Excerpt from Favor– a mystery novel by Parnell Hall
“I remember back in the days when sex was young and innocent. It used to be, if you had sex, you might get the clap, in which case you’d get a shot and have to take it easy for a week. Then it got a little worse: if you had sex, you might get herpes—you couldn’t get rid of it, but it wasn’t that bad: a lot of people had it, and you could all kind of itch together.
Now, you have sex and you die.
AIDS has gotten so frightening they’re even advertising condoms on TV. To me, this is mindboggling. When I was a kid, you couldn’t even find a condom. Druggists kept them hidden under the counter. If you wanted one, you had to ask for it. For a pimply-faced kid, that took a lot of guts. And you’ll recall, I was never long on guts.
They didn’t call them condoms then, either. We kids called ‘em rubbers, of course, but that was slang. The proper names were contraceptives (for prevention of pregnancy), or prophylactics (for prevention of disease). A contraceptive or prophylactic or rubber was like a thin, transparent balloon. One looked at it and thought, “Jesus Christ, this is the only thing standing between me knocking up some girl, dropping out of school and fucking up my entire life?” And then one usually wound up filling the damn thing up with water and dropping it out the window on a passing classmate, which, while not quite as much fun as having sex, was infinitely safer.
But that was contraceptives and prophylactics. Today we have condoms, which I hope would be tougher, seeing as how they have a more important job to do, keeping you from getting dead. They seem tougher, somehow. Even the name sounds tougher. CON-DOM. It sounds like a steel-belted radial. It inspires confidence. CON-DOM.
I can recall back in my youth, on one of those few occasions when I did actually wind up having sex, I used two contraceptives, just to be sure. I’m sure I only would have needed one condom.
At any rate, l wasn’t going to be chasing any women in Atlantic City. Because, when the cowards line up to be counted, they can count me in. And’ I’ll tell you something. In this new AIDS society we live in, they can talk about safe sex all they like. But I am such a big coward that, as far as I’m concerned, in my opinion, the only truly safe sex is masturbation.
With a condom.
I went to the movies.”
*****
Reprinted with permission from Parnell Hall
