Last week during the regular staff critique of the paper, we brought up all the things that make a column good. One of the conclusions that we reached was that although it’s nice to have solid writing skills and a fun, engaging topic, what really brings a column to life is the personal experience behind the writer. So basically, you’re all a bunch of perverts who want to read about my sex life. With that in mind, I present to you the following:
This new guy I’m sleeping with is really rad and stuff, but he has a totally weird dick! It’s bent at an extreme angle. It looks like the letter L. He says it happened when a girl stepped on his boner at summer camp when he was 13 and it broke. Can that even happen? That’s fucked up! — Brokedick Mountain
Yo, that totally happens! And guess what? It could happen to you. I know this because it happened to me, and it was the single most scarring event of my adult sex life. Have you ever witnessed a naked man screaming in agony? I have.
It happened while I was staying in a tiny village in Laos with my friend Shaniqua. It was the monsoon season and all roads in and out of the village were washed away, so we were stuck there with about 100 other young European party animals, some bored Laotians, and a lot of cheap whiskey. One evening we got involved in a game of whiskey pong with an Irish college rugby team. After a few rounds, Shaniqua bowed out to forage for a sandwich, and her place was taken by a 19-yearold boy with the body of a ninja turtle. He must have been insane to be turned on by my stained souvenir beer shirt, sweaty face, and overall grittiness, but I am a master of seduction, especially with drunk men. One thing led to another, and I invited him back to my horrible little bungalow to watch a movie (code for sex, because I had neither TV nor dependable electricity).
I should have known the evening was about to slide into shit gear. The whole way back to my love-shack he regaled me with endless tales of his many satisfied former girlfriends and his acrobatic sack skills. I resigned myself to an evening of little physical and even less mental stimulation. At some point in the night all the electricity had gone out, and the only light we had was a bit of feeble seepage from the ancient streetlight and a wind-up emergency flashlight that I’d forgotten to wind up. I think I’ve blocked the actual sex from my memory. All I recall is that it was short and it was more like being in a naked UFC match than anything else. At some point I gained the upper hand and was about to go for the gold medal when there was a sickening snapping sensation followed by an agonized howl of pain like a dog being raped. 
At this exact moment Shaniqua flung the door off its hinges and burst into the tiny cell with another random man in tow. “Put your clothes on, slut! This is Ian! He lives next door but helost his key and – what the hell is that!?” she screamed, pointing at my companion’s exploded Irish sausage.
“Mate! She broke your banjo string!” said Ian excitedly over the screams of pain. “That’s supposed to hurt like a bitch.” Suddenly serious, he turned to me. “You’d better take him to the hospital, or his banjo string is going to be fucked forever.”
I had no idea what a banjo string was (Irish for penis?) but I couldn’t just throw him out on the street with witnesses around, so I fed him a few Valiums for the pain and hustled him out into the rainy night. One thing that you ought to know is that alcohol and Valium should never be mixed: as both are downers, combined, they will turn you into a mentally handicapped, drooling mess. By the time we arrived at the hospital, luckily after only a 45 minute walk down a dirt trail at 3 AM in the rainy in the bowels of the Asian jungle, the pain had left the poor guy, as had all reason and motor functions.
The hospital looked like a cross between a public restroom and a Vietnam War hospital tent. “Doctor! Where is the doctor?” I shouted dramatically, throwing him onto the nearest bamboo mat.
A sleepy and ancient Laotian man emerged from under a mosquito net. “No English!” he grunted, so I spent ten minutes performing humiliating charades while a small crowd of nurses and overnight patients gathered around to witness the spectacle. “Penis!” I said desperately, “Intercourse! Broken! I don’t know, I thought it was an urban legend!”
Finally they got it. “You must be strong lady! Ha ha ha ha!” said the doctor, slapping his knee hilariously while the others pointed at me and laughed. At this point I was considering the karmic implications of just throwing the guy a $20 bill and fleeing into the night. After all, he would probably have forgotten my name by the morning (I’d forgotten his about ten seconds after we met). But deep down, I suppose that I’m a good person, or maybe I was just feeling incredibly guilty that I’d pretty much forever ruined a perfectly nice dick. So I hung around the hospital while he got his penis … splinted? Stitched? I’d rather not know, but judging from his moans of pain from the next room, it probably sucked. I also paid the $40 hospital bill and even hired a rickshaw to dump him back at his hostel afterwards. When I finally dragged myself back to the bungalow at five in the morning, I willed myself unconscious and hoped that the whole thing would be forgotten.
But of course you never get away with this sort of stuff in real life. Apparently, Shaniqua's friend Ian had taken it upon himself to run back to the only bar in town and regale everyone with the story of what he had witnessed. The next evening when Shaniqua and I stepped back into the bar, I was greeted with a gleeful blow to the top of the head. “Look! It’s Banjo!” shouted Ian to the gathered masses.
“I can’t believe you actually snapped that poor bloke’s dick!” said a complete stranger, while everyone else pointed at me and laughed. I don’t know if you have recently stood alone within a ring of people all laughing at your expense, but it was bringing up painful flashbacks of high school.
“See you back in Canada,” I muttered to Shaniqua, as I fled into the night pursued by shoutsof “Ban-JO! Ban-JO!”
Some time later, I asked a friend of mine about what had happened. As he’s entering med school and also has a penis, I figured that he would be able to shed some light on the situation. “It’s called penile fracture,” he explained. “And it’s quite common. The worst part is that if it happens once, it’s much easier to break again, often repeatedly. Most cases are caused by … trauma … during sexual intercourse. Usually with the woman on top.”
I nodded in a dismal way.
“It often happens when the penis isn’t fully erect,” he added soberly. “And you know whose fault that is: YOURS.”
“What the hell!”
“Just kidding!” he said, punching me on the arm. “It was totally the alcohol. But seriously … take it easy next time, Banjo.”
Moral of the story: it could happen to you.
// Cheetah Powers
// Artwork by Stefan Tosheff
