Story Time With Uncle Ricky (NSFW)

I was a late bloomer. Wait. Backup.

I was at a Breeders concert my freshman year of college. I was not old enough to drink, which the state of Oklahoma takes very seriously. (The entire state was dry until 1957, meaning soldiers returning from WWII were not allowed to have a beer.) So having a drink was out of the question. A young woman with a drink -- this means she was old enough you see, and here I was just 18 -- asked me if I wanted one. A woman asked me if I wanted a drink, and an upperclasswoman at that.

It did not occur to me that might have meant anything other than that she was being nice, because it did not occur to me that she would ever actually be interested in me, mostly because no one in high school ever had been.

Late bloomer.

When I broke free, towards the end of my junior year, I spend the next few years, including my first year in medical school, making up for lost time. I worked at a local tobacco shop/coffee shop hybrid (it was fucking awesome -- free merch all day) which is also where I picked up most of the bad habits I live with today. It's also where I tried LSD for the first time.

The assistant manager at the shop threw many parties. He was engaged at the time, and his fiancee (and future ex-wife) lived with him, along with one of their friends, call her Jane, who they were helping get back on her feet after an awful break-up involving, as I understand it, some violence.

Jane was fucking hawt. I will skip over her physical details, but suffice it to say she was a well-endowed woman. At one party, I apparently became a pet project, and soon we were dating, only I had an asshole roommate at the time and for reasons blah blah blah we always hung out at my friend's house.

One day my friend pulled me aside and asked, very politely, if we could "keep it down."  I am certain his wife put him up to it 'cuz frankly she was a bitch. But I was mortified. Truly. I felt terrible. Here I was a guest in someone's home, and I wasn't being respectful. So that night things were not animated.

Now, it was an old house, and, being a pipe smoker, my friend never cared if I lit a cigar. So I did, a fat Hoyo de Monterrey Excalibur No.1 maduro. As I was smoking, Julie called me out -- loudly as I recall -- saying we needed a do-over. I explained to her the conversation I'd had earlier, and she said tough.

For the record, Julie was generally very accommodating, but she was a pretty girl and accustomed to being taken care sexually. She grew loud, mostly in jest as I recall. An argument ensued.

The important thing to know is that arguing is like kryptonite to my penis, by which I mean green kryptonite. (Crying, on the other hand, is like red kryptonite.) As Julie got more frustrated, so did I, which meant I wanted Round Two even less, which meant I resisted more, which meant she argued more, and so on in an ever-downward spiral.

Meanwhile, I'm still smoking.

At some point, I don't remember how, Julie joked that I got to suck on the fat cigar, and what did she get? Also important for background: all of this was taking place around the time of the Monica Lewinski scandal. So I joked that she could "have" the cigar too. She said I wouldn't dare. She had basically been questioning my manhood indirectly for the last twenty minutes, and I'd had enough.

I told her to lay back and spread 'em, which she did, and in went the cigar, lit and still smoking. We started having fun with it, and she started to fake moan and everything.

Now, my friend's fiancee had of course had mounting frustration with our noise for the past week or so, and I'm sure after the earlier conversation, she thought we would keep it down. Now she'd no doubt heard us arguing. It was late at night. I was a grad student and Julie was unemployed, but everyone else in the house had to get up and go to work, so you can see where they might be frustrated.

So all of a sudden, with Julie moaning at full volume, my friend's fiancee bursts into the room, sees the smoking cigar sticking out of her friend's vagina, turns around, mouth agape, and walks back to her bedroom.

I finished that cigar.

Art by Tina Lugo