Love a Happy Ending Lifestyle Magazine August 2013 | Page 44

my father sort of missed the mark. Not so coincidentally, I also learned that I would no longer
be able to watch a Gene Hackman film without throwing up in my mouth a little.
Observing my look of confusion and disgust, my brother chuckled over the free
entertainment. “You knew about this didn’t you?” I asked. “Yeah, he told me a few weeks
ago.”
“Does Alex know too?”
“Yep.”
Christ. One brother is in the midst of a divorce and the other hasn’t gotten laid since the
Clinton administration. Aside from Caligula and my mother, I’m the only person around here
having regular sex, yet was the last to be told to look out.
It’s not a secret that no one has Hornyak-Miranda rights around me, so my father had to be
aware that everything that had, and will come out of his mouth will in some way be used as
fodder for my readers. If the thought had crossed his mind he must have dismissed it, since
an attempt at justification via medical jargon referred to his malady as Peyronie’s disease.
Disease? I don’t think so. It’s not like he forgot to wash his hands before touching a door
knob and his dick suddenly snapped. He can refer to it as Peyronie’s disease if it helps him
sleep at night, but unless ‘Peyronie’ is Italian for “bad aim”, he should just call a spade a
spade and own up to the fact that he literally fucked up. There are physics involved here. If I
ran naked into a tree with a raging erection, the only acceptable disease you could pin on
me is psychosis. Not about to blindly accept the fact that I was being forced to add one more
item to my personal sex watch-list, I researched the bullshit disease to find that Peyronie’s is
a tissue disorder that affects an incredibly small percentage of men.
It may seem odd, but I’ve told this story to a handful of friends, and nobody has ever asked
how my father was doing. I don’t blame them. The real question revolves around the state of
my mother’s spine. Were we two pounds of pressure away from an embarrassingly
unexplainable Christopher Reeves situation. The speculation is making me sick.
I have always known that I would grow out of my physical ability. I’ve already seen a slide in
my strength, speed, and, when driving drunk, my ability to articulate the alphabet. I worry
that one day food won’t taste the same, and I won’t be able to see as clearly, but agonizing
over an imitation disease isn’t worth my time. The simple fact is that this is nothing more
than a ‘crooked’ side effect of something that everyone should be giving my parents a
standing ovation for.
Dad. Congratulations on scarring my brain just a little bit more, and for your ability to find the
woman with whom you constantly fight with ‘do-able’. No Way Out will continue to be an
unwatched film that I will sadly write off for the remainder of my life, but maybe one day, we
can all sit down at the fire again without fear that a penis will enter the conversational
periphery. I love you dad, and as always, think twice before sharing with me.
Brought to you by: Adam Hornyak
Twitter: @AdamHornyak FB: Adam Hornyak