Pond Scum: Love is the Infinite Placed Within the Reach of Poodles
by Steve Finbow
Like the Jaffa orange, and the sultana grape, like Tim Henman at next year’s Wimbledon, I am unseeded. I’ve shot more blanks than John Wayne and am about as fertile as Pluto – and I’m not talking Mickey’s mutt. Does it bother me? No. The only problem I have is trying to persuade women I want to have sex with that, “No, of course I’m not wearing a condom. Why should I? You wouldn’t want to eat truffles through a crisp packet. Of course it’s impossible for you to become pregnant. Yes, I have had tests and, yes, the doctor explained it all to me. Who do you bloody think explained it? The Morris dancer down the street? The old lady who runs the hardware store? My barber?” “But what about STDs?” the woman asks. And I say, “STDs? STDs?” Pointing south I say, “Have you seen the size of these guys? And to enhance the effect, I’ve shaved down there.” “No, not small testicle disorder,” she says, “the other STD.” My hard-on now has all the tensile strength of masticated Plasticine. “Standard trunk dialling?” I say. “Short-term disability? Standing tremor disorder? Standard transmission difficulties? Sexual tension disorder? Because if you don’t hurry up and get your kit off,” I quip, “I’ll be suffering from all of the above.” “No,” she says, buttoning up. “No,” she says, putting on her jacket. “No,” she says again, lifting her bag and heading for the door, leaving me limp and inquisitive. “Sex-u-ally trans-mit-ted dis-ease,” she says. “Oh, that,” I shrug. “Well, I guess I’ve just been lucky,” I say, knock-knocking the cherry wood of my bed’s headboard as I hear the door slam.
By Nicholas Allanach
My semen is not able-bodied. There are no snakes on my plane. My Charlies don’t surf.
Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Harry Mathews Singular Pleasures are novels about masturbation. We have De Sade’s treatise on sexual liberation and sadism in The 100 Days of Sodom and Juliette (although I would argue that De Sade himself was a masochist); bringing us nicely to Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. We have Mailer fascinated by anal sex, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Evan S. Connell’s The Diary of a Rapist, and Anna Sewell’s classic of bestiality Black Beauty (just kidding). We have novels about pedophilia – A.M. Homes’s brave The End of Alice, also check out Ian McEwan’s short story ‘Butterflies’ in First Love Last Rites. We have Updike’s microscopic poetical/technical descriptions of genitalia. But do we have any books about impotence? I’m not impotent. I have no problem getting sequoia. I do not have erectile dysfunction or ED as it’s known in the medical profession. Oh, my god! Imagine if you were a male porn star who was in turn impotent and priapic – thank you, fluffers of the world – the director would be shouting ED! WOOD! ED! WOOD! ED! WOOD! Viagra is the drug of choice in the porn world, that’s why most male porn stars look like boiled lobsters.
Impotency in literature – and I’m not talking Alex Garland. There’s Stendhal’s Armance and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (ironically). In Inside Mr Enderby (the Enderby Trilogy is a work of comic genius) Anthony Burgess wrote:
He stealthily felt his way down to find out what was his body’s view
of this constatation, but all was quiet there, as though he were calmly
reading Jane Austen.
That made me spurt (beer from my nose). And in The Information, Martin Amis wrote:He was impotent with her every other night and, at weekends, in the
mornings too… Sometimes, when the Tulls’ schedules conspired, he
would be lazily impotent with her in the afternoon. Nor did the bedroom mark the boundary of their erotic play. In the last month alone, he had been impotent with her on the stairs, on the sofa in the sitting room and on the kitchen table.Damn! I can’t find the quote but I think it’s from Humboldt’s Gift – describing the impossibility of getting an erection, Saul Bellow wrote and Martin Amis later “borrowed” – something along the lines of “it was like trying to put an oyster in a parking meter.” Very good.
Why am I obsessed with impotency? I think all men are. It’s like stage-fright. Knowing you have to perform. A woman has the choice of lubricant. (I’ve always thought KY Jelly would be a good name for a rap singer; that and Doug E Style). What’s a man to do? Collect lollysticks and build a scaffold around it? Varnish it with Ronseal until it’s hard and shiny? Cover it in raspberry soda and stick it in the icebox until one has an empurpled popsicle?
Do you know why men are obsessed with impotency? I do. I blame George W. Bush (no, I’m not going to make a lame joke). I blame Tony Blair. I blame Anthony Eden and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Specious argument number one: the male of the species equals the West. The female of the species equals the East. Male – occidental. Female – oriental. I give you – Suez, Vietnam, and Iraq – the West’s failure to win wars – to ensure victory by guns, airplanes, submarines, and missiles; a Freudian field day. We’re too nervous to perform in case, like our warmongering leaders, we fail miserably, have to withdraw, but later in the pub boast to our friends that, yes, indeed, we’d given her a right good seeing to.
I’m sorry to say that this is the prepenultimate issue (excuse me) of Pond Scum. In a fortnight, after two years of procrastination – not procreation, obviously – I will be chronicling the differences between American and British women – ooh, my bleeding heart (and probably bleeding head). The final PS will be number 50. I’m busily preparing to move to Japan. I’ve wanted to live there ever since, as a very impressionable and pretentious teenager, I read a biography of Yukio Mishima. While in Japan, I’ll be interviewing David Peace who lives in Tokyo and is currently working on a Tokyo Trilogy – Tokyo: Year One (published June 2007), Tokyo: Occupied City, and Tokyo: Regained. I am also hoping to interview Haruki Murakami – I want to ask him about cats, spaghetti, beer, and ears. Arigato gozaimasu.
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© 2006 Me Three
