Too Close for Comfort

That time came before he knew it. When they got back to her apartment, they settled down to watch TV as usual. Jacinda had been overwhelmed by his professions of love. She knew they had been getting closer, that the relationship was getting stronger and stronger with each passing day, week, and month, but she hadn't expected him to start talking about a future together. He had always been so adamant about not wanting anything long-term. She was happy, for the first time in her life, she felt like, "This is it, this is my happily ever after." The relationship wasn't perfect, the disparity in emotional maturity was offset by the ease, fluidity, and comfort they shared in so many other aspects of their partnership, but it was, or so she thought, healthy and happy and stable and just perfect for her. She figured it was the ideal night to talk about the lack of seduction and variety in their sex lives again. In her mind, he had taken a huge step towards her and it was really a game changer in their relationship. She chose her words carefully. Tentatively, she said, "Khari, I need to ask you a question."

"What?" he responded, his voice dripping with defensiveness, preparing himself for the showdown.

"I've been thinking a lot about us, well, about you know, about our sex. I was just wondering if . . ." She hesitated. She wanted to be as gentle as possible. There was never going to be an easy time to bring up the topic but she took a deep breath and decided that if they really were going to spend the rest of their lives together that they had to have this discussion. "It seems like you have never feel comfortable being naked around me unless we are having sex. You aren't even comfortable with me being naked unless we are having sex. I was wondering if . . ."

"Just say it," he said, pretending to be growing frustrated and annoyed with her stalling but really not caring one way or the other what she was about to say. Whatever she said, he was going to turn it into a reason to break up.

Jacinda summoned up the courage to ask the necessary questions. "Well, I was wondering," she said in her sweetest voice possible, "I have been thinking about all the women in your past. And I've tried to make sense of the patterns in your life. Do you think the reason why you are so uncomfortable with being naked around me, and the reason why you seem to enjoy more of a wham, bam thank you ma'am is, I was thinking maybe the reason you aren't so comfortable with exploring our sexuality more is . . . maybe because you . . . you know . . . aren't . . . well, truly comfortable with your . . ." She took a deep breath. "Black men are perceived to be well-endowed and I was wondering if you might feel a bit uncomfortable because . . ."

Before she could even finish her thoughts, Khari yelled, "DA FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!?!?" He jumped up and stormed across the room, staring out the window into the dark urban street 14 floors below. "You trying to say my dick ain't big enough for you? Trust me, I have never had anyone complain. I got plenty of women who want to get down with me. Way hotter women than you, in fact." Jacinda's word cut him like a knife. He was hurt, truly hurt, and he was trying to hurt her back. This wasn't part of his master plan, this was the real deal. "So what, I don't have a foot of dick between my legs. I still blow your back out," he added.

Jacinda ran to his side, tried to reassure him that she wasn't complaining, that she wasn't trying to hurt his feelings, she just wanted to be open and honest and discuss what might be behind the reason he was so unwilling to explore their sexuality more.

The truth was Khari had been ashamed of the size of his dick since his earliest memories of knowing what sex was. He was on a little league team when he was 11 and he was the only Black boy on the team. In the showers after a game one day, one of the boys started making fun of him, pointing at his penis and saying how it wasn't big like Black guys were supposed to have, telling him he wasn't really Black. His dick wasn't smaller than any of the other boys on the team, it just wasn't hanging to his knees either and they made sure to remind him of it every chance they got. They told him that he would never get a white girl with his little dick; they said that he must have slave master blood in him because he didn't have a big, black cock like the other brothers in the hood. It didn't really matter that none of them had even been to the hood or seen another Black penis in real life. They were basing their comments on the interracial porn stashed in their father's porn collections. Khari never told anyone. He never told his parents, he never told the coach, he never told his friends or a girlfriend. He couldn't bring himself to say the words that they were making fun of him because his dick was average. In his mind, they were saying, your dick is too small and he carried that pain with him deeply.

