RED SPLOOGE by Doc Sigerson (Part 3)

Part One

Part Two

He ventured next to a more upscale establishment, The Jasmine Touch.
Sippy was met upon entering by a fetching young Asian girl, her jet
black hair in a Louise Brooks cut, her slim figure sheathed in a red
cheongsam as warm with gold dragons stitched into the silk garment, its
thigh slit revealing a slender, yet shapely, leg. She gathered him by
the arm, led him down a hallway to a massage room where he undressed
and donned a white terry cloth bathrobe before heading to the steam
room. While taking the steam, Sippy enjoyed some hydration as the
girl brought him a pot of ginseng tea on a tray with a small bowl from
which to drink. He showered and dried. When he returned, the massage
room was filled with a subtle scent of lavender and the ambient
strains of Chinese music, more “new age” than authentic.

“You want banana or cherry?” asked the girl after the flipover.

“No understand,” said Sippy, hoping that she meant that Slurpees were
included in the amenities.

“Banana,” said the girl and she made a circle of her thumb and
forefinger, pumping them up and down in front of her mouth, a
pantomime of fellatio.

“Cherry,” said the girl and through the circle of her thumb and
forefinger she plunged in and out the forefinger of her other hand, a
pantomime of coitus.

“I would like both banana and cherry,” said Sippy. The girl smiled.
She slipped out of the dress. Sippy noted that she wore Hello Kitty
panties. There ought to be a joke somewhere in there, he thought.
Her dress and undies neatly stacked upon a chair in the corner, Lily
expertly wrangled his erection and lowering her face, placed her lips
ever so gingerly on the glans and then rolled down the condom that had
been hidden in her mouth so swiftly that his penis was enveloped
before he even realized what she had done. Then she set to work. She
moved up and down Sippy’s lower body, her breasts caressing his
thighs, as she tongued his shaft and finally began sucking him off
with real conviction.

“Ohhhhhhh, sweeeeeetheart,” moaned Sippy for the only thing he could
think of as the animal stormed and raged was the proverbial golf ball
through the garden hose. Crescendo. The condom shot forth like a
champagne cork.

“You asshole!” yelled the girl wiping the bright scarlet splooge from
her eyes, “[something in Mandarin]! Shit, shit shit! [something
derogatory in Mandarin]! You are disgusting! Oh, I must get this out
of my hair!
[something unspeakably vulgar in Mandarin]!”

Lily fled the room, sheathed in a very different red. On his way out,
Sippy snagged the abandoned Hello Kitty panties as a trophy.

* * *

Oh! He was crowing! Such victories he’d won which now he saw fit to disclose.

“Sippy,” I said. “You’ve really stepped over the line!”

“Doc, how can say that? Isn’t that what you do here all day long in
this dang card room? How many times have you boasted to me of all the
suckers you’d fleeced?”

“There’s a big difference,” I began, “between the sheep who come here
willingly, knowing in advance that there’s a damn good chance they’ll
lose their wad and those women who make their living providing a
service, doing honest work for an honest dollar. And I’ll tell you
something else, Sippy Cullen. These are women are mostly new to this
country and because they may not have sufficient English to call the
police, they are most vulnerable to predators. Predators like you,
Sip.”

“Oh, it’s not like that, Doc. I’m not doing any real harm.”

“You’re cheating them, Sip, pure and simple. And I’ll tell you
something else. Because they can’t rely on the police, they have
other ways of protecting themselves. Not always legal, not always
pretty. Get me?”

“Jiminy Christmas,” said Sippy, “You mean like ninjas or those Yakuza dudes?”

“Wrong culture but gangsters of some sort, usually dime-a-dozen
thick-necked goons with gaudy tattoos. Many of these places are
‘connected’ to shady organizations.”

“Really?” he said, quietly.

“Sippy, you have got to give up this game. It can only end badly for you.”

“Okay, Doc.” said Sippy, “I know you’re right.”

I had misgivings. Sippy Cullen had proven himself not always a
forthright fellow and there was something in his eyes that said that
the boy’s gotta have it.

