With the end of the fiscal year, I’ve been thinking a lot about my finances:  mostly, that I should get some.

As a matter of fact, I might need to, once again, get a day job.

It’s okay, because when I made the decision to become an actor, I also, implicitly, made the decision to take on some dubious jobs to support my dubious choice of vocation.

To point:  in order to help pay my way through acting school and my subsequent Off-Broadway obsession, I was a nude model, a weight room supervisor, a Go-go dancer at New York nightclubs, a yoga teacher, a caterer, and a math tutor.  I even got paid to rollerblade around Manhattan with a flag advertising a crappy Chelsea hotel.  Yep, I was THAT uncool asshole.

But the weirdest (and briefest) job I ever had was that of a “sperm donor.”

In my early teens, the concept of a “sperm clinic” seemed like an urban myth –  like alligators in NYC toilets, or Mikey from “Life” cereal’s cranium exploding from a Pop Rocks/Coke fission reaction, or the existence of a compassionate conservative.

The idea that all my crestfallen clumps of Kleenex could actually be galvanized into scientific advancement and cash (most importantly) was mind-boggling!  For a guy in his early twenties, this boundless reward paradigm seemed too good to be true, like a masturbation Ponzi scheme or something.

“Uh, you mean the embarrassing shit I do crunched up like Quasimodo under my comforter doesn’t HAVE to be a degrading exercise in waste disposal and spot removal?  Hmmmm… please continue….”

It was the late nineties, pre-Google, so I went to the Yellow Pages.  Now I believe Yellow Pages are only used by juiced up ‘roid monkeys to show off forearm power, but pre-2000, they were still used to find businesses and delicious eateries.

I located a place in Chelsea, Manhattan, called Repro Lab.  Since I was impoverished and in my early twenties, I figured donating sperm would be a great way to make money to take girls out on dates.  (Irony alert: at the time I didn’t know what an irony alert was).

For some reason, I was inordinately nervous when I showed up.  It was all on the “up-and-up,” I told myself — after all it was in the Yellow Pages!!!  But as I stood outside the unassuming brownstone on West 30th street, my mouth turned to cotton and my adam’s apple cantilevered into the back of my gullet.  It seemed seedy (no pun intended) and illicit, which thankfully, made me want to masturbate.  So I stepped up into the building.

The facility itself was white and sterile, a hint of lemon zest Lysol in the air.  Working reception was a svelte, blonde woman.  Her hair was pulled back into an angry bun.  Dark horn-rimmed glasses framed blue eyes.  And, of course, a lab coat, one that was juuuuust tight enough to display furtive C’s.  She was the quintessential, cliched MTV music video version of the incredibly hot nerd.

Since I was flying blind (fitting for a story about masturbation), I immediately assumed that the sexy scientist was part of the package:  she would escort me into a sultry bedroom where where she would rub me with exotic oils and whisper in a Russian accent and, together, we would make cock yogurt that would save the world.

I gave her my best dimply smile and told her that I had an appointment.  Over the phone, they seemed pretty interested to make the appointment when I told them I attended Princeton University.  Granted, it didn’t matter that I was a shitty student once I got there or that I went to mostly black public schools growing up, or that genetically I have the melanin and constitution of an albino 6 year-old with lupus — NOPE!  All that mattered was that they could label my samples as “Ivy League.”  It was stupid.  And I was in.  Well, dad, that Princeton degree finally came in handy (alas, pun intended again)!

Lusty lab technician gave me tons of forms to fill out, all pertaining to the life and times of me and my wittle babymakers.

“Excuse me, I’m just agreeing to have my sperm used for research purposes right now, right?  There’s no agreement to have it, like, to make babies.”

“Right now, we have to test it.  And then we can reach a new agreement later.”

I wasn’t sure, but for some reason, I started to get anxious as I faux-read the forms and carelessly scrawled my name wherever I saw a horizontal line.  I gave it all the attention of an iTunes user agreement.

“Come with me,” said the blonde nerd in the lab coat.  I audibly laughed at the phrase “come with me,” but she just gazed at me deadpan and wheeled down a hallway.

I got up and looked around the waiting room with a shit-eating grin.  Woohoo!!!  I was going to get an old-fashioned from an incredibly hot Eastern European, is anyone else seeing this???

She led me to a nondescript white door, which she perfunctorily opened and nodded for me to enter.

Here we go…. Whaaaaa?

It was not a Rudolph Valentino red satin boudoir, to say the least.

Here’s the best way to describe the room that was supposed to seduce me into producing an orgasm:  Imagine a dentist’s office…. And then don’t change anything.

How so, you ask?

Well, mostly because, smack dab in the middle of the room, there was a fucking dentist’s chair!!!  No bed, no couch, no kitchen table, nope!  Just a torquoise vinyl dental chair on a slight incline.  And, apparently to make the dentist office correlation even stronger, annoying Muzak piped into the room.

Nothin' says MOOD like MOLAR CLEANING

But wait!  There’s more….

In front of and high above the chair there was a TV — in probably the same location that TV’s are in the penitentiary, I imagine, when orange-jumpsuited prisoners watch Jerry Springer from cafeteria benches.  It dawned on me that the inaccessibility of the TV is important in both the pen and the donor room in order to protect it from lunchtime brawls and violently supersonic spooge, respectively.

To top it off — the sexy piece de resistance — 5 stainless steel surgical trays with pornography magazines haphazardly strewn on top of them fanned out around the dentist’s chair like a perverted poker hand.

I looked at MTV hottie as if there was some sort of mistake.  Nonoononnonooooo, I signed up for the special “Ivy League” package, where you peel off your lab coat, gently lay me down onto Egyptian cotton, and then slather my balls with baby oil, right?  Not this, not the “Marathon Man” Laurence Olivier Nazi “is it safe?” torture room!

The clinician continued her instructions with a monotone to match her vacant expression:

“You can either choose to watch a video or you can use the magazines.”

She gestured to the television and trays with a grand sweeping gesture as if to say “All of this could be yours!”

She then handed me a skinny glass cylinder without a word.  My mind was teeming with questions, both appropriate and inappropriate.

“Okay, so I just like… in here?”

“As much as you can,” she said.

I was getting apprehensive.  “How much time do I have?”

“The sooner the better. There’s another appointment in a half an hour.”

A part of me suspected the conversation I was having wasn’t actually the  conversation I thought I was having.  What did she mean by “as much as you can?”  How quick was the turnaround?  And how was I supposed to get my, uh, contribution to the scientific community into this little tube? Do I squirt into a sponge and then squeegee it into the tube?  Do I attempt a straight shot right out of the tap?  Or do I do more of a Michael Jordan arcing jump shot?  Should I lay on the dentist’s chair or should I stand?

The logistics seemed untenable.

I struck me as odd that the magazines were just randomly assorted on the trays.  Shouldn’t they be hermetically sealed, vacu-sealed, or at the very least in their own individual Ziploc bags?  How many sperm-encrusted male digits have flipped through this June’s “Hustler?”  Hypochondria and homophobia joined forces in my mind and then snuggled into the growing pit in my stomach.

I laid down on the crinkly paper covering the dental chair and looked up at the rectangular flourescent lights and water-damaged Celotex ceiling tiles.  I felt like I was about to jerk myself off in a high school hallway.  Dammit, I was being cockblocked by the entire room….

And now I had 23 minutes left!

Reluctantly, I shimmied my tattered Levis and Fruit of the Looms down towards my ankles, where they bunched up over my scuffed-up Adidas.  I took a deep breath and unfurled a centerfold.

…. My penis just laid there sideways looking like a sad one-eyed Sarah MacLachlan PSA puppy.

Serious panic began to set in.  I had a contract.  A tube that needed filling.  And a penis on a deadline!  I had to focus.  For the first time ever, I experienced performance anxiety… with myself.  There was no time for gentle coaxing and creative narratives.  I needed blood flow STAT.  My rough hand became Ike Turner to my scared Tina of a penis.

I grabbed another glossy magazine.  Nothing.  Everything seemed so fake.  Dry wall.  Mildew.  Was the Muzak getting louder?  A bead of sweat began it’s excruciating trickle.  Fuuuuuck!  Close your eyes, Luke.  Use the force, Luke, use the force…. “Star Wars”…. Hmmm…. Princess Leia in “Return of the Jedi?”  A pang of desire shot through my loins, dredged up from a Proustian pubescent memory of young Carrie Fisher, sweaty, scantily clad and chained to Jabba the Hutt.  It was a bizarre and gross image.

And it was working….

19 minutes later, I was victorious!  Yes, I had to twist awkwardly on the chair to fashion a point-blank projectile into the tube, but I did it!  A feeling of enormous accomplishment coursed through my veins!

I burst forth from the dentist’s office, walked into the lobby, and wielded my frothy specimen in the air like Excalibur.  Surely, this prodigious progeny of nut was going to be met with a standing ovation by the staff and the sexy nerd!