As Khari got older to the age when everyone was experimenting with sex, he was afraid to approach girls. Senior prom, he got up the nerve and asked a young lady to the prom. After the prom, they got a hotel room with a bunch of other kids, some alcohol, and they were off to make memories. Immediately upon completion, his heart racing and his mind full of doubts and insecurities, he asked her how it was for her. Her response was to be etched in his subconscious forever. "Well, I thought it was going to be different. You know, all my friends said it would hurt but it didn't. I thought it was going to be . . . better."

With those words, she sealed Khari's fate. From that moment on, he decided that if any girl showed an interest in him, he would pretend to be in love with her so that if and when it got to the point of having sex, she wouldn't complain that he wasn't some super-hung Mandingo. It was his insurance policy. He didn't care who showed him attention, fat, ugly, younger, older, married, dating, nothing in common, he didn't care if she had slept with every man in a 50 mile radius, as long as she showed an interest in him, he would say whatever he had to say in order to get them to be infatuated with him so he could fuck her. He didn't realize that he all of the pretending that he was in love was unnecessary, that most of the girls would have slept with him regardless. He never realized that his dick wasn't too small at all, it was average. But having an average-sized dick for Black men is often times a source of shame.

When he got to college, he made sure to never shower or undress in front of anyone, not roommates, not girlfriends, especially not anyone on the baseball team. At the first opportunity, he got an apartment by himself off campus. The only time he got naked in life was to shower and to have sex. He never even looked at himself naked in the mirror. Did he equate any of that with his insecurity about his dick size? Not once. Never having made any conscious connection between what happened to him when he was on the little league team and his behaviors with women for the last 25 years, the only thing Khari knew in that moment was that he was angry with Jacinda and he didn't need an excuse to end the relationship, she had nailed the coffin shut herself.

Khari calmly denied her accusations and stood there, stoic and outraged, in silence, ignoring Jacinda like she didn't even exist. Jacinda was crying hysterically, trying to calm Khari down, reason with him. She was falling all over herself, apologizing. It hadn't come out at all like she had wanted. She wanted to reassure him that he was more than big enough for her, that she was satisfied with the relationship and the sex; she had made a stupid attempt at bringing up a subject that most Black men are terrified to talk about. Kicking herself, Jacinda knew she had made a huge mistake. She knew Khari wasn't the sort of man who would ask himself the hard questions. She knew that whenever it came to bringing up any issue where he would have to reveal something about himself that was ugly or painful, that he would react negatively and deny, deny, deny.

"I'm out. I'm not going to do this anymore." With that, Khari grabbed his jacket and walked past Jacinda like she wasn't even there.

"Wait, where are you going?" Sobbing uncontrollably, Jacinda pleaded. "Stay, we can talk about this. I'm sorry. Babe, we had a wonderful evening. We love each other. We're going to spend the rest of our lives together. We can work through this. I will admit I wasn't as sensitive about the issue as I should have been. Let's talk, this is a misunderstanding, let's not ruin the evening. Sweetie, I am so very sorry. Please don't go!"

Khari made sure to shut down any hopes of working things out as he put his hand on the front door. Without even looking back, he mumbled, "I don't want to be in a relationship with you. I didn't really love you. It was all a lie," as he shut the door behind him to the unhinged and irrational screams of Jacinda behind him.

Jacinda cried for weeks. She sent texts, emails, cards, she made phone call after phone call, all of which were ignored. She sent links to articles about penis size and a woman's pleasure, explaining in detail that bigger does not mean better. She sent diagrams showing that a woman's g-spot is located about 2 inches inside a woman's vagina and that even an average sized dick is more than sufficient to give a woman a vaginal orgasm. She could have sent Dr. Oz himself to say that Khari's dick was more than big enough and he wouldn't have cared one iota. Khari was too emotionally immature to email or call Jacinda back so he just let her keep emailing and texting him until she eventually got the message. He had erased her out of his life like she didn't exist. In his world, anyone who made him face his insecurities was dead to him. Unable to wrap her head around the fact that she was in what she thought was the happiest relationship of her life one minute, and literally, an hour later, it was gone, Jacinda struggled with depression, anger, confusion, loneliness, and a sense of betrayal for months.

