Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale Read Online Free

over at the clock’s glowing face on
the table beside the bed: 10:32. His doctor’s appointment wasn’t
until one o’clock. Jim still had plenty of time. He pulled
halfheartedly on his poor penis. He took a sip of his third
screwdriver of the morning. He still had some hope.
     
    Don’t give up the jackoff!
Jim admonished himself. Never say die! I have not yet begun to jack
off, Jim told himself resolutely.
     
    After dropping Judy off at
the airport the day before, Jim had made trial runs all afternoon.
The first trial run, he had parked in the lot of the campus clinic
and for a half hour or so simply stared at the building’s front
doors, again and again imagining himself walking up to them. He
then drove to the Oasis on El Camino for a pitcher of beer. The
second trial run, Jim had walked up to the doors and almost
entered. The third trial run, after spending an hour at the Red
Lion downtown drinking among buddies, mostly outpatients from the
Veterans Hospital, one of whom sucked his vodka-tonic through a
straw he inserted in a hole in his neck, Jim had entered the doors
and sat in the vast lobby on a couch between potted plants and
watched people walk by with what appeared to be purpose, and he
envied them bitterly. Whenever somebody glanced in his direction,
Jim looked at his watch impatiently, as though he were waiting for
his wife, say, who could be at that very moment entertaining a test
for pregnancy, or having a biopsy, and he would sigh audibly and
gaze up at the high ceiling of relentless fluorescent lights,
affecting the attitude of a fellow bracing to accept any
news.
     
    Jim did owe Judy. Who had to
tell him that? And he was the last person in the world to complain
about somebody springing things. Judy had been a technical virgin
when she and Jim were married, hence her experience was not immense
in the male- equipment department, so what could she really know
about normal scrotums? Not until nearly a year after they were
married did Jim’s mother, a nurse and well-meaning woman, let the
cat out of the bag, so to speak, when she mentioned to Judy that
there were astounding advances being made in medical science every
single day, especially in areas such as artificial insemination, so
couples like them always had hope. Hope? Judy had asked Jim.
Medical science? What in the dickens does that all mean,
anyhow?
     
    Only then had Jim tearfully
informed Judy, his bride, who had not even seen an ocean until
their weekend honeymoon at Virginia Beach, that having her family
of two boys and two girls might need a little help in the miracle
department from medical science, due to this litde disability he
had been born with, through no fault of his own. Disability? Judy
had said. What dag- gone disability? You never told me anything
about any daggone disability. I have testicles, Jim assured Judy.
It’s just that those litde rascals aren’t all the way down where
they should be is all, undescended, so to speak. You can say that
again, buster, Judy had agreed wholeheartedly. Listen, Jim said,
I’ve fought in the Golden Gloves, I’ve battled with switchblades,
I’ve driven a stolen car crazily toward a cliff’s deadly edge for
no better reason than romance, I’ve pulled seven armed robberies,
lived on the lam, and survived to write about it all.
     
    What in the world does any
of that bullstool have to do with my two boys and two girls? Judy
had been real curious to know.
     
    Eleven thirty-eight, the
clock by the bed read, the faint sweep of its second hand luminous
as it spun around insanely in the darkened bedroom. Jim had held
his limp, sore, sad member in his hand befuddledly. What sexy thing
between him and his wife had Jim not tried to conjure? He should be
thinking about his wife while he jacked off, shouldn’t he? This
whole ordeal was for them, wasn’t it? For their litde baby-to-be,
their son, for their future. But Jim found there was nothing, no
memory, no imagined thing between them that would