How to do the wrong thing right
Here you go, guys—the ones that didn’t make it. This Lenten month of “rebirth” seems good a time as any to Lazarus some of your queries previously buried, entombed or decomposing. Being a gay sex advice columnist is, to say the least, not exactly a normal job. I never can answer all the questions I receive; I can’t answer most, in fact. These three, nonetheless, came so close to being published, yet each, for their own reasons, got axed at the eleventh hour.
My extraordinary editor, Arnold Wayne Jones, always has his hands-wringing full with me; invariably, every column I turn in somehow runs overlength, over-verbose and overly fuckin’ potty-mouthed: On one hand, I’ve total discretion regarding column content; on the other, I’m reminded that Trump’s America is still not Caligula’s Rome… well, just yet. I assume Arnold braces himself for the lacy “delicates” I consistently torture him with via channeling a triumvirate of “Howard preparedness hats:” Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, self-proclaimed smut peddler Larry Flynt and that Tasmanian devil of intolerance incarnate, Carrie Nation. You fellas think what makes it into print is raunchy? If only you ever saw what’s left filthily behind, bleeding in spasms on the cutting room floor, after Vicar Jones finishes ministering his necessitated probity hatchet.
Often, I’m asked, “How do you decide which questions to pick?” Well, anything seasonal always receives a leg up; beyond that, I consistently choose mirthful over the morose, and perverse over Pollyanna. But most importantly, if you can just string a half-way literate paragraph or two together using real punctuation and not have it read like some paean penned by either Son of Sam or Beavis and Butthead sniffing glue, then, baby, you’re in. Thus, if you’re one of the thrilled three here, my sincerest apologies for it taking so long. Let’s get belatedly right to it.
First up comes an apparently un-killable question I’ve received so many times now that to invent creatively venomous new ways of answering: “How many empty calories are there, really, in an average load of explosive man-juice?”—has unabashedly devolved into this dissolute, well, caprice-a-la-cryptic, we’ll call it.
Dear Howard: You’ve probably gotten this question before, but I seem to recall reading—I can’t remember exactly where—that the average ejaculation can contain anywhere from 25 up to 100 calories. What’s more likely the truer number, do you know? — Mort
Dear Mortimer: Where’s a plummeting iron safe to stand beneath when one needs it? (Deep breath in now, Howard, and … serenity now.) OK, Mo, lemme see if I can phrase my answer in a way warped enough you’ll best grasp: You know that pretty little teenage runaway slave boy you’ve got chained-up in a Neoprene hood and a spider-gag down behind the soundproof firewall in your dingy basement? Well, he’s gonna starve fruitlessly to death if all he’s allowed to nutritionally subsist on is your delicious, creamy rich jizz (that is, if your boytoy doesn’t succumb shivering naked to hypothermia first). Hell, Morticia, it is still calendrical winter, you know; hence, in between his spooge feedings from that lustfully impressive two-inch erection you’re packing, perhaps you’d like to, oh, at least consider tossing one of your old cum-crusted blankets into the kid’s cage.
This second “question” didn’t run because it doesn’t ask a question — well, that, and the minor factor that it’s not one sparkling rhinestone gay, either. Nevertheless, I’ve held firmly onto it now for two solid years, and with Arnold granting me carte blanche on this “resurrection” column, I’m running it, for no real contextual legitimacy other than my admiration of the narrator’s deft touch for gallows’ humor. Hard-hearted Howard’s always more than a dollop surprised, even touched, when people write me just as a viaduct for personal catharsis. And this is my favorite example. Please, do accept my apology, Ms. Hazel, for publishing you so ashamedly late.
Dear Howard: I became stranded this morning for an entire three-and-a-half minutes by an inescapably pointless traffic light just fifty miserly feet away from Whole Foods. Easily, I could’ve abandoned my car there in the road and purchased my entirely unneeded shopping list in less soullessly butchered time. Of the two equally furious cars in front of me, one was a Mercedes-Benz, the other a Lexus. Finger-tapping behind me, naturally, seethed a newer, more pearl-esque model Tesla than my own. To our immediate left, huddled in a narrow strip of windswept median against the coddling warmth of a No U-Turn sign, shivered a frumpy, glum woman clutching aloft an indigo-fingered flap of cardboard box that announced, “I am hungry and homeless.” That was how I knew she was homeless—because of her held-up placard. Not one other car’s window in line glided down except mine.
I rooted her out a twenty from my handbag; tears congealed about her cataracts: “Oh, my, now I can really get something mighty fine to eat! You don’t understand, but I’d have been out here in this awful weather, hungry all day long, without you.” Elatedly, her amaurotic eyes darted about for the nearest fast-food nirvana. “You know, I used to be hooked on nasty things, that’s how it come to this,” and merrily she danced away, waving her money back at me, brandishing in anticipation a full belly: I blew thanks up to my own personal God for Ruby (that’s the name I assigned her) not capsizing our secularly brief bond with the usual, emptily dreaded “God, bless you” parting; you see, I was raised Southern Baptist. What matters to “good” Southern Baptists are appearances in front of their own edematous kind: There exists no slovenlier denomination in the entire theological canon; i.e., relinquishing so much as a tarnished penny to a hungry beggar — to justify our eighty-thou vehicles idling directly next to any given Ruby at, say, an eternally tomato-bisque traffic light — is called moral prudence: “Why, all she’d do with my hard-earned, Christian cash anyhow is just blow it on even more dope and likker!” A psychopath’s empathy is put to shame by a Southern Baptist’s—I fled fast as I could.
Eventually, the light turned kaffir lime, and all us perpetually dieting, Emmenthaler-hearted rich folks, perched snugly behind the wheels of our designer automobiles, pulled fumingly into a cornucopia of seasonal-irrelevance where no one even considers demonstrably gavotting over our global bounty joyous as shivering, homeless Ruby with her solitary $20 bill—whom nary a saturnine individual amongst we “people like us” would have recollected ever missing in a million reflected smug years—and Ruby’s the one getting into Heaven. — Hazel Michelle Ructis
My final “resurrected” entry experienced pub date crucifixion solely because, astonishingly enough, it was deemed just too trite even by Ask Howard standards, which, put in properly vapid perspective, are every millimeter as high as, say, a yellow Xanax bar: I’ll even wager a signed, hardback first edition of Valley of the Dolls that this marriage here below lasted, oh, at least as many days as Lazarus’s first death.
Dear Howard: My longtime beau and I got officially hitched, finally! I was beginning to wonder what tactics might be required for Jim to ever make a decent man out of me: We’d met at our hospital, where Jim’s a cardiologist and I a nurse… A total cliché, I know, and nobody gets to call him Jim but me. Ultimately, Jim and I both felt it best for the lifelong “health” of our marriage if he and I not stay joined-at-the-hip, 24/7, so I “retired” and am now just a happy househusband who’s bored… screaming… numb! They didn’t say it would be like this: What’s the long-term solution, dear lord, for ennui? — Uriah
Dear Mrs. Heep: Yeah, well, chalk-up your lifelong malaise, Euphoria, to yet another thing they never quite got around to ever mentioning in “The One-Percentile Academy for Upward Mobility” — OPAUM (pronounced exactly like opium) — that boredom is both shallowly expensive and deeply narcotizing… as you’ve so serenely, of course, discovered by now all on your “retired” own.
— Howard Lewis Russell
Do you (attention-seeking freaks and all) have a question — about etiquette, love, life or work — that needs a special spin from Howard? Send your problem to AskHoward@DallasVoice.com and he may answer it.