Men, Women & Children

Men, Women & Children

A Novel

Chad Kultgen

Epigraph

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

—Carl Sagan

Contents

chapter

one

D
on Truby thought about Kelly Ripa’s anus. He thought about what it would look like as he slid his penis into it. This image was all he could focus on in the forty-five minutes he had left of his dwindling lunch break. He took the largest bites he could from a Big Mac as he drove home, averaging ten miles over the speed limit. He felt both anxiety and shame about the frantic level of effort he was willing to exert in order to create a fifteen- or twenty-minute window in which he could masturbate. He allayed these concerns by reminding himself what his doctor told him a few weeks earlier during his annual physical: that, for every year a man lives past fifty, his chance of having some kind of prostate trouble, cancerous or otherwise, increased by 5 percent. And to combat these odds, his doctor added, it was wise to maintain as healthy a prostate as could be managed, which meant employing it in the creation of ejaculate as often as possible. Don was only thirty-seven, but he rationalized that regular masturbation could be considered a form of preventative medicine. This rationalization sustained him through the rest of his drive home.

With roughly thirty-five minutes left in his lunch break, Don entered his house. By then, his mode of excuse had moved from medical prevention to blaming his wife for her lack of willingness to engage in sexual activity with him. They had been married since they were in their early twenties and they had a thirteen-year-old son, Chris. Both of these facts were things that he understood could take a toll on the libido of any average person, man or woman. Nonetheless he couldn’t help feeling that, in the past year, something had changed. The frequency of their sexual encounters had dwindled to once every month and a half, and his wife, Rachel, seemed completely uninterested in and unwilling to offer him fellatio or manual release as alternatives to intercourse when she wasn’t in the mood, which had become excessively frequent. Don felt that he had no choice but to engage in the only sexual outlet on which he could still rely: semi-regular masturbation.

He entered the bedroom that he and his wife shared, sat down at their computer, and tried to suppress the feeling of self-pity that always seemed to creep up on him at exactly this moment. He reminded himself that because of the schedules of everyone else in the house, these twenty to thirty minutes were the only ones he would have to himself all day, and hence the only ones he could use to satiate his biological need to ejaculate.

The computer, which had been idle on the Windows loading screen for several seconds too long by Don’s estimation, reverted to its boot-up screen. Don had seen this before with their previous computer. He knew it meant one of two things: Either the computer was just getting old and overused and it was time for it to be replaced, or more likely, he had browsed one too many pornography websites and accidentally infected it with some kind of virus or adware or spyware that had rendered it inoperative. He decided to power the computer off and give it one more chance to make it out of the load screen into some form of operational status, but when he turned the machine back on, the same thing happened again. He wasn’t looking forward to taking the computer to the Best Buy Geek Squad, as he had done once before, but that was the least of his concerns. With twenty minutes left in his lunch break, and no hard copies of pornography anywhere in the house as a result of Rachel having accidentally found his collection some years ago—at which point she forced him to destroy it in front of her—Don gave a brief thought to masturbating using only his imagination. He hated masturbating without pornography, always finding the orgasm to be less satisfying. But in order to get to the limitless fountain of pornography on the Internet to which he had become so accustomed, he would have to resort to something he had never done. What he was contemplating would far surpass any level of indignity he might have felt for masturbating during his lunch break, or at work (as he had done twice before), or in his car outside his own home, or in virtually any other scenario in which he might have found himself in the service of ejaculating.

He opened the door to his son Chris’s room, purging all thoughts of guilt or shame. He knew he would have no time for either of those if he was going to make it back to work before his lunch break was over. He had purchased Chris a laptop the previous Christmas, primarily for schoolwork and video editing. Chris had expressed interest in possibly pursuing a career in television or film postproduction, so when he asked for a video camera and a computer to edit on, Don and Rachel agreed to foster his curiosity. Don thought about these things for a fleeting moment before he opened the laptop and powered it up.

The procedure Don used to reset the Internet browser history on the computer in his and Rachel’s bedroom had become second nature to him. It was not complex: He simply reset the entire history after each use of the computer for masturbatory purposes. Don knew that Rachel wasn’t savvy enough to understand why the browser history had been cleared. Very infrequently he would have to field one of her questions about the mysterious disappearance of a website she saw on
Oprah
from “that little drop down thingy,” but a nonchalant “I don’t know” or a “sometimes the whole thing just resets so it doesn’t get viruses” always seemed to satisfy her questioning. He was well aware that this would not be the case with Chris, who knew far more about computers and the Internet than Don himself did.

Before he logged onto BangBus.com, the website he had gotten a separate and secret credit card specifically to pay for six months prior, he planned to look through the browser history of his son’s computer and write down each website. He then planned to erase the browser history after using his son’s computer for the five to ten minutes he assumed it would take him to reach the point of ejaculation. And, finally, Don Truby planned to type back in all of the websites that were originally in his son’s browser history, in the order in which he had written them down. He knew of no technique that would have been more efficient, although there were several.

