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.”
* * *
