Free Spread by Barry Malzberg Page A

to reach a point in the situation with my wife where I think things will break the other way very quickly now and it is only a matter of timing. In a good mood, sipping her second Gibson, she looks at me with wonder and says that that will be fine, she is willing to be patient. She has, after all, not even truly begun her life.
    The ad stays.

XXII
    We run an advisory column, something in the lonelyhearts tradition but strictly for laughs as most of the queries are invented in the office and the few that aren’t are too dull to print. (
What is the difference between a sadist and a masochist? What is shrimping? Is there any street action on the East Side? Are streetwalkers dangerous; would it be smart to go with one to a hotel?
) I write the questions and answers myself and to the degree that I have any writing talent at all or interest in personal expression, believe that I have found the outlet here. Today, however, a letter arrives in the offices, addressed to our advisory service, which puts me at something of a loss for one of the few times since I got into this branch of publishing.
    The writer is a twenty-eight-year-old white male of Jewish extraction. He lives in New York City, has a college degree in accounting from one of the city university, drives a fairly new automobile and is well employed by a large firm which specializes in accounting for the jewelry trade. The writer works with several female secretaries in his office, he attends mixers and parties advertised in the columns of the evening paper, he goes to dances and has essayed singles weekends at the resorts. He makes, before taxes, $11,500 a year. He has never had intercourse with a girl in his life. He has never had “heavy petting” (his phrase) with a girl in his life. Because of a deadly fear of sudden impotence, he has never used prostitutes although now “more and more I find myself looking at scarred black women of the streets with desire.” He finds it difficult to procure dates; girls seem uninterested in him, but on those occasions when he does pick up a girl at a mixer or by prearrangement, he finds that he has nothing to say to her and absolutely no idea of how to make a date progress. Sometimes he will make a sexual advance, but despite everything he has read and heard about the “New Morality,” he finds that these advances are repulsed as violently as they were ten years ago when he was in college and trying to get girls in dormitories to neck with him before curfew. At other times he has tried to take a more direct approach, telling the girl he is with about his problem, his sexual suffering, his loneliness, his deprivation, in the hope that the girl will have sympathy for him and, as he has read in certain publications, then try to “protect” and “mother” him and “prove his adequacy” out of her own ego. He has found, however, that this approach is even less successful than direct advances since it fills the girls with unspeaking, uncomprehending horror and they obviously no longer want to be in the company of someone as abnormal as he.
    He masturbates frequently — two or three times a day, in fact, on weekends, and almost once a day during the week — but has found a slow decline in his sexual powers over the past few years; whereas he could once have thirty orgasms a week he is now lucky to have ten or fifteen and furthermore the masturbation is no longer satisfying since he finds himself possessed after climax with a “strong psychic urge to have intercourse” which the masturbation has in no way reduced. Also, masturbation is now beginning to make him feel increasingly inadequate; he is convinced that something in his life has been irretrievably taken from him, and sometimes he is so full of bitterness and loss that he finds himself crying in his sleep, something that he never used to do. He cannot believe, in this age of easy sex and relationships, that something like this can be happening to him, and he is driven