Walking back from the porn shop, I noticed a man walking the opposite way. He had a backpack on, like I did; he was small, spectacled, shy-looking, poor. I wondered briefly if he was on his way to the porn shop just as I had been a dozen minutes earlier, carrying his backpack just as I had because he didn't want to bring his magazines all the way back in a plastic bag--everyone knows what is in there. I realized what I had become. I am one of those lonely, undersexed, urban, unattractive, paunchy males, addicted to looking at naked pictures of 18-year-old girls, jacking off to magazines in dim apartments. He will be nice enough to everyone he knows; he will be shy and withdrawn, and treat every female acquaintance like a lady; but he has a dirty habit he won't tell you about--and flips bug-eyed through the smut magazines in porn shops and at newsstands. I never wanted to become what I am; but now that I am one of those men--the ones mothers tell their children to be wary of--I suppose the only thing to do is accept it. I used to have a roommate who was bald, paunchy, short, and had bad breath. He used to comb strands of his dark hair from the left side all the way across the top of his bald head, as if he were fooling anyone. He was addicted to porn and phone sex; he too was a shy and lonely urban man, with few friends and a marathon number of years with no actual sex. I could hear him through the walls of his room talking on the phone at those sex lines he would call, giggling like an embarrassed girl at the explicitness of the woman's speech. One day he said to me, "At one point in my life, I was having sex with a guy friend. It wasn't like we were gay or anything--we just started looking at porn together and we said to each other, 'Don't you wish we had a pussy here?' So we settled for the next best thing." I couldn't tell if he were suggesting we do the same thing, or if he was only admitting something hard to admit. Now he told me his friend, the guy friend he was sleeping with as they looked at pictures of women together--now he told me he had died of AIDS a few years later. Ever since then, he'd been terrified of AIDS--so terrified he hadn't had sex in many, many years. I think by now I've probably gotten him beat. I haven't had sex since the last year of the Bush presidency--Bush Senior, I mean. Now his son is in the White House--I don't think you can call that an entire generation, but nonetheless a word is coming to mind that describes me perfectly: "Loser". What else could I be called? I am what no one sets out to become--oh I am a loathsome thing, constantly dipping his fingers in Vaseline. Is this anything like what my mother hoped for when she christened me?