I lingered in New Haven as Thanksgiving break began; I did not go to Cambridge for The Game. It was freezing here, as I’ve heard it was at Harvard. Lit up, Harkness Tower looked like a giant inverse icicle.
I thought I might get work done, but instead I fell into a familiar pattern of worrying, staring at Word documents, and walking around. Evenings I socialized. Then I got so bored, anxious and sad that one night, alone in my room, I took Viagra just to see what it was like.
I can’t tell you how I got it, since doing so would violate the privacy of someone I’d rather protect. Suffice it to say that I stole it from someone.
Stole it over the summer and kept it — even brought it to college with me. All semester it sat on my bookshelf, like a tiny, lusterless sapphire. I didn’t have plans to use it, necessarily — imagine getting one of those four-hour erections the commercials warn you about in the company of another person, then trying to explain it to her: “I can’t help it, girl; this is what you do.” No, I was too nervous by nature even to use a guaranteed hard-on pill. I guess it just seemed like a good thing to have around, like a nuclear weapon.
A friend once told me he had tried it, despite of course not needing it. I asked him how it felt. “It’s like having a trophy instead of a dick,” he said. I thought this sounded terrific.
The weekend of the Princeton game, a recent graduate told me how he bought a leather jacket at the thrift store and found in the pockets a packet of Virecta, a generic product of the same chemical makeup as Pfizer’s flagship boner tablet. Sildenafil citrate. Not that spam-promoted herbal shit: the genuine article. He took it one night, because he had nothing else to do. All his extremities felt filled with warm blood.
So on Friday night, Nov. 21, fretting over homework that hadn’t been done and awaiting a phone call which I slowly realized wasn’t coming, I thought about Viagra.
Reader, can you blame me?
I text-messaged Trophy-Dick, who encouraged me. “Just don’t take too much,” he cautioned, “or you’re sure to endure priapism.” Priapism: abnormal persistent erection of the penis, without sexual arousal. A serious medical condition that, if left untreated, can result in irreversible erectile dysfunction or penis loss. Other known side effects of Viagra: blindness, cyanopsia (“seeing blue”). “Seriously,” Trophy-Dick told me, “just take half.”
A 50 mg Viagra tablet isn’t made to break in half; I don’t even know if the active ingredient is distributed evenly throughout the pill. But I know that Priapus was cursed with a phallus so horribly over-engorged it required the constant support of a makeshift harness, and that this mythic inconvenience would seem small compared to the real-life consequences of his namesake affliction. (The treatment for it is penile bloodletting. The treatment!) So I split the pill as best I could with a dining hall knife, losing in the process numerous miniscule shards of precious pulverized sildenafil. Not taking it was no longer an option, though consciously I did not know this yet.
I got into bed with my laptop. It was incredibly cold. At 12:45 a.m., I took the stuff. It was like jumping into a cold swimming pool on a day that’s not too hot: At a certain point, without really willing it, I stopped considering and did it, and it happened.
Around 1 a.m. my face started to feel flushed. I was still freezing. I put on a sweatshirt. My lips pulsed industriously. I tried to stay calm while awaiting the signs of incipient blindness.
My metabolism is overactive enough for purportedly overnight medicines to affect me in 15 minutes, so at 1:07 I figured I’d waited long enough. I opened my computer and looked at Internet pornography, which at this point in my life feels like doing a dirty chore.
Viagra works with terrifying efficiency. The customary inverse proportion between my levels of anxiety and arousal — which had motivated my theft of the pill in the first place — had been abrogated. Though I feared the fates of Milton and Abelard my penis rose like Frankenstein’s creature, a thing made animate by science. Before it could attain self-consciousness and demand a bride I ran to the bathroom, hoping that bodily movement and a lack of stimulation would reverse the turgidization. It went down, thank God. I saw in the mirror that my face had gone red and marveled that the drug even induced in me the outward signs of shame. That, and an erection.
On the plus side … I’ve still got the other half!