Whiskey, Smoking & ED, A Dog That Didn't Talk

Anyone getting close to or beating 90 and still fantasizing about having breathtaking sex is my hero. But I didn't need having sex to be short of breath even when I was 40.

God, that was a long fucking time ago. 50 years have years have whipped on by. I smoked at least 4-5 packs of 'coffin nails’, also known as Chesterfield's every day. I smoked even while bike riding in Portola Valley. I did have to stop when I needed to light up the next one which was often. Lighting a cigarette while pedaling was not, for me, possible. I gave up riding 'no hands' when I was about 16.

The family dog Haaken, a Norwegian Elkhound, went with me on my rides. Haaken didn't talk. He never said 'You shouldn't have done that'. He was perfect company. I didn't have to say 'I'm sorry. It's all my fault'. I could talk to Haaken without worrying about a fucking answer. How lucky was I that I owned a dog that couldn't talk.

I was desperate to stop smoking and thought, stupidly, that shrinks could help me stop. No chance. They were too fucking busy squeezing my money tit like milk out of a cow all the while trying to convince me that I was a latent homosexual and that being married and still masturbating made me one 'sick' son of a bitch.

Shrinks don't understand that to get a long time married man to stop masturbating, just get him a divorce. Shrinks are huge going after symptoms like smoking, drinking, eating too much and jacking off. The hell with attacking the 'sickness' itself.

In Portola Valley where we lived, we had a yearly neighborhood New Year's Day blow out. TV Football, booze, hors d' oeuvres and steaks made for one hell of a party.

Some smoked dope. I, at least, turned down smoking dope. Booze got me in plenty enough motion. 'Rammers' were the order of the day. Right before dinner some son of a bitch would yell, 'time for the rammers'. So after hours of serious drinking (wine hadn't yet caught fire) we would ingest at least two, big gin martini's with very little, if any, vermouth which would then shoot us over the fucking moon without our moving our feet. You felt like King Kong, omnipotent, indestructible, a great lover and a fucking genius.

At the 1973 party I noticed that Bill Kelly, a serious drinker and smoker, wasn't smoking. He told me that he had 'institutionalized' himself at the St.Helena Health Center, in Napa Valley, for a week.

Run by the Seventh Day Adventists, its mission was preventive medicine. The 'treatment' centered around physical activity. No religion. (Though I will say that if I could get around to believing in Jesus Christ, I would become an Adventist.).

Drinking booze and smoking while at the Center got you thrown out of the program. I told Bill that the Princess and I would go there. He cautioned me that the two of us to go through that trauma together was a very bad idea, unless we were prepared to have one of us strangle the other. An opportunity that I wasn't going to give the Princess.

So up to St Helena went the Princess with me as her chauffeur. A week later I picked her up. She was all virtue and self righteousness. The Princess no longer smoked, which made her, in her mind, a superior human being. A legend in her own mind, maybe a Saint. What a pain in the ass.

A few weeks later it was my turn in the barrel. Naturally the Princess was tooooo bizzzzy to drive me to St.Helena. And I knew that if I had a car available I would never survive a non-drinking, non-smoking week without driving off and cheating. So, I chartered a small two engine plane (a one engine bird was too fucking scary for me) and flew to St.Helena.

We landed at a strip in Calistoga located behind a filling station. I asked the attendant at the filling station how to get a cab to go to St.Helena. He looked at me like I was a bull with a bastard calf, laughed and said, “Are you kidding me? This town has a population of 3,000, a ton of serious drinker's bars, a famous alcoholism treatment center, mud baths attached to motels but no cabs."

So I offered him $25 (1973) and he drove me in his pickup truck to the St.Helena Recovery Center with me smoking like a chimney in Alaska. As we pulled into the grounds, my last, ever, pack of smokes went out the truck window and with it, the beginning of the end to a self destructive life style. Booze was next on my 'give up' list of two to hopefully be replaced by sex.

A few months later booze went the way of smokes and another new life began. Tennis, women, lots of laughs and new careers. I went from being a functioning, smoking, alcoholic to just a functioning alcoholic followed by becoming a non-smoking, recovering alcoholic no longer suffering from ED (old age brought it back).

Shrinks never understood that smoking a lot, drinking a lot and erections don't work well together. All the analytical bull shit in the world wouldn't snap that little son of a bitch back to attention. Abstinence was the answer. However, it did survive booze and cigarettes but not time. As Willie Nelson said, "I'm sorry that my dick has died before the rest of me." An old man's lament.