Issue #17/72, October 16, 1999  

by Mark Ames

I can trace it almost to its very inception. The giardia bug I'd caught in Krasnoyarsk this past May. Either it was giardia, or else Lebed's Revenge. Maybe Lebed's goons had smeared my toilet seat with snapping colon flukes. When I sat down on the toilet, they attacked, swiftly tearing my innards apart, making their way straight through my ass and out my genitals. So that when I was on his downstairs dacha toilet, giggling and snapping photos of myself playing Toilet Polo, the General and his goons were watching me through a secret camera in an upstairs Command Control Room, snickering at the knowledge that the two things dearest to me in life--shitting and fucking--were about to become my two biggest personal nightmares.

Whatever it was that I caught, I napalmed it with an overdose of antibiotics. This particular antibiotic was something I'd never heard of before--and I consider myself no stranger to the world of antibiotics, not after some of the swamp things I've sloshed around with. I ingested so much of it that I nearly gave myself an ulcer. The antibiotic-napalm killed the bug colony that had transformed my asshole into a cheap yellow spray paint can; but the lingering damage is still apparent.

Impotence. I have lost interest in sex, folks, and th'aint nuthin no one c'n do 'bout it. Lawdy-lord

Case in point. Last Saturday night, I took to the bottle in a desperate attempt to ward off a looming comedown from a previous night's teleport to the Golden Triangle. I figured it would be better to substitute a common liquor hangover for an even worse hangover/withdrawal. After a night of bouncing from bar to bar, mooching as much free liquor na khalyava as I could score, I wound up at Chesterfield's, where Liz and a band of bearded Cubans had me nursing a bottle of cheap vodka. The mix of everything from Ouzo to gin to vodka, beer and wine along with the residue of stomach-twirling synthetic opiates was too much. I stumbled outside, nearly vomited, then rolled back inside. I made my way to the dance platform, where I swayed, eyeing some dyevs with the predatory gaze of Ted Bundy... The next thing I knew, I was involved in some cheesy semi-Latin dance with a blond dyev, stepping on her feet as I tried to pretend that I had the moves. God knows why she let me grope her--it doesn't speak well of the better sex. I must have stank horribly. We spoke a little bit. Then we moved to a booth, where she unhooked her bra and pulled it out of her white top. I still had that Ted Bundy evil smile plastered on my face, my eyes rolling into the back of my head. I pulled her close and tried to unscrew her nipples, rather roughly. "Oo, m'm, what are these, huh? What are these?!"

She seemed to think it was all normal. I guess by local standards it's pretty tame. She one-upped me by reaching for my crotch. But before you all start to use this tale as a warm-up for some disgusting jerk-off, let me warn you that this is where our little Penthouse Forum letter ends and the medical notes begin. My fee-wee recoiled as if I'd just jumped into the Arctic Ocean. That didn't deter her. She gave my crotch the full court press. She didn't give up. She didn't know it, but to me, her hand felt as if she'd just pulled it out of a cooler full of frozen Bud Ice. She grew frustrated and tried to strike a spark in the flint. It was useless. Finally, I had to knock her hand away. You don't see that too often--she clearly hadn't.

Her face sagged into a kind of confused depression. She pulled back and looked away. I kept twisting her nipples, but she ignored me, no matter how roughly I tried to unscrew them. She slipped her bra under her white T-shirt, clipped it back on, then rested her chin on her hands, elbows splayed on the wooden table, and stared straight ahead. I stopped trying to pull her nipples off, and leaned back in the booth, feeling oddly proud and relieved.

The weirdest part is that not only do I not care, but rather, I find the whole experience liberating. It's as if my body has finally agreed with my mind that the only way out of this whole mess is to completely remove yourself from the horrible food chain that we're all forced into at gunpoint. By becoming impotent, I'd struck a blow against Darwin. There aren't a lot of options open to those of us who want revenge on Mother Nature for offering us such a shitty menu. One way to avenge her is to not have children--nay, to conceive as many children as possible, then to call in Cap'n Hook to suck out as many of the fuckers as possible, thereby denying Her a fresh mortal for her meatgrinder. But She continues to entice you along with Desire, and it seems there's nothing you can do about it. It literally hurts, desire.

Now that my desire has gone, She has little recourse left. She has to kill me, because I cannot offer her anything in return for having granted me life. She's probably choosing her weapon now: brain cancer, heart failure from a meth overdose, or any number of her standing army of viruses. In the end, she'll win. But at least I'm doing my best here, holding out against all odds in this doomed Alamo. I'm impotent at the very age when I should be giving her children. Impotence is a weapon, folks; it is liberation.

When I stumbled home late that morning, I heard one of the local alley cats in my courtyard wailing and growling in the throes of sex agony. Possessed by that merciless bitch Mother Nature. He cried from the pain She inflicts, pain from the genitalia up through the spine and into the throat--that pain called Desire. I was once just like that cat. Up until this past May, when giardia and heat killed it off. Or maybe it's just the whole de-mojonized Moscow. Or age. Whatever it is, it's the closest thing to heaven I've felt, and I hope it never stops. Leonard Cohen--on whom I wasted so many of my limited sympathy credits for having been an impotent pop star in the vortex of the Free Love movement--was, I see now, the luckiest of them all. It's good to be impotent.