Photo of the Fabulous Fabi by Brant Huddleston

Introduction

The essay found below is a chapter taken from my book Blue Skyways, now available for sale on Amazon as a paperback, ebook, or most recently as an audiobook. The video offers my short introduction to the chapter. I hope you enjoy it!

ED the Extraterrestrial: A Chapter from Blue Skyways

The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin’

That’s what I said

The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand

Or, so I’ve read.

My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo

I love to sink her with my pink torpedo.

Spinal Tap

“They’ll cut your throat for that thing, you know?”

Those were perhaps the last English words I heard in Quito, Ecuador, a warning (and not my first) about the dangers of street crime in the south American city.

My advisor was a Canadian woman who owned and ran the hostel where I was checking in for what would be my last night there. The “thing” she was referring to was my laptop, which I had been lugging around the city like a turtle carries its shell.

“Not to worry,” I thought. Quito was not to my liking, and after a few days there, and other places in the country, I was ready to move on. The problem of getting out was religious.

Specifically, the annual Caminata El Quinche festival in Ecuador involves a pilgrimage that blocks roads to the airport for days on end. The weather was cold, rainy, and bleak. My mood was quickly matching.

When there was finally a break in the blockade, I bolted for the airport, where I had a 15-hour wait ahead of me before an American Airlines’ flight for Miami was scheduled to leave. From Miami I planned to fly to Havana.

After about eight hours of hanging about the Quito airport, surviving on bags of nuts and bottles of beer, and hoping the Miami flight would have at least one seat open, I grew restless and anxious.

“What if they don’t have a seat open?” I wondered. “Then I’ll have to spend another 24 hours in this airport.” There are only so many nuts and so much beer a man can stand. So I began looking for another way out. Iberia, Spain’s national airline, came to my rescue.

As I mentioned earlier, my brother’s gift allows me to fly standby on airlines other than AA for a deep discount. A few minutes on my computer revealed I could fly from Quito to Madrid for not much money.

“Do you happen to have any seats open?” I asked the Madrid gate agent. “Sure. Plenty,” she said, and an hour later I was on my way to Madrid instead of Havana.

That gave me plenty of time to cook up a new plan. I would head south from Madrid through Seville, Spain, and cross the border back into Portugal, where I planned to visit a beach town I’d read about called Tavira. That was the plan at least. What I didn’t anticipate were the Dutch women.

I made it to Seville just fine. So far, so good. I rented a tiny room in the old town, freshened up, and went out for dinner. Soon enough I was sitting at a lovely restaurant chowing down on grilled polvo (octopus) and swilling a ruby red local wine. Perfecto! As I finished eating, the trouble started.

My table was situated so I could see through the restaurant windows to other tables on the street. There I saw an attractive woman having dinner with a female friend.

At that time I was reading The 3% Man: Winning the Heart of the Woman of Your Dreams by Corey Wayne, who advises men to look women in the eyes, smile, and not look away unless they do. If they don’t look away, and if they do smile back, then, he says, hike up your big boy shorts, go over, and say hello.

Now please understand — I am not accustomed to such behavior. I am an old married guy. Adapting to this “stare them down” tactic made me realize how often I do look away when seeing an attractive woman. Basically always. Never-the-less, there in Seville, with a glass of wine or three in my gullet, I decided to give Wayne’s advice a try.

She glanced through the window of the restaurant and saw me.

I looked her straight in the eyes and smiled. And?

She smiled back and did not look away.

“Oh shit,” I thought. “Now I have to go to level two!”

I paid my bill, got up from my table, and with a good touch of trepidation, walked over and said hello to the two women.

Both were Dutch but spoke acceptable English. They invited me to join them, and we bought each other a round of drinks, and then another. It was a good evening that ended well.

Over the weeks and months that followed, with help from Wayne’s book and others like it, such as No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex, and Life by Dr. Robert Glover, I gained more and more confidence in my masculine power. I slowly began to value myself as a man whom some women just might find attractive. It has everything to do, Wayne and Glover say, with a man’s internal landscape and how he thinks of himself.

