Rock Hard

So Paris Hilton says she's going to give up sex for one year. Big deal. In my late 20s, I gave it up for 4.

Not by choice, but hey, I still gave it up. Unlike Paris, I hadn't walked away from a Hilton-esque sex life. There were no best-selling videotapes like One Night in Paris. Alas, the best I could have offered would have been Rocky Mountin' High available only on Beta.

I'm not surprised I had such a long dry spell. Maybe it was because Mom put me between a rock and a hard place when it came to sex education.

In fourth grade, I started to realize the girls in my class were losing their cooties. I also noticed that I was getting more frequent hard-ons, especially in the morning.

The latter was a bit concerning. The only time a body part had ever swelled up that big was when I broke my wrist. I had fallen off my bike and hit my nuts on the crossbar a few times, but would this make my ding dong swell up every day for 14 months? Something was not adding up here.

Dad was out of town, but I couldn't dick around until he got back home. I needed to know the answers to my questions immediately. Mom didn't have a penis, but she was swiftly thrown under a hot light for questioning. My theory that the hard-on served as a sort of "kick-stand" so boys wouldn't accidentally roll out of bed was shot down immediately by Mom.

She assured me morning wood was not a medical emergency, a safety feature for boys, or extra pee that had somehow lost its way. It was the foundation of baby-making.

"Wow, so the stork doesn't bring babies?" I asked.

"No, that's just a story we use until you're old enough to understand where they really come from," Mom chuckled, before rattling off a brief scientific explanation of the birds and the bees.

"So babies come from hard-ons?" I asked, still confused.

"Yes, but it's not that simple..." Mom said.

"What about a stork with a hard on?" I interrupted. "Then can he bring a baby?"

Mom pondered this one for a moment, but then admitted that as long as the stork had a stiffy, a baby would be sure to follow.

"That's how it all starts," Mom beamed. "First of all, before anything happens, the penis has to be hard."

"How hard?" I asked.

"Rock hard," Mom said. "It has to be rock hard or nothing works."

From that day forward, I thought if my penis didn't feel like a slab of granite, I would never become a father. This was instantly troubling. I wasn't impotent, and I'd had at least as many hard-ons as chicken pox to that point of my life. But not one had been "rock hard." I calmed myself by thinking that surely by the time I was 14 or 15, I would get these rock hard ons, and at that moment I was just too young.

When I was a freshman in high school, I still hadn't been rock hard. Sure, I had been close. I'd been as hard as a ridiculously overstarched shirt. I was a little concerned, but I figured I was a late bloomer. Maybe another wave of puberty would hit me and I would be rock hard in no time.

High school graduation came and went, but I still had not been rock hard. I had been as hard as Play-Doh that had been left out without the cap on the container, but still not quite rock hard. I had come a long way since the starched shirt days, though.

I was starting to feel a little insecure about my erections at this point. I was in my sexual prime, so it was hard almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at this point. But I couldn't honestly say it was rock hard. I worried that I might be at the peak of hardness. The closest I had gotten to rock hard was adobe. But my geology professor and everyone else knew that this wasn't really hard rock, it was just dried-up mud.

What was I going to do? I was 19 and still had not been rock hard. I wondered if I'd ever procreate.

A few years later, a girlfriend told me she was pregnant. I doubted it was mine from the start. After all, I had only been as hard as petrified wood at best when we had sex. For about a week we were sweating bullets, but it turned out she wasn't pregnant.

"Ha! See?!" I told her. "You're lucky I had not been rock hard or we'd be shopping for baby clothes right now!"

We broke up a couple of months later and then I went into that 4-year sexual drought, becoming a born-again virgin.

OK, I didn't give up getting frisky willingly for a pre-determined time like Paris Hilton claims she is going to do. I made a "deal" with myself I wouldn't have sex again until I met the woman I wanted to marry. I didn't think it would take 4 years to find The Rockette. No lovin' for 48 months was tough.

After that I was rock hard.