Excerpt: 'Dysfunctional Males' by Fernando Sdrigotti

From The Vanishing Onanist of E5:

I put a pizza in the oven and decide to wank a fourth time while I wait for it. I should have a good 15 minutes. I search through my archive and unearth an old pirate copy of Briana Bangs Extreme. I put the DVD and fast-forward to scene two where Briana gets fucked in stockings. After the usual routine the guy comes inside her. I remember this, so I try to sync my orgasm with the guy’s. I miss it the first time and have to rewind a couple of minutes and wank faster. The second time I get it right. I clean myself and while I do it I smell the pizza burning in the oven. So I rush to the kitchen with my pants still down. I open the oven door and the smoke fills the kitchen. The pizza isn’t really burnt, just slightly overcooked, but my fire alarm sets off anyway. I open the windows and rush to the fire alarm, get on a chair, remove it, and take the battery out to kill it. I feel the cold wind coming through the window and realise my pants are still hanging round my ankles. I move to the window and shut it closed and pull my pants up. I look across the back garden and catch a glimpse of someone moving on one of the flats on the other side. I can’t tell if it was a man or a woman but I’m sure I saw someone moving. The lights go off. Were they spying on me? Did they see me running with the dick wrapped in toilet paper, saving a pizza from burning, going through a perverted fire drill?

I sit at the table and eat my pizza straight from the cooking tray. The film is still playing in the other room and I can hear Briana’s moans. This must be the scene in which she fucks the two guys on a pool table. I eat quite fast because I’m surprisingly hungry. Soon I finish my pizza and I’m still craving food. It seems jerking off has opened up my appetite and these stupid pizzas are too small for a guy my size. A second pizza would be too much and I can’t be bothered to cook once again. I should have bought a fourteen-inch pizza, not a ten incher. It’s hard to get it right. Unless you have a freezer there must be nothing harder than buying food for only one person. So I end up opening a can of Pringles. I eat half the can and the hunger disappears. And the lights switch back on in the flat across the back garden while Briana shouts “come in my ass” in the other room.

…

I wake up at some point during the night. It takes me a few seconds to gather my whereabouts. I realise I’m in my living room, lying on the sofa. The music from the Big Red One is playing on the TV set, quite loud. The DVD menu must have been going on for hours. I turn the volume down but leave the TV on. The knocks disappear. There will be a note tomorrow. She loves pushing notes under my door.

My back hurts from the gap between the cushions on the sofa. I sit. I’m still quite dizzy from the screwdrivers I drank after dinner and my head hurts. I feel a bit sick too, but I know for a fact I won’t be throwing up. Cheap vodka, manufactured to poison you to the best of its abilities, not even puke-fuel.

All around the sofa is littered with tissues. There are four or five DVDs scattered around too. The scene makes me feel sad. Perhaps it’s the guilt to which all addicts refer when trying to fight against their demons. But I’m not sure it’s guilt in my case. Perhaps it’s just the same kind of sensation that someone who just ate four pizzas would feel if being made to look at a quattro formaggi or a healthy ball of mozzarella. Guilt or wank indigestion. Am I addicted to wanking? Is that even possible?

Sitting down makes me feel better and soon enough I don’t feel that dizzy anymore. I can’t remember at what point in the film I fell asleep. It must have been pretty near the beginning as there are no cigarettes butts in the ashtray and the pack is still unopened. I have seen the film many times. I don’t even know why I keep trying to watch it again — it’s one of those films that gets worse with time. I turn off the TV and for a few seconds I can still hear a hissing high frequency sound. Then it vanishes.

I move the wank tissues with my feet and gather them in a round. I can feel the smell coming up, a bleachy smell. I pick them all up in one big ball of sticky, drying spunk and rush to the bathroom. I flush the papers down the toilet and, although it looks like I threw too much paper all at once, it disappears with the water. I feel better, cleaner.

I decide it’s a good time to smoke a cigarette and drink another beer. I go back to the living room, pick the cigarettes up from the sofa and go to the kitchen. I open the window slightly and sit on a chair with my feet on the table. My back is close to the fridge and I can get a beer without much effort. Still, if I wasn’t half-asleep I would have probably remembered to do this before sitting. I would have also remembered to get an ashtray and my lighter. Beer no problem, but there’s no ashtray or lighter in sight. I abandon my momentary comfort, go to the living room, fetch the rest of the smoking tools and come back to the kitchen. I light up, inhale, hold the smoke for a few seconds, exhale. I feel complete with the smoke in my lungs and the cold night air sneaking into the kitchen, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. The clock says it’s three thirty something in the morning, and it says it loud. Every second that passes makes a strong point. Like a hammering or an explosion. Like someone nailing something to the wall or to my head.

I smoke slowly, the clock almost playing the role of metronome in the middle of the night. Or like music. I smoke, drink, look through the window, I stand up and open the window a bit more. I lean against the windowpane smoking. Jesus, it’s cold. The lights on the flats on the other side of the back garden are all off. I stare at the window from where they were spying on me and feel like the guy in Rear Window, somehow trying to pass a message across: “I know you were spying on me while I was running around with my pants down, I know it, and I don’t care”. Smoke, drink, listen to the clock. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen puffs. Gone, the cigarette is no more. Seven minutes forty-three seconds. Seven fifty-five taking into account the time it took me to kill the butt in the ashtray.

Excerpted from Dysfunctional Males,by Fernando Sdrigotti, published March 2017. Republished here with permission of the author.