I was ten years old and I knew nothing. It was bad enough being the shortest kid in the fourth grade, but I was made to feel even smaller by how much all of the other kids seemed to know about this thing called sex. All I really knew at that age was that it was something action heroes did that involved saxophone music, billowing curtains, a naked chick, and a hell of a lot of candles.

Most of us had been educated on the basic mechanics of the act in children’s books like “Where Did I Come From?” – two fat people lie on top of each other until smiling white pollywogs fill the page (big deal), but it was clear there were things the adults weren’t telling us. In movies like “Airplane!” actors would say sex things that would elicit booming, knowing laughter from our parents – using words that hung in the air like little clouds of filthy vapor – but these words did not exist in any dictionary. Believe me, I checked. There was no internet to help us back then. Your computer did not fire pop up windows full of high-resolution vaginas at you like Alien face-huggers any time you searched for a recipe for clams casino. A picture of a vagina was a rare thing you and your friends would have to go on an actual quest to see, usually squirreled away under a wet, worm-ridden log somewhere deep in the woods out past the chainsaw massacre shack and guarded by a foam-spewing Rotweiller with one eye. A boy would risk life and limb and all sorts of dangers just for a rare glimpse of fur.

When I was ten, anything a kid learned about the dark, secret world of sex they would hear from an older person – a big brother, a drunk relative, or some creepy old homeless dude shouting at them from under a bridge. But I did not have an older brother, or a bridge hobo. I only had my friend Wes, a curly-haired kid who could fart on cue, which was a valuable talent to have back in those days. And Wes was the Bob Woodward of boobs and muff.

We were playing video games on his Commodore 64 one afternoon when he asked “Hey man, have you ever heard of this thing called a ‘blowjob’?”

I hadn’t, but I was sick and tired of being the last to know these things. “Pssssh. Yeah, of course.”

“Ok. Then, what is it?”

“I don’t have to explain it to you. You tell me.”

Wes rolled up his sleeves and began miming the whole process. “It’s when a woman unzips a man’s pants… grabs onto his honker… takes it out…” Interesting, interesting, go on, I thought. “… takes a hair dryer… and just waves it back and forth over the guy’s crank. It’s meant to feel amazing.”

I did not even miss a beat. “Boom. Yes,” I lied, “Exactly. That is exactly what I heard, too.” Because when you are ten, the way everything is named makes sense. Snow pants are pants you wear in the snow, Autobots are robots that turn into cars, and so if there was one thing I was absolutely certain of at that moment, it’s that a blowjob had something to do with wind.

As we turned back to our video game my brain just swelled. I suddenly felt all-powerful, as if I had lopped the noggin off the last Highlander. I had learned a new sex term – one that no one in my class had uttered on the playground before. A blowjob! Blammo! This little slice of wisdom was going to get me places, for sure. Everyone at school was going to be so impressed.

And so the next day I sat on pins and needles in class, waiting for recess to be called, and once it was, I didn’t waste half a second, turning to the kid next to me. “Hey man, you ever heard of a blowjob?”

The basketball court was empty that day. Kickballs blew across the baseball diamond like tumbleweeds, not a kid in sight. There was but one child’s voice heard shouting on the playground that recess, and that voice was mine – the shortest kid in the 4th grade, standing atop a bench with a class of enthralled 10 year-olds clinging to my every word. And so, like Prometheus bringing fire to the ancient Greeks, I bestowed upon them my knowledge of blowjobs. And I was treated like a sage. “A hair dryer, you say! Fascinating!”

For an entire afternoon, I was the most popular kid in our class, and desperate to keep a firm grip on to this new position, I even began to make up definitions for sex terms I’d heard mentioned before but could never sort out. Your mother’s feather duster became a “french tickler”. “Felching” was when a man sniffed a lady’s bicycle seat, and so on and so forth.

That evening, perhaps somewhat mad with power, I decided to give it a whirl myself. A blowjob was, after all, meant to be the greatest sensation a man could feel. And so I snuck into the upstairs bathroom, pulled down my pajama bottoms, plugged in the hair dryer which was resting on the lid of the toilet. And I blew myself.

It wasn’t half-bad, really. It hurt for a moment, but once I got the hang of it and held the hair dryer at just the right distance it was really quite pleasant. It wasn’t what Wes built it up to be, but I thought perhaps when I was older, once I had vaulted past puberty and had long David Lee Roth-like locks sprouting from my nethers this hot breeze might be much more pleasurable. But for the moment it was just so-so. I often wonder how many of my fourth grade classmates went home and did the same that evening and were now walking the Earth with crispy Freddy Krueger penises because of me and my shitty intel.