Instead, a chubby guy with a clipboard pointed me to a sort of check out counter where another female technician unceremoniously grabbed my steaming tube without so much as giving it a sommerlier’s circular whiff and smirky nod.

Nope, not even a word.

“Is that a good amount?” I asked haughtily, fishing for validation.

“It looks fine,” the woman said, without looking up from the sheaf of paperwork in front of her.

“Cool,” I said and then slowly turned, waiting for… something more.

I walked out into a Manhattan dusk as my feeling of accomplishment faded and turned into something that felt like ennui.  Drained and depressed,  I plopped down on the stoop of the brownstone and looked out over the Hudson River.  Brilliantly amber and violet streaks were painted across an otherwise azure sky, courtesy of Newark and Jersey City toxins.

Unzipping my backpack, I took out my rollerblades and thought “Too bad I can’t get paid to rollerblade around the city doing something.  Maybe advertising something.  That would be cool….”

Don’t you just hate 9/11?

It sucks, right?

Let me preface this rant by saying that I’m — IN NO WAY — belittling the tragedy of 9/11.  As a matter of fact, I think it goes without saying that 9/11 was the worst catastrophe in American history (well, if you’re not black, Native American, Mexican… or a woman… or a child in the early 1900’s… ANYWHO, IT SUCKED!).

The reverberations of the destruction have spread throughout almost every aspect of life in the United States, but obviously, the most palpable effects are seen within the practices and policies of the travel industry.

Clusterfuckery at airport security became one of the first casualties of war.  Suddenly, everyone was a potential threat: much to the chagrin of whites and the bemusement of blacks.  Power trips ensued.  Barely qualified TSA agents donned latex gloves and started to studiously scan ID and travel documents like mouth-breathing GED Sherlock Holmes’.

The process is laborious and seemingly always the same.  You approach the agent and hand him your ID and boarding pass.  He then puts it on his wooden kiosk and looks at it.

Then he looks at you.

Then he looks at the document.

Then he looks at you.

Then he looks at the document.

Then he takes out his magic TSA flashlight and does some sort of CSI DNA blacklight spooge search on your drivers license or passport.

Then he looks at you.

Meanwhile the guy in line behind you is doing an exaggerated sigh of exasperation, a sigh you recognize because it’s usually reserved for grocery store lines when the fuckface in front of you is writing the cashier a personal check to buy a People magazine and a Kit-Kat bar.

At this point, you put on your best “I’m not a terrorist expression” for the guy doing all the looking.  Often, if he’s taking an exorbitantly long amount of time, you combine your facial expression with a slight shoulder shrug-smirk of “Hey, Jerome, I’m a fuckin’ American like you, don’t make this about racial reparations!  I’ve forgiven you for Tyler Perry, dammit!”

He writes a secret code in red Sharpie on your boarding pass and hands it back to you.  You are convinced that the mysterious message is a directive to future TSA agents do an aggressive body cavity search.

And then comes the protracted inanity of the metal detector.  The line of people on the way to the detector is infused with the unadulterated joy of a Bataan Death March.

But you’re an expert traveler!  Pshaw!  You’ll zzzzzzip through!  Everything is set and you’re ready to —  crap, you forgot that you had to remove your laptop.  Done….

What’s that, sir, the iPad too?  But, I thought…. Okay, I wasn’t aware of that, sir.  FUCK YOU, STEVE JOBS!!! …. Huh?  Oh, this isn’t a liquid.  It’s actually a creme, sir.  Fine, throw it away then, I don’t need protection from the Ozone …. And these nail clippers are from Walmart, they don’t even work — got it!  In the garbage…. I  just — oh fuck — I totally forgot about that bottle of water in my backpack, sir, I’m not trying to smuggle it or something.  CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!  Done.

But you’re never done.

Because, oops, your shoes are still on.  Damn you, pesky double-knotted shoelaces on my  boots!… Hurrrrrry… a bead of sweat starts a quiet trickle down your forehead.   Your fingers seem to be intentionally fucking with you…. Hurry…. And they’re off.  Done.

Now, you’re ready to go through.

DING DING DING!

Oh fuck, my belt.  Sorry!  DING DING DING!  The nickel in my back pocket?  Are you fuckin’ serious?!  What do you mean “where’s my boarding pass,” sir?  I put it in one of the 6 bins I used on the little, uh, treadmill thingy.  Fine!  I’ll get it, sir.  Here it is?  Am I done NOW?

During this, of course, the same person from before has crept up behind you now.  He is doing his best vocal rendition of a “I can’t believe this retard” sigh of exasperation.  He couples it with a foot stomp and a little head shake.

You pass through the detector.  NO DING! YES!

But it’s not over, fuckstick, not even close.  The stress has just begun.  Because now you have to collect your bins and belongings with the dexterity, alacrity and timing of a bank heist expert/Vegas magician.  Everything is coming out fast furious and you start scooping up your shit with the frenzied panic of an “I Love Lucy” candy factory conveyor belt scene — you even end up having to stuff your wallet in your mouth.  (Note to reader:  if you don’t get that reference, watch better TV.  Also, kill yourself.)

Once that ordeal ends, and you spit out your wallet, you put your boots back on, recompose yourself, and coolly begin your trek to your gate.  Usually, it’s a mere 80 yards to your gate, but since you’re in a severe rush this time, the gate has up and decided to be about 2,500 yards from security.  You make the journey in a slight jog, using all the moving walkways, which literally saves you 4, maybe even 5, whole seconds of time.   When you finally see your gate number, blisters are starting to form on your feet.

But finally, you can sit.

So you look for a seat next to a hot chick before you realize that hot chicks only fly Virgin America.  Still, there are two seats open next to each other so you can spread out now.  Relief.  You finally sit down to chill.  You think maybe it’s time to Poke ex-girlfriends on Facebook, Google yourself, or write a hilarious tweet (@billdawes) about penises when you realize that you left your brand new MacBook Pro somewhere in a beige bin back at that fuckin’ security station, which is now almost two miles away, possibly in a different zip code.

At this point, the plane has just started to board, so you quickly ask someone “unbeknownst to you” (an Asian female is preferable because none has ever committed a crime more than a class-C misdemeanor in the history of recorded time) to “watch” your stuff real quick — 5 minutes max, you tell her — and you race back through the airport like OJ Simpson sprinting towards his Hertz rental car.  Or OJ Simpson sprinting away from the scene of a double homicide.  Or O.J. his senior year at USC.  My point is, your sprint is very OJ-like.

OJ running

When you get to security with daggers in your lungs, menisci of snot bubbles bursting in your nostrils like molten lava, you swivel around for an agent to whom you can report your missing MacBook.  You find a humanoid heffalump who, laconic and annoyed, tells you “I’ll go get someone” and proceeds to walk away with the urgency of decaying lettuce.

Finally, someone comes back and looks at you with a skeptical grimace.  When you tell him that you left a 13” silver MacBook Pro in one of the plastic Tupperware bins going through he security, his reaction is probably the exact same as if you had stated, “I declare Jihad on Jetblue and on your stupid face.  LALALALLALALALA!  (I can’t spell a ululation, obviously.)

This TSA “manager” is sure you’re a terrorist so he puts you through an irrelevant rigamarole in order to make sure that you’re not pulling some sort of flim-flam sham.  He asks you easy, pertinent questions like “What’s the serial number of your MacBook?”  And all you can do is shrug and point to the MacBook he’s holding and say “That’s mine!” over and over again like some kindergartener with Autism.

Finally, you fill out some forms, receive some more hairy eyeballs, and you get your MacBook.  The plane has already fully boarded so you race back to your gate like Lindsay Lohan dashes to a dish of grade-A coke.

The rest of your stuff is where you left it on the chair, with no one in sight.  It has been unguarded and subject to all sorts of dubious shit from all sorts of unbeknownst people.  You manage to sling everything over your limbs and then waddle over to the agent at the gate who asks for your boarding pass.  Fuuuuuuuuck.  So you dig through your pockets and wallet and pull out every little piece of paper and trifling receipt in hopes that you will find your motherfucking gay ass boarding pass.  Arrrrgh!  You are about to have an aneurism, but instead you calmly ask the guy to go back to the computer to print out a new one and, clearly, he loves you soooo much that he does it with only a modicum of eye rolls.  17, to be precise.

Finally.  You did it.  You are on the plane.  You have the empty/sweet joy of epic accomplishment — the same feeling Bobby Fischer must have had when he beat Boris Spassky at the 1972 World Chess Championships in Iceland.

This elation is quickly submarined by the announcement that the plane is delayed for 90 minutes on the tarmac.  And that the inflight entertainment is down.  And that you’re in a middle seat between two Weight Watchers “before” pictures.

I mean, as I said, don’t you just hate 9/11?

Just me?

This is not about my ex.

That’s the first time I’ve actually used the word “ex” to describe this particular woman.

