Dink, known to his patients as Doctor Walter Dinkleton, chief of Urology at the local medical center, outpaced me by an unknown, but assuredly massive number of strokes, as we reached the final hole. My patience, known to my friends as tolerant, right up to the moment before I bloodied someone's nose, had evaporated an hour ago.

"For the love of Saint Sandpit, we've reached the gates of heaven." I pointed to the clubhouse with my putter and called out to some unseen server, "Bartender, the next round is on the good doctor. Please let this torture come to a swift conclusion."

"If you'd listen to one percent of what I've been trying to teach you, you just might enjoy yourself." Dink slid the silk cover off his thousand-dollar putter as if it was a stocking from his girlfriend's leg.

Christ, girlfriend? Was she really forty-one? Whew. I smiled at him. "Sink this please. Without the lecture. Without the theatrics."

"Victor." He walked up to me, the golden putter cradled in his arms. "You could have said no."

"Oh. Oh? Oh, I could have said no. Yes. I could have said, no." I took a step back, up the slight rise behind me, to look him straight in the eyes. "And Carol would have said... what? 'Oh sure, honey, you tell my brother, no, and then let him remind you whose name is on the mortgage, the cars, and both student loans.'"

"Have I ever done that?"

I rolled my shoulders around. "In those exact words? No."

"You think all I've done for you was just for my sister?"

"Hey, I'm not saying anything like that." Crouching, I pulled a few strands of the shortest, greenest grass I'd ever seen, and rolled them in my fingers. "Look. It's your birthday. Let's not screw it up over some stupid game."

"See? That's just it." He turned and walked over to line up the shot.

"What's it?" Dropping the mashed grass, I followed him down, coming to a stop in between Dink and the hole.

"Your whole life. If you'd taken my advice when we first met, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"Oh, you had a crystal ball?"

"No." He tapped me on the shoulder with the putter, urging me to move out of his line of sight. "I had nine years of experience ahead of you. I'd already been through one bad market and knew what to look for when things rolled over the edge again."

"Real estate was a good investment back then."

He nodded. "Yes, especially when forty-nine percent of it is swamp."

"Marshland."

"That's an oxymoron." Dink laughed, "You had to pay to clear the alligators!"

I clenched my fists and took a deep breath. Nothing good ever came from my anger. "Look. Let's just finish this and get a drink." I picked up his ball, walked over, and dropped it in the cup. "Goal!"

Dink covered the distance between us in four long strides. He froze in front of me, his face, a testament to quality plastic surgery, inches from mine. "Victor, there are times when I wonder why I don't pay for some psychiatric care for you."

"Oh, and who's the nut case running around after cheerleaders." I poked him in the chest. "In the three years since Gladys died, have you spent more than a weekend with the same woman? Your kids are thrilled."

He pushed my finger away. "My kids have nothing to say about it." Grinning, Dink's body seemed to shrink a few inches as he relaxed. "At least I'm getting laid."

I pursed my lips and nodded. "Well then, we have that in common."

With a wave of his hand, he graciously acknowledged, "You're welcome."

"For what?" I cocked my head to the side. "Dink?"

His mouth opened and I could see him start to form a word, but there was an awkward look on his face, as though he'd opened the wrong door and let something loose that shouldn't have been there. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

I caught the look and he knew it. "You said, 'you're welcome'. What am I supposed to thank you for?"

He took a couple of steps back, the putter resting over his shoulder. "Look, Victor, we're brother-in-laws. You're married to my sister, for God's sake."

"And?"

"And I'm not completely comfortable talking about this." Wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead, Dink swung the putter back and forth, his eyes searching behind me for a way out of this hole.

"Talking about what?" I emphasized the "what" with a shake of my head.

He blew out a breath and, letting the putter come to stop between his feet, smiled and asked, "How are you feeling?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" I crossed my arms over my chest. "What's going on here?"

"How's your sex life, Victor? Still get it up on a regular basis?" Dink asked the questions as though taking a survey.

"Not that it's any of your business, but yes, Carol and I still screw once or twice a week." I grinned and gave him a wink. "Does that fulfill your prurient interests into your sister's sex life? Or was this Doctor Dinkleton interrogating a patient?"

Smiling, he put the head of the putter on turf and stood, one leg crossed in front of the other. "How was it last year?"

