---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 96 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “Home at Last” Down in the Dirt (v123) (the May/June 2014 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book the Beaten Path (a Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2014 collection book)		get the 372 page Jan. - June 2014 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Need to Know Basis (redacted edition) (the 2014 poetry, flash fiction & short prose collection book)		get this poem collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

The Beatin’ Path

Damian Sebouhian

    I think it was Doctor Phil who said “Beatin’ is the same as cheatin’”. By “beatin’” he means masturbating, just in case there’s any confusion. He could have said “Masturbatin’ is the same as illicit conjugatin’”, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue so pretty. If you have a significant other and you masturbate – via the visual stimulation of internet porn, a nude magazine or your own imagination – you are essentially cheating. I don’t know how I came about this information. I don’t watch Oprah or the Doctor Phil show, if he even has a show. I just know that I know that that is a phrase and somehow I know that it’s affiliated with Dr. Phil. I probably overheard it in a bar, or as a bit from a stand-up routine, or most likely the internet. Anyway it’s part of the collective cultural unconscious and somewhere along the line I absorbed it. It doesn’t really matter how. What does matter, is that it’s in my head at all. Dr. Phil threw it out there for the nation’s mainstream couples to argue about and despite my considerable distance from that arena of the mainstream, the fact that I know the phrase “Beatin’ is the same as cheatin’” pisses me right off. Especially when I’m sitting in front of my computer with my jeans at my ankles while my girlfriend sleeps in the next room.
    Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a load of crap. I know when I masturbate, I’m not cheating on my girlfriend, and Sabine – my girlfriend – would agree. As a matter of fact she’s asked on more than one occasion if she could watch. That’s not going to happen, I told her. Some things are private. The problem is, every time I go about my dirty little business, I have to battle Dr. Phil. I can see his balding fat head looking down at me from my thought cloud, shaking in disapproval. I can even see his fat index fingers rubbing in perpendicular shame-fashion as his grubby fat mouth makes tsk-tsk noises. You can’t get any more boner-deflating than that.
    Please don’t misunderstand me. I recognize there are legitimate questions couples wrestle with regarding the definition of infidelity. It’s not a black-and-white issue. For instance, if you make out with a girl, but don’t have intercourse, is it still cheating? If your wife flirts with other men on a regular basis, is that a kind of cheating? Is a blow job cheating (remember that debate)? These are fair questions, namely because they involve another person, a person who could potentially upset the balance of a relationship. An outside threat, so to speak. But masturbating? The same as cheating?
    Doesn’t our culture give us enough mixed messages as it is? A woman should look sexy and attractive, but if she gets raped it’s because she was wearing a whore costume. Say no to drugs, but here, have some pharmaceuticals for that mental disorder we just invented. Don’t abort that fetus, but kill the hapless dude on death row. Give to charities, but don’t feed that loser homeless guy. It’s wrong to abuse your pets, but just fine and dandy to use a chimp for scientific experiments. Hunters are asshole gun-nuts who kill for sport, but lets factory-farm the shit out of cows. No prayer in school, but the pledge of allegiance has the words “under god” in the fucking thing. The list goes on and on, and I can deal with the hypocrisy of most of it because I’m used to it and I’m not generally affected on a personal level. But when it comes to my dick, stay the fuck away! That’s what I tell the imaginary Dr. Phil when he tries to infringe on my solitary good-times. Then, I check out my favorite porn site, SexIsLove.com, and within moments Dr. Phil and any lingering shame resulting from his presence subsides. By the way, I mention SexIsLove.com, because I’m not turned on by most pornography out there; it’s sexist and borderline abusive, if not out-right rapey. “At SexIsLove.com we believe that sex is beautiful and endeavor to create unique and passionate pornography, capturing real feelings and genuine intimacy.” I’m here to tell you, they stick to that mission statement and my penis and I are very grateful for that.

