Chapter 1: sharpening skills

Let me take you back to a troubling time in my life.

It's last year.
I have a problem.

My problem is named Dick Jones.

No, I'm not jonesing for dick. Ha ha, very funny. Get your mind out of the gutter. Well, at least out of that particular gutter.

Dick Jones is the name I attached to that monster between my legs.

Lots of guys give their member a pet name. I'm not one of them. At least I didn't used to be.

But shit, I figured if it's gonna ruin my life the least I can do is give it a name.

I know what you're thinking: how can the old one-eyed worm possibly get a man into trouble?
Okay, that's not what you're thinking. You're thinking, Well of course it'll ruin your life -- if you let it. So don't let it. You just have to keep the big head in charge. It's okay to let your downstairs neighbor have a party every once in a while, just make sure things don't get so rowdy that somebody calls the police.

See, that's where you don't understand. This is not a normal boy-and-his-penis relationship.

Dick doesn't get out of control.

Dick gets in control. Literally.

Yes, I know what 'literally' means. I'm not just saying 'literally' to mean 'no, it's really almost like.' I mean Literally, Meaning 1.

I mean when something catches my eye and Dick wakes up, he takes control. He controls what I say, what I do, and he makes pretty damn convincing arguments when it comes to what I think. And he doesn't let go until he's been satisfied.

No bullshit. I'm serious.

Go ahead. Take a minute to wrap your head around it.
Your other head, you freak.

Ready?

At this point you probably think I'm writing this from jail. While somebody else's Dick takes control of me. Whoops, sorry, some of you are squeamish about that. Believe me, I'm not gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But I'm not incarcerated. I'm actually typing this from the corner booth of a coffee shop. To my knowledge there are no warrants for my arrest, there are no teenage girls' fathers waiting for me at my apartment with a shotgun, and I haven't bankrupted myself with hookers and porn. (Well, there's that $30 a month to suze.net, but I've had that account since Usenet dried up three years ago. And I've been meaning to cancel... )

So how does a man who's a slave to his own Dick not wind up behind bars on some indecent exposure or public fornication or sexual harassment or rape charge?

Simple: Dick is very persuasive.

Yeah, you said that already -- you can't control yourself.
No, I said Dick controls me. But that's not what I'm talking about.

It's not just me. Dick controls whoever he wants to control.

This is the part where they dub in that needle-running-off-the-record sound.

Hey, nobody said this would be light reading. We'll just dive in with an example. How about the first time? Everybody loves First Time stories.

Oh, but I haven't even introduced myself. You need to know a little bit about me to really appreciate my tale. After all, if some 6'2" blue-eyed star quarterback told you his wang was running amok and he was having his way with gorgeous women, you'd say, "so what else is new?"

Well, I don't play football. My eyes aren't blue. I'm not 6'2". And until recently I was no stud.

I'm, um... average. Yeah. Average. We'll go with that.
What? Shall I be clearer? Okay.

I work in I.T.

Doh!

(For those of you who've never worked in a... who've never worked, I.T. is not Spielberg's latest effort to recapture the lost profits of youth. It's Information Technology. The computer department. You know, the people who show up at your desk when you've installed one too many screensavers, and the faceless trolls in the basement who deleted your five gigabyte MP3 collection. I'm the one who enabled the porn filter on the proxy server. Hey, sport, get a DSL connection and whack off at home -- that's what we do. Your constant porn-hoarding was fucking up the NetDoom tournament. By the way, remember when the no-porn rule first kicked in and you got Access Denied four hundred eighty-seven times? We do. It was funny how you'd always enter a google search for something work-related right after your usual site came up Access Denied. Not fooling anyone down here. And the CD-ROM drive tray cupholder joke? It was hilarious... in 1995. If you stop one of us in the hallway to tell us that joke one more time, we'll set fire to the building. And we'll take your Swingline. Seriously. Stop it.)

So I'm... a computer geek. Dockers and polo shirt weekdays, dockers and t-shirt weekends. Body by Burger King. (Not fat, just cuddly.)

And I'm not young anymore. Twenty-seven. Shut up, old-timers, that's not young. You remember when you were twenty-seven? You remember that moment?

That horrible moment?

The one where you're sitting in a park, or at the mall, or in the cafeteria at work if they have one, or... well, wherever it is that you like to people-watch.

