Given PTSD’s prevalence among the disadvantaged demographic that is middle-class students in their early twenties, it is a travesty that most of the public remain unaware of the terrible effects the disorder can have on both its sufferers and the genitalia closest to them. “Acceptable” diseases like breast cancer monopolise our charitable hearts and our annual donate-a-coin-to-get-that-person-on-the-street-corner-to-fuck-off budget, while innocent sluts like me endure memories of unwanted anal penetration and flaccid penises in silence.
But the injustice stops now. In an effort to raise awareness of the tragic, incurable condition that is PTSD, I offer you three cautionary threesome tales. If reading these saves just one innocent dick or vag from the trauma I must endure every single day, I might just forget my pain, if only for a moment.
The One With The Pawpaw
I really, really like Lucas’ Pawpaw Ointment. Who wouldn’t? The red tube contains a generous amount of the wonder salve, it’s moisturising but never greasy, it’s equally good on chapped lips, torn cuticles, and ingrown hairs in the pubic region, and the packaging is just rustic enough to make you forget that you are paying $12.99 for what is effectively a tiny quantity of glorified Vaseline. But I can enjoy this wonderful multi-tasker of a product no longer. After a trip to India a couple of years ago, the sight of that little red tube now sets off major dissociative episodes of PTSD which leave me crumpled on the floor of Albany St Pharmacy in the foetal position.The genesis of the threesome was on a beach in Goa. After ingesting copious quantities of rum, Valium, and Ritalin with an Australian girl I had bonded with over our shared nymphomania, she and I began fingering each other and virtually scissoring as we slumped drunkenly in the sand. We decided it would be rude not to invite a penis to the party, and began scanning the group of people looking for possible candidates. Unfortunately, by this point several of the most eligible men had staggered off to pass out, and there were only two options left, one of which was homosexual. I asked him anyway but he politely declined, saying that I was “a honey” but vagina left his cock “softer than Justin Bieber’s at the Bunny Ranch.”
The last man staggering, then, was an Australian guy with sloping shoulders, a thick Perth mine accent and a disturbing penchant for fluoro Wayfarers. As we all staggered back to my beach shack, it became apparent that his misguided impression of his own amusingness was equal to Mike King’s. Also like King, his ability to shill for the pork industry proved to be compromised. His dick remained utterly, utterly flaccid even when he disappeared from the shack for a few minutes and returned with some miraculously acquired Viagra. I started to feel like the gay guy might have been the better option after all.
The girl and I were keen to admit defeat and default to a twosome, but instead of being a gentleman and leaving us to it, the Wayfarer wanker kept insisting that we blow him despite the fact that there wasn’t enough room on his marshmallow-like penis for both of our mouths. For a good ten minutes the girl and I stared sympathetically at one another over his shrivelled-up dick, passing it listlessly between each other’s mouths in a twisted version of that childhood game where you have to pass an orange to the next person without using your hands. Finally, in a bizarre attempt to rectify the situation, after much fiddling about with a little red tube he stuck two surprisingly well-lubricated fingers in my ass while I was distracted with my head buried in the girl’s crotch.
“The great thing about Kiwi and Aussie girls,” he crowed triumphantly, “is that they always have Lucas Pawpaw Ointment!” I extricated my face from between the girl’s thighs and suddenly realised that, despite being stark naked, his fluorescent green wayfarers were still perched on his head like the feathers of a peacock in heat.
Goodbye, Favourite Lip Balm Of All Time. We had a good run, I guess.
The One With The Emotional Agony
Freaks love me. Especially German freaks, as I found out when I lived in Berlin for a while. I don’t know exactly what makes me irresistibly attractive to Teutonic weirdos, but stalky, obsessive, needy losers from the sylvan hills of the Rhineland flock to me like wanna-salts to the latest issue of Vice. Setting aside the guy I used to see selling newspapers in the train station who would cheerily inform me that “next time you be my victim, uh??” and the 5’3” Iraqi jockey, the most repellent was an insurance salesman who, in a moment of drunken weakness, I let squeeze my left boob on a dancefloor at 6am on a Sunday.Unbelievably, despite my boobs’ slight triangularity and resolute refusal to grow beyond a B cup, this unmemorable incident became the genesis of an infatuation Taylor Swift-like in its terrifying intensity. Henry texted me every 10 minutes for weeks until I finally relented and agreed to hang out with him and his friends for a night. When I arrived, Henry introduced me to his “best friend,” who looked like a better-dressed Louis Theroux. This was a pleasantly jarring contrast to Henry, who looked like a worse-dressed Skinny P. Louis 2.0 offered me a seat. I inwardly sighed with relief that the couch was upholstered for optimum absorption of any imminent wet spots.
The night went well, except for the part where Henry attempted to kiss me repeatedly and I was so coked up that I told him the truth, which was that I would rather bang Louis 2.0 than him even if Louis had recently writhed around for hours in a pile of ripe durian fruits, and Henry started crying so I left. As I sat on the train and wondered just how bad durians actually smelled, and therefore whether I ought to have gone with a stronger analogy, I received a text:
“Fuck: Yes or No?”
“No.”
“Threesome with Louis?”
“Yes.”
“Ok. My apartment. 7pm Friday.”