In the past, I referred to her as “my girlfriend,” “the love of my life,” “my future wife,” etc. depending on my mood and the company.  Now, after a tumultuous and crazy and passionate year of pleas and vows and mistakes and tears, I guess she (by relationship law) gets relegated to “ex.”

Way to go, American phraseology, you really nailed it on this one!  Terse, to the point: “ex.”  A harsh 20th century, industrial age word.  A sturdy vowel exploding into a violent consonant cluster.  No word could capture the finality and the forced and permanent dismissal of a human being from one’s life better than “ex.”  Even if this “ex” used to be the main reason I got my ass out of bed on weekends.  And the ONLY reason I got up with a sincere smile.

She had a name, now it’s just “ex.”  More specifically, for story purposes, she is “my most recent ex.”  Although I used to think it was cute to refer to hot girls I met as “future ex-girlfriend”’s, it is almost unbearably sad to think of “my most recent ex” that way.  Other girls could be thrown onto a romantic trash heap of e.e. cummings/Walt Whitman wistful lessons about missed connections, but this one… was supposed to be the one.  The one to the ex.  1 to ex.

Anyway, this is not about her.  My ex.

This is about me.  And about what I did in an attempt to recover from the stupefaction of “one to ex.”  Now that I’m older than I care to admit — let’s just say NOT in my 20’s — emotional pain ricochets around the cells in my body with a different timbre and more resonant echo.

At 23, heartbroken, I might call upon my Celtic ancestors and drink from a bottle of Jameson, smoke Marlboro reds, and indulgently roil around in pain while my iPod rebooted my misery approximately every 3.5 minutes with a new ballad that would conjure forth the smells and seasons which could, in turn, harness the full thermonuclear power of my despair.  Then, I wanted to feel it all so tragically, like some character in a Tom Waits song, gravelly voice bemoaning tragic tales of woe….

But my recent tack is to do stuff that is purely “life-affirming.” No booze, no cigarettes, no banging blondes named Britney with fake boobs, and DEFINITELY, no wallowing in abject misery.  This time, I’m going to take action.  This time, I’m making a chrysalis around my pain, from which I will emerge a stronger person.

And that is why I decided to bike 32 miles from West Hollywood to the Long Beach Laugh Factory on a beautiful day.

It started off with a trip to “Spokes” on Melrose.  I fashioned brand new lights on the bicycle, sparing no expense, and also bought a new goofy looking eggshell helmet, replete with racing stripes.  I pumped my tires and began my journey.

I used “Google maps” to look up the route and clicked on the “bicycle” icon to find the best way to get there via my electric bike.  That’s right.  I said it.  Electric.  And so, I was off.

I cruised east through Hollywood, through the trashy hipness of Melrose Avenue, through the stoic Jews of Hancock Park, past the busy Persians of downtown LA, and then into the Mexicans of… downtown Tiajuana?

Unbeknownst to me, there is a long fuckin’ stretch of land between Long Beach and downtown LA that is quite literally nothing but empty warehouses, meatpacking factories, clandestine drug deals, and cholo gang meetings.

My gps, I now suspect, thought it would be heeelarious to start fucking with me, so it sent me on a labyrinthine route through South Central Los Angeles.  Apparently, my gps thought it would be an awesome idea to do an idyllic tour of the barrios of the 18th street gang and the Mexican Mafia. The hum of my electric bike turned many a tattooed head.

Finally, my gps told me to get on the “bike path” along the Los Angeles river.  Thank God, I thought… but alas, the entrance was locked.  What the fuzz?  I was at a dead end of a cul-de-sac.  Suddenly, I turned from the locked entrance and saw about 5-6 blue plaid-wearing cholos with number “13″ neck tattoos staring at me, heads cocked like curious Labradors.  Just so you have the right sense of visual irony, let me give you the aesthetic that I was sporting:

Blue Blazer

Over my blazer, black and pink Lululemon backpack

Green eggshell-style bike helmet with white racing stripes

Comfortable pair of slacks, tapered to my ankles, tucked into my socks

Zipper down (I have ADD)

White tube socks with a single yellow stripe

And the coup de grace, my shoes:

gray SHAPE-UPS.

Visual approximation

All of that masculinity was perched atop an electric bicycle.  Cushy cruiser seat with a big battery on the backside.  Meep-meep!

I can’t say what these gang members were thinking as they glared at me as a gorgeous imperial violet dusk started to streak the sky behind me…. However, I did get the distinct feeling that at least one of them felt an obligation to murder/rape/maim me and perhaps would have, if it weren’t for the confusion of the sheer cognitive dissonance of the moment.

For a brief second, I wanted to be murdered, just so I could imagine my “ex’s” reaction to my death. The fleeting thought gave me a brief wash of relief.

I piped up: “Hey guys, this gate is locked. Do you know how I can get onto the bike path?”

It was silent for a few seconds and then one of the guys pointed down the street, where another entrance was apparently available.  The other thugs looked at him like he was otherworldy, having an ability to communicate with a dorky caucasian.  I saluted the guy and then hit my electric bike full throttle!  I mean, FULL THROTTLE!!! I must have been going 12, maybe 14, miles per hour!

I got on the bike path along the LA river and headed due West towards the sunset.  It was majestic, awe-inspiring, beautiful.  The moment was all, of course, constructed to help me get over the paralyzing break-up from my girlfriend.  So my eyes consciously absorbed everything: the lonely black crow winging across the sky, the plume of white smoke trailing a commuter jet landing onto an LAX tarmac, the tangerine sun dipping into the Pacific, painting the sky above a mesmerizing azure-pink…

I also inhaled everything:  the faint smell of fresh tar being laid on back-to-school playground blacktops, the nostalgic aroma of burnt wood smoke and barbecue, demarcating the fading days of another beautiful LA summer.  The distant wind-chime tinkle of an ice cream truck, blocks away. I tried to cram it all into the bandwidth of my brain, perhaps with the desperate hope that it would squeeze out, like a tube of toothpaste, the haunting memory of her smile, her smell.  Breathe, Bill, Breathe in the present, I told myself.  Let the breathtaking work of mother nature refresh and recharge your mind. Breathe.  Look around you.  Jack rabbit white tails bouncing away in front of you…a young chicano couple under a bridge, snuggled tightly into the hoodies and desperation of young love, a stream of — THONK!

A divet on the path knocked me out of my reverie, which subsequently knocked my cell phone out of my hand, which subsequently crashed onto the concrete, spiderwebbing instantly.  I stopped, got off the bike and saw that my tire was bent a little.  On the ground, I heard a beep, a plaintive reminder that my cell phone battery was, in fact, also dying. I glanced at the battery meter for my bike. It had one out of four circles left.  Shit!  That meant I probably only had a good 10 minutes left of charge.  And a full 8 miles left to go, according to my snarky gps.

“Can’t get worse than this,” I said to no one.

That’s when it started to rain.

Suddenly, mother nature was a fucking bitch.  My mind, which had been replete with the miracle of God’s bounty, reverted back to my previous, tacit suspicion that God hated me.  Well, at the very least, he is my most formidable heckler.

I tried to laugh along with him, feebly.  Pitter patter.  Thunder.  This was a bad 80’s movie and I was John Cusack.

I wobbled forward on my bike.  The path got overrun.  It somehow segued into dirt and desert.  Once again, I found myself at another gate.  A high gate.  A dead end.  I turned around.  Uh oh.  There was another Mexican guy there.  Clearly a gang member.  Tear drop tattoo by his left eye.  Filled in.  That means something, I thought.  He was smoking a cigarette, inked from head to toe with numbers, spiderwebs, and, perhaps, crime scenes.

I wanly smiled at him, “Haha, it looks like I’m at a dead end.”  Instantly, I realized how unbelievably ironic that would be if it were my last sentence on Earth.

He took a long drag of his cigarette and then dramatically threw it onto the cracked concrete.  What the fuck was going to happen now?  I thought in a panic, the sky darkening at an exponential pace all around me.

The Mexican strolled over to me licking his lips.  Then he said, “I can help you lift your bike over the fence if you want, man.”

I silently nodded, mouth agape.  Together, as a team, we hoisted the bike over the tall fence.

“Thanks,” I said.

He nodded, with a subtle smirk.  A smirk that maybe contained the ironic knowledge of my quasi-racist fear, which rankled through my stiff body language and tight vibrato.

I walked the bike to a gas station, called my friend Kyle to pick me up, and waited, my thoughts spinning.

I was a fool.

I tried to do this “life-affirming” journey to help me get over the painful break up with the love of my life, the woman I thought I was going to marry.  I put myself in  untenable situations.  Situations where I thought I was going to die at the hands of Latino gang members.  These gang members ended up being nothing but friendly and helpful.

I guess I learned a very important moral from this:

women are such bitches.

Right?  I mean, what other moral could there be?

749pm

As you stroll in, you give a nod and a “daps” to the big bouncer out front of the comedy club.  “Daps” — or a fist-bump, to the unenlightened caucasian — seems to be the go-to move these days, especially with black dudes. You’ve had way too many awkward experiences throwing out a collegiate handshake only to find yourself clumsily shaking a fist afterwards.

