only thing going through my little head. Because this wasn’t some ridiculous gag about being a pianist, this really was my penis we were talking about here.
Men don’t talk about their manhood problems. When I imagined sharing my revelation with any of my male friends, the likely reactions swung between pity, horror and full-blown hysterics. So, after much pride and alcohol swallowing, I decided to open up to a girl. Obviously, I had to pick one where there was no shared sexual attraction – admitting you’re packing a shrivelled chipolata isn’t exactly the best way to get into a woman’s pants – but I could’ve kissed her for not laughing.
‘What did the doctors say?’ She asked instead.
My doctor has long been suspicious of me. Ever since I pretended I was depressed then blew it by asking for ‘Valium, or anything like that that’s good for a comedown’, he’s had me pinned down as a drugstore cowboy, on some addled mission to scour as many prescription pills as I could lay my grubby little hands on. ‘We’ll need to do some tests,’ he said in the voice of a headmaster admonishing a truant, ‘before we consider Viagra.’
Jesus wept! Viagra is cheating, and charlatan as I may be when wooing a woman into bed, the idea of having counterfeit sex was genuinely depressing. I don’t want a virility drug, dammit. I want my mighty one-eyed soldier to stand to attention and fire instead of surrendering and crawling into the wretched bunker of my testicles. For years, his escapades made me feel omnipotent, now I was being told I was impotent? Had it really come to this? Who would have thought my years of binge drinking, chain smoking, junk food and substance abuse would lead to dysfunction?
I had the tests done. Diabetes, hepatitis, blood pressure, thyroid function – fit as a fiddle came the results. Still reluctant to prescribe me Viagra, despite my protestations that I didn’t want any, he concluded it must be a psychosexual problem.
What the hell did that mean? Was he suggesting that I liked to dress up as my mother and stab women to get my kicks? No, he explained. Perhaps I’d been sexually humiliated recently? ‘Oh I’ve taken a blow to my manhood all right,’ I jested, ‘plenty of times thank you very much.’ He did not laugh. It’s my subconscious playing tricks on me, he insisted. I should see a therapist.
So broken, bereft, and benumbed by sorrow, I booked myself in to see a sex counsellor. She was an idiot. Advising me to build my sexual confidence by recommending me a series of infantile pop-psychology books was like me trying to explain to an astrologist how balls of plasma turn into stars by reciting Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. (Note to the NHS: If you’re going to offer a service designed to help men get their mojo back, don’t hire someone so unappealing that she’ll put any man off sex for life.)
My female friend listened to all this intently, or so I thought, until she asked the most unexpected thing any person could ask in the face of such a tragic revelation.
‘Why have you got so much hair all of a sudden? You were balding last time I saw you.’
I was furious. Was this her pathetic attempt at cheering me up? Much as I’d been loving my renewed follicles, it’s hardly bloody worth it if it made a woman find me more attractive now was it? What were we going to do when I got her into bed? Shampoo?
Annoyed, I tell her I’d been taking Propecia. It works. So what?
‘You do know that stuff makes your willy go limp, don’t you?’
I couldn’t say I did. Like everything I get sent to work, if it’s expensive yet free to review, I swallow it wholesale. But naturally, I stopped taking it. For a couple of days, nothing. Then suddenly – ping! Oh the heavenly morning glory. I literally did a pogo all day, feeling like a human tripod.
But the story doesn’t have a happy ending. In my haste to plant my flag as soon as possible, as I write this I find myself lying next to the first woman who succumbed to my drunken woos the night before, a mass of ginger and flesh, who will wake up any second demanding morning sex, and much as my mind screams ‘flee’, my soldier is charged up for action and showing no signs of hanging up his helmet. Psychosexual? I feel positively deranged