I strolled through the house with a swagger the next day, brimming with a degree of confidence I had never felt and have certainly never felt since. I was no longer the playground runt, but a big man on campus. I was a man who knew things. And it was just that sort of hubris that got me into trouble when my mother and older sister returned home from the drugstore that afternoon, plastic bags dangling at their sides.

“So, what did you get?” I asked my sister.

Immediately suspicious of me, she flipped her Farrah Fawcett perm to the side and arched an eyebrow. “Nothing you’d care about. Make up. A toothbrush. A new hair dryer.”

She had thrown me a softball. “A hair dryer, eh?” I said with a smirk, knowing all too well that what I said next would pop her top like a volcano. “Is that so you can give your new boyfriend a blowjob?”

There was a loud CRASH from the kitchen. The sound that came out of my mother at that moment was something primeval, like the screech of a pterodactyl protecting its young. The very walls of our small row house tremored with a quake I’m sure was felt at least four doors down. The next few seconds were a blur, but I can say that my arm was nearly popped from its socket as I was dragged up a flight of stairs and thrown into my room, sentenced to a week of complete isolation, with only my Transformers and the french tickler I had stolen from the hallway closet to keep me company. I had never seen her that angry before.

The only company I was allowed to see was when my aunt and uncle brought my cousins by for a visit that Sunday. It must have been pretty boring for my cousin hanging out with me in my room, pushing matchbox cars around the shag carpeting, with me not allowed to leave.

“So what are you in for?” he asked, and so I told him what I had said to my sister to deserve a week of incarceration.

He was baffled. He sat upright and stared at me for a good minute before asking. “Yeah… umm.. What exactly do you think a blowjob is…?”

I launched one of my matchbox cars over a ramp I’d made with a coloring book and said “You know. When a girl takes a hair dryer and waves it over a guy’s dong.”

That was when my cousin’s brain exploded.

He laughed so hard at me for a moment I feared he would have a stroke, his hands clutching at his sides to prevent his guts from bursting out of him onto the carpet. Any confidence I had cultivated over the past week drained through my toes at once. “Holy shit… Holy shit. That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Whatever,” I said. “You don’t know what a blowjob is.”

He composed himself. “Of course I know what a blowjob is. I’m eleven.” He could see how upset I was becoming. “Listen, dummy. A blowjob is when a woman sucks on a man’s penis.” His chest began to spasm again and was once again doubled over, thrown into fits of laughter. “Holy shit! You’re killing me!” he cried.

All at once, the world as I knew it completely stopped making sense. Just when I thought I had taken this great stride towards understanding the mysterious world of adult sex, I had been punted a mile back, flat on my ass. How could this possibly be, I thought? I’m supposed to believe that a blow job is when a woman sucks on a man’s penis?

Well, that’s just retarded.

Ok, so, this is a first…

While I’ve been working on the book, I started performing live at open mics around the city. I took an amazing storytelling class, run by Kevin Allison of the sketch comedy group “The State” and the awesome “Risk! podcast“, and was just informed that he’s posted the audio of my final class performance online.

It’s weird for me to hear my own voice, but I think it’s a pretty funny story, so here it is. Hope you dig it.

In Reverse by Drew Prochaska by RISKshow

Matthew when he was little (he’s not cute anymore)

My ass slowly zombified in its position, a cold cushion of pins and needles as I sat on the dermatologist’s table, stark-raving naked as he examined every fold, crevice, and pore of my skin with what looked like a glowing probe left behind by alien scientists. It had been at least five years since my last skin cancer exam and my mom had been relentless with her reminders. She had grown up in what is now Zimbabwe, a fair-skinned redhead who’d spent her childhood daring the African sun to do its worst and the damn thing was now giving her an annual health scare.

I look less like my mother than I do my Austrian father, but while I have the blonde hair and blue eyes of a poster child for the Aryan Nation and the soul and heart of an elven warrior princess, I’m covered with the freckly skin of the gingeriest of gingers. I look like the end result of a science experiment in which they sent a toe-headed gent into a teleportation device with a chocolate chip cookie and he emerged from the other pod half-man, half-Chips Ahoy. Interesting fact: if I were to appear naked before you (and unless I am surprising people in the park, I am a gentlemen who gives fair warning), you’d discover the freckles on my body form a map to King Solomon’s mines.

I was finishing my Cirque du Soleil contortions for the dermatologist – lifting things here, spreading things there – when he finally put the device away and stood before me, annoyed.

“I don’t see anything to worry about right now, except for one thing.” He folded his arms. “Your farmer’s tan. Why are you so tanned?”

“Because I’m awesome…?”

He was not amused. “You don’t get it. You can’t tan, Drew.”

“But look at me. I am tan.”