You always try to get there early.  Even though the 8pm show will inevitably start at 8:14pm, you want to make sure the club owner and/or manager isn’t/aren’t freaking out.  Comics are notoriously flaky/negligent/irresponsible/stoned, so it’s always nice to let the manager/owner know: “Hey, I’m professional”/”Hey, I deserve a shit ton more spots!”

Right away, you start muttering about the fact that no one is there.  You tell everyone within earshot “I can’t believe how empty it is!”  Your annoyance is both magnified and confounded by the fact that the sparse audience exists, partially, because YOU are a featured comic on the show.

If Dane Cook or Daniel Tosh was the emcee, it would be standing room only, coeds’ chests heaving for a mere glimpse of their golden god.  But, alas, YOU are the host of the show, and the nanny nanny boo boo of unused chairs reminds you that no one cares about your stupid “credits.”

810pm

The lights dim, music starts, and the show announcement starts.  You’ve been doing it for a while now, so you’re not nervous.  Well, not like you used to be — when you would pace back and forth like a 7th grader by a locker waiting to ask Jenny Simpson to “go with you,” heart drumming in your ears, terrified that you might have lettuce in your braces.

Also, you’re not intoxicated, either.  You used to concoct chemical cocktails like Bryan Cranston on “Breaking Bad,” looking for the perfect amalgam of caffeine, weed, adderall, alcohol, and sugar to set you on a course where you’re simultaneously confident and relaxed.  As a comic, you used to solely exist in some hybrid physiology where you would cycle between wanting to take a nap or clean your apartment.

The first comic hasn’t shown up but the manager and owner trust you enough for you to go on anyway.  Not so secretly, you hope the first comic doesn’t show at all so you can go on for an indefinite amount of time.  You decide you’re going to do 3 new jokes, 1 new bit, and build to a killer closer!

812pm

Your name gets called and you walk onstage.  There’s a part of you — a part that you pretend not to acknowledge — that wants the announcement of YOUR NAME over the speaker system to make the audience spike in recognition.  But alas, the smattering of applause… the applaw, if you will … has completely ended by the time you reach the mike stand.  You feel yourself resisting the urge to be loud and cheesy and hacky, but…

“HOW YOU GUYS DOING TONIGHT!? LET’S GIVE IT UP FOR THE LADIES!!!!”

…. comes out, instead.  You want to shoot yourself in the face.

818pm

You are walking off-stage annoyed.  You didn’t do any new jokes, definitely didn’t try a new bit, and 3 minutes into your set, the first comic of the show waves to you to indicate that he’s here.  Then he gestures again, by pointing at his wrist (where “watches” used to exist on human beings before cell phone clocks), that he is sooooo late for his next spot, and can you please bring him up right away.

819pm-843pm

You don’t want to and you shouldn’t, but you order french fries from the waitress.  You hate yourself for your weakness and your allergy to gluten.

You watch the comic onstage do his set.  You’ve seen his exact same set for years now, so it’s hard to focus, hard to even feign focus.  Unfortunately, it’s a small crowd and the comic keeps looking at you for approval, so you try to muster up some faux-laughter for his benefit.  You are amazed at how good you’ve become at the quasi-fake laugh.  So good in fact, you can’t even tell if you’re sincere anymore.

You notice more comics coming in.  Great… this means there will be no time to fill, and so, as Emcee, your job now is to simply remember names and credits, every once in a while “shushing” a drunk girl who grew up dad-less and never learned what “indoor voice” or “discipline” is.

956pm

A “famous” comic “dropped in” to work on a “few minutes.”  He just wants to “try out a coupla jokes” for his next “special.”

1045pm

The “famous” comic finally finishes his “few minutes.”  Fame clearly trumps logic and the space-time continuum.

1046pm

You bring up the next comic (who had been cursing the “famous” comic with a stony look for the past half hour) and sit down. You eat one more french fry, which instantaneously sends a plaintive message to your bowels.

1112pm

You go onstage and, surprisingly, the next comic isn’t there yet! YES! Time to work on new jokes, new material, build your set, and kill the crowd!

1121pm

You just got offstage and didn’t do one new joke.  You even did a 7 year-old joke from your first year of stand-up that’s about — shocker! — masturbation.  You feel guilty reaching back into the hack sack for a joke about smelling fingers, but that doesn’t stop you from doing that and a classy follow-up joke about buttsex.  That joke is 6 years old.

Since it’s been a long night, you realize that you actually told the same joke twice, which  explains why 90 percent of the audience was looking at you like you were a jackass when you flaccidly mentioned that you “found a new contraceptive for men:  it’s called wearing Shape-ups.”

Male contraception

You then show the audience your actual Shape-ups, which engenders more sympathy than laughs apparently.

You want to go home, obviously, or at the very least take a nice relaxing french-fry-dump.

1158pm

The manager “lights” the final comic.  “Lighting a comic” means you turn on a light (usually a red light, but sometimes it’s a pen light or a flashlight or an angry club owner flapping his arms around) giving the comic 2-3 minutes to wrap up their joke and get offstage.  It’s not uncommon for comics to run the light (i.e., ignore it like a douche) for 5 to 10 minutes.

1206am

The comic has seen the light but doesn’t seem to give much of a shit about its existence.

1215am

The closing comic is still onstage.  You like the guy (enough) but you feel like screaming “get the fuuuuuuuuck offstage, you selfish prick!”  Some comics run the light like they’re afraid to go home, and this guy is no exception.  You start to walk around the club, seeing if there’s anyone to talk to or flirt with.  You go in the bathroom and check yourself out in the mirror to make sure you don’t look like reheated death.  You look longingly at the bathroom stall, knowing that the full release of your bowels is contingent upon some recondite factors of loneliness and validation that this fuckface of a quasi-famous comedian is dealing with right now.

You go to the bar and get another bottle of Poland Springs water.  You have a five dollar bill in your pocket and it’s a great idea to tip the awesome bartender.   Of course you don’t tip him, but it makes you feel good about yourself for just considering it.  You are a mensch — even if it’s just inside your head.

The comic onstage, who happens to be African-American, says “I’m about ready to get up on out of here,” which is usually a black comic’s way of saying “I might consider leaving the stage if the next joke gets a standing ovation, but probably not.”

1222am

The comic says “I’m about ready to get up on out of here in a minute” again.

1231am

For the third time, the comic laments the oh-so-sad fact that he has to get “ready to get up on out of here”  and tells the audience this, clearly hoping for some caterwauls of protest.

1233am

I flash the light.  The comic says “Yeah, I see the light!”  Which, I guess, is code for:  “Fuck your stupid existence, fuckface!”

1238am

The comic gets off-stage.  You run onstage and rouse the audience into a collective uproar for the hour long set you just actively ignored.  You then try to galvanize the same laughter to celebrate every comic they’ve seen that night.  The audience is exhausted but happy to oblige.

You notice that the some of the tightly wound people in the crowd have seemed to loosen up.  What started off as pursed lips are now bright teeth beaming.  Eyes that initially spoke of a weary work week with spouse problems, shitty bosses, crying babies, and financial strains are now shiny and, at times, streaked with tears of laughter.

You are tired with an upset stomach and maybe you’ve been a bit of brat for the past 5 hours, but above everything else, you feel honored.  Honored to do what you do. Honored to tell your story. Honored to see true comic geniuses onstage.  And, most importantly, honored to bring some joy to people’s lives.

You will sleep well tonight.  After a date with your toilet….

I was at a red light in the middle of a three lane boulevard today.

I looked to my left and I saw a girl texting.  I looked to my right and I saw a guy texting.  Of course, that made me feel like an unpopular loser so I started texting, but then immediately got beeped at by the guy behind me, who had apparently just finished his text before the light change. I would have given him the rear-view-fuck-you-face, but the horn was actually intended for the girl ahead of me, who was firmly ensconced in her text, which was probably about yoga class and full of LOL’s and emoticons.

I started to think about the past.  For example, what did we, as a human race, DO at traffic lights before texting?  Did we think about life or something?  Did we just look at ourselves in our sundry vehicular mirrors and existentially pucker our faces until some impatient douche honked at us pre-text?  WHAT DID PEOPLE DO?!

It’s almost hard to believe that people got into car wrecks before texting.  How? Were they just stupid? Whatever the reason, they did.  However, since the advent of texting (around 2007, when “American Idol” ushered it into the mainstream), city streets have become a manic menagerie of ADD bumper cars slamming into/near missing each other thousands of times a day.  There is no greater threat to public safety than driving while texting, “drexting.”

Then “sexting” started happening.  But it wasn’t until phones got cameras that men across America, collectively, went batshit crazy.  In the same way that SMS texting changed driving forever, MMS texting changed sex forever.  Let’s face it, in the 80’s, the big buzz was about a virus going around on people’s penises.  But in the 10’s, the big buzz is about people’s penises going viral.

