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Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICA - The situation is totally absurd. I'm seated in a cubicle looking at a man, black like me, standing, a pink dildo attached to his waist jiggling like a gigolo. I smile because I'm about to laugh and don't want to. He's talking. I don't remember what exactly he was saying but whatever it was, he delivered it in such an earnest tone, it only made me want to laugh more. He was a medical assistant, a fresh one too it seemed judging from his earnesty. I was a patient. At the Men's Clinic.
I'm sitting on a bed with a prostitute, Violet, in a dingy room in Joburg. The mattress is bare as is she below the waist. She's holding my penis in her hand, pumping her arm, up, down, up, down. "It's not standing," she says.
I don't look down. Instead I reach out for her bare waist.
"Don't touch me, I'm not your wife."
Her words dispel any hope I may have had that anything was going to happen that afternoon.
It had happened a lot of times, this non-event. Still something inside me had hoped that today my body would not betray me again. If only I was Uri Geller, able to move anything by force of will. The man on the next bed looked slightly amused, it didn't stop him, though, from heaving at the woman beneath him. She looked so disinterested, in him, us, "will you hurry up man," her look seemed to say.
"Not today sweetie," I tell Violet, "keep the money." It was only 20 rand anyway.
"The 2 week package will cost 865 rand," the medical assistant is saying.
I don't have cash on me, "Can I pay by card?"
"Yeah that's ok."
I hand him the card. This will be my most expensive lay ever. Add the woman whom I'd have to test the medication on and it would be just over 1000 rand. So much more than the time Betty and I took off on one of those long weekends to a lakeside holiday resort. I'd had to pay for the room and board and part of the fuel but it was sti
ll nowhere near 1000 rand. The 865 could have been more if I'd followed the cashier's advice. "Take a whole month's package ... it works out cheaper in the long run. ... You're paying by card, take two months then ... It won't hurt."
"No, two weeks."
The injection didn't hurt. All I felt was a short sharp jolt before the spot turned numb.
The doctor rubbed the injection site at the base of my penis, "Wait a few minutes, we'll see what happens."
I was lying on an examination table, boxers pulled to my knees, my mind wandering back to the last time I'd been in a similar situation. I was 11 and getting circumcised. My brother had gone the year before and -- not wanting to be the only boy in the house -- I had insisted on going. My mother had taken me, a taboo I later learned.
Circumcision is a man's affair even when done in a hospital like the one I was headed to. My father should have taken me or in his absence, a close male relative. But we had none. My mother and father had split shortly after my birth. My grandparents took it very badly, almost personally. They had shunned my mother as had her brothers. My brother had gone with an 'uncle,' really a close friend of my mother. But they had since fallen out. So instead she took me.
"Wait here," the doctor said, "I'll check on you in about 15 minutes." He opened the door to a room, the cubicle. There was a chair and a table at its end. The table had some magazines. I was hoping they would be skin rags, instead there was Getaway, Autotrader, Wegbreek; a bit disappointing given that my dick was getting harder and harder and sex was the only thing I could think of at the time.
So here I was looking at a Toyota Prius instead of a female ass. Somehow though, I felt elated. I had discovered sex in a syringe. It would be so much easier this way. No anxiety. No uncertainty. No more erratic erections.
I could tell when one of those was coming on. I'm with a woman, we're fumbling each other's clothes off when a cold feeling of alarm churns in my stomach, my heart beats faster pumping blood everywhere except where it was needed most. And then the non-event.
Sometimes, though, when I'd drank, I'd forget the self-consciousness that usually came on just before the interrupted intercourse. Like the night I got drunk with Phumzile. She said I'd been so rough with her. She also said I threw up but I couldn't remember that. I didn't even remember the sex. Scary, to do all that and not remember a thing. So the alcohol had worked for me and against me. Next time it would have to be in the right dosage, like those writers who have to drink if they are to work but not too much in case they crossed the fine line between inspiration and inebriation.
I don't know what the doctor had injected me with. The syringes they later gave me with my dosages had said insulin. But was it really that or had they been deliberately mislabelled to save their user from embarrassment, in case one was found lying in the fridge where the instructions had said they should be stored. It probably wouldn't matter anyway if it was one of those difficult pharmaceutical terms. Whatever it was anyway, "6 ml of it has given you an 80% erection," the doctor said when he walked into the cubicle to check on my, its progress.
"Let's see how long it will last then I will decide on your final dosage."
"How do I rate doctor," I wanted to ask him, "you must have seen a lot of men's erections, am I small, medium or large?" Betty had taken one look and immediately declared it small. "So what," I barked back, "it matches my clothes."
"Don't worry, with regular use, it will become bigger," she'd reassured.
"An African man measures his strength by his virility," I once heard my mother say. We'd been talking then about men who moved from woman to woman, the type of man I secretly wanted to be.
No self-respecting African male would be seen announcing his impotence like the white man in the ad that had led me to the Men's Clinic. He looked happy, as if he had just gotten lucky. His wife clinging to him. "They saved my marriage," he was saying. He was diabetic which affected his performance. His wife thought he didn't love her anymore as he didn't even want to touch her. She had insisted he go to the Men's Clinic where they saved his marriage and salvaged his self-esteem. Strangely, all the patients I saw that day at the Men's Clinic were black men. Trying to keep their strength up.
Looking at the assistant standing in front of me, dildo flapping from his waist, I wondered again what had brought me here. Failure with Violet, Phumzi, Betty, more recently Patience. Fear too, and uncertainty and desire, all mixed in unequal parts.
"Here are your five injections," the assistant was saying, "space them three days apart and I'll see you again in 2 weeks time."
A scribbler
Among other things
THABO PULE says of himself: I am (not listed in order of importance);
This is his first article for The World's Magazine.
A South African
An African
A man
A copywriter
A traveler
A seeker
A college dropout
A Kanye hater
A boy
A doodler
A brandy addict
A lerato lover
A joburger
A late twenty-something
A TV and people watcher
WEB SITE PICK OF THE WEEK: The video of venerable journalist Bill Moyer's 15 May, 2005 speech at the National Media Reform conference in St. Louis, Missouri, USA can be viewed at the FreePress.net site. We believe it is well worth your time. [Broadband connection recommended.]
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