Chasing a Light Beam – Chapter 5: “Dick Doc”
DICK DOC
A hard man is good to find.
-Mae West
The martini glass was still one-third full, and the olives were intact. Ben Bob was pacing himself nicely. The recorder clicked, and he resumed speaking.
It was the summer after my junior year at Duke, and I had wasted most of the first two years on God-squad courses. Uncle Sam didn’t allow young men to tarry more than four years in college, and I knew there was no hope of completing all the pre-med subjects in time to be accepted along with my graduating class. Still, I enrolled in summer school for the equivalent of two semesters of organic chemistry to keep things moving in the right direction. Organic chemistry was the course that killed the hopes of most pre-med students at Duke. In fact, one of my pre-med roommates had switched his major to business after the organic chemistry experience. I had emancipated myself from my mother following the arguments we had over my religious “enlightenment”, and my scholarship covered neither summer school nor living expenses. I hustled a student loan and a night job at the student information center. Cell phones have made this job unimaginable today, but all student calls were made from central dorm phones, and the phone books were always missing. They called me for the numbers, and for notification of incoming calls to the male dorms. In no time, I knew the phone number for everything from the girls’ dorms to the primate lab.
I was a robot: five hours of class each morning, with daily tests on the previous day’s material; an afternoon of studying for the following day; an evening of work at the information center; studying and shooting hoops all weekend. It was the most organized I had ever been, and it resulted not only in all my bills being paid and my stomach being full, but also an “A” in first semester organic chemistry. I had no way to know it then, but that grade would eventually be the reason I got into med school.
When I got out of the Army, I moved to Atlanta with my new wife Bonnie while she completed grad school at Emory. I established state residency and applied to the Medical College of Georgia, because their policy of accepting only Georgia residents greatly improved my chances. The war was still on, and because of the automatic draft deferment, most med schools had about twenty applicants from all over the country for each spot. One of Bonnie’s friends, who was the lone student representative on the admissions board at MCG, arranged an interview for me. Without this intervention, I’m sure my application would have found the round file. My early years at Duke of farting around with missionary ideas, and moping around with love-sickness, had produced a pretty weak transcript.
My interviewer was the chairman of the admissions committee, a pathologist who coincidentally had received his undergraduate degree from Duke. He looked over my transcript and said, “It’s not very impressive, is it?” I don’t remember what I said, but then he moved on. “I notice you got an “A” in organic chem. Who was your professor?” I told him it was Dr. Brown. “Maw Brown?” He raised his voiced incredulously as he asked the question. “The only ‘F’ I ever got in my life was in Maw Brown’s organic chem class. Your MCAT scores are good enough, and if you got an “A” from that old battle ax, med school should be a breeze.” It wasn’t quite that simple, because the class was already full, but it all worked out when the first week’s encounter with cadavers sent one guy packing.
Thank the Virgin I didn’t meet Mac during the first semester with Maw Brown.
He had to stop and smile, and take another sip of vodka before going on. The glass was empty now. He closed his eyes and relived the experience, as he had done so many times before. He was a typical male.
Mary Anne Carter was a summer counselor in a Duke-sponsored camp for “special” kids. I don’t know just what kind of special they were, but I’m damn sure it wasn’t academic. I ate lunch every day in the student cafeteria after my five hours of classes. So did they. One day, one of the kids came over and lisped, “Mac wants you to come eat with us.” I didn’t know what sort of specialness Mac might have, but they were all pretty small, and I figured he couldn’t be dangerous, so I went.
Well, Mac wasn’t a kid; Mac was Mary Anne Carter. She lived in Durham and went to East Carolina University during the school year. She was cute. By Duke co-ed standards, she was gorgeous. She had freckles, and her front teeth were slightly crooked, but the two little flaws complemented one another in a way that made her even more appealing. Her hair was brownish-gold, long and straight, as if it had been ironed. She was about five feet, two, and just the right weight. She wasn’t intrinsically sexy, but everything was where it ought to be, and with me being a 20-year-old virgin, the fact that she wanted me to eat with her and the special kids was pure sex. We talked, and she wanted to go out on the weekend. I told her I was broke and a pedestrian. She could raise one eyebrow at a time, and she did so as she assured me that she had enough money and her mother’s car. So we did.
We went to a dive with a jukebox in Durham, and slopped burgers and danced. She kept her pelvis tight against me for all the slow dances, and I was hard the whole time. She smiled and pressed right into it. She had an air of confidence about her that was so different from the missionary-style of Bonnie. On the way back, we stopped in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, and made out for about an hour. I’d dated Bonnie for a year before she even kissed me. This girl was hunching me and putting her tongue down my throat and not only allowing, but demanding, mammary massage. My hand found its way into her panties, and for the first time I felt pubic hair that wasn’t my own. She was so wet that her whole bottom was slippery. And then she whispered, “We’re not going to do it tonight. I never do it on the first date.” I don’t remember for sure, but I think the next words out of my mouth were, “Wanna go out tomorrow?”
The next words out of her mouth I DO remember: “Did I mention that I’m on the pill?” Oral contraceptives were brand new. As far as I knew, I had never met a girl who took them. In my mind, the only sex issue was avoiding babies, and the embarrassment of buying condoms deserved as much credit for my virginity as did moral turpitude. And now I didn’t need one.
