Now, if you ask my mother, she will tell you that she sat me down one day and gave me “the talk.” If you pump her for details, she will not remember exactly what she said or recall any of the emotional details. To be honest, there was a moment when we sat down for “the talk,” but I remember it being so excruciatingly painful for her to discuss the subject with me that “the talk” was more like "the torture session" and ended rather abruptly. I know she never said the words “penis,” “vagina” or even “sex” for that matter. But I do remember my Robin action figure mounting my Catwoman and thinking that if Batman walked in right now, he would be pissed.My mother was always uptight about sex when I was a kid. I remember she caught me masturbating once when I was about 12. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was going at it at least five times a day and that was when there were people in the house. Man, those were good times. What I wouldn’t give to be overwhelmed by my libido just once and without that senseless guilt I used to feel because no one told me it was cool, just lock the door. It used to feel as if the center of everything was in my crotch and there was nothing more important than getting it out into the world. Laugh if you will, but on the genetic level that is exactly what’s going on with every human being born. We are the chauffeurs of our DNA, my friends, and that is all. I think we tend to not see the beauty in the male sex drive because it seems so base and monkey-like. But is a woman giving birth any different? It’s all just animal instinct, blood, come, grunting and release when you get right down to it. For me, being forced to suffer massive erections at the slightest provocation and feeling that I must do anything to ejaculate was at once awkward and profound. It was embarrassing, buty it was nature’s way of pointing me in the direction the universe wanted me to go. Thank God for gym bags. I learned about sex mostly from pornography. My uncle was a truck driver and apparently he stole quite a bit of porn from a big load he was hauling cross country. This wasn’t “Playboy” or even “Hustler” porn. This was nasty, specialty store stuff with penetration and exotic set decoration, plotlines, dialog balloons and all the hot action a young lad could ask for if he had any idea this stuff was out there in the first place. My uncle disseminated all this skank to friends and relatives profanely one Christmas, the disgusting pervert. I think it seemed OK at the time because it was the 70s and everybody was a little more curious and open about sex than they had been. Hell, my sainted mother even went to see “Debbie Does Dallas” with some friends of hers whose husband is a minister to this day if you can believe that. Would I lie to you? So for years my dad had this big pile of what, in retrospect, was some pretty awesome porn. It was from this magical nasty stash – concealed ingeniously under his side of the bed – that I realized sex had less to do with making babies than with making women make the most agonizing expressions. I must have spent five hours a day looking at those magazines while committing the sin of Onan once every half hour.Today, I can't get revved up without a bottle full of deer phermones, an upright vaccum cleaner and a truck battery attached to my nipples. Time's funny like that, ain't it?