A planet where people actually VERBALLY communicated about their sexual proclivities and genitalia seems almost like a Bizarro world nowadays. Imagine that: VERBAL SEX TALK!

It’s not that men DIDN’T have penises before MMS.

I’m sure they had the same delusional desire to share the splendor of their spackle hammer, but what was their recourse?  Write poems about it on a Grecian urn?  Sit for a painter?  Use smoke signals to transmit dimensions to faraway lovers?  Pose in front of a giant, accordian-style wooden view camera with a flash and then develop the shot of the ding-dong in a darkroom?  And then send a sepia tone photo of the tickle whistle to some dollop in Topeka via pony express?

WHAT DID THEY DO?!

Regardless, penis scandals didn’t seem to exist back then, did they?  Don’t hear much about Warren G. Harding’s hard-on, do you?  Hmmmm….

Let’s examine how it all started.

Pre-MMS (up through the mid-00’s), the image of the penis was pretty much left to the sordid and untrained fantasy of America’s collective unconscious.  In fact, before this, most human beings died after only seing a few phalluses (phalli?) in their lives.  And they were more than okay with that fact.

Don’t get me wrong, America still had its share of phallus “stories,” but since it was before the ubiquitousness of one-click digitization, the juicy pics didn’t accompany these stories.  The graphic over-exposure of the penis (no pun intended) was still years away, so the male mayonnaise cannon was still a murky and mysterious thing.  Stark jpegs hadn’t tattooed themselves into our cerebellums yet.

As a result, when the Bill Clinton affairs got revealed in the late 90’s, the technical specs of the Commander-in-Chief’s kit-and-caboodle were speculative.  That being said, due to quality reporting by “The National Enquirer,” it is forever ingrained in my brain that Bill’s bald-headed yogurt slinger, like his political beliefs, leans significantly to the left.

Then it just seemed that, after Bill’s split-headed bishop made headlines, men started whipping theirs out at a furious pace with a devil-may-care “Look at me, mommy!” attitude.  Of course, new technology helped.  Camcorders were now ubiquitous and facile. So easy to use, in fact, that even the extremely mentally handicapped could use them.  And yes, I’m talking about Pamela Anderson, who was able to capture Tommy Lee’s unfurled schlong, which subsequently and figuratively dick-whipped an entire nation.

More atrocities followed suit in the ensuing camcorder-to-internet decade of the 00’s.  LIke most films out of Hollywood, these videos rarely lived up to their hype, with boring, predictable stories and C-list celebrities nobody gave a shit about.  It was a veritable who’s who of who cares.  The list reads like a sign-in sheet at a Planned Parenthood: Paris Hilton, Screech from “Saved by the Bell” (please, let’s not pretend this dude has another name), Kim Kardashian, Colin Farrell, Fred Durst, R. Kelly all hopped on the boner bandwagon and “accidentally” released videos of themselves having sex in the 00’s.

If you were a celebrity with a failed career, a non-career, or genital herpes, you were definitely disseminating a sex tape or at least contemplating it.  One thing was for certain:  if you made a shitty sex tape in the 00’s, you were probably going to get a development deal at VH1.

But then sexting started.  And sexting’s sociological thermonuclear bomb followed: the Dick pic.  It’s alliterative symmetry was so poetic it seemed almost inevitable.

It started with a whimper when Brett Favre MMS’ed some frowny-face pics of his graying gherkin to a Jets message therapist, who, upon receving the photos, probably lit up like a goddamned Vegas $$ slot machine.  Poor, beleaguered Brett was just trying to get a little stink on the down low when said masseur blindsided him with a press conference to basically tell the world at large, “Ew.”

Because of the instantaneous and delicious ease of the the cell phone dick pic, Brett didn’t get to retire from the NFL as a Hall of Fame quarterback with an image as a true American hero. Nope, instead the image we are left with is a landscape shot of his lonely and lilting junk — sad grey pubes curling through his fingers  –  looking like a diminutive drunk dude with cancer trying not to fall down into a sidewalk gutter.

Chris Brown figured he could sway public opinion in his favor after his violent transgressions with his dick pic.  That post of his prodigious member didn’t necessarily endear anyone to Chris Brown, but it did make people question if he used it as a weapon in the Rihanna beat-down.  It also made white people proportionally more insecure.  Tito Ortiz followed suit with his penis picture.  Ironically, both his beating of Jenna Jameson and his penis were significantly lesser events than Chris Brown’s, which makes me wonder if there is some mathematical formula involved.  Unfortunately, only an Asian guy could figure that out and why make him feel worse?

America’s obsession with all things penis-related came to a head (pun intended this time) with the Eric Weiner dick pic.  To date, this Twitpic is the Acockalypse of phallic overkill.

His simple action — sending an MMS of his bulging BVD’s — was blown so completely out of proportion by the media (CNN announced it as “breaking news” for two weeks straight), that the event really only served to reveal one thing:

America is obsessed with pee-pee’s.

Totally.

100 percent.

And, apparently, we needed cell phones to reveal that humiliating fact.

The teehee-inducing penis is still as mind-numbingly taboo as it was when we first doodled a cartoon of it on the notepad in our Trapper Keeper.  It is the anatomical equivalent of the fart — funny and embarrassing, and NEVER talked about in refined society.  We know it’s there, but we ignore it.  Like a fart, we claim we don’t want to be around one that isn’t ours, but we do, but we don’t…. but we kinda do.  We love it, we hate it.  If pulling grandpa’s finger meant he whipped out his World War II battle-scarred Squirt Reynolds, the grandkids would probably still do it at Thanksgiving dinner.  And giggle twice as much.

Since we’re unduly obsessed with it, we show it around.  Constantly.  Desperately.  For validation.  Since we’re too dumb to create anything substantive in America anymore, we take our dick-swinging seriously.  And cell phones have served to make it worse.

Ironically, women SAY they don’t want our dick pics.  But I have a different theory.

They do.  It’s EVIDENCE!  And women love nothing more.  As a matter of fact, I’m theorizing that cell phone cameras are a feminist conspiracy generated by the same breed of bitter bitches who created glitter in 1934 as a tracking system to catch cheating husbands.

Clearly, these feminists knew that stupid, flat-footed men would take pictures of their privates, and then women would have blackmail and bribery power ad infinitum.  Fun fact:  it takes 3 years for carbon to be pressurized into diamond, but it only takes ONE misplaced penis pic to pressure your husband/boyfriend into getting you a diamond.

The “DICK PIC” was the perfect plan for women to maintain control of the world!  And it worked!  Mostly, because it couldn’t work both ways: women don’t want to send pictures of their genitalia, because as idiosyncratically goofy as a penis is, at least it doesn’t look like Alien and Predator mouths locked together in a fierce and drooling death grip.  (Sorry, ladies, there are Youtube clips of pit bull mouths that are completely indistinguishable from the “precious flower” that your vagina is, no matter how many pilates classes you take).

So, guys, we have to fight back.  We have to take back the night, if you will.  How about a commitment to stop taking pictures of our purple-headed belly ripper?  And then remove the pics from our phones.  We have to go back to the past, when these scandals didn’t exist.

We have to start talking to women instead.  VERBAL communication.  That’s right. And then, ultimately, to never, ever, ever show our penis again to a woman unless she VERBALLY asks for it.

Well… good luck.

Prologue:

I finally got a new computer this week. When I first brought in my busted up 5 year-old Mac to the Apple store, they looked at me like I was holding a butter churn that I had just farted into. Wtf? It’s ONLY 5 years old! Does a 5 year-old computer instantaneously relegate me to Colonial Williamsburg?! I was so embarrassed by their dorky disdain that I immediately bought a brand new Macbook Pro simply out of a sense of “FUCK YOU, NERDS!” Yes, I had to take out a small home equity loan to do it, but I showed them!

Anyway, I’ve been doing the laborious process of transferring data and I came across a piece of writing I had completely forgotten about. The piece is not my own. It is from a brilliant doctor who, at one point, wanted to relate his experiences about working in the ER, but then worried that even writing anonymously might cost him his job.

The piece is sad, touching, funny, horrible, and it speaks to the absurdity of the human condition much better than my dick jokes do. So, this brief anthology of dubious holes has sat alone on my cracked computer screen with the title “Orifice stories” on top of a little Word icon for the past 4 years. No one else has read it.

Until now…

P.s. Don’t try any of this at home. Enjoy!

“ORIFICE STORIES”

I have been an ER doc for over 7 years. I was better off when I did not know how truly fucked up people are. I have seen child abuse, elder abuse, domestic abuse, rape, murder, assault. The worse part is that the shock and repulsion gradually fades, and, like a slow growing cancer, callousness invades your brain. There are times I feel dead. Thank God, or whoever spins the planet, for humor. Humor is not a feeling that needs to die to keep you sane in the job. Humor can penetrate the callous. The psychiatric community seems to have discarded the ideas of Freud, but he must have been on to something. People love orifices: the sounds that emanate from orifices, of course penetrating orifices, and orifice stories. I think every ER doctor has stories of various objects stuck in the lower intestinal track. I have seen dildos, some still vibrating, plastic bottles, and even a can of shoe polish. Never a gerbil.

