The room is polished, posh. There are magazines on the table, arranged like a hand of cards. The first letter of each title is visible, except for the final magazine completing what seems to be collage art: ____.

The grandfather clock has been ticking since he sat down, and yet the hands of the clock have not moved.

Chet listens to this—Tick.

Nothing.

Tick.

Still nothing.

This is the first waiting room. Most days, empty. For today, there are two other men: an old fella with grey hair flared outwards, and another fella around Chet’s Dad’s age (they are sitting in an L-shape), balding in a cul-de-sac pattern. Chet visualizes himself in the baldness, walking at a midnight hour in his family’s gated community, inhaling an entire joint of marijuana. Listening to it all. Tick. Head encapsulated by the confined noise. Tick. Pace slowed to perfection.

Used to be that Chet couldn’t handle more than a few hits of marijuana from a one-hitter. Now he can ingest an entire joint. And his penis functions (probably) somewhat similarly to this man staring at his shoes, looking to be the same age as his Dad.

The nurses here are all men. They either weigh a ton or blow away in the wind. Clinics like this usually staff attractive women with exaggerated curves: titanic tits, oversized hips, held together on one meal a day. But here?

The receptionist, the same man who greets broken men like Chet, leaves the sculpting of their body to the fast-food chains. The chunky ice cream Sundae tinkers away behind the glass partition. He did not require paperwork for today’s appointment.

He looks up and Chet’s eyes are already on him and he grins, and they both know which room to meet in.

This the very same man who takes Chet’s blood pressure. The fat feller with brown bed-head, permeating French toast and syrup, wraps the cuff around Chet’s arm and frowns at the reading: “178/76.”

The numbers here are consistently high to the point Chet wants to say, “I checked it last week at a regular clinic, and they said it was fine,” but doesn’t, because he hasn’t, and the receptionist records the high number and walks out.

This is the second waiting room. Quant, wholesome walls painted in subtle coastal tones, while a television crackles at a low volume. There is a sink; it looks clogged. Evening is setting in.

A doctor emerges wearing shoes molded to his feet that accentuate each individual toe. The man holds a clipboard (always). Chet has never once seen him use it. Maybe the doctor thinks it gives him a more clinical air to the stoner toe shoe, maybe I have a mental disorder vibe.

“On a scale of 1-10, how have your erections been?” The doctor asks.

“6.” Chet doesn’t really know. He’s been giving random answers these past few sessions. They ask him about how he fares with women, but women haven’t been receptive lately, so it’s not like he can really test out his erections with any amount of consistency. All those sleazy websites advertising girls selling it give him chills. And legalized prostitutes—strippers, as his boys tell him—charge so much, and Chet had to dip into his savings to pay for these treatments.

So Chet lies. Most of his answers fall below 7, but not too low because that would be acceptance, and right now Chet is considering asking for a discount for a few more treatments.

No matter Chet’s answer, they gave him the same solution. “No improvement means more currents.” “A perfect 10 that one time you brought it up? Let’s hook up some cords to our acoustic guitars and sing to your dick.” Chet likes to imagine them all in his room with acoustic guitars, bopping back and forth as they somehow channel the soundwaves up the shaft of his dick.

By that point the doctor has left the room, and Chet changes into a gown.

It’s the nurses who administer the currents. A lanky fella Chet has been speaking with for the past few weeks enters with a machine attached to a long hose ending in a wand-like nozzle. The acoustic pulses the nozzle emits are supposed to break up plaque inside the blood vessels of the penis. Six sessions means six weeks of the same routine: this lanky nurse rubbing Vaseline between his hands and moisturizing Chet’s balls while he (Chet) is reclined beneath the fluorescent, staring at the ceiling, levitating.

“How are we doing today, Chet?”

“Oh, I’m diddly dandy, Randy.”

“That’s what I probably didn’t need to hear.”

All sessions are scheduled late in the evening, per Chet’s request. There is a single car parked outside as he peeks outside. He forgot to close the blinds this time.

The machine powers on with a low hum.  

Sometimes this lanky fella (more technician than nurse) talks throughout the treatment, his hands working Chet’s lubricated groin while Chet stares at the ceiling, feeling nothing, and making small talk easy. The one session they didn’t talk, all Chet could do was stare at a small slip of purple paper wedged between the square ceiling panels.

Their conversations often start the same way. The hose erupts with a rapid series of taps, a chisel against stone striking electric currents through a man’s dick. Their conversation is a wave breaking against the coast.

“Why do you do this?” Chet asks.

“I am looking to get into med school.”

But these doctors are not board-certified urologists.

“You can get the required hours to go to med school even though no one here is specifically trained or licensed?” Chet asks.

“Yeah.”

“Is that like some workaround to administering drugs?”

“Well—”

The rest of the man’s answer is white noise. Because Chet complained about the pain—“it’s a jackhammer against my dick,” said Chet—so they offered him Oxycontin and/or Xanax. It is only then Chet realizes his balls only feel the consistency of the nurse’s gloved hands. They are not lubed like the nozzle of what should be used to smoke hookah.