* * *



Much like a gambler, Sippy knew his luck would have to run out sooner
or later and, as the animal seemed unsated, the urge to assail just
one more spa was so compelling that Sippy rationalized that another
outing would incur minimal risk, but no one could possibly have
foreseen the terrible exactions of his comeuppance. As it happened,
The Paradise Health Spa, nestled unassumingly between the Formosa Nail
salon and Poppa John’s Pizza would become his Waterloo. He was
greeted by a woman in a blue smock who introduced herself as Lily.

“Would you be interested in the four hand special?” she asked, “Most
beneficial for relaxing muscle and will promote healthful blood flow
through your body.”

“Four hands?” asked Sippy, “that mean two ladies?”

“Yes,” said Lily, “two therapists will perform deep tissue massage on
your body. This special would also include a table shower before the
massage”.

“I don’t know what that is,” said Sippy, “but I will give it a try.”

Sweeeeeeeeeeet! two-on-one and that’s a dream come through! he
thought, as, Cleo and a second woman in a pink smock, both protected
by clear plastic lab coats, lathered his body with rich suds and
rinsed using shower heads which extended from the wall just above his
body as he stretched out on a padded vinyl-covered table. They
scrubbed diligently every inch, literally, from head to sole, and if a
client entertained the notion that there were certain taboo locations
on the body which they would avoid, he would be mistaken. The two
attended the sensitive and secret places with unswerving zeal. Three
times they washed completely Ol’ Sippy who afterward felt exuberantly
tingly, freshly minted. Now the animal was revving up.

On the massage table the women plied with warmed lotion his back and
legs, their hands, petite yet applying steady pressure, crisscrossing
in a subtle choreography. He could not discern which hand belonged to
which woman and gradually he felt as though there must have been more
than two pairs of hands working him. This is really paradise, he
thought. Suddenly, he was flipped over and pinned to the massage
table, rendered immobile, before he even realized what they had done.
Just as swiftly, he was gagged with a small towel. He could count at
least six Chinese women holding him down, most in blue smocks and some
in pink, and there may have been more women beyond his limited field
of vision.

“Mei-Mei,” said a woman with long light brown hair as she reached
behind her and opened the door. An elderly Chinese woman entered,
padding softly in fuzzy pink bedroom slippers, a pink bathrobe wrapped
around her small gaunt form. Next came a young girl, not quite of
high school age, bearing a tray that held something which Sippy could
not make out.

“You have been a very bad man,” spoke the old woman into his ear. The
animal still purred, his cock remained hard and one of the women held
his erection at the base so it rose perpendicular from his supine
form. The old woman now began taking ultrathin acupuncture needles of
varying sizes from the tray and inserted them with great precision
into Sippy’s lower abdomen. Even though he could barely feel a
pinprick as each needle penetrated his skin, his anxiety level rose
and soared. Finally, from the tray she took a sounding probe about
twelve inches in length, which to Sippy looked like the largest needle
he’d ever seen, and she brandished it above the head of his penis so
that he could comprehend with ever increasing terror what she was
about to do. A few dabs of lubrication and she inserted, slowly,
slowly, the sounding probe into his urethra He started feeling woozy,
his mind slipping into absurdity. Jiminy Christmas, he thought, a
penis kebab. Halfway in, she removed several of the acupuncture
needles, then plunged the probe to its limit. A sudden scorching
white light leaped across his brain pan and his mind went black.

* * *

“Okay. Well,” I said. “In a way it makes sense. If acupuncture can
cure, then it can also harm ...”

“Dang you, Doc! You’re not listening!” shouted Sippy. He stood in
front of my booth where I worked at draining the ale from a semi-clean
glass. It’d been five days since his ordeal. Upon regaining
consciousness he’d found himself slumped in a heap in front of his
apartment door. Still naked, his clothes had been dumped next to him.
Only a few hours had elapsed and no neighbors had noticed the inert
Sippy Cullen displayed au naturel in their communal hallway.

