THREE-MINUTE MIKE Three-Minute Mike was the very first man – and the last – I met on an Internet dating website. Our final date occurred about a month after we met, after some rather transparent probing (his), aimed at ascertaining whether I was going to have sex with him readily, or would make him labor for it (he evidently never considered the third option). We had shared two brief hugs by the time of this date, our third, dinner at a local Chinese restaurant.

His opening conversational strategy was to shock, as after we ordered dinner, he coyly informed me (“Heh – want to hear a secret?”) that his penis and both nipples were pierced. Reportedly (I never saw it), the penis sported a curved silver barbell, inserted through the underside of the head of the organ and perpendicular to it. After a few sophomoric questions (“did it hurt?”), I settled into a meditative silence, musing on his rueful disclosure that a former girlfriend had in fact chipped a tooth on the “large, heavy jewelry” with which he used to adorn his penis. These days, he added, he rarely sported the “big bling” anymore, as it made sex uncomfortable for him (never mind his partners!). He confided that this particular piercing was designed for sexual pleasure; specifically, to stimulate a woman’s “G-spot”. And, he boasted, he had special condoms that accommodated the various swag he could attach to the small barbell. As he finished his glass m of water and started in on mine, he assured me the barbell would “tickle” my G-spot in ways I had heretofore only dreamed of.

The patronizing tone in which he delivered this promise was so irritating, his presumptions so appalling, and his decision to express them to me indicative of such poor judgment, that I momentarily considered just walking out. But he fascinated me in a repellant way, sort of like a giant centipede: I daren’t go too close to him, but it was all too interesting to look away. I wondered if his genital jewelry – whether small and dainty, or the big gems he said he preferred – would not be an irritant to the female organ, rather than a pleasurable enhancement.

Too, I pondered how any woman could view a bejeweled penis without–well, laughing. I could not erase the vision of one of Great-aunt Louella’s beloved Cartier sapphire earrings, so weighty that both of her earlobes were permanently elongated, attached showily to the tip of the male sex organ, dangling like a wind chime or turning slowly like a Calder mobile. The intrinsic impossibility of the image caused me to shudder: Elegant, elderly, cantankerous Aunt Louella’s favorite earring hanging from a-a–a what? A penis?

Three-Minute Mike had no sense of social decorum, no feel for the conventions and unspoken rules that regulate all human interactions. If it is true that our relationships with one another are governed by implied social contracts, Three-Minute Mike managed heedlessly to breach every clause of ours as our month “together” progressed, musing out loud about my salary, plucking food off my plate without asking, observing I colored the gray in my hair, showing up half an hour early for a date, and blurting out unwelcome intimacies. Put plainly, the man had no filter.

Accordingly, it was at this dinner, over General Tso’s Chicken, that he chose to share yet another unsolicited confidence, one that quite took away my appetite (for him or for dinner): that his “equipment” was jumbo-sized — an absolute colossus of a penis perfectly in scale with his 6’4″, 280-pound frame. And, he added as he spooned chicken onto our plates, he was “damned good in bed”. He “knew how to use” his “equipment”. “Let’s just say”, he smirked, “I don’t get any complaints from the ladies, if you know what I mean. Heh.”

I did know what he meant, of course, but I couldn’t dwell on it even for a second, as I strained to process the astonishing fact that the topic of our dinner conversation, if I did not change it, was going to be an adult human penis I had never seen and was never going to see; a penis to which I felt less attraction than I did to General Tso himself, now a century dead; a penis which, in fact, I wouldn’t help across the street in a blizzard even if it slipped in the crosswalk and fell down right in front of me.

As my brain raced to find a safer topic for discussion, Three-Minute Mike, twisting the cap off the bottle of soy sauce and dumping most of it of it into the bowl of rice we were supposed to share, brayed, “Oh no, no…heh…I am not one of those three–minute guys, wham bam, you know… not by a long shot! Heh,” he chuckled, stirring the bowl of rice with his soup spoon, “I’m no three minute man….they don’t call me ‘three-minute Mike’! More like …. ‘three-hour Mike’! Heh.”

But worse – much worse – was yet to come. As he ate,Three-Minute Mike advised me that “women sometimes get infections after having sex” with him, especially women who have not had sex in a while. The latex of the condom, he lectured, using a chopstick as a pointer, along with the friction (and by the way he described it, one imagined actual sparks flying), generated by the jackhammering of his Bunyanesque member against the walls of my own female organ, (possibly for three hours!, I recalled in alarm), would “completely change the Ph balance in the vagina”. This, he admonished, somewhat anti-climactically, could lead to infections.

The Ph balance! As though my reproductive organ were a swimming pool and he the cabana boy charged with the weekly task of keeping it clean!

“Lemme warn you right now,” he confided with a little chuckle, “if we do take this to – you know – the next level – heh – be prepared for a yeast infection…..or even a urinary tract infection. Ouch, I know – right?” He drained his water glass and took a sip out of mine. “But it’s happened to more than one of my partners after the first time meeting, um, ‘Little Big Mike’ , heh, you with me? So maybe you might wanna think about starting antibiotics sooner rather than later, like, as a preventive measure?” Placing his used chopsticks on the tablecloth and unsuccessfully suppressing a burp, he scooped a large spoonful of rice out of the pool of soy sauce he’d drowned it in, and slurped it off the spoon into his mouth, his cheeks bulging as his tongue fondled the grains. Mesmerized by the dribble of soy sauce running down his chin, I waited, but he failed to wipe it away, and it disappeared into his beard.

This fact sealed the deal for me. As though the scenarios he conjured weren’t ghastly enough – his brute of a penis bombarding my alkaline-poor, chemically-unbalanced genitalia so furiously the condom shredded into a thousand pieces, black smoke stinking of burning electricity emitting from me as his member seared a trench through my poor little reproductive vault, spawning en route unpleasant, painful infections, plagues so inconvenient to our anticipated coupling that he was ready to take me to the pharmacy as soon as we paid our bill – my secret knowledge that a quarter teaspoon of soy sauce now stained the roots of the man’s beard – left me queasily unbalanced.

Explaining truthfully that I felt unwell and was certainly feverish (back of my hand pressed to my forehead for effect), I determined to flee. So anxious was I to leave that in my haste, I tangled my arms in my sweater as I struggled to put it on without taking it off the back of my chair. Even as my choppy efforts to dislodge my hands from the twisted sleeves caused my chair to tip precariously sideways, I managed to toss Three-Minute Mike a twenty dollar bill. He whipped it off the table with a fast, practiced flourish, one I’d seen on our two earlier coffee dates, when I’d offered and he’d accepted my $2.00 “share” of the check

When I declined to see him again, he objected. In a single 5-minute phone call he professed shock, then complained, then feigned indifference; then he wheedled, then he shouted; finally, he begged. He ran out of tricks when I refused to discuss my decision. I felt I owed him no explanation. In the month I knew the man, he did not give me a single reason to believe he was capable of learning from his mistakes.