Where you're looking around, like you do every day, doing what every guy does -- subconsciously grading every female that walks by. Ladies, don't get all huffy on me now, it's not what you think. We're not looking for flaws. We're looking for assets. And we're seeing them everywhere. Okay, almost everywhere. Still, a gal's gotta be pretty far gone not to register something positive on the old boner meter. You think we don't notice you because your husband or your boyfriend or that cute guy you keep "accidentally" bumping into at the corner Starbucks doesn't notice you. (No, not that Starbucks. The one across the street.) But we notice.

And while the eyes are scanning each woman for that thing we can build a fantasy around, whether it's ass or tits or legs or hips or lips or your walk or your outfit or your hair or your smile -- well, YES, you're an object until you say Hi, or make positive eye contact; we work with what we're given -- we're starting to imagine what we'll say to you, what we'll have in common, how we'll impress you, what your voice sounds like, what we'll see in your eyes, what your skin feels like, what we'll talk about when we wake up in each other's arms the next morning -- hey, some of us are romantics...

Did I have a point? Oh, right.

The moment.

So we're running through these scenarios, a hundred times a minute if necessary, and one day we notice we've been hitting the same roadblocks over and over again. We don't know you anymore. We can't imagine how to hook up with you anymore, because we don't belong in any of the places we imagine you going to. We've lost the familiar bait off the hook, and we're wondering why if we haven't changed since high school we're suddenly not cool anymore.

Wham! In a moment, guy's old.

See, we're creatures of habit. We look at all females, but we do tend to hover around whatever we got used to seeing when we first woke up to the mystery of the opposite sex. So when we get to be 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, we're still looking at eighteen-year-olds. We're looking at 23-year-olds too, but that's too, as in "I can have this, and I can have that too!" We only see the buffet table getting longer. We don't know we're getting older. There's nothing in our psyche that says "she's too young for you" -- at least, nothing with any influence. About the best we can do is "she's not legal yet" -- and you underage girls need to cut that teasing shit out because it's not easy to figure out. Now, those of us lucky enough to log actual flight time come to understand women better and actually form preferences, and for these lucky bastards the idea of an eighteen-year-old may be less appealing as the palate becomes more sophisticated. Not that any of them would turn down a no-strings-attached roll in the hay with a hot high school graduate, but they're going to review their options first (including careful analysis of the various costs). The rest of us shlubs with the low batting averages never lose our taste for the just-legal because we're desperate for any taste at all.

So it comes as quite a shock to think that all these beautiful experiences we could have been having for the last five to ten years if we'd just gotten around to it -- around to building self-confidence, or building muscles, or building conversation skills, or building an appreciation for the girls about as good-looking as we are -- suddenly those could-be's are could-have-been's. Suddenly the field is narrowed, we get fewer chances, and we've had no practice. Then some of us look in the mirror and see that those years of living like we'd be nineteen forever have added a few things. Like pounds. Or an unfashionable wardrobe. Or "relaxed" grooming habits.

Point? Let's see. Getting old. Twenty-seven. "I.T. Average." First time.

First time! I was sixteen, and my cousin's family was visiting, and she...

Oh, right. First time with Dick.

I was sixteen, and my cousin's family was visiting, and he...

Okay, seriously now.

Wendy from Accounts Receiveable.
Wendy A. Cummins. (Go ahead, snicker. I'll wait.)

Big deal, so I shtupped a girl at work.
No, you don't understand. This is Wendy.
And I'm... Average.
Wendy had no business being in our Accounts Receiveable department. Our Accounts Receiveable clerks are... well, they're married, we'll leave it at that.

Wendy was a misfit. Miss Fit. She belonged in Sales. Outside Sales. Of adult beverages. But she was shy, so she went into accounting.

A shy cute girl who was good with numbers? Every geek's fantasy. They were all trying to get their hooks into her before her coworkers rubbed off on her and she started eating HoHos and wearing sweatpants to work. The field techs in our department fought over who got her trouble tickets. More than once they accused each other of hacking her system just to break something so they could go fix it, talk to her. Maybe show her how to fix it herself next time with a hand over hers on the mouse. Maybe have to dig around under her desk for a while looking for that loose cable. Here's your loose cable, Miss Cummins.

Even the second-level guys got into the act. Suddenly somebody had to meter traffic in the closet nearby. Somebody else had to tone and tag old wiring. Somebody else changed the login scripts and wondered if she could test it "as a typical user in her department."

But I wasn't interested in Wendy. Sure, my cerebellum was interested, but Wendy worked where I worked, and I have a strict policy against dipping the pen in the company ink. And let me tell you, that policy had been sorely tested on numerous occasions. Well, one. And she might have really not meant to bump into me. But still, it's the principle.