“So, you have to be medically approved to prescribe those drugs, eh?” Chet asks.

“Yes.”

Somehow, the conversation only evolves from there. They drift into their day-to-day. Lanky technician likes to hunt and has a house near Illinois’ forests. They don’t cover it all in a single session, but their conversations tend to circle back to things they’ve learned about each other before. This is one of those subjects.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Chet asks.

“Yeah, I do.” Then he asks, “Do you?”

“Nope.”

A sudden burst of compressed air sneezes out, so subtle Chet barely notices. He can’t care as much since he’s gotten older. Most of his friends still think he’s the biggest player.

All that matters is he’s trying to fix himself.

Almost $2,000 for six sessions of acoustics up the shaft of his dick, for zero ROI. The only thing consistent between this place and actual urology clinics is what they don’t mention: how bad smoking massive amounts of pot is… or jacking off.

The last time Chet felt himself pop with that sudden exhilaration cascading through his central nervous system telling him now was the time to fuck was a brief stint where he quit jacking off and smoking pot for two weeks. The gal wasn’t physically attractive—somehow his dick worked—like he was a dog trained to fuck only on command—which would be insane.

Tick.

None of these medical folk bring it up or talk about it: how much marijuana and jerking off can cause impotence. Chet knows people who can smoke weed and still fuck, and some part of him wants both: to stay a stoner and still perform. It makes everything better.

He can smoke half a joint, sit at his desk, and whittle away at productive endeavors, watching himself and everyone else dissolve into that amorphous mash of internal head noise. Chet often chooses a carousel of amiable memories for the emotions filling in the blanks, or vice versa. It’s hard to focus with a lanky fella tending to his boys.

All this fires off through Chet’s mind as the lanky fell continues running a light series of pulses through his cock. 15-20 minutes of this.

Sessions end the same way. The nurse says, “Make sure to use it as much as possible.”

Which, as Chet has come to find from personal experimentation, seems to be the exact opposite of what should be done. And as before, Chet does not tell the man that genetics is a major factor when it comes to using your dick, when it never seems to work correctly.

The nurse wheels the machine away and leaves Chet to dress himself. He buttons his shirt, looking off at the single car in a parking lot. Late evening casts jittery shadows across the pavement.

Chet walks from the second waiting room through a hallway adjacent to reception. Blank white walls with a clinical confection.

The receptionist mentions something. Timelines. Next week, same day of the week, sometime around nightfall.

Chet walks out into the early night. The complex is mostly empty office space on the second floor of the business complex. His car is parked downstairs.

Another old chap stands outside on his phone. Broken like him, except older, as all the other men here seem to be.

There’s a blood pressure machine at a Walgreens down the street. Costs a couple of cents to latch the Velcro to his arm, generate a number in red letters.

Chet feeds in the change. The machine outputs an answer: 120/80.

Chet rattles off possible excuses in his head, “We use different numbers for our machines. “It’s high based on these metrics. Much different than those more clinical, USDA-approved numbers.” “We don’t hire beautiful women like those other urology clinics. We only hire fat guys trying to get hours for med school.”

There’s no pain that hits right then. For things such as this, sometimes, it never does. Chet isn’t surprised as he unstraps the Velcro from his wrists. “Everyone’s a snake,” one of his contacts from Hollywood spoke about this: those folks who screw you over because they are above you, or need to step over you to climb higher.

“It’s my answer to them when they tell me I’ve been blacklisted,” Chet told this man. “They didn’t want the pedophiles of the world to get their hands on me.” Chet sees the confusion in the man’s face, hearing ‘pedophiles of the world’, so Chet leans in and explains, “Hollywood.”

“How did you get blacklisted?” the contact asks.

But Chet didn’t answer, because it’s only about money. “The question you should ask is who are they?” Chet wanted to say.

Really, nothing about his train of thought is linear at this point.

Money matters little to Chet. He comes from a good family. Wealthy to the point that Chet, working as he does now, is optional. It’d be nice to have more of his own wealth, but his sexuality is his priority, and his means of income can be a bit more sinister and creative. That’s what he tells himself.

The justifications rattle off at a great rate internally as Chet carefully appears to select which energy drink to purchase. Doused in fluorescence, all his eyes see are the conversations and stimuli striking his nerves. It’s red hot how he justifies his decision from this point forward, as he buys an energy drink on auto-pilot and walks out.

He’s got a burner phone in his pocket, and one of his recruits is on speed dial.

Chet decides then, prepping for a call beneath the sharp edge of the moon, that that session at the clinic would be the last of them. There’s no better functionality down below.

“On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate it?”

“0.” Honest.

Even now, post-pulse barrage tingling his ding dong the way it does, Chet knew he’d have to stop smoking marijuana for any hope.

The clinic always calls and emails. Their last voicemail comes bundled with giggles from grown men advertising testosterone therapy.

“You’ll lose the ability to have kids, but fuck it, you’ll pay us for hope.”

Something along those lines.

However, that clinic prescribes OxyContin and Xanax. All he’d need is someone he could use. Someone malleable.