Three months after a vasectomy, you have to go back to the urologist and give them a semen sample so they can see if it took. That part you knew about. What you didn’t know was that the sample you give them can’t be more than an hour old. What’s the rationale behind that, you think. Okay, so sperm can’t live too long outside a body, but…surely the lab could see their tiny little corpses? Are you meant to believe that sperm disintegrate when they die, like video game enemies? Oh well, who are you to contradict them; they got degrees in Jizz Studies and you didn’t.

The lab where you’re gonna need to turn it in (who helpfully provided you with a pre-labeled specimen cup, freeing you from finding a Tupperware to sacrifice to the cause) is on the north side of the city. From your house, a twenty-five minute drive, minimum; thirty-five realistically. If there’s construction, unexpected traffic, trouble parking, an issue with finding out where in the hospital this lab was—well, you’ll be cutting it pretty close.

You imagine missing your deadline. No point lying about it, you can only hurt yourself by doing so. Worst-scenario, they’d just hand you another specimen cup. And then…what?

Your first instinct would be to just duck into the nearest restroom and shave the carrot right there on the john. But you don’t know if you could face the desk clerk afterwards, after being gone only a few minutes. She (in your head, it’s a woman) would immediately know you jacked off on premises. You don’t know if that’s against the rules or something—after all, it’s not a sperm bank, or some other place they expect people to be jacking off in; it’s just a regular old hospital. But let’s say that it is against the rules. What could they realistically do about it?  Not take your jizz? Sorry, sir, we cannot sanction the way you comported yourself just now, and we’re not going to extend our lab’s services to you. Have your jizz analyzed elsewhere.

The interaction is fraught with levels of awkwardness that you’re not sure you can survive, and you don’t want to take the chance to draw it out any longer than you have to. The more you think, the more clear it seems that a neutral third location is in order: a restroom, or other jack-off-in-able space, close enough to the hospital that transport time won’t be an issue.

Right on the corner there’s a Burger King. It gets points for convenience; you could grab breakfast while you’re there. Problem: not a single-person bathroom. It’s got stalls. What if someone walks in during the “task at hand”? You’re pretty sure you can stifle any noise—Lord knows you had enough practice in college—but you have a weak sense of smell from smoking, and you were never sure how much other people could pick up on the smell of fresh jizz. Old jizz smells, certainly. The old ripped pair of tighty-whiteys you jizzed into as a teenager, even shoved decisively far down in the space between your box spring and bed frame, brought a glucoseous piquancy to the room that, in retrospect, kick-started your illustrious career in hoe-scaring. But you never noticed that much of an odor when it was fresh. Your older cousins used to tell you that women, in particular, smelled fresh jizz like truffle pigs, especially when they were ovulating. Typical cousin ballbusting, but that sort of shit sticks with you.

There are a couple of businesses nearby: liquor stores, convenience stores, laundromats. When you were a kid it was mostly Bosnians that ran them; now they’re largely African-owned—Somalis, Sudanese, Eritreans. A lot of them don’t have restrooms open to the public because the neighborhood’s too rough.  Others do, but your liberal neuroticism bristles at the idea of going into an immigrant’s business, defiling the bathroom, and leaving without spending any money. You’re worried it will be interpreted as some kind of mild, circuitous hate crime.

You worry you’re horribly overthinking what ought to be a simple task, and that worry makes you stick fast on the next feasible option that crosses your mind—the park across from the hospital. You know the park well; you’ve played disc golf there. The park has public restrooms housed in a brown-and-tan brick structure that looks a bit like a bomb shelter.  Sure to be cold and dirty, but deserted, particularly at this time of year, and that’s your main criterion at this point.

And so the morning arrives, and you pull up to the park under a uniform steel-gray sky and all of early autumn’s glorious colors lying washed and wrung out underfoot. Tiny piles of rough-textured slush ring the parking lot from last week’s snow. The air smells like wet gravel and the pavement’s slick with tarry filth. A turquoise Suburban lies at the kitty-corner opposite you, a neatly dressed black guy milling about it. You don’t meet his gaze as you walk toward the bomb shelter, the empty specimen cup thick in your coat pocket.

You round the corner. Tragedy strikes. CAUTION tape forms an X over the men’s room doorway and a tall traffic cone sits sentry in front of it. You kick the cone out of the way and reach beside the X to try the handle. At least half an inch of backed-up stormwater covers the floor. God damn it. You rush around the building to the women’s room but the water is even higher in there.

You hadn’t budgeted that much time. You have to be at work in half an hour. You have no contingency plan. Your mind whirls, gropes for a solution. You can’t jack off in your car because of the guy in the parking lot. Could you find a knot of trees to shield you, whack off in the open air? Can you even perform in wind chills like this? If caught, could you plead medical necessity?

Your salvation comes in the form of a tall, brown, mud-splattered kybo with “Jim’s John’s” printed on the side, and a delightful little Punch magazine-esque cartoon of a fat man sitting on the toilet. It’ll do nicely. You duck inside without hesitation and your pants go down. Your cock shrivels visibly on exposure to the cold air. It tries to retract, the glans huddling up inside the foreskin like a small woman in a thick muffler. You pinch the head between two fingers, stretch it out to its full length, and rub the shaft in a slight twisting motion to try to generate some heat.

