Jonny's Nob

(from 'Supplements' - A Collection of Short Stories)

He’s been trying to wank properly for years, but so far his success rate has been subpar. Worse than subpar, actually. Out of the ten times Jonny has tried to toss himself off over his 20 years on earth, he has managed to come a total of zero times. He doesn’t understand. Why does nothing - and I mean nothing  - get him going? There doesn’t even seem to be any kind of motivation to give it a go, there never has been. The only reason he’s trying now, tonight, is because he’s bored and hoped that maybe over the past year something might have changed, a switch might have flicked, and he might suddenly be able to get it up, fill the time. 

    As he sits at his desk, limp cock in one hand and phone in the other, he manages to tug enough blood into the organ to thicken it up and reduce its malleability, but not nearly enough to take him all the way home. The tinny sounds from one of the fifteen porn videos he’s clicked on in as many minutes echo silently around his room and land in the dark spaces that the lamplight refuses to touch. Yeah baby, fuck me. Yeah that’s it honey, harder! The same thing has happened every single time Jonny has attempted this activity, and each time it has chipped away at him, grinding him closer and closer to the weak frame at his core. He sees himself in the third person: a sorry excuse for a man. 

- What the fuck kind of bloke can’t get hard to a pornstar getting fucked, full penetration, in front of his very eyes? Hundreds of generations of men would kill for this opportunity, it’s what we’ve been working towards for the whole of our sexual existence, you ungrateful shit. 

Trembling from tips of his shoulder blades with a resentment for the self that usually emerges post wank (for the rest of us), his body becomes a flacid mass of resignation and a few feeble thuds sound as he whacks his head on the MDF desk. FUCK YES! YEAH BABY, MORE! Tears now. Questions, questions questions. It doesn’t make sense to him: why was he given a nob if its only use was to piss? What about the inbuilt need for human reproduction, recreation, pleasure? How much longer can he go on joining in with the conversations of male friends about their sex lives and wanking habits, knowing full well that his tales are just a composite version of everything he’s heard from them? He’s gonna crack someday soon and those cunts will be all too ready to rip the living shit out of him. That’s men for you. They’ll find a hole in his narrative, or ask a trick question and he’ll be snookered. Maybe it will be him that asks the question, but a stupid one, like the time in year seven when he asked Ryan Steer whether or not you needed to have a boner to have sex. 

- Are you a fucking virgin, Jonno? Ryan Steer, year nine. 

Jonny secretly called him Ryan Smear (but not to anyone else) because he was such a dickhead… ha ha, that taught him. Still, he had guessed it was a bit of a stupid question even before he’d asked it so attempted to style it out… 

- Course not. Just asking. He was just asking, that much was true, but in all fairness to Ryan Smear, Jonny was also very much a ‘fucking virgin’ in year seven, and still is aged twenty. 

- Well the answer’s no, anyway. As long as you can fit it in it counts. But I reckon your’s probably wouldn’t reach far enough anyway. Ha ha. 

It took Jonny six more years until he knew the actual answer to his question.

Now, back in his room and wrapped around his limp dick like a deflated embryo, he remembers the only time he ever managed to get it up. It wasn’t on purpose, though, and he wasn’t even that sure he liked the feeling, but it counted… he thinks…   

Laying in his bed, aged 8, Jonny shut his eyes and felt the mattress spinning into oblivion. Too warm under his Star Wars duvet, he stuck one foot out and let thoughts of the day just gone cruise past him like the buses at Colwyn Bay coach stop, letting none of them halt long enough to be of use. None of them, that is, except the snippet of mental film which looped and looped itself of its own accord. It showed a moment he’d shared with his good friend, Daniel, that afternoon. He had many memories with Daniel, but this one was newer, shinier and it wouldn’t dissolve. In his mind’s eye Jonny could see the hairless abdomen of a boy his age, drenching itself in the late afternoon sun of May. It was Daniel’s. It was soft and smooth and looked as though it had been carved out of the same stone you sometimes found in the kitchens of rich friends. It was near to him, to his face, to his lips. He wanted to be nearer to this picture and hold it forever. So using the gravity of his psyche, Jonny reached from his bed out and pulled the flat stomach towards him and kissed it. The skin smelled of newly applied sun cream and clean clothes, he remembered. Feeling his lips catch on the convex belly button and his hands grip to the waist which housed the holy canvas, he was filled with a strange sensation that rushed through him, from the base of his spine to the crown of his head and shone like that afternoon sun. It was new to him, overwhelming. In a chemical confusion he sensed a part of himself harden, as if he’d suddenly grown up, become like his father in an instant. An almighty tingle wrapped itself around the frame at his core - the core which these days feels flimsy - and the purpose of his very being felt like it emanated from him. Daniel. He felt cradled in love, connectivity. But he was wrapped in fear. Feeling that it was all too much to handle, he turned over onto his front and focused on oblivion, trying to sleep. That was Jonny’s first boner, as he lay there in his Star Wars duvet aged 8. It was also his last. 

  。。。

But even now, inside his dimly let cell of self-loathing, Jonny finds that no sense can be made of this memory. The screen of his phone displays two men, naked in the grips of a sexual act too complicated to describe and it does nothing to him, and means even less. This is the same with all of them: the three middle-aged ladies with the strap-ons; the big black man and the girl who looked about sixteen; the french guy in chains… It means nothing. None of it. Just pictures playing out pictures. 

- What does it do for everyone else? What am I meant to be seeing? How am I supposed to feel?

There’s a blankness behind the eyes of the people on his screen; it’s as if they aren’t really there. Surely everybody else can see that Jenni Coxx the Cleaning Lady is probably more passionate about getting her mortgage repayments in on time than she is about Tony Scotti’s ‘BBC’?

That feeling - the frightening exhilaration which gripped Jonny twelve years ago - seems eons apart from what is happening on his screen. A disconnect that his mind has never been able to reconcile. 

- Where is the beauty? Where is the love?

Lifting his head up from the desk, he folds his mess-less penis back into the pants his mum bought for him when he started Second Year. 

The Beatles - Yer Blues - Esher Demo

This is the story for Jonny. The lonely, subpar story.