One time, when I was 17, I broke my boyfriend’s penis.
We had been cooped up for days in his mother’s basement which had a kitchenette and a bathroom and a TV, so we saw no reason to leave. This was summer in East LA, so the sounds that floated in our window were of chickens and barking dogs and car alarms. One time, there was a foot chase that we watched cautiously out his bedroom window, the tottering, overweight policeman tripping down the ravine with his flashlight, the person he was chasing already lost in the dark.
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In the midst of this, we were two quasi-intellectual weirdos, content to read poetry, eat peanut butter sandwiches, and screw each other’s brains out.
Which is what we had been doing for a full 72 hours before I broke his penis.
As to how this horrific sex story happened, I am still unclear. My experience was this: It was the middle of the night. I had taken my contacts out, so I was almost entirely blind. The room was dark. We had tried to sleep, but we simply couldn’t and had started touching each other again.
He pushed inside me and faster than I could register he leapt off of me and was screaming horrible piglet-y bleats. I scrambled to get to the lamp. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong?”
“It’s my dick!” he cried. “Oh no,” he said, “Oh no!”
I turned on the lamp but this didn’t help much since my contacts were out. I kept asking to see it, to see what was wrong, but in my blurry vision it just looked kind of red — I couldn’t diagnose what had actually happened.
“It has turned inside out,” he said. “Parts that should be on the inside are now on the outside. Oh god!”
It was four in the morning. “Do you want me to get your mother?” I asked.
In general, my boyfriend avoided his mother. She was an Irish Catholic nurse with a heavy commitment to socialism. Her new husband was actually the head of the LA communist party. She was an insanely, even dementedly practical woman. She also told horrific stories about the nursing home where she worked. I did not expect that he would want to involve his mother in this, but it was the only idea I had. But he surprised me.
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“Yes,” he said. “Go get her.”
I stumbled out of his bedroom and into the basement living room, only to realize I was nude. Surely I could not go wake his mother up nude? I grabbed an afghan from the couch, the kind that is full of holes, and wrapped it around myself and climbed the dark stairs to try to find her.
First I looked in the bedroom she shared with her new husband, but all I saw was his huge blanketed body hooked up to a sleep apnea machine. I didn’t know what a sleep apnea machine was, so this was pretty terrifying. Frantic, I started just opening doors, and finally I found her in a spare bedroom, sleeping in a narrow single bed.
“Your son is hurt,” I said. “You need to come downstairs.”
She was a pro. “Alright,” she said, having already woken from a full sleep and gathered that this was an emergency. “How is he hurt?”
“I can’t say,” I said. “You have to just come and look.”
I led her down stairs. We opened the bedroom door. There was my boyfriend, naked, pacing around the room, just sobbing as his wounded penis bobbed up and down. I still couldn’t see exactly what was wrong with it.
“You stay out here,” his mother said, and shut me out of the bedroom. I waited in the dark in my afghan. I heard her muffled voice, “Let me see it. Let me see it.” I heard him whimpering. Then she cracked the door. “Baby oil,” she said to me. “Hurry.”
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I bolted back upstairs and began going through their bathroom in a frenzy, baffled by so many boxes and tubes and containers whose labels I couldn’t read without my glasses.
Finally, I found a bottle of what was definitely baby oil and I raced it downstairs to them. I knocked and his mother came out. She took the bottle from me, then said, “I need you to show me how his penis normally is.”
I looked at her blankly. She held up her hand and pulled the sleeve of her nightgown over her fist. “Is it normally like this?” she asked.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I nodded anyway.
Original by Your Tango