I am not sure what the best part for me is. It’s a tie between listening to the confabulation of the patient of how the object got into this particular orifice and throwing the x-ray on the light box to get the visual. One of my favorites was the husband and wife team. The wife let go of the dildo and it was gone. That one even caught me off guard. The chief complaint on the chart had been rectal pain. I assumed when I walked in and saw this proper middle aged couple that I had a thrombosed hemorrhoid or maybe a pilonidal abscess. The usual confabulation ensued during the history, but I was not getting it. Finally the wife blurted out the truth. I still relish the awkward silence that followed this. It was less fun when I worked in West Hollywood. No confabulation. Just “I have a dildo in my ass, doctor.” But these lost rectal foreign bodies are not my favorite orifice stories.

It was about 2 am. I was bleary-eyed on this night shift. The transition from days to nights was hard this night. I had just eaten a 12 inch subway sandwich in less than 5 minutes. The blood rushing to my gut, and leaving my brain, made the early morning delirium worse. I gazed over to triage and saw a fat, pimply female talking to the triage nurse. They were close together giving me the uneasy feeling that the complaint was private. I prayed to the triage lottery ball god that it was not a vaginal complaint. Doing pelvic exams on these fat women is almost worthless. Folds of slimy skin rarely allow visualization of much. The odd corollary to this is that while you cannot see anything, you certainly get the full power of the odor. I felt my stomach rolling the sandwich around and hoped that my stuffy nose would save me. I could not resist the urge. I walked by triage to glance at the chief complaint on the nursing note. The word “private” was the only notation. Damn.

After seeing the complaint, the selection of the pelvic exam room was not unexpected. I took some humor in the mental image of this nearly 300 lb. woman struggling to fit onto a pelvic exam bed that only adequately accommodated a 100 lb. person. My smirk began fading however as the nurse failed to exit the room. Private is bad enough, but the longer the nurse is in the room, the worse the case. My pain was temporarily eased when the nurse exited and briefed me on a possible sexual assault.  I have become callous I know.  Maybe even evil.  In my county, sexual assault exams are conducted by specially trained teams. In this way, there is less risk that the evidence will be mishandled and hurt the criminal case. So, I am not evil. It is better for the patient. Yes.

I entered the room to make sure the woman was physically stable. My heart sank as my nose encountered the body odor. This was the body odor of the mentally ill. Worse, this was the body odor of the fat mentally ill. The lack of bathing and other self-care creates quite a distinct odor, especially in tandem with the folds and creases created by the fat layer. The blunted affect further discouraged me. I know the mentally ill represent an at-risk population and they are the victims of crimes, but I had been down this road too many times before to continue any optimism about my escape from the pelvic exam. I perfunctorily called the local police to report the crime.

It was no surprise that this patient had reported many sexual assaults by her boyfriend in the past. These had been investigated in the past, and in each case, no charges were filed either because the patient recanted or because she failed to cooperate with police. I wasn’t sure if the boring in my gut was disgust with the patient, disgust that she actually had a boyfriend who willingly fucked her, disgust at the thought of the exam that would come next, or just indigestion from my hastily eaten sandwich.

I re-entered the room to report to the patient that the police did not want a sexual assault investigation. She replied matter-of-factly that she had no interest in the police involvement. She just wanted her vagina re-opened. I swatted at the cobwebs that had been forming in my brain all night. I think I even rubbed my eyes before I replied. How did I miss this in the initial history? I had heard blah, blah, blah, put his penis in when I told him I did not want to have sex, blah, blah, blah. I missed the part about him using crazy glue to glue her genitalia shut. I called the nurse in to chaperone my exam. I braced for the horror, the sight, the smell. When the patient lifted her sheet, I had to squint to see any detail in the rolls of genitalia. I used gloved hands to separate the skin folds and found that indeed her genitalia was fused by super glue. All that I could muster to say to the patient was “OK,” and I walked out with the nurse trailing me. And then I wrote one of the strangest medical orders of my career: nursing to rub Vaseline onto the genitalia. Yes, I wrote that on a medical chart.

I have had many patients who got crazy glue in the eyes. Not sure how they confuse super glue and an eye ointment, but I quit questioning stupidity years ago. The treatment is Vaseline since it dissolves the compound. I never did ask whether the super glue was self-applied (I learned she had a history of self-destructive behavior), applied by a jealous boyfriend who did not want her fucking anyone else (my brain screamed not possible), or applied by a boyfriend who was desperate to create a tighter entrance for sex (again my brain screamed).

Sometimes the orifice story comes from an unusual source. I was working a swing shift in a posh LA hospital and picked up my next chart. The chief complaint was vaginal bleeding. At this particular hospital, the emergency entrance doors had a “body must fit this size to enter” sign like the airport carry-on signs. I was not worried about my eyes and nose on this case. I glanced at the age and saw the patient was in her 60’s. That is bad. Women in their 60’s should not be bleeding. It usually means one thing: cancer. The history was unremarkable except for bleeding that had been going on for 24 hours. No weight loss. No history of abnormal gynecological evaluations. She however had the most serious risk factor for cancer: she was nice. It is another reason I have become such a bastard. The nice patients die early. The mean ones linger on against all possible odds.

I brought a nurse in to chaperone. As I peered into the vaginal vault with a speculum, I noticed a small amount of red fluid, and what appeared to be a fungating mass where the cervix should be. My stomach sank (I would say my heart sank except that I lost that in residency). I asked for a ringed forceps to explore the mass. As I grasped it, a piece came off easily. I pulled it out to the light. The image did not come into focus right away. It was the way rubbing a steamed mirror slowly allows the image to come in focus. My brain scrambled not to look foolish. I was a new attending and hated looking unknowledgeable. I did not hear the words come out of my mouth, but somehow the question “what does this look like to you?” floated teasingly in the air towards the nurse. She bent down and squinted as well and replied that it looked like a cherry. My left hand was still holding the speculum in place and I could suddenly feel it moving up and down. The strange noise that was accompanying this movement became identifiable as giggling. Without a word, I removed the remaining cherries, flatly joked that she had quintuplets, and left the room.

Sometimes the orifice stories are almost biblical. I was working a day shift and the nurse called me in to see a 16 year old female who was writhing on the bed. She was immature and on her period and not handling the pain well according to the nurse. The nurse, knowing I was busy with some other patients, asked if it was OK to give her a pain medication injection now and then she would set her up for a pelvic while I wrapped up some other tasks. Sounded reasonable to me. I re-entered the room a short time later and found the patient still writhing in pain. With the nurse as my chaperone, I began the pelvic exam. As I prepared, I asked the usual menstrual history. She was not pregnant. She had not missed any periods. They had been regular and had a normal flow. She had not been recently sexually active. All good.

I placed the speculum at the entrance to the vagina and ran into something hard. I retried. Same. I placed my hand in the vagina and found a rock hard mass. This too is one of those fogged mirror times. I have delivered many babies, mostly in residency, but the fact that this was a crowning baby head was slowly coming into focus. I was in such disbelief that as I asked the nurse to call labor and delivery, I wheeled a bedside ultrasound into the room to check. Indeed a term baby was ready to be delivered. Her father, who had just arrived and was standing in the hallway, looked shocked as we pushed his daughter’s bed down the hall. As I passed him, I told asked him whether he was ready to be a grandfather. The look was priceless. Immaculate conception happens more than the lay public would believe. Jesus was not the only one.

I could go on and on with orifice stories. They are always amusing. I did not even broach the explosive diarrhea stories. Few things are as embarrassing as blowing putrid fluid out of both ends in the middle of a room full of strangers. Yelling, moaning, screaming, cursing, these sounds do not even register in the hell of the emergency department. But the sound of the double orifice explosion, well that can make the entire room quiet. I do not hate these patients.  These patients are my saviors.  Humor is the only thing that makes me feel human in this job.

I want to apologize to my readers… sorry, being ambitious here… I want to apologize to my reader for the fact that I haven’t written a blog in a long time.  The truth is I have been dragged into the seedy underworld of internet procrastination.  At its best, that procrastination is emails, bills, facebook chatting, and at its worse, it’s something that rhymes with procrastination.

The truth is, I had a quasi-clever, pseudo-important piece about this being the decade of the dick pic after the slews of penii I found in my inbox.  And by inbox, I am, of course, referring to my gmail account.  There seemed to be an upward trend (pun alert) in the amount of posed proboscis pix flopping around the cybersphere since Brett Favre limped onto the scene in mid-2010.  Chris Brown, Tito Ortiz, and Anthony Weiner headshots all made interesting fodder that fed American’s obsession with all things pee-pee and tee-hee.

But then 2011 came and it marked the death of stand-up comedy.