His son’s browser history contained multiple social networking sites, a few music sites, some movie news websites, the Goodrich Junior High School website, and a few others that Don wrote down without giving them much thought. One site, however, was unfamiliar to him and gave no indication of its nature through its name alone: KeezMovies.com. With only a few minutes left to masturbate, Don’s curiosity overrode his carnal urges for the brief second that found him navigating to KeezMovies.com instead of just writing it down and opening a browser window to BangBus.com. What he saw filled his mind with thoughts and reactions that were difficult to reconcile.

KeezMovies.com, Don learned, was a website that contained page after page of thumbnail images that represented streaming videos one could access by merely clicking on the thumbnail. The videos ranged in length from a few minutes to well over thirty minutes, and they were all pornographic. The website was free and seemed to offer a much wider variety of pornographic content than BangBus.com. Don was immediately reminded of the time he found his father’s secret stash of pornography. He was roughly the same age his own son was currently: thirteen. He had been in the garage on an innocent errand, recovering a wrench from his father’s toolbox in order to tighten the chain on his bicycle. After several minutes of looking for the wrench in various places that seemed likely, Don found a cardboard box labeled “Junk from Old House” and opened it. Inside he found a dozen or so
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines as well as a Super-8 film reel. The film reel was the obsession of his adolescent existence. He had no idea if his parents even owned a Super-8 projector, and beyond that he would have had no idea how to operate such a device even if they did. He would, from time to time, when he became tired of using the same images in the dozen or so magazines, hold the film strip up to the garage light and use the tiny still images as fodder for his early masturbation sessions. He remembered most of them vividly, and certainly the discovery of his son’s stash of pornography brought him back to the moment he discovered his own father’s. It was strange.

At first, Don lamented the fact that technology had progressed to a point that a teenage boy’s first experience with pornography would never again include the discovery of his father’s stash. He realized that children reaching adolescence would never again need their parents to supply them with their first glimpses at human sexuality, intentionally or otherwise. Don felt a brief moment of sadness about not being a part of that moment for his son, about not being involved in what he considered an intrinsic part of growing up. Still, he was relieved that his son’s pornographic tastes contained nothing homosexual or overtly abnormal. Then he saw the clock on his son’s computer and he was reminded that he had only a precious few minutes left to masturbate before he had to get back in his car and drive back to his office, where he would spend four more hours trying to convince people to invest their money with, or to purchase a life insurance policy from, his employer, Northwestern Mutual. He had stopped, years ago, questioning how his life had become what it had become, but every so often, when he unbuttoned his pants, untucked his shirt, and threw his tie over his shoulder in order to masturbate with as little disrobing as possible on a lunch break from a job he despised, his mind would fire off some almost imperceptible objection. This isn’t what he thought he’d be doing at thirty-seven.

The first thumbnail he clicked on opened a streaming movie starring a girl he had never seen, named Stoya. She was extremely attractive and extremely pale. Don had never found pale girls particularly appealing, but he knew that if he got caught in the trap of clicking on multiple videos until he found one he liked, he would most likely be late for work and he would have to deal with his manager. He pulled the elastic band of his underwear down so it fit just behind his testicles and applied a small amount of pressure.

Don had first implemented this technique many years ago after stumbling upon it purely by chance. He had been lying awake the whole night as a result of his wife pressing her buttocks against his genitals as she slept. He had tried gently grinding his erection against her, as this sometimes brought him to full ejaculation, but that night Don was wearing a pair of boxers that were made of a thicker material than normal, and this just made him more incensed. He knew that the jarring motion of all-out masturbation would surely wake his wife and bring a barrage of questioning that he was unwilling to endure. At some point his wife, Rachel, got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Don took the opportunity to pull his underwear down under his testicles for the first time and quickly masturbate, cupping his hand to catch the ejaculated semen and wiping it on the side of the bed before Rachel came back. He didn’t know if the elastic band of his underwear being placed behind his testicles made his orgasm come any quicker or stronger, but he enjoyed it and from that moment on occasionally employed the technique, especially in scenarios that required him to complete his masturbatory session in a short amount of time.

And so it was as Don ejaculated into a McDonald’s napkin, which he crumpled up and tossed back into the bag with his empty Big Mac container and french-fry sleeve. He shut his son’s computer down and put it back where he had found it. He was momentarily reminded, once again, of putting his father’s pornography back in its secret location in the garage, hoping his transgression would remain undetected. As he left his house, he knew it was excessively unlikely that the series of events necessary for his wife to discover his semen-covered McDonald’s napkin in their own trash can would ever transpire. But he saw no sense in taking unnecessary risk, so he threw the McDonald’s bag away in the neighbors’ trash can.

On his drive back to work, he thought about his son and was again relieved that Chris’s pornographic tastes seemed normal. As he walked back into his office, Don wondered what his son was doing at school, and as much as he didn’t want to, he couldn’t help wondering about his son’s masturbatory habits—when he did it, where he did it, where or into what object he expelled his semen.

He gave only a brief thought to what his wife might think of their son’s indulgence in pornography. He would not tell her about his discovery.