Yes, O sexy reader, you know I love you baby, yes, and now let me open:

I'm such a tease. Can't open it yet. It's all for your pleasure and I'm sure that prolonging the duration of my sensual thrust will intensify my climax. It's a blue one. The condom is blue. The sort the 3am convenience clerk tosses you when you're obviously scanning the behind-the-counter condom racks and he recognizes your intent and simultaneously breaks and maintains the silence by flipping the package off the rack across the counter and into your hand all-in-one flowingly graceful and ever-so-endearing angelic sweep. 

I've had this one in my drawer for months. All the sharp corners are folded-in and the blue paper's faded and cracked around the rolled-up condom's circle.

What's the paper made of? 

What highly durable hybrid of rare plastic and synthetic vellum's been brewed and solidified to seal the great protector from all life's rabid and piercingly fierce externalities?

Who concocts the pouch that protects the jimmy-hat? 

Who spins the protective web in which this amorous chrysalis develops? 

Who? 

Someone: chemists -- and now that I acknowledge their toil and bring their labors to light, they sit alone or tucked in bed as far as possible from their bored and weary lover. They read this admiration of their lifework on a laptop. They sit there reading this and their confidence swells. They renew a pallid affair with a mildewing beloved. How I'd love for the chemists cocooned with mates in bed to share the coincidence of these passages and smile and click tongues and love and love and love and tomorrow go to the laboratory and make more wrappers knowing that everyone reading these lines composed now (with condom still under wraps) will one night or one day or in a few seconds after reading -- they'll find a condom and scrutinize the wrapper's material and realize that the subtle encasements of the prerequisite of pleasure, so often torn at and cursed in the dark, so often so frustratingly a mirthful player of precoital interruption -- they'll discover that the wrapper (prepared to unleash a latex stench of pungent lubricant when opened ) is worth a few moments of every discerning reader's attentive perception.

In the morning after a lush embrace who has not paused upon discovery of the empty sheath of last night's loving?

In the morning who has not adored the tossed and torn wrapper of the night before? 

Who has not felt a pang of guilt tossing the wrapper and the spent and unfurled plastic flaccidity into the trash along with all the dust-bunnies and snot-flung tissues?

Who has not felt disgrace?

Once the torn package and spent rubber crossed the plane of the trash can's receiving lips, who has not felt that last night's acts and its horizontal ovations only succeeded in immersing the lovers in superficial decadence? 

O, I sing the stark loneliness of the wrappers wrapping that which wraps!

With latex sheath still hidden in its perforated square sealing it like a scabbard, I hold the blue beauty to my nose. I let the circle of the lubricated roll-up crown the tip of my nose. I breath in. The sterile smooth plastic of the wrapping wafts the elastic stink of possibility and past.

I smell the stench of memory. 

All the awkward moments of the last decade, the distracted left hand caressing, the lips still smacking, the right hand groping beneath a mattress or in a drawer for the ticket to stickin' it divinity-the youthful practice-runs and the very rational absurdity of the lonely adolescent with his ineffectual and rigid member all dressed up with no place to blow, cranked to attention by Martha Quinn or Tootie or Dana Plato or whoever happens to cross the television the moment the clandestine teen tries-on a precaution and jacks one safely into nothing.

Smelling the still-wrapped condom and filtering the unfurling of associative immediacy, do I cease to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal? 

I can only say that I run with the precious essence of love, or not love -- but lust and longing for all the delirious copulations of the last decade, of a melancholic desire to rewrap myself in that musk of spermicidal lubricant prevailing the memories of even my quickest and most pathetic attempts at rigorous amor. 

I sing the rock-operatic ballads of the teen with a circle of hope riding his mesh and velcro-clasped wallet.

The pristine patina of the fresh and ready-to-wear rubber placed in the credit-card slip of the middle-school wallet. So expectant. So ready. So prepared. So sad when months pass and the circle wears away at the wallet's mesh and traces another more embarrassing hoop through the worn denim of the unsullied adolescent's backpocket. Finally the condom still under wraps is pulled from the youth's wallet. His back pocket's frictional warmth has probably dropped the expiration date to within a few weeks of his thirteenth birthday. The unused condom's wasted on hope and preparation in the name of every youth's desire to penetrate centerfolds. It's withdrawn from the wallet and another's inserted. This one's concealed in heavy cardboard. The back pocket bulges -- all in the name of hope, expectancy, the possibility of sexual ascension with the next-door-girl's disrobing silhouette seen through her backlit windowshades; the rumor, the myth, the need to know the smells, the motions of it. All of it's unified in the worn circle of the schoolboy's loaded wallet. 

Love under wraps.

The condom I've been describing is safe and still wrapped away in its sealed womb of spermicide. Ready and waiting: perhaps it's ready for me to turn what I got towards the rubber again, or maybe with the help of an enraptured horn-dog the condom under wraps is waiting to be torn from its confines and subjected to the quartet of sublime punishments that constitutes the fulfillment of the breed's collective dream: to be rolled-on, to withstand lush pistoning frictions, to uphold its latex net against gelatinous expulsions, to be swampily rolled off and then lost forever -- seen on the street, cursed as filth, avoided even by free-range dogs and starving crows. 

I can't open it. I've lost interest. I've lost the condom in a clutter of paper on my desk. I'll find it when I need it. I'll inadvertently throw it away. The condom never shall be opened. Not for now at least. 

Let it develop. Long live its protected quiescence. Long live its gradual emergence into the pursuits of pleasure. 

Editor's Note #2: This "story" was deleted from an early vision of Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World. This early version has recently been rediscovered on an old hard drive. A few presumed-dead chapters will appear in the coming weeks. You ask, "Why post parts of a book that were deleted from a first draft?" I answer: "If you're going to post an unpublishable novel, why not put its subparest parts on display?"