There was a small cemetery beside the Duke football stadium, walled in by stone. It was only about twenty feet square, but apparently it belonged to the original owners of the land, and had been preserved. We went there the next night with a blanket, and climbed over the wall. We lay among the headstones, but we were far from dead. For twenty-four hours, I had been debating whether my pledge to save myself for Bonnie and marriage was really as important as I had thought. I considered that maybe Mac was the girl for me instead of Bonnie, and I came up with a list of questions to ask her under the stars, to see if she was marriage material; if I was going to have sex, I had to be contemplating marriage. That’s the way my mind worked back then.
So, I interviewed her there, and she thought I was crazy cute. I decided she probably was the one, and that I probably did love her, so I tried to remove her bra. I couldn’t get it to work; she laughed and popped it open with a single hand behind the back, the way girls do. I removed everything else she was wearing, and all my clothes as well, including socks, because I knew for sure we needed to be completely naked. For the first time since my first year of life (a time thankfully I don’t remember), I tasted nipples in my mouth. She was DEFINITELY the one. She was completely wet again, and I moved so that she could put me inside her. Not because I was being polite, but because I didn’t know where it went.
And now the point of the story. This isn’t a coming-of-age scene. It’s a coming-before-you-get-it-in scene. My penis would not get hard. I had been walking around with a hard-on for about twenty hours a day since I was fourteen, and now that I finally had a bona-fide use for one, it didn’t happen. As Mac tried her best to stuff it in, the event occurred that made any further effort even less likely to succeed, and it was over. She was flabbergasted, and mumbled something like, “nothing like this has ever happened to me before.” I, on the other hand, was truly ALARMED, because I had never even HEARD of anything like it before. I was certain I had cancer or some other not-yet-diagnosed terminal malady.
But Mac wasn’t a quitter. The fact that I was a virgin was all the incentive she needed. The next night she took me in her mother’s car to the Durham Confederate Memorial Cemetery–I don’t know what it was about this chick and graveyards-apparently a favorite local parking spot. We joined a line of cars already there. With Mac again providing assistance with that damn bra snap, I stuck with my battle plan for total nudity, determined that my first time would be proper. Mac put forth some really inspired effort, and eventually the old weenie became firm enough to slide in with her sitting on me. It wasn’t blue steel, but it was in. In the “good parts” of novels, this is where the woman starts coming in uncontrollable surges, so after a few thrusts, I figured she was ready, and I knew I was. So I asked her. “Are you ready?” She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it, as I experienced my first ejaculation caused by someone other than myself. While I was thinking about the wonder of it all, she grabbed me for a big, wet kiss to distract me as she wiped herself with a handful of tissue. “It’s part of being a girl,” she giggled.
A police cruiser came up about then, and started at the other end of the line of cars, making certain no serious crime was being plotted against the city of Durham. I got behind the wheel and drove us naked out into the downtown streets. It was daring and exciting, but I was still wondering why my peter responded better to me than to Mac. And so it went all summer. We got together every night, and my second semester grade dropped to “C”. Sometimes the wood came more easily, sometimes not, but it was never the kind of hard-on that you could pull down, turn loose, and have it “pop” on your belly. You know, the normal kind.
Mac went back to East Carolina in the Fall, and I kept trying to get through pre-med. In the second semester, she came home and called me, and we had a date. At the end, in my apartment off-campus, I went to remove her panties, wondering if I would be able to perform. “Not on the first date,” she said, as she grabbed my hand. I couldn’t believe it. “Whatta ya mean! We screwed all summer!” “Well,” she said in her most logical tone, “after three months, it starts all over. If you want to take me home, you can come back and get me in about an hour, and it’ll be our second date.”
I surprised even myself by just taking her home. Bye-bye, Mac. Never saw her again. And, I never had a peter problem with Bonnie. Maybe I didn’t love Mac after all.
Ben Bob’s problem with his recalcitrant member would not return until after his separation from Bonnie. At first, Ben felt certain that one way or another, their family would reunite. But after six months of Bonnie hanging up every time he phoned, and far too many communications from her lawyer, one day he had an epiphany, and almost miraculously, after that he no longer wanted her.
Ben had been tied to Bonnie in one way or another since he was fourteen. He had never led the raucous life of the seed-spreader or the philanderer. Now he was a single surgeon, sterile from the vasectomy his resident buddy had performed after Bonnie’s second pregnancy, and ready to cut a wide swath through the nether regions of the female population of Lafayette. The women came out of the woodwork, some so bold as to feign urologic problems as a means of achieving his acquaintance. They all went to bed with him, and they all went home dismayed. The recalcitrant member had returned with a vengeance. Comments from the perplexed would-be lovers ranged from, “Are you gay?” to a simple, “Don’t call me again.”
It is often said that with men, the little head rules the big head. This axiom now became fact for Ben Bob. The lack of cooperation from the “little head” would change the course of his life, both socially and professionally. Years later, he would reflect and wonder about the direction of his life, had Viagra been available twenty years earlier.
For now, Ben Bob could both sympathize and empathize with the sufferers of impotence. He didn’t know for certain whether he responded to Maggie because he loved her, or whether he loved her because he could respond to her. Either way, he ended his planned conquests and stuck with what worked. He married her.
His own experiences made it easy for him to see that there was a huge market of men-gone-limp just waiting for an interested expert to come along. And they were insured. Serendipity was working overtime to make Ben Bob their Dick Doc.