The wind rattles the thin plastic walls of the kybo. A freak gust blows the unlatched door dangerously wide, but you manage to catch it before it blows completely open; the second or two you spend not stroking undoes all the progress you’ve made toward a workable erection. The kybo is obviously far past its normal emptying schedule; the vile chemical brew you’re sitting atop is wafting its pestilential miasma between your legs right into your face. No matter how frantically you stroke, your unit flops glumly in your hand like a two-week-old stalk of celery.   You make the mistake of looking past your cock and you see a huge blob of toilet paper cradling a saucer-sized puddle of pasty diarrhea streaked with black and red. In irritation you get up, slam the lid, and sit back down, but the cold plastic on your balls proves to be even more distracting.

Never before has your nut eluded you this badly—not when you’re tired, or drunk, or on a new medication, or ate too much pho; not while cold, hot, sick, hurt, or itchy; not while depressed, distracted, nervous, grieving, furious, bored; not while fucking somewhere gross, fucking someone gross, fucking somewhere dangerous, fucking someone dangerous, fucking someone who says weird shit, does weird shit, asks for weird shit, does weird shit to you without asking; not while down bad for someone else, not with someone who’s so much hotter and freakier than you it’s intimidating, not while just craving a little shake-up, a little variety, a little balm for not even some huge psychic wound but the quotidian strains and sadnesses that your life has come to provide, and finding none; and these struggles and failures are all weighing on you now, they’re all whirling around in your head and accreting into a huge ball that fills your skull, expelling all else, and you’re pitifully playing with your rubbery cock as if in a daze, as if you had an aneurysm while jacking it and are spasming, having a last few seconds of motor-memory Selbstbefriedigung before collapsing.

You rally. You grit your teeth. A porn video is out of the question. You have someone on the other side of that thin wall, and no headphones. You have to summon every scrap of imagination you possess. You overclock your powers of fantasy to dispel all the cold in that filthy plastic booth, to transport yourself to a tropical cabana with languid waves of heat drifting in from a shimmering ocean. Sheer force of ideation peels away your coat, sweater, the flannel-lined jeans shackling your ankles, until you’re totally nude, stretched out in a hammock. Beside you is a woman who is as yet just a shapeless log. You don’t want to use any real ex-partners or regular fantasy players because you’re too lost in your memories as is. Someone totally invented is called for. You whirl through physical attributes like you’re making an RPG character. Your cock gives encouraging twitches in turn as you land on: Indian, curly hair, medium titties, large ass, several tasteful tattoos, one not so tasteful tattoo, huge bush, round face, moderately snaggly teeth.

You two are going at it in the hammock, or at least trying.  You’ve never fucked in a hammock in real life, but the particular lattice of fantasy you’ve constructed exacts its own brand of verisimilitude. You and your dream woman are both climbing and falling all over each other, trying to get purchase. She lies on her side and cocks one leg as you lie beside her, and your hard cock brushes her labia, but the act of thrusting into her throws you off balance and sends you tumbling over her, landing on her other side. Strangely enough, you are not frustrated, but encouraged by these cumbersome conditions. In your fantasy you’re both laughing at the ridiculous contortions you’re making, and throwing yourselves at each other all the harder with every failure. You get up on your knees to try doggystyle, but your knees are audibly straining the hammock’s seams, and she places one of her hands badly and lurches the hammock to the side before you get five thrusts in. She gets on top of you and starts riding, but you can’t thrust up into her with nothing firm supporting your back, and you bend your dick trying. Finally you settle on just lying next to each other like snakes fucking; she’s got her legs closed, giving you a thighjob, and you’re moving your hips up to brush her clit with the base of your cock (you reduce the size of her bush to accomplish this more easily).

You’re getting into it now. You’re feeling the squeeze of fleshy, sweat-misted butt cheeks on your cock. You’re feeling her bare skin against yours for the entire length of your body. The awkwardness of the hammock, the extreme restriction of your movements makes every bit of difference. You’re wriggling against your big-assed, toothy Indian goddess like you’re eight years old and just discovering the potential thrill of a wadded-up hump of blankets. You’re overcoming the cold and the stench, you’re putting mind truly over matter; it’s not the hardest you’ve ever been, but it is more than adequate for your purposes.

Exactly nine minutes later, when you walk up to the counter at the clinic with your 10 ccs safely sealed inside a white paper bag, an electric jangle careens through your body. You stifle it. There, sitting behind the counter, is the very picture of your toothy Indian fantasy: rye bread skin, curly hair brushing the collar of her scrubs, looking bored and wan like she’s been here for many dull hours already. She’s already seen you; you dare not turn away. You’d give something away to her. This is much too awkward, this is much too much. She knows. But how would she know? You can’t explain that, any more than you can explain her. Horror shoots from toes to scalp, one bolt after another, but through sheer will you smooth the trembling out of your gait. You wonder if you saw her somewhere before, and pulled her appearance out of the bog of your subconscious, or whether you actually created her as some sort of jizz tulpa.

You tell her, “I’ve got a drop off,” and point to the label on the bag with all the relevant lab information on it.

She says “Okay, got it, thank you,” without a smile.

You do not linger. You don’t invite the opportunity for friction you’ve worked so hard to avoid. You heel-turn and head right back down the hallway and through the sliding glass doors of the front entrance, the glass twinkling with vague unreality. You wonder what you’re meant to do with what’s just been put in front of you. Should you probe further? Come back another time, see whether she still exists? Or back away prudently? Did the universe thrust her into your path, or did you crack it open and spy a chink of forbidden interior? The question occupies you on the whole of your drive to work.