“Sorry, Sip. I was ...” I began. I had been deflecting as now it
hit me that I’d been too sanguine, too lackadaisical, in dealing with
the man and failed to foresee these repercussions. I needed, somewhat,
to back up, regroup my thinking. “That was a message - they were
telling you they know where you live.”

“How ...?” he asked.

“Oh, I imagine it was a simple as looking in your wallet for your home
address.” I said, “You had it with you, right?”

“Yeah. I checked it and nothing was taken. Except ...”

“So take it to heart. They could have done much worse.”

“... and the woman, “ he said, “she called me a bad man ...”

“I won’t sugarcoat this, Sip,” I said. “You made some bad decisions,
some incredibly reckless decisions, without a shred of regard for some
of your fellow human beings. Surely even you knew that body fluids
are considered biohazard. You weren’t just unethical - you put them
at risk.”

“But dang it Doc,” he said, “sure, I skipped out on paying for
services but that blood could just be wiped off or cleaned up. I
don’t fucking deserve what they did to me. You say they could have
hurt me much worse but you don’t know. They took away my life as I
knew it.

“Sippy,” I said, “you’re alive and intact. Just make amends and get
on with your life.”

“That blood vessel blowout should have bummed me out.” Sippy said,
“but here I thought ‘Mr. Cullen you just take positive steps and get
your act together.’ Dang it, when life hands you lemonade then make
lemon cake! And that’s what I was doing - boosting myself with my
bootstraps and just for a few moments in my life I felt in the game,
riding the crest of the wave ... like I was someone ... like I was
really someone ... it was like I stepped out of that old life - the
life where I schlepped the equipment for the players ... those guys who
were actually in the game ...and where I was constantly bombarded
with the sex boasting and the jock jabber in the locker room ...
taunted by the sort of life I could never have ... and all of a sudden
I could be this new person ... a normal person with a normal life ...
or something more ... I wanted to attack life and chew it up in
man-size portions ... to drink up the whole dang world in big gulps
... to really leave a footprint ... my life should have been so much
more ... but it never was ...”

He swallowed, suppressing a sob.

“And in your eyes, Doc,” he continued, “ ... in your eyes I was always
that no-moxie munchkin ... the snuffler in the backroom ... the guy
what missed the gravy boat ... and now fuck it all! I may be
sidelined for the rest of my life. In the game for a few plays and
then sidelined, benched like a chump in a slump.”

He was trembling, noticeably.

“And you know what they took, Doc?” he continued, “they took away my
drive. They killed the animal. I can’t get it up anymore and I’ve
tried everything. Looking at any image no matter how extreme don’t
juice my fella. Talking to Barb at the 7-11 don’t give me any kind of
buzz no more. I tried little blue pills I borrowed from Old Man
Bigelow up the hall and nothing happened. I can’t even fantasize and
my dreams are dullsville. I never had much before, but I had porn and
now porn is a closed door. There’s a hella big sucky black hole
that’s was my life. Did I really deserve that from them women? I
just want what everyone seems to have. Doc, I ask you. Am I so much
less deserving than anyone else?”

Ah, Sippy, I thought, you wretched man, you were never the one and
never going to be the one to paint the town red. And maybe it’s just
your lot in life to be sidelined from the game which in the end is
just a trifling thing. But, you’ll learn that eventually. We’ve all
had setbacks, especially you, Sippy Cullen, but you always had porn to
fall back on. Now you don’t have the one thing that made tolerable
your sad sack existence.

All the things that I could possibly tell Sippy would be of no comfort
to him at this moment. He swayed, emotionally exhausted, unsteady on
his feet, his rant spent.

“Sippy, there are times I don’t know anything at all,” I said. “Sit
down and I’ll buy you a pint. A big pint.”

He tottered, collapsing into the seat like a dead weight.