    There was quite a wait period between when I figured out what masturbation was and then how to incorporate it into my everyday life. When I say wait period I’m talking four years. Yeah. It was a rough four years. I started getting regular erections around eleven, and right around that time, I knew that to help alleviate the suffering an erection can give a young lad, I just needed to touch it in a certain way. Problem being, I didn’t know what certain way that was. Being the oldest and with two sisters, I had no one to teach me how to do it correctly. While my parents were both liberal folk, and rejected the tyranny inherent to most Christian values, they also never talked to me about sex. My father, as a political science professor, was too highbrow, too cultured a figure, for me to approach on such a primitive subject. It went without saying that as a boy, you simply did not go to your mom about how to satisfy the longing in your loins. Sex education, you might say. True, while our school had a sex education unit in health class, masturbation was not explored in any practical manner but to admit that it existed. Not very educational is it? The only other route for knowledge was my (possibly) more enlightened friends. The trouble there was, at that age, admitting you masturbated was tantamount to declaring yourself the hunchback of Pervertville. Or worse, gay. Nope, I was on my own. And while I was a wiz at taking a piece of graph paper, a straight edge and a well-sharpened number two pencil to design the most intricate of dungeons for our weekly D&D sessions, I just couldn’t figure out how to ejaculate into the toilet.
    When I hit puberty at fifteen, things got worse. A prepubescent erection can be demanding, but it goes away eventually. Just think the right thoughts and it will fall into wrinkled, flaccid sleep. My default method in those days was imagining my father doing yoga in his underwear. It always worked then. Not so at fifteen. A fifteen year olds’ erection is a dangerous, unforgiving force of nature. If not flogged to submission, it will threaten one’s psyche with madness. It was rare that I was ever at home alone, but when I was I never wasted an opportunity scouring the house for something to rub my dick on. I tried towels, blankets, tablecloths, even my sisters’ panties. While those items would feel good for a short while, teasing me with the hope for a promised-land climax, the longer I rubbed, the faster the pleasure turned to chafing pain, and I’d be forced to stop, utterly frustrated. There must me SOMETHING in this house I can fuck, I’d cry to myself. I knew I had sunk into the well of moral depravity when I started trying ways to get the family dog to lick my hard-on. There was never enough whip-cream, her tongue was so masterful that she only needed two or three laps, and it was gone. After that, she wasn’t interested. And if I insisted she continue, she’d give me a look that said: “I might be a dog, but I’m not your bitch.”
    Then, a miracle. It was the day I got my first pair of glasses, something I wasn’t looking forward to at all. If I was already considered a nerd, sporting a new pair of plastic, black-rimmed glasses wasn’t going to help my cause. My worries quickly subsided as soon as I saw the pouch the glasses were to be stored in and a eureka-light of awareness beamed through my skull. I had found my answer. It was a brown leather pouch with a belt clip, opened at one end, the inside lined with some type of soft cream-colored fur. I counted down the hours for night to fall, anticipation gripping my groin. I went to bed early that evening, explaining to my parents that I felt a cold coming on. Using the illumination of my nightlight I opened a D&D book to my favorite page: a picture of a female elf standing on a cliff and gazing triumphantly over the valley below. Her shimmering chartreuse gown had a slit that exposed her muscular left leg all the way to her upper thigh. Her blonde hair spilled over her back to caress her perfect ass. The gown also revealed impeccable cleavage. I was naked sitting up with my legs over the side of the bed. Fully erect. I entered the pouch and the softness of the fur did not disappoint. I moved the pouch slowly, squeezing it at the appropriate times. Unlike before, the faster I moved, the better it felt, until...my body tensed and a kind of void spread through my testicles, numbing all sensation for what seemed like an eternity but was more likely only a few seconds. Then... I heard a knocking at the door accompanied by my mother’s voice. “Ben, did you take your cough syrup, honey?”
    I ejaculated at the sound of my name, feeling at once, intense pleasure and intense humiliation. When I answered it was during a spasm of release and the sound of my voice reflected it: “Ye-EHS!”
    “Are you okay in there?”
    My mother opened the door just as I grabbed a pillow to cover my crotch, the book still open. The light from the hallway spilled into the room. I couldn’t stop the tiny orgasmic aftershocks from twitching my body.
    “Look at you, you’re sweating bullets.” She rushed to my side and put a hand to my forehead, seemingly completely oblivious to the act I had just performed. “You’re not going to school tomorrow,” she said with her patented concerned authority. “I’ll be right back with a thermometer and some aspirin.” She left, and I closed the book and tossed the pouch under the bed, flung myself under the covers and smiled.
    Although it wasn’t the ideal start to a career that would last for three more decades and counting, I had learned two important lessons that night: how to finally jerk-off, and how to set up a perimeter of safety so that I would never (almost) get caught again. It didn’t take long before the fur in the pouch became matted down, crusty and useless. I went through three pouches in less than a month, until one day while raiding my parents bedroom for Playboy magazines that didn’t exist, I found a bottle of personal lubricant on their headboard. Turns out, that was the missing link all this time. Lubrication. I’ve been using it ever since, although now mostly in the form of Canola oil. Who woulda thunk?