If a man sees himself as valuable and worthy of a woman’s attention, he will show up in the world that way, and many women are attracted to a confident man. Even if you have to “fake it till you make it,” once you genuinely love who you are, it will naturally come out of your pores, and people notice.

For me, that meant no more skulking around like a dog that has just peed on the carpet, and rather, putting my shoulders back, accepting that I was not the business tycoon I always aspired to be, and just being…me. Then let the chips fall where they fall.

“What do you do?” some women would ask me, fishing for my economic potential.

“I’m a writer,” I would respond without a hint of reticence.

“Where do you live?”

“Out of my backpack.”

If they show little or no interest, I politely excuse myself and don’t look back. As Corey Wayne advises, if a woman doesn’t show at least some interest in you, then just move on. Otherwise you are wasting your time with her. There are plenty of fish in the sea, and for men in the second half of life, especially those with a mission and a working penis, there are plenty of fish indeed.

I have no problem with the mission — I am writing a book. The working penis? Well, for 63 years, I never had a problem. The staff of life always showed up proud and strong whenever I needed him, and like the geyser “Old Faithful” in Yellowstone park, I could always count on the old boy.

“But the times, they are a changin’” said the sage Bob Dylan, and for the first time in my life, I experienced a few instances where my Eiffel did not tower, my Empire State was not building, and my Niagara was falling. Not always, but enough times that I became anxious about it, kind of like one might feel anxious if one’s brakes don’t always work. There are some things in life that you just want to be 100%.

Plus, Erectile Dysfunction (ED) isn’t just “some thing.” A man’s erection is his lion’s roar, and when it comes out more like a kitten’s mew, then “some thing” doesn’t just collapse outside of you — it collapses inside of you too. ED dealt a nasty blow to my ego.

“How old are you again?” asked my 70 year old buddy when I confided in him.

“63,” I whimpered, wiping away a small tear.

“Oh yeah, dude. That’s about when it hit me. Things got kinda soggy.”

I still hate my buddy for telling me that. I’m thinking of unfriending him on Facebook for his brutal honesty.

I blame part of the problem of my occasional ED on condoms. Imagine having to strap a water balloon on your tongue before eating a ripe peach. That’s enough to stifle anyone’s appetite.

And not being accustomed to using condoms, half the time I would put the damn thing on backward or upside down, and there I’d be, stretching it to the breaking point over my wilting wang while my partner stared at the ceiling or worse, painted her nails.

But the ED problem was not just a technical one. In time, a woman of passion and heart showed me that it was mostly a problem north of my neck. I thank her for that.

There is a lot to be said for having one and only one intimate partner so you can have sex au natural without a piece of Saran wrap between you and her. It also allows the two of you to work on the choreography of sex, learning those intimate dance moves that bring maximum joy and complete relaxation, greatly helping with the ED.

I look forward to having that precious intimacy again one day.

###

Further Reading About Men

Highly recommended:

• Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man by Sam Keen
• The Way of the Superior Man: : A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire by David Deide
• Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly
• No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex, and Life by Dr. Robert Glover
• The 3% Man: Winning the Heart of the Woman of Your Dreams by Corey Wayne

Also good:

My Own Essays On or About Men:

Books by Brant

Most Recent

For Christmas 2018, my brother, a pilot with American Airlines, gave me a gift that became the experience of a lifetime: 12 months of free travel anywhere American Airlines flies.

Thus began a year long journey that took me from the rocky coasts of Portugal, to the hot sands of Morocco, to the mangrove swamps of Panama, with many places beyond and between. In cheap hostels and the backwaters of the nomadic milieu, I discovered a treasure chest of colorful and fascinating people. I tell their stories and a bit of my own.

The trip became as much a spiritual and emotional journey inward as it was a literal outward one, and found me in a place those of you who are in the second half of life are likely to recognize.

With references to the philosophies of Carl Gustav Jung, Jesus, Bob Dylan, and the Buddha, Blue Skyways is an international romp by a man in his 60’s with not much more than a pack on his back, and still much to learn.