* * *



Now you’ve heard the story of Sippy Cullen. I’ve told it straight, no
digressions, no trick endings, a direct and unvarying trajectory with
only one possible outcome. Several days afterward, I made my way to
the Hong Kong Palace restaurant. Inside I asked for May and was shown
the back office where sat an old Chinese woman wearing a black tunic
and slacks and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers. Thank you, she said, for
helping us stop this problem. He has made a first payment of
compensation. I asked if he would recover. Possible, she said, but I
hope not. My girls were so shook up, they will not come back to work.
They must be tested. Tested again in six months. The rooms
rehabbed. I said he had become unhinged. All his life a harmless
midge and just the slightest injury derailed his sense of what is
right. She spat on the floor and gave me the cold eye. Do not tell
me your troubles, Doc Sigerson. I have my own.

RED SPLOOGE by Doc Sigerson (Part 2)

Part One

The last thing I should have done was proffer any notions that might
inspire a harebrained stunt, least of all to Mr. Keith “Sippy” Cullen,
that mook. At first it seemed out of character. The man practiced a
pathological frugality, pinched his pennies until they squealed like
pigs. His porn sessions were his version of a cheap date. Sure, he
was a natural introvert, but it was parsimony mostly that prevented
him from pairing up. Now, The Red Splooge Boogie had him
high-stepping to a different tune as he betook himself to The Joy Luck
Rub, a tidy emporium of tug jobs tucked into a strip mall not too far
from his favorite 7-11 store.

Middle-aged Chinese women, originally from Hong Kong, operated the
massage parlor. Though they possessed but a smattering of English,
they moved him from lobby to massage room in a manner businesslike and
brisk. The women wore plain blue hospital scrubs and though far from
matronly frumps, they were certainly not the China doll ingenues of
desire’s imagination.

Mother naked, he stretched out on the massage table, his arms dangling
rubbery and loose off the sides of the table, his face firmly in the
cradle allowing him but a hemmed view of the floor and sometimes a
glimpse of a sensible workshoe. The masseuse set to manhandling
whatever muscles he had achieved through a regimen of role player
video games and internet porn. She directed him to turn over onto his
back and as he turned, she placed deftly a small pillow beneath his
head before he even realized what she had done.

“Little Brother need massage?” she asked.

“What brother?” he started, “I don’t have a ...”

“Little Brother.” and she pointed.

“Oh ... oh, yes, please,” said Sippy. “Please, take good care of him.”

The woman stationed the bottle of lotion between Sippy’s knees,
applying liberal amounts to her hand and began slathering Sippy’s
loins. She proceeded in circular motions on his abdomen, sweeping
lower, lower, and then working the inside of his thighs. The circle
was closing in. Then running tentatively her fingers along his shaft,
with the other hand she kneaded the scrotum. Grasping his balls with
increasing pressure, she started stroking his penis. Sippy felt the
grumbling and flexing gland exert its power. A sudden inner
convulsing,and like a damburst, the woman was drenched. Sippy moaned
and the woman gasped.

“Aieeeeeeeeee!” she cried, “Ugh! Ugh! Oh, no! [something in Mandarin]!
You ugly defective white man! [something more in Mandarin]! I might
be contaminated and die of a horrible disease!
[something-something-something in Mandarin]!”

She wiped frantically the blood from her face and jetted from the
room, down the hall. Sippy heard doors slam and could discern several
excited voices but could not understand the words in Mandarin. Then
more slamming of doors. He toweled himself dry, then dressed and made
his way to the front desk. Seeing no one there, he slipped out the
door, hastening homeward with many a backward glance. The woman had
not collected money before the massage and Sippy had failed to leave
payment on the desk. When it became apparent no one pursued, he
slowed, breaking into a saunter and a shit-eating grin.

* * *

As if no one wanted to play cards with a man called Doc, pigeons were
scarce in the card room that next day when Sippy showed up, a spark in
his eye, a spring in his step. I motioned him over and asked how he
fared.

“I took your advice, Doc,” he said, “been trying things out, seeing
what’s exactly my new normal.”

“Your hemospermia condition - still erupting red?”

“Yeah, Doc. It’s a dang mess.”

“Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Sippy Cullen.”