“No, YOU: Drew Prochaska. You can’t tan. Listen to me: you’re going to get cancer. This WILL happen. It’s pretty much an inevitability. Don’t help it along. You’re not allowed to leave the house without sunscreen. Period.”

And so this is my life now. When I emerge from the shower I need to slather my entire body in SPF50 or should I venture out into the open, I could very well erupt into flames like Johnny Storm, The Human Torch. I am doomed to roam the Earth a slippery, pale Gollum of a man who has to cower before the big fiery ball in the sky because it has been prophesied that the fucker will kill me. The idea has taken a firm root in that tiny squash of a brain I have: I’m going to get skin cancer. Thanks a bunch, doc.

Hypochondria has been a running theme in my life, and like a good cheese it has ripened and gotten funkier with age. My primary care physician does cartwheels when he sees me, because over the years I have put enough money in his pockets to pay for a harem of japanese blowjob robots and a personal hovercraft. I am a doctor’s dream come true: a gullible guy who is by all means healthy, but has been led to believe his body a vessel of constantly crumbling parts cemented together with a fine paste made from pork products and scotch. I wish I were joking, but I’m a man who once called an ambulance because I smoked too much pot, and once paid a visit to the doctor for blue balls.

I turned 37 two days ago and this shit has to stop. I’m entering the second half of my life and I’m not going to live it in fear. From this day forward, I’m going to stop worrying about my mortality every single second and start facing my fears one by one: disease, heights, sharks, flying, flying sharks, snakes, the Amazonian candiru which swims up your urethra, C.H.U.D.s, and talking to pretty girls.

Carpe diem, kiddos

When I approach the metal detector at an airport I die a little thinking I’ll be the guy to set it off. This has nothing to do with my mighty robot heart, my supercool telescoping metal appendages, or the high levels of mercury in my bloodstream from all the sushi I cram down my gullet. I’m just a nervous person who feels guilty for no reason at all and I know I’m going to make that damn thing beep. I’ll be pushed against a wall in front of everyone as the security team pulls all sorts of things I didn’t even know I had on me from my pockets – knives, sex clamps, drugs I took in 1994, German pornography (the worst kind), blueprints for an intercontinental ballistic missile, the missing half of a magical amulet – you get it.

My friend Jessi told me she has the same issue when leaving a store. “Are you ever scared you’re a secret klepto? That you stuck something into your pocket without paying for it and you didn’t even notice?” Absolutely. I don’t trust myself at all. That guy’s been holding me back with his stupid shenanigans my entire life. He would totally do something like that. “Every time I leave a store I just know the damn security thing is gonna beep for me,” she says.

I’ve done loads of illegal things in my life, all semi-victimless crimes, few of which I feel sorry for. I’ve taken drugs, committed hilarious acts of vandalism, and driven my car through the city like a Dale Earnhardt on a bender, yet I’ve never once shoplifted because I couldn’t carry the guilt. I can’t steal, cheat, or hurt someone intentionally who doesn’t deserve it — not because I’m afraid of any legal consequences (but let’s face it: my first day in jail I’d be the guy wearing lipstick) — but because I would absolutely crucify myself with guilt. I am a Shaolin master of self-flagellation and my kung-fu is unstoppable. I felt guilty watching Schindler’s List, and not because I had anything to do with the holocaust, but because I totally look like someone who would have.

Last summer I was summoned for jury duty in downtown Brooklyn. It was a huge inconvenience, as it is to everybody, but I was excited as it might have been a chance for me to play out my “Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men” fantasy, where I’m the sole voice of reason in a room full of cold and bigoted jurors, indifferent to the fate of some poor inner-city kid. I’d get to slam my fist on a table and say things like “Damnit, man, a kid’s life is at stake! Who here among us has never made an illegal right turn on red!?” I would make an impassioned speech that would change the minds and lives of everyone in the court and rock the very foundation of our justice system to its core, and all my fellow jurors would feel humbled and impressed by my obvious moral superiority and the eventual Time magazine piece written about me would inspire a movie in which I’d be played by James Van Der Beek giving the comeback performance of the century. That kind of bullshit. So, yeah, jury duty –

I showed up at the courthouse early in the morning ready to do my heroic civil duty. I breezed through security, and entered a pen full of hundreds of other bored, inconvenienced New Yorkers thinking that I’d be done with the case in time for dinner and could go back to my happy life of building websites in my underpants in my cave of an apartment. No such luck, we were told. The trial I was a jury candidate for was estimated to last for seven days to a month. An entire month?! That’s like seven dog months. Immediately, people lined up to dish out their excuses. People were claiming sick relatives, planned holidays, irritable bowel syndrome, work emergencies. Brand new horrible diseases were created in that very room for the sole purpose of avoiding public service. But me? I sat there like an idiot, without an excuse in my noggin. Because sitting at the end of the long wooden bench I was on, like a curly-haired angel, was Felicity herself, the actress Kerri Russel. And yes, angels do carry Blackberries.