Over on the other side of town, Khari struggled with no such conflict. They broke up on a Wednesday, he was fucking another woman by Saturday, and it would have been Friday but he had plans with his co-workers after work that night. Within weeks, he had a different woman for every night of the week to play with and manipulate. Most were women from his past he could call up and manipulate easily, newer women required more time and finesse to seduce but he was up for the challenge. He was single and had not ties to anyone. He would have tried to romance the homeless girl who sat on the bus stop all day if he thought she would give him some. Before work, during work, after work, all night long, he was trying to romance someone to get them in bed. He felt no compunction using them, degrading them, taking out his anger and frustration on them sexually.

Truthfully, it wasn't anger and frustration Khari felt, it was insecurity and fear. He heard Jacinda's words over and over again in his head every time it came time for "that moment" when he had to undress in front of a woman. He hated her for making him feel like that little boy being shamed in the locker room, like the young man on prom night all over again; memories he had intentionally shut out. If there was one thing in life that Khari had prided himself on was making women infatuated with him to stroke his ego. He became so terrified someone was going to tell him that his dick was little that he began to overcompensate by doing his level best to hit it, stab it, kill it, to brutally and savagely fuck every woman he could. And the women ate it up. They showed up in the middle of the night or 5 AM in the morning, they were at his beck and call whenever he needed to silence the voices in his head. He loved the dysfunction and the drama. He loved lying to women, convincing them that they were the only one when they were one of so many, he couldn't keep track of them all. They didn't seem to want to know or care about other women in his life, they just seemed grateful for the emails, phone calls, dinners, concerts, and the good dick.

For the better part of a year, Khari was on a sexual rampage; a slave to his dick. He was sticking it in anything and everything without a care for disease, pregnancy, common sense, or standards. Sex was his drug of choice and he was self-medicating and numbing his feelings of insecurity in all aspects of his life, demons he had never faced, with women he manipulated into bed. He wanted and needed to sexually dominate them, to slap, choke, degrade, and humiliate them in order to feel good about himself. And because they loved it, each and every one of them ate it up in fact, and came back for more whenever he told them, he felt high off the adrenaline.

Everything came crashing to a halt one day when, before work, he was overwhelmed with emails from all the women in his current rotation of fuck buddies that he composed an erotic story and sent it to all of them, which wasn't unusual or uncommon. This particular morning however, in a rush, he accidentally didn't BCC them and by noon, his phone was blowing up with calls and texts from a half a dozen women all wanting answers. They started emailing each other, confirming times, dates, and commonalities in seduction. They all started to piece together that the restaurant that was "their special restaurant" wasn't so special and that he took all of them there. They started to figure out that in far too many instances, when one woman left in the morning, there was something else there that same night. And they all figured out that there hadn't been a condom used between all of them.

Two of the women had a modicum of self-esteem, cursed him out, and walked away. Three of the women believed him when he said that it was all a contrived plot by a nameless ex-girlfriend who had hacked his e-mail and made up the other email addresses to cause drama. They "sort of" questioned his sincerity but they were just as addicted to his level of dysfunction, lying, and hot sex as he was to the adrenaline rush of manipulating them into being infatuated with him so they simply chose to ignore the obvious truth and keep on with the way things were. One of the women however was never really mentally-stable in the first place, and while she was sweet and oh so pleasant as long as she was in the dark, she became a psychotic lunatic intent on exacting painful revenge after finding out the truth. She stalked him, she called him night and day, she showed up at his job unexpectedly; she was intent on making him pay and pay dearly.