“Doc, sometime I don’t get you at all,” he said. “So it’s funny. I
thought this brouhaha with the burst blood vessel would check my
action but just the opposite - it’s jumpstarted and turbo-charged my
whole sex drive. I’m in full-on horndog mode. All the time.”

“Well, that’s surprising,” I said. “I ‘d have guessed it would have
let the air out of your balloon.”

“It’s like I have an animal down there below my gut” Sippy said,
“purring away all the time, then when I get going, the animal is
roaring like that talking tiger on the cereal commercial. I’m about
to shoot my wad and the animal feels like it’s trying to explode out
of my body. It’s more powerful than anything I’ve felt before.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a good thing going there,” I said.

“It’s like when you absorb a power booster capsule, you up your energy
and your firepower increases tenfold.”

“Sippy, for the sake of my reputation, I’m going to pretend that I did
not understand what you just said.”

“Hardy-har-har,” he said, “You just like to pretend that you don’t
know as much as you really do. So let me ask you about something
that’s come up.”

“Tell me what’s itching your brain,” I said.

“I’m thinking of going to one of them massage places I see around
town. Seems to be new ones popping up every month and I don’t know
which one would be really right for me, if you get my drift.”

I gave him the eye and thought oh ho, once more he’s the man of gelded
dreams and stillborn schemes.

”Well, Sippy,” I said, “there’s legit ones and then there’s not so
legit ones where you can exercise your animal, if that’s what we’re
talking about. But seriously, you need to take care of your problem
first.”

“It’s getting better, actually,” he said, “should be cleared up in a few days.”

“Just like finding the right plumber or barber shop, it’s trial and
error, or you rely on word of mouth. You might try doing some
searches on the internet. I understand there’s chatrooms and websites
where the ‘patrons’ discuss and rate the different establishments.
I’ve heard that if you’re interested in a superb by-the-book working
over, then steer yourself to the Asian joints.”

“Really?” he asked. “Why’s that?”

“Regular massage has been a part of their culture for centuries and
unlike run-of-the-mill American-operated massage parlors, those run by
Asians make a practice of rendering service before receiving payment,
leaving the amount of the gratuity, if any, to the gentleman patron,
which is one their ways of sidestepping the snares of Uncle Leo.”

“You mean the crazy uncle from Seinfeld?”

“That character’s name has been hijacked by the criminal subculture so
that here LEO stands for Law Enforcement Officer.”

“Jiminy Christmas! No kidding!”

“And try to avoid anyplace that advertises ‘hot stones’ therapy,” I
said. “According to my sources, that’s the piss-poor substitute
provided by sleazy incompetent joints that don’t have trained massage
therapists and any extra services they might offer are usually
substandard, as well. So you think you want to sample the skills of
one of our local service providers?”

“Nah,” he said, “probably not.”

“I didn’t think so for a moment, Sip. We are who we are.”

“Guess so,” he said.

In hindsight, he’d laid enough cards on the table for me to suss out
the situation but, you see, I had never taken Ol’ Sippy seriously, not
even halfway, and so my mind skated over what otherwise would have
been evident.

* * *

RED SPLOOGE by Doc Sigerson (Part 1)

RED SPLOOGE
by Doc Sigerson

Sunday morning, porn session in progress, and Sippy Cullen was never
more alive, his synapses percolating merrily along as he mouse-clicked
from image to image, pausing at certain almost familiar faces as if
there were a faint possibility that she and he could have met sometime
in Sippy’s mostly uneventful life, leading to an even more implausible
fantasy of an intimate encounter. Progressing from merely teasing his
prick to a full-fisted grasp, he fell into a rhythmic pumping. He
leaned back in the chair, his eyes closed, the pressure mounting, and
visualized first that zaftig middle-aged dyed-blonde woman at the 7-11
store where he buys his banana-flavored Slurpee each afternoon and who
often seemed interested in his small talk, then that Asian newsbabe on
Channel 6 with the flashy smile and infectious laugh and whose
signature cleavage was always sweetly center screen, and finally that
slim fresh-limbed blonde cheerleader on whom he suffered a forlorn
crush in high school. The urgency was burgeoning, building and
building, a potent pressure aching to burst free. He released into
his left hand. He took a long breath. He opened his eyes. His heart
stopped.