Let’s backtrack.  When I first started doing comedy in 2003, I became obsessed with what the fuck this art form was all about.  So one of the first things I did was watch a documentary on the legendary Lenny Bruce.  Looking at it now, his jokes about race and religion seem pretty tame, to the point where it’s actually hard to find the funny, much less the offensiveness that got him arrested multiple times for “obscenity.”  It literally boggles the mind to think that in the early 1960’s — when blacks in America were still getting lynched in the South — Bruce was somehow considered a threat to civilized society.  Once, he was famously arrested for saying that “the sexual context of come is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, it means he probably can’t come.”  CLINK!  Then he said “cocksucker.” CLINK!  Then “schmuck.” CLINK!  (wait… really?) At a show in Sydney, upon arriving to the mike stand, he called the crowd a “great fucking audience” and was promptly taken down under to the gaol, which is Australian for jail.  As Doug Benson might say about this arrest, “WTFuck!?”

And it didn’t stop there.  Lenny Bruce was, quite literally, harassed and arrested to death.  Even his “accidental” overdose appears to be the final heckle of an overzealous LA police department.  The photo of the death scene is obviously staged, with a flat-footed, handlebar-mustache-twisting flair that makes an Ed Wood movie look subtle.

Then the 60’s came into full motherfuckin’ fruition, drugs were taken by many good people, wars were lost, and the reeling hangover of the 70’s produced the progeny of Lenny Bruce’s suffering in comics such as Richard Pryor and George Carlin.  Although their likes shook things up and ruffled feathers, after Bruce’s untimely demise, a stand-up comic would never again be charged with “obscenity.”  And despite a crazy and tumultuous political American landscape that ricocheted between puritanism and progressivism, the safety of the stage for a stand-up comic became a simple, and established, truism.  For the ensuing thirty years, stand-up seemed to be the last remaining forum protected by the blanket of the first amendment.  You could even call Oprah fat and get away with it.

But it seems things have been, in the words of Tony Soprano, “trending downwards.”

Before I begin with the specifics, I think everyone reading has to agree to disagree.  With everything and anything.  Things suck.  Things are mean.  Things are funny.  Things are not.  The quibbles over the artistic merit of stand-up are as boundless as a mobius band.  We can, and will, spend the rest of our miserable human existence extolling our worthless opinions into the hereafter about what is or isn’t funny. Some of us will even create an anonymous Youtube account JUST so we can troll the website looking for people and videos to take steaming custard-cream piles of shit on.  Yay for us!  We will lord our opinion over everything and anything.  Our brains will burst with “you sucks!” until that last neuron quivers through our dessicated flesh.  We are stubborn monkeys with stupid opinions that matter only to us.  For example, I hate Bill Cosby.  I think he can suck a big, fat dick. (What, I won’t be in “Leonard, Part VII” now?) Does that matter to you that I despise the Cos?  Doubt it.   But fuuuuuck, it made me feel good to say it because it validates me as a sentient being.  Or, as Descartes might say if he were around in the internet age:  “I think I’m right, therefore I am.”

My point is this:  although we are allowed to relish in our hatred and flaunt our silly opinions, it is not, nor is it EVER, our job to be the judge of whether or not someone has the RIGHT to say what they say when they are doing their job as a stand-up comic.  The discussion of what is “allowable” to say on stage is, in my opinion, a slippery slope away from book-burnings and Volkswagen ovens.

I agree that there are offensive words.  Retard.  Faggot.  Cunt.  Nigger.  Even my fingers on a cold, unemotional keyboard have a tough time typing the final consonant on each of those words.  They are crisply brutal.  Countless of thousands of people have suffered incredible emotional damage under their collective historic vitriol.

But what does that mean to you as a comic?

If you’re Michael Richards and you temporarily snap, should you apologize?  Probably, particularly when there’s no joke attached to the epithet and you’re a shitty comic on top of it.  And so Richards did apologize, feebly.  But should the N-word be banned from comedy?  You know who might take umbrage to that?  Who’s that black comic I’m thinking of?  Oh yeah, I think his name might be every black comic ever.  (Except for the Cos, of course, but fuck him, he’s a pedophile.  Allegedly. )  So remove the N-word?  Nigga, please.

If you’re Tracy Morgan, and you tackle both the F-word and the R-word within the span of two weeks like an insult idiot savant, does that mean you need to make amends to all offended groups?  Maybe, but mostly because you’re not a talented enough comic to use those same words in ways that genuinely make people laugh and genuinely hold a shaky mirror up to the the terrible linguistic power of those words.  Accordingly, Tracy trotted out his “I’m sorry’s.”  And if you don’t believe me that talent matters, try to start the same wave of protest against Louis C.K.  Good luck with that, tardo!

On this heels of Tracy’s verbal diarrhea, Jo Koy jokingly quipped that an audience member was a “fucking faggot” and, allegedly, got instantly fired from the new Chelsea Handler “Are You There, Shitty Sitcom?” series.  Not only is the idea of that scary, but it’s also soooo gay!

So, what does Jo, a comic for over 15 years, do?  He apologizes, and by default, associates his good-natured stand-up with the maniacal rants of Richards and Morgan.  Say it ain’t so, Jo!!!!

What are the repercussions of this?

First of all, Jo Koy, an incredibly talented comedian, will NEVER be allowed to say “faggot” again onstage.  Ever.  He cow-towed and backed down to a bunch of fear-mongering, bandwagoning assholes and PR-blitzed a mea culpa that was about as disingenuous as  Tiger Woods’ “I shouldn’t have banged those 49 cocktail waitresses” apology.  Instead of Jo saying that a guy heckled his crotch and he shot back (a little crassly) with the nearest tool in the shed, he issued a Bataan Death March of an apology that swiftly undermined 15 years of great work as a professional comedian.

Second of all, it means Jo Koy will escape the fate of being in perhaps the shittiest shitcom of the fall season.  I’ve taken dumps with more texture than the trailer to the show. (note to self:  tell agent to get me audition to replace Jo as bartender).

Which leads me to Frankie Boyle.

Who is Frankie Boyle?  Well, if you don’t have the google.com or the google.co (I recommend you enjoy either one of these internet search engines if you haven’t been made privy to them yet), he is a very controversial Scottish comedian who is in the European news quite a bit these days.  Now, is Frankie Boyle everyone’s cup of tea?  Most certainly not, and DEFINITELY not if you’re someone who tends to drink tea.  Because, according to current British tabloids, Mr. Boyle is the biggest scourge to hit England since the bubonic plague of 1665.

See, in London, there is a woman named Katie Price, who seems like a very nice lady, perhaps a bit too nice when it comes to opening her legs to dudes with money and/or fame.  And unlike most American celebutards with a sassy streak of slut in them, Katie Price is a writer, humanitarian, and mother, who is valiantly raising her 9 year old autistic son, Harvey.  Harvey is also blind and with a severe weight problem.

Enter Frankie Boyle.

During a taping of one of his many stand-up specials, Boyle theorized that Katie Price married cage fighter Alex Reid because “she needed someone strong enough to stop Harvey from fucking her.”

Yikes.

Is it offensive?  It is to me.  I completely stay away from jokes about children and the mentally handicapped.  I find them tasteless and boorish.  I can’t even begin to explain to you the guilt I felt after my initial burst of laughter.  Almost as much guilt as I felt after the second wave of guffaws.  Is it funny?  Well, I guess it was to me, but that answer is up to all of us, right?  Remember?  With our swirling infinite mobius band of opinions?  Which adds up to one magical paradox:  we’re all right.  And we’re all wrong.

So, should Frankie Boyle apologize for a written and classically crafted joke he told on stage as a stand-up comic?  Absofuuuuuuuuuuuckinlutely not.  Not ever.  Because if Frankie Boyle gets banned from comedy, they next thing you know they’re burning his CD’s in a government-sanctioned bonfire and blonde young boys in khakis are raising their arms at 45 degree angles.

Frankie Boyle told a cruel joke.  It probably means that he has a small penis.  But is it part of his job as a professional comic to tell edgy jokes?  You bet your buttfucking hole it is!  If you hate the intent behind it, good for you.  That probably just means that you’re a normal person who went through the regular Piaget steps of healthy cognitive development.  You should feel content with your CBS sitcoms and books about moody Vampires who don’t mind 3 centuries of cockblock.  And guess what?  You never have to listen to or see Frankie Boyle again.

But that doesn’t mean that the rest of the twisted world has to be deprived of laughter just because they tripped awkwardly down the same Piaget staircase in elementary school.  There are some sick fucks who found Boyle’s joke about Harvey “hilarious.”  They probably laugh about it every time they think about it.  And YES, they are also probably the same oily creeps who jerk off with a leather belt around their neck.  But even these social miscreants deserve a moment of giggly respite from their tormented minds and cubicles.

Lenny Bruce got crucified in court in the hopes that similar comics wouldn’t get crucified in the court of public opinion.

