Published in the New York Press, 7/2/2008. Read the original (w/comments) here.

I was somewhere in the middle of Tennessee when the burning started again. It wasn’t quite a burning, really. More of an itching. Like a caterpillar was crawling inside the shaft of my penis. It would stop for a little while, perhaps to explore an interesting twist in the vas deferens, then it continued to bumble its happy way up and down the length of my cock. It was particularly active whenever I took a piss—a bad sign.

“Joey, do you guys have any medical supplies here?” Joey was my ex-boyfriend. I was visiting him as part of a 10-day road trip, from New York City to Tucson. He lived on a queer commune hidden deep in a mountain valley—the sort of place you’d never expect to find on the borders of Appalachia. It was equal parts glitter and gutter, manure and magnificent. I was surprised they hadn’t been run off 15 years ago. But there I was, standing between the goat pen and the wood-stove-heated sauna, trying not to claw at my dick like a deranged lunatic on the subway. I found that a subtle squeezing of the penis seemed to relieve some of the itching; but from someone else’s perspective, this was indistinguishable from masturbation.

“What are you looking for?” he said. “There’s a first-aid kit—Bactine, suntan lotion, that kind of stuff—up at the main house.”

I didn’t particularly want to tell him that my new boyfriend (let’s call him DW) had given me gonorrhea. For the second time. However, if I had any chance of scoring some prescription antibiotics in the next 5,000 miles, it was here on the fag farm. The only other option was to find a free clinic in the area, and I knew what that meant— another sadist in a lab coat ramming a Q-tip down my willy until I cried. It had been bad enough in Brooklyn. Out here, I bet they used wooden splinters with steel wool on one end. Plus, it was Saturday. Nothing would be open.

I couldn’t even blame DW. He was asymptomatic, and until I started itching and dripping, he had no idea he was a modern Typhoid Mary. It was possible he hadn’t even given it to me the first time—perhaps I had a particularly long-incubating case from the last person I’d slept with. After the itch started, DW and I both got treated—but on separate days. We thought we’d waited until his course of antibiotics was done, but unless I’d slipped into a patch of poison ivy somewhere in North Carolina, we’d miscalculated.

“I, uh…I think I have gonorrhea.” Scratch, scratch.

Joey rolled his eyes. He thought of me as a total slut, mostly because I used to be one, but partly because he still considered me emotionally stunted and incapable of having long, deep and meaningful relationships. I hastened to explain that I’d gotten this particular STD from someone I was actually dating. That in fact, every STD I’d ever had —crabs twice and now gonorrhea twice as well—had come from someone I really liked, whose last name I knew and could even spell. I could walk out of a sex club in Germany with nothing worse than some abrasions from a sling accident, but put me in a relationship and something was bound to start itching.

“Oh, God,” he muttered, then stalked off toward the house. “Let’s go look.” I followed sheepishly behind him, with my head down and my hand in my crotch. Thirty minutes later, we’d turned up all sorts of over-the-counter pain medications, some anti-depressants, a few unlabeled prescriptions bottles, and more herbs, tinctures and medicinal teas than I could shake a stick at. But there wasn’t a single bottle of plain old-fashioned penicillin.
“You want to call Morty?” Joey finally asked me, resignation making his voice weary.

Did I want to call Morty? No. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Sadly, I didn’t have any other choice. Morty was Joey’s dad and was a licensed physician. He’d helped out friends of ours before with everything from morning-after pills to consultations on the effects of taking testosterone; but what was I going to say to him?
“Hi, I broke your son’s heart a year ago and now I’m hoping you can fix this pesky venereal disease I seem to have developed?” Yeah, that would go over well.

How much humiliation does it take to outweigh a penile swab? I know some people are into that kind of thing, but I’m not one of them. I’m more afraid of physical pain than embarrassment. I write nonfiction; public humiliation is an occupational hazard. I called Morty.

After a perfunctory “Hi Dad, the goats are fine,” exchange, Joey explained the situation. He put me on the phone and left the room. My voice cracked like a teenager as I assured Morty that I knew it was gonorrhea, told him how I’d gotten it and promised to inform DW and my primary physician as soon as possible. He was polite and professional the entire time, and he never said anything about my being an emotionally stunted slut, for which I was thankful.

For all his eye-rolling, Joey helped me find a place to get the prescription filled, gave me directions and made me some lunch. We talked about mutual friends, lovers and acquaintances; and we discussed his garden and my graduate school program. I told him about DW, and he introduced me to his new girlfriend, a fellow commune-ist. We all held hands and sat on a broken-down couch whose springs had seen better days.

Joey might have been right. I wasn’t the best at relationships. At least not the dating kind. But the friendships that lay at the heart of those relationships—the passionate, compassionate, warm, hot, strong, long-lasting friendships that came before, during and after—those mattered to me. My journey cross-country was a map studded with friends and former lovers who I could not wait to see again. And they were all letting me stay with them, so the feeling was at least somewhat mutual.

By the time I rolled into Tucson, two days and another ex-boyfriend later, the itching was gone, replaced by a warm feeling somewhere deeper and more primal than the shaft of my penis. My heart.