His surroundings were spattered and scumbled with a surfeit of fluid,
not just the modest amount of jizz contained easily within the palm of
one hand, not just a skosh of overflow, not just the scattershot of
erratic aim, but an inundation of King Kong proportions, and lest you
think I exaggerate, a Jackson Pollack pattern covered the computer
screen, random shots had scored the wall and speckled the ceiling,
larger drops had begun sliding or dripping downward, obeisant to
gravity, moving toward the growing puddles on the floor between and
around his feet. Only it wasn’t jizz. It wasn’t semen. It was
blood, dark red and thick and gloppy.

“...eee ...” he squeaked. And he sat there a long while trying
desperately to make his brain work harder, to think faster, to wrap
his mind around what just happened. Sippy Cullen decided finally that
the blood was real. He wiped clean his hands with the tissue he had
set out and then examined systematically his private parts,
ascertaining that there was no external injury or wound. His relief
lasted only a moment as he realized that no external problem could
only mean that an internal problem existed. He mulled over the
possibilities.

“Jiminy Christmas ... now what?” he muttered.

* * *

“Damn it, Sip,” I said, “I’m a poker player, not a doctor.” He had
found me laired up at Whisperin’ Lanes Bowling Center where, in the
cocktail lounge and card room, one is isolated from the din of the
alleys, the whoops and banter of bowlers, the clatter of colliding
pins, the jarring clunk and rolling schadenfreude of other people’s
balls in the gutter. We go way back, Sippy Cullen and I, back to our
early days, grade school, then high school where we both were involved
in sports. I ran cross-country and track, while Sippy was the team
manager for whatever sport was in season. I ‘m one of the few to know
that his legal name is Keith and perhaps the only soul to remember
that he acquired the nickname of Sippy because his family came from
Mississippi before relocating to the Northwest. He’d always been
weedy and scraggly, his mouth hung open in perpetual disbelief, his
eyeglasses in constant need of adjustment, and somewhere over the
unkind decades he had acquired a strange compulsion to unburden
himself to me.

“They tested me at the free clinic,” Sippy said after a prelimanary
explanation. “Told me no infection, probably a blood vessel that had
burst.”

“Ain’t that a kick in the pants? ” I said, “It’s called hemospermia.
So you had a little blood in the semen?” By the time a man gets to a
certain age he’s apt to have more than a nodding acquaintance with the
hazards and mishaps of the male plumbing.

“No, Doc,” he said, “it was a hell of a lot more than just a little!”

“Was it,” I asked, “like a little ketchup mixed in tartar sauce?”

“Jeez, Doc,” he said, “I said a lot. More like a murder on CSI:
Miami. Everything covered in blood.”


“A crime scene and you got caught redhanded!” I chortled.

“Doc, you a real A-hole sometime,” he sniffed. “gotta look for the
joke in everything. But dang it, why? What was I doing wrong?”

“Could happen to anyone,” I shrugged. “Even a brand new Goodyear can
have a blowout.”

“The clinic P.A. said it was common problem but dang if I ever hear of
it anywhere.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve heard that about a lot of various conditions and
maybe it’s because guys are embarrassed to talk up their shortcomings.
And you have to remember, Sippy, those medical professionals only
come in contact with luckless souls afflicted with problems and
looking for help. Their view of the world is necessarily skewed.”

“There was one thing he didn’t tell me and I was too mushmouthed to
ask. And this is the real question. Do I stop for a while or can I
go back to ... you know ... normal activities?”

“I don’t know, Sippy,” I said, thinking for a moment. “There are two
possibilities, it seems. One, the injury will be aggravated every
time you ejaculate and there will always be a copious amount of blood
in your spew. If so, this will be your new normal.”

“Jiminy Christmas! I hope not!”