One would think that at damn near 40, Khari would have learned that pretending someone doesn't exist, ignoring them like the emotional pain he had caused them meant nothing, is really only appropriate if you are 7 years old and you are ignoring your imaginary friend. But ignore he did and he paid the price for it. Had he simply faced his victim with a bit of humility and remorse, if he hadn't acted like she meant nothing to him and that her pain was insignificant to him, he could have saved himself a world of trouble. But Khari was arrogant and stupid. For every email that she sent him that went unanswered, for every text he deleted, for every phone call from her he rejected, he sent her into a fuming rage, infuriated that her voice wasn't being heard, her pain wasn't worth addressing.

Treating women like disposable game pieces and ignoring the pain he caused them was a lesson he would learn with near fatal consequences. As he pulled into his garage one night, lowered the door, and grabbed his bags of groceries, the sensation hit him quickly. At first, it was warm, then, almost instantly, it became a burning sensation. He couldn't breathe. It was surreal. He reached around to his side and felt the warmth. He held his hand up and could see the blood, but it was almost like it wasn't his own. Crumpled to the floor, he managed to call 911 just before he passed out.

Had she stabbed him an inch to the left, she would have punctured a lung and Khari would have died instantly. Talk about a close call. As he recuperated in the hospital, Khari thought it was almost comical. "I damn near lost my life over some pussy." But it wasn't pussy that almost got him killed; it was the heart of the woman who was attached to that pussy that he should have never fucked with. Even after a woman had played sushi chef with his insides, he still wasn't willing to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. He couldn't wrap his head around the fact that it had even happened to him. Things like this weren't supposed to happen to him. For all of his lies and manipulations, he was so great at lying, he'd avoided any drama like this up until this point. He was the guy that women loved, not hated. The physician at the hospital, hearing bits and pieces of the story and able to figure out pretty much the rest of it, recommended therapy for Khari and he vehemently refused. He didn't think there was anything wrong with him and he certainly didn't want to change. He liked being "free and independent" as he called it, meaning, egotistical and self-absorbed.

In the months following the stabbing, there was a trial. The young lady was convicted but she brought out the infamous email and all the women were called to the stand to testify. Khari's family, hell, everyone in the city learned all about the type of man Khari really was because it was the opening story on the local news for weeks. He distanced himself from his loved ones and friends even though they still supported him but he was ashamed of his actions and just wanted to hide out in his basement and sit in front of the TV.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch as they say, in the weeks following the trial, Khari found that his libido had started coming back and his need for sex was returning. Only problem was, he was afraid to initiate sex with anyone. Khari was sure that every woman in the world knew of his womanizing ways and that the next time one of them got close to him they were going to try to cut off his dick rather than stab him in the back. He would never admit it to anyone but he was even more afraid after the stabbing that women were going to ridicule him for having a little dick if he didn't lie to them and convince them that he was in love with them. Therein was the root of his conundrum. He was terrified of lying to women to get sex but he felt like he had to lie to get sex. He had a six inch scar to remind him of what lying had gotten him in life.

Isolated from friends and family, with no one to talk to, and most importantly, feeling like he had no opportunities for sex unless he moved to east Mozambique, he pulled out the card for the therapist he had been given and made an appointment. It was the last thing he wanted to do and he didn't even think it would help. The only thing that made him keep the appointment was the vague memory of Jacinda and how she had said that maybe, just maybe, that his need to use women was tied to his concept of manhood. Something about that had resonated with him. He'd gone to counseling before and it didn't work because he, obviously, lied the entire time. He planned on lying this time as well. He just wanted a quick fix, some magic pill that would allow him to get back to fucking women again.

For the first three months, Khari lied so much that he couldn't keep track of the lies. His therapist was a man and not distracted by or attracted to him so he would call out the lies and they would have to start over from scratch. Finally, lonely, isolated, scared, horny, and hating himself, Khari started to tell the truth. It started spilling out. He talked about the boys on the baseball team and how he pretended to his buddies that he had a big dick in order to feel validated. He spoke of the women in his life he had hurt, his compulsion to use women, what makes him feel good about slapping women and degrading them during sex. He opened Pandora's Box and he started telling the truth like his life depended on it.