    I’m forty-three now and Sabine and I have a very healthy sex life. My libido hasn’t changed much since fifteen and I finally found a woman who matches me. She’s one of the few women I have never cheated on. I used to feel guilty for cheating, but it took being with Sabine for me to realize why I had been doing it before. As shallow as it may sound, in those relationships, I wasn’t getting enough. It was always the women who ruled our sex life, who controlled the when and the where. For me, it was never enough. Maybe after those four years of frustration, wanting so badly to “get off” and unable to figure out how, I subconsciously swore to myself that I would never let it come to that situation again. I don’t mean to rationalize my sleeping around. A committed relationship should involve loyalty. I should have broken up with those women instead of cheating, or at least communicated my needs more thoroughly. The challenge with that approach was the embarrassment I felt for having such a strong sexual drive. I should calm down, I’d tell myself. Sex once a week isn’t bad. Life isn’t all about sex. Quit being a jerk. So I’d shove my feelings into a box, hoping they’d stay there. But they didn’t, they’d manifest themselves Pandora style through flirting, then late-night parties, then sexual trysts. The lying I’d have to do was much more difficult than finding a safe place to masturbate. I usually got away with it, but then somewhere along the line, maybe when I knew the relationship had hit its peak, I’d confess. Instead of breaking it off myself, I’d force them to do it. And they always did. Until Sabine. I told Sabine about Dr. Phil’s declaration one night, expecting her to brush it off as bullocks, just as I had done. I was surprised with her response. She paused and looked to the ceiling for a brief moment while chewing on the pencil she uses for her crossword puzzles. “I could see a situation where that could be argued,” she said.
    “What?” I exclaimed. “Where jerking off is the same as cheating?”
    “Maybe not the SAME as cheating, but if you stopped having sex with me for a month or so and I discovered that the whole time you were wanking it to internet porn, yeah, I’d be pretty upset.”
    “That would never happen,” I said. “I mean, yeah, I jerk off, but that’s when you’re asleep or not around.”
    “But if you stopped having sex with me...?”
    “Why would I do that?” I said, flabbergasted at the thought.
    “That’s exactly my point. Why would you do that?”
    “I don’t know. I wouldn’t.”
    “You wouldn’t, but I bet if you watched the Dr. Phil show where he says...what did he say?”
    “Beatin is the same as cheatin’”
    “Yeah. If you watched that show, I bet you the guy he was talking about had stopped having sex with his wife and that she was feeling unwanted and unloved and then she caught him masturbating to some disgusting porn site. I’m just saying, there’s probably a lot more to it than what you’re talking about.”
    We discussed the subject for some time. Sabine told me that there are a lot of men out there who lose attraction for their wives, but instead of putting the effort into an extra-marital affair, they simply use the internet. It’s easier that way and a lot more guilt-free. Dr. Phil was probably just using that phrase as an exaggerated spotlight. If you don’t communicate anymore with your spouse both verbally and sexually, yet you constantly seek out sexual release, albeit by your own hands, you might as well be cheating.
    She had a point, and by making it, the shame that I felt while masturbating evaporated into the ether. I finally understood what Dr. Phil was talking about. He wasn’t talking about me. He was talking about those ugly fat losers who have thrown away all dignity and self-worth.
    “If you ever feel you aren’t attracted to me anymore, you’ll let me know, right?” Sabine said. She was wearing tight Aero Postal blue-jeans and a v-neck, strawberry-colored bustier, her dyed blond hair done up in pigtails. We were in the living room both of us leaning against the couch.
    “I promise you,” I said moving closer, my voice lowering an octave. “Senility would strike me before that ever happened.”
    We embraced, we kissed. We touched foreheads and locked eyes.
    “You’re beautiful,” I said.
    “You’re beautifuller,” She grinned her patented scimitar grin.
    “You’re the beautifullest,” I finished, and we laughed at our silly joke.
    I grabbed her by the waist and squeezed. She gasped, pretending to be surprised.
    “Now,” I said. “Would you like to watch?”

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...