“The second possibility,” I continued, “the injury was a one-time only
affair and that by ejaculating you are actually flushing out your
system. Tell me, Sippy, was there any pain?”

“No, Doc,” he said, “nothing at all.”

“Well, you ought be able to take the little fella out and show him a
swell time. See how it goes and if you aggravate the injury, then
take a break for a few days and try again,” And I added. “You know,
it ‘s a damn fine thing you weren’t with some actual gal. She’d been
thoroughly freaked out.”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, “totally freaked out.”

* * *

I WAS YOUNG and NEEDED MONEY and FOR A FEW BUCKS I LET STRANGERS FINGER MY BUTT

"I WAS YOUNG and NEEDED MONEY and
FOR A FEW BUCKS I LET STRANGERS FINGER MY BUTT" by Doc Sigerson

The late eighties fell on me hard. After being fired from a gas station job for assaulting a customer, I scrounged for odd jobs to supplement the unemployment benefits, preferably those jobs in which the compensation would be “unreported”. To get by, I sold books culled from my own library, and I did get a part-time gig working for a retired rare book dealer who needed a dog’s body as he was limited in mobility, but the gig petered out when he started paying me in books instead of cash. I endured a one day affair as a walking chocolate chip cookie which involved a huge foam costume and handing out coupons for a free sample. A direct mail advertising venture failed to pan out. Then I saw an ad in the local alternative weekly newspaper for a medical school that needed nude models. They offered $15 per hour, which hitherto had been more than I had ever been paid. Hoping that they would work with any and all body types, I sent them a letter.

The Bastyr College, later to become Bastyr University, offered a four year course in naturopathic medicine. They hired a half dozen guys, five who worked frequently as artist’s models for life drawing classes at the nearby University of Washington - and me. Our purpose was to teach second year medical students to perform the male pelvic exam, mostly by being the body upon which they could take some practice pokes. We had a three hour orientation class followed by an physical examination where a doctor showed two guys at a time what a proper exam would feel like. He put extra pressure on my prostate gland so that I would be certain, unequivocally certain, mortally certain, through the fucking roof certain, that I would know exactly when the student’s forefinger would be pressing through the rectal wall upon my gland and not taking the spelunker’s tour. On the day of the live labs we sat in on the anatomy class with the students and found out that not every med student is the sharpest knife in the drawer, judging by some of the questions they asked.

I was concerned about the size of the audience I would entertain with my debut. The worst case scenario would have me standing mother naked on the stage of a vast lecture hall, seats filled to capacity with what passed for college students, the professor a white-haired man of advanced years welding a long tallywhacker of a pointer, intoning, “and this (thwack!) is the male genitalia!” Sure, I have had the usual young man’s share of exposure. The years spent in the public school system where communal showers are the norm for both gym classes and after school sports were spent without mishap, except for one hapless classmate who became aroused in the locker room surrounded by naked boys thereby becoming an object lesson for those uncertain of their own orientation. Interestingly, he is now a member of the so-called Tea Party, though I am not asserting a cause-and-effect relationship. In the army I was spared the notorious, and by then obsolete, “short arm inspection” whereby soldiers fell into formation on the parade ground wearing only boots and a raincoat which would be flung open when the medical officer passed by as he sought signs of dreaded venereal disease. The induction center, however, was the scene for a mass examination of fifty-or-so young men foolish enough to enlist. We queued up in two parallel lines facing each other, wearing nothing but skivvies and socks. On command, one line did an about face, while the doctor in center aisle went down the other line. Each recruit dropped his drawers while the doctor checked for hernia. Then that line did an about face, the doctor retracing his steps, checking this time for hemorrhoids as the recruits bent over, cheeks spread. The doctor repeated the procedure for the second line and all along no one’s privy parts were exposed to the gaze of his fellow recruits. What’s crazy, in retrospect, is that at no time did the doctor wear gloves as he examined all those privates of the soon-to-be privates.