In retrospect, the staccato texting should have indicated that it would be unwise to proceed any further, but Louis Theroux is the only man in the world I have ever been able to see myself marrying, so to turn down the opportunity to bang his lookalike seemed like a pretty big call. Unfortunately, the moment I arrived I realised that this threesome was going to be group sex as conceived by Dostoyevsky on a particularly downbuzz January evening in Petrograd. Henry’s eyes were bottomless pools of pain, and as he kissed me he sobbed softly into my mouth, sending a sad trickle of phlegm sliding slowly down my oesophagus. I asked if he was everything was okay and he said yes, so I gave Louis a BJ while David sat hunched on the bare floorboards, the curvature of his spine and occasional strangled groans suggesting that everything was, in fact, not okay.
Unwilling to continue a threesome moonlighting as an anthology of pain, I went to the bathroom and discovered that I had suddenly “got my period.” Henry said sadly, “you can still blow Louis if – if – if you want.” He said this in the same tone a parent would use when offering themselves as a sacrifice to an axe murderer to spare their offspring from mutilation and eventual death. I opened my mouth to say something comforting, but Henry looked like he was about to spontaneously combust with abject agony, which was very off-putting, so I said “periods, lol.”
Henry began to mewl like a newborn kitten. I waited for Louis to say something gently incisive yet empathetic, but he remained silent. Clearly Therouxian in appearance only. What a waste of time. I gathered my clothes and left the apartment. Henry’s sobs, snorts and gasps followed me the entire way down the stairwell.
I think it’s safe to say that if the song that springs to mind when you think of a threesome is Radiohead’s “No Suprises,” a diagnosis of PTSD is pretty close to 100% accurate.
The One That Never Actually Happened
On a weekend trip to Wellington last year, I met an attractive mid-twenties YoPro type whose geek-chic child pred glasses, skinny navy Crane Brothers suits, and predilection for general debauchery made him the perfect candidate for a weekend away from cold, mould, and immature Tourism majors incapable of locating the clitoris. We had sex on the Friday night, and it seemed sensible to maximise utility by going back for seconds on the Saturday.From now on, the only time I go back for seconds is for a particularly decadent flourless chocolate plum cake or similar. The guy invited me out with him and his ginger ex-flatmate only to ignore me for the entire evening. He spoke to me precisely twice all night – the first time to irritably mention that another girl sitting at our table was a model from Milan, as if I had fundamentally failed in my two-night-stand duties by being neither Italian nor working in the modelling industry, then to ask if I wanted to have sex in the toilets of the aptly named “El Horno.”
The night was rapidly becoming duller than a BJ from a St. Margs girl, so when it was suggested that we go back to the ginger friend’s house and do some lines I eagerly acquiesced. We sat down on the ginger’s bed to do the drugs. I was okay with this. The YoPro started kissing me and taking off my clothes. I was kinda okay with this. Then suddenly both the boys were standing in front of me stark naked and the ethereally pale penis of the ginger was snarling at me from its scratchy thicket of autumnal pubes and it seemed I was expected to have a SURPRISE GINGER THREESOME.
I genuinely believe that there is no more terrifying phrase in the English language.
I hissed at the YoPro, “EXCUSE ME CAN I TALK TO YOU OUTSIDE FOR A MINUTE PLEASE.” We went outside, and I asked if I was indeed expected to have a SURPRISE GINGER THREESOME. He replied in the affirmative.
“Did you consider maybe asking me how I felt about the idea, before I was, you know, being confronted by the albino corn snake of a younger, less funny Ron Howard lunging at me from eye level?”
“Well, I asked you earlier in the night if you’d had a threesome with two guys before, and you said yes.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. It must have slipped my mind that having had a threesome before makes one contractually obligated to re-perform the act with any two penises that happen to appear unsheathed in the same room as me. Even if one of those penises belongs to a man who probably moonlights as a Waitomo cave tour guide with no need for a headlamp.”
Turns out that just as the removal of a benign breast lump can throw an otherwise healthy person for a loop, a threesome does not necessarily have to be completed to induce PTSD. The condition is so insidious that sometimes even the proposal of the threesome is enough to reverberate through the sufferer’s life for days, months, or even years.
Ironically, I turned down a threesome in order to write this article. I had an eight-hour stopover in Sydney, and the girl from the Goa threesome wanted to share her latest penile discovery with me. She emailed me a picture of his dick, which was the same length and girth as her size-seven feet and seemed appealing enough, but when she sent through a link to Luke’s Facebook profile, I knew I was going to have issues – the man was a bona fide ginger.
I vaguely promised that I’d do the threesome, but when I touched down in Sydney the PTSD returned with a vengeance. The presence of both the girl from Goa and the ginger hair was just too much – I knew that the moment I laid eyes on them the PTSD would resurface violently. So I said my flight had been delayed (perhaps the only time in the history of mankind the inherent unreliability of Jetstar has ever been useful to anyone), and sat in Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport and wrote this.
I knew it was the right choice when my uneasy demeanour led to me being singled out as a “person of interest” at the international transfers security check. I was not only forced to go through the body scanner, but also had to watch as a red-headed Australian Customs officer went through my carry-on while glaring at my sweaty, shaking form with intense suspicion. I wanted to say something to assuage his suspicions, but I couldn’t. How could I possibly explain that I was in possession of no balloons of heroin, but rather a severe case of PTSD, which was deteriorating further with every minute I spent in his traumatically ginger-haired presence?