I’ve crossed paths with Ms. Russel several times in my life, so surely it was fate that put us both in the courtroom together. I’ve seen her walking in the East Village once or twice over the years, we’ve eaten at the same restaurant, and I once physically stopped my friend Aaron from bounding over rows of theater seats to accost her, a star-struck monkey off his leash. So this was an interesting development for me. There are countless celebrities in New York, but why do I keep running into Felicity? Truth be told, the only thing I’ve ever seen her in was 30 seconds of her TV show in which a kid got splattered by a bus – which was just ten kinds of wonderful. So, I decided that I needed to see why the gods kept putting us in the same room together. I accept how creepy that sounds and am comfortable with it.

There we were: Drewbacca and Felicity, ready to right the injustices of the world together. We would have seven days to a month to become the best of pals, to play pranks on the other jurors, to laugh with one another as I performed Chaplain-esque feats with my food in the courthouse cafeteria. It was going to be great! But would we be assigned a boring case? Would we have to yawn through some drawn out civil suit in which some land whale was suing McDonald’s for making their McNuggets too delicious? No! As our luck would have it, we hit the jackpot. Ours was a case in which the defendant stabbed another human being NINE TIMES! Could the day get any better?

After the first round of juror interviews we were given a recess for lunch. I wandered around downtown Brooklyn for a bit, read a some of my book and stuffed a falafel in my face before returning to the courthouse. When I found myself back in the line at the security checkpoint I realized I was standing about three people behind Ms. Russel. I wondered: should I say something? In New York it’s a big faux pas to violate a celebrity’s personal space, so what could I use as an opener that wouldn’t seem creepy? Every line that popped into my head just made me sound like a deranged stalker. She passed through the metal detector without incident and began to collect her things, so I realized my window for an introduction was closing quickly. Anxiously, I put my laptop bag on the security conveyor, held my breath, and shakily walked through the security gate. There was no beep. Phew. Hurry, now, Felicity is getting away!

“WAIT RIGHT THERE!” someone yelled. It was the security guard working the X-Ray machine.

I froze. Suddenly, there were two guards at either shoulder, their hands gripped around my arms. Felicity slid her purse around her shoulder and looked back at me: a criminal, a terrorist, a subhuman Breaker of Rules. She got on the escalator watching me, her Blackberry to her ear, a frightened look on her face as she disappeared through the ceiling.

“COME HERE, son.” The X-Ray man waved me towards him and pointed at his monitor. On the screen was the fuzzy green outline of my laptop bag, in the center of which, was a shape any twelve-year-old boy would recognize. It was the unmistakable outline of an honest-to-God ninja throwing star.

“Did you just bring a NINJA STAR into a NEW YORK STATE SUPREME COURT!?”

My bladder nearly exploded. I was going to backfire in my pants. HOW COULD THIS BE HAPPENING TO ME!? I’m a 35-year-old man! How could I have forgotten there was a ninja throwing star in my bag!? Why did I even own a ninja star? I haven’t been attacked by ninjas since 1997.

I stammered. “I swear to God I had no idea that was in there! It was a gag gift for a friend, like a year ago.” This was true. I had purchased it online, along with some pornography, as a birthday present for a buddy of mine. Clearly, neither the ninja star nor the pornography ever made it to him.

The guard pulled the ninja star from my bag and held it up to me. It was shiny, spiked, probably forged in a rusty trailer by some methed-up redneck from the melted toys of his waterhead children. “What were you thinkin, son? Are you stupid?”

What was I thinking!? Wasn’t it obvious? Clearly, I’m an assassin. I was going to throw that ninja star right into the face of a star witness, in what was to be the most awesome and nerdy courtroom murder ever.

“Yes! I AM! I am very stupid! I SWEAR TO GOD I had no idea that was in there., I SWEAR! Please, what can I do to make this go away? Please let me walk away right now. I am a good person.”

The guards released their grip on me and started laughing. Everyone in line started doubling over, cackling, howling with laughter and pointing at me as a tide of sweat ran down my face taking all of my dignity with it. “Look at that dumb motherfucker!”

“Get out of here,” the X-Ray guard said. I grabbed my laptop bag and high-tailed it to the escalator.

“You take care now, Ninja Star!” one of the guards yelled behind me.

And so I ascended the slowest escalator in the world, a crowd cackling behind me, knowing I’d have to go through that security checkpoint, past those same people, every morning for the next seven days to a month.

The next time I get called up for jury duty I’m moving back to Canada.