In those years between 1977 and 1989 the world learned of A.I.D.S. and its halfwit brother, H.I.V. Gloves, either latex or vinyl, became paramount to the safe conduct of medical procedures and examinations. Gloving, de-gloving, and even double gloving were drummed into the heads of these students, becoming their mantra as they divided up into groups of four or five, each group led by an instructor or a proctor, that is, a savvy senior classman. The live labs were held in the school’s practicing clinic, not a classroom, and each of us models were assigned a real exam room.

There I stood in the unheated room - a thin hospital gown, white guy pale shins and black socks -when a group of four entered. Included in that first group was Native American girl from Eastern Washington, the part of the state which remains extremely rural and agro-centric. An inordinate amount of time she dwelt upon my testicles and sac. She lingered. The room grew quiet. When the instructor hinted that she should move on, the girl said that this was her first time examining male genitals other than her experience growing up on a cattle ranch where she assisted her father and brothers castrating the bulls every year. I happen to be a taurus, I said.

Next up was a doe-eyed laddie who rolled my penis between his thumb and finger as though he were appraising a fat postprandial cigar and assumed such an air of the true connoisseur that I was forced to suppress a shudder, turned my eyes to the clock above the door and I set my mind to digging up a childhood memory of when as a boy scout I had sculpted and slept in an snow cave in one of the several gigantic glaciers on Mount Rainier during the coldest winter night of the year. I repeated to myself the bank robber’s advice to stay calm and no one gets hurt. Also I kept my gaze fixed on the clock as the young man seemed eager to make what I shall charitably call “inappropriate” eye contact.

The second year there was a new mom in the group who was nursing her newborn baby quite openly with her full breast exposed and right in front of me as I was being examined. While this was not exactly an erotic situation, anytime I start getting my buttons pushed there is sure to be a reaction. No noticeable twitching, let alone a full blown raging hard-on, but I did start leaking. Ah, dear me. The instructor told the class that a clear discharge was common but a discolored discharge would be cause for concern. Not just my body, but my bodily functions were now on view and a subject fit for group discussion. Ah, dear me. Then the new-age-in-your-face mommy half-joked that her lab report would be pasted into the child’s baby book as the her first pelvic exam, the very first step on the child’s future medical career. The tike was asleep, blissfully oblivious and made not a sound - not a gurgle, not a burp, not a tiny baby fart. The baby and I were both there, but only one of us had been marked for life.

In the third year I encountered the Wesley Crusher of Alternative Medicine, a young overly earnest baby-faced fellow who couldn’t wait to jump into the captain’s chair and take command. Part of the male pelvic exam is checking the inguinal canal for signs of hernia. This is done by using a finger to trace back the spermatic cord from the testicle and invaginating, that is, turning inside out, the scrotum until the finger reaches a triangular shaped opening in the corner of the groin. This is the inguinal canal whence the testicle descended during puberty. A finger is placed over the opening, the patient is asked to turn his head and cough. The coughing causes the diaphragm to put pressure on the bowel and if there is a hernia, that is, a break or breach in the bowel wall, then quite often the hernia can be detected by the finger as the bowel pushes out through the canal. If the doctor’s finger is small enough, and most female doctors have petite fingers, then the finger can actually intrude up into the inguinal canal which is a more reliable check. Believe me, that is a feeling quite unlike any other. So Ensign Crusher thinks he feels the bowel protruding on my right side and jumps into a spiel as to how I should proceed in naturopothic treatment and how he would be willing to see me in clinic and .... The instructor cut him short, reminding him that I have my own medical plan and that there is no naturopathic treatment for hernia. After the class, the instructor checked me herself and confirmed that I probably had a right inguinal hernia and that I should consult a surgeon.

I did this job every May for three years and I had continued even after I was employed full time and no longer needed the money because I felt that helping to train doctors to detect cancer was a worthwhile and important pursuit. After the third year, the school gave up the program because of the expense and instead the students practiced on each other. For a few years thereafter, I included the job title “Teaching Assistant at a Medical School” on my resume and I even tried to impress young ladies by telling them that I had taught medical students to perform pelvic exams.