Even more ironically, England doesn’t even have the right to free speech the way that America does, yet the Yanks are the ones sniveling our apologies.

So, this July 4th, I want you to think about what the fuuuuuck “Independence Day” means to you.  Does it mean backpedaling on the very rights that our forefathers fought and died for.  Does it mean that comics need to pussyfoot — sorry vaginafoot — around every topic on the off chance that some modern day Senator MacCarthy mentality is going to ban them from network TV?

Or does it mean that we are American, and no faggotty ass cuntard is going to take away our freedoms?

When I was in my early twenties, I experienced something that was life-changing, to say the least.

I got something that every single man — and definitely every single single man — has either gotten or almost gotten or imagined getting or had nightmares about getting.

I got “THE PHONE CALL.”

Some of you, namely my female readers (or reader, I don’t want to get cocky), might not completely understand what I mean by “THE PHONE CALL.”  But I assure you, to anyone with a functioning penis, it can only mean one type of phone call.  In the same way that “THE PILL” is obviously not talking about an over-the-counter capsule of Zantac 150, “THE PHONE CALL” is clearly not a call from an ossifying grandma asking if you got the Bill Cosby Christmas sweater she knitted.

When a girl says she is on THE pill, most guys get a little pulse in their penis.

When a buddy tells you he got THE phone call, the same aforemenioned penis will almost always attempt to revert itself back into the colon.

For those of you who don’t know or haven’t figured out what “the phone call” is (let’s call these people ‘women’), it describes the moment when a man or man/boy receives the surprising (sometimes random) information — via fiber optics or an extensive 3g network — that he might be a father.

Tada. ”Hello Innocence, meet my friend Experience.  Put down the bottle of Jim Beam, Experience, and say ‘hi!’”

The phrase “might be a father” is used here for myriad reasons here.  First, the most obvious reason, is that many women are pro-choice.  I’ve never personally owned a vagina or the brain of a woman, but I imagine having a child with a guy to whom you have to re-introduce yourself as “Uh, I don’t know if you remember me…” might bring even the staunchest Episcopalians to Planned Parenthood (which, according to most Republicans, is one giant abortionplex).

Although there is only one “the phone call,” said phone call has variegated subsets.  In 2011, I guess “THE phone call” could also be “THE text message” or “THE email” or even “THE Facebook status update.”  (I would pay money to see that last one.)

Every guy who has been slightly profligate about his seed and its whereabouts has probably had one of these variations or at least a “scare.”

The phone call, email, or text can ALSO have a number of permutations.

A friend of mine recently received the following text:  Hey, I’m a little late on my period…  :(

(First of all, I don’t think that pregnancy news should ever be appended with an emoticon, and YES, my friend is too old to date a girl who wears Hello Kitty backpacks, but most dudes can relate to the general idea.)

Another guy I know got a phone call, the first sentence of which was:  “What does two blue stripes on the pregnancy stick mean?” I told him his response should have been “It means break up.”  Alas, he didn’t, and now he is the proud father of twin boys.  I promised him I would be there for his divorce.  I mean, I’m a gentleman, after all.

The particular version of the phone call I received was:  “What do you think about being the father of an 18 month old?”

In my case, I was about 2 years too late to be a part of the abortion discussion.  Apparently, my “baby mama” — let’s call her bm from now on — had had that discussion already with another man who she had THOUGHT was the father.  I wasn’t privy to the 27 months before the phone call, but I get the feeling that Baby Daddy #1 started to have some misgivings vis a vis the lack of physical similarity between himself and his alleged progeny, so he plucked out a wisp of downy hair and took it to a lab.  Tada.

Actually, I’m not sure what transpired.  One day, I hope to meet this famous actor that goes by Cantname Getsued and ask him myself.  Until then, the circumlocuitous path that this vital information took to reach me fiber-optically remains, quite frankly, a M Night Shyamalan mystery.

When I heard the news that I was the ALLEGED father of a young girl from a one-night stand that occurred almost 3 years previous, I reacted the way any upstanding American male would.  I said, “Hablo no ingles” and hung up.

Kidding!  Since I obviously couldn’t pull off the “no hablo ingles” excuse, I did the next best thing: I closed my eyes, and chanted “There’s no place like home” over and over again like I mature adult.

Of course, she called back.  ”The phone call” was, technically, in two distinct parts.  I didn’t believe her so we agreed to have a private company do a DNA test to determine whether or not I was, indeed, the Babby Daddy.  I prayed every night after that that it wasn’t possible.  Don’t get me wrong!  I love children… particularly when they belong to other people… and from a distance…. like when they’re in Hong Kong stitching my Nikes.  But I didn’t have any reason to believe or want to believe that I was a baby daddy.  Plus, I’m white!  How often do you see a white ‘baby daddy?’  That’s like seeing an asian woman who can parallel park!  NEVER HAPPENS!

To be honest, the idea of being in my mid-twenties with no job and a credit score of i (math jokes, anyone?) raising a daughter with a 38 year old woman I didn’t particularly like was about as appealing to me as being a window squeegee technician at a peep booth palace, except without the employee benefits.  At least if I was mopping spooge off glass, I could still go home to an empty apartment where I didn’t have breakfast cereal choices in wooden cabinets.

The date was set for the DNA test.  The first thing I was shocked to find out was that not ALL DNA tests are court-ordered or Maury Povich-ordered.  Most are performed in the privacy of one’s home.    The second thing that was a little unsettling was that the company gave me a range of time during which their test taker would come.  Screw it, I thought, I’ll set up a cable appointment in the same time slot — at least I could get a 2 for 1 out of staying home for an entire afternoon.

That day was one of the most nerve-wracking days of my life, mostly because I couldn’t get my HBO to work.  So annoying….

Finally, buzz, the guy from the testing company arrives.

I buzz him in an find myself unconsciously adjusting my clothes and fixing my hair.  Like if the guy saw that I looked decent enough, he would be like “You look wayyyy too responsible to be some guy who didn’t pull out, I’m calling the boss and going home.”

When I open the door, I see an officious gentleman with vaguely Latin features in a suit and a fedora holding a suitcase, like someone out of “El Adjustment Bureau.”

From HIS point of view, he walks in and sees this scared-shitless, bug-eyed 25 year old kid in a teeny turd-encrusted Hell’s Kitchen tenement kitchen/living room eking out a smile that, at best, looks like an admission of severe flatulence.  To this man, doing his job, everything about the situation must scream out “Oopsie!”

The man puts the briefcase on a wobbly formica chair (yes, no table! What do I look like, Donald Trump?), and produces a baggie with a Q-tip in it.  My first thought upon seeing the cotton swab is “Am I going to have to put that in my pee-hole right in front of him?!!!!”  My stomach knots and my face flushes instantly at the thought.  I’ve had an errant pubic hair wend itself into my urethra before and the pain of a millimeter of keratinous filament inside it is fuuuuuuckin’ excruciating.  The idea of a whole Q-tip still makes my balls ache with fear.

He hands me the cotton swab and says, as if reading my mind, “All you have to do is swab the inside of your lip.”

“That easy?” I say.

“That easy.”

I sort of held the Q-tip up, looking at its inches of length with a bizarre distant awe like I was holding up Simba in the opening scene of “The Lion King.” Wow, this little piece of blue plastic with a white cotton top will be the arbiter of everything in my life.  This 2 cent household product will serve as a referendum on my entire existence, huh?  If it shows that I’m not genetically linked, I get to go back to being a selfish man-boy.  If it shows that I AM a DNA match, putting on AXE body spray and hitting up the new club in the East Village on Saturday night will officially and irrevocably make me a douche.

“So all I gotta do is someone change my DNA instantaneously and I’m off the hook, huh?  Where’s a radioactive spider when you need one?” I joked to the Adjustment Bureau spectre.

“If you have a daughter out there, wouldn’t you want to know?  Don’t you like the idea that maybe when you’re an old man, she will be there to take care of you because you did the right thing and took care of her?”

Wow… this guy was good.  He managed to make me feel like a legless gnat on a mound of steaming horseshit in the span of 3.2 seconds.  There’s nothing worse than someone calling you out and being absolutely right.  On top of that, he did it politely.  What an asshole!

I looked at him in the eye and said “Down the hatch!”

Yes, there was still a part of me that tried to swab the piece of chicken lodged in between my molars to sully the results (hey, didn’t something like that work for OJ?), but I followed orders, scraped the inside of my lower lip, and handed it back to him.  He daintily put it in a ziplock bag, which got sequestered into a briefcase.

Then he said “Say cheese!”  and took a Polaroid of me.  I can’t even imagine the expression I was wearing.  It must have been a strange brew of fear, confusion, guilt, anger, sadness, and irony.

The man then briskly left and I waited… until I saw the photograph.  The DNA test was no longer necessary.

POSTSCRIPT

I am the father to an amazing and beautiful girl from this brief encounter.  She lives with her mother and couldn’t be cooler.  Hopefully, one day, she will read this… and maybe find it funny.