"What? Sex?" I looked at him and shrugged. "It's always been about the same."

He shook his head slowly from side to side. "Not according to your wife."

"What the hell are you saying, Dink?"

"I'm not surprised she didn't tell you." He sighed and continued, "She told me a couple of years ago that you were having trouble getting an erection. She thought at first it was her - getting older, putting on a few pounds. I asked her if you were screwing around."

I took a step toward him, but he held up his hand.

"Remember, I was at your bachelor party." Walking over to his bag, Dink put the silk condom back onto the golden club and slipped it deep into the leather bag. "Anyhow, I believe her and so I gave her a bottle of pills to help you out."

"Pills?"

"Yes. For erectile dysfunction. Little black pills. Soft ones. If you didn't know any better you'd think they were raisins."

"Pills that look like raisins?"

"Without the wrinkles."

"Dink, I eat cereal with raisins for breakfast at least five or six times a week."

He laughed. "Well, buddy, looks like you've been getting an extra boost from your breakfast for quite some time now."

My mouth slid open and it took me a few seconds to absorb this sort of news. "How long?"

"Have a good New Year's Eve this year?"

I thought back to the balcony, the ocean crashing in the background, and the guy above us who, after what must have been an hour, shouted down something about taking it inside our room. "Jesus." I blew out a breath. "Six months?"

"I gave them to Carol when she stopped by our office for the Christmas party. They take a few days to work. All natural, you can buy them over the counter in Canada and Europe, but the FDA is screwing around with their approval for the US market. I have a colleague in Toronto who ships them down to me." He shrugged. "They taste a little sweet to some people, but I think they're as bland as raisins. But no getting around their effectiveness."

"Hey, wait a minute." I walked over and snatched the golf bag from his grasp. "I've been taking this drug for six months. What about side effects? What about long term?"

"Long term? This is a question coming from someone who drinks as much as you?" Dink pulled the bag back. "The only side effect I've ever seen is a guy who got a hard-on for most of a weekend after eating a dozen of them. When he reluctantly convinced his girlfriend to drive him to my office on Monday morning, I gave him a shot of valium and he went limp as fast as a wet noodle. And you're probably not taking this every day. If you did, you'd be in much better physical shape than you are right now." Swatting a fly, he looked up at the clouds for a few moments. "The pills have a 48-hour half-life, so you'd have to take them at least every other day for a daily erection. My guess is that she's giving you at least two or three days rest between..." He cleared his throat, "trysts. Plus, like I said, they're all natural. You stop taking them and there's no effect other than leaving Mr. Happy in a flaccid state."

I let my arms drop to my sides and turned to walk toward the clubhouse.

"Hey, sink your last putt." Dink pointed toward my ball, less than a foot from the hole after a dozen extra strokes to get it there.

I bent down, picked up the ball, and stuffed it into my pocket. "Raisins, huh?"

My dad had always said a man's life was coming to an end when three things happened - you bent down to pick something up from the floor and you couldn't make it back up without using your hands, you squinted when trying to read the words on a Stop sign, and the only hard thing in your pants was a collection of used toothpicks. The cold shudder of age suddenly blew across my forehead, raising the hairs on my back. Pills were giving me erections? I couldn't do it on my own anymore? I slammed my hand on the steering wheel. What's next? How far down the slide had I gone?

I was about to start the car for the drive home, but paused as an icy thought pierced my mind. Why didn't she tell me? Carol's my wife, the one person on the face of the earth I should be able to trust without question. I never lied to her. Why would she keep this from me? I mean, that's the real kick in the cojones here. I looked out the window, letting the rage pour into my thoughts. Too bad they didn't have pills for bigger boobs or softer lips that I could have popped into her corn flakes. Here sweetheart, I baked some oatmeal raisin cookies, try a few. Okay, that was harsh, but after thirty years... well, whatever.

I found her stash in the kitchen pantry, lazily packed behind a family-size tin of steel-ground oats - one of those large, brown glass bottles sold in the health food stores with vitamins as big as silver dollars. With a quick glance toward the patio where Carol was still clearing the table from our impromptu pizza-on-the-patio-because-no-one-wants-to-cook dinner, I dumped a handful from the open bottle into my palm, rolling them around and sniffing them for some discernable odor. Dink was right, if I didn't know any better, they'd pass for raisins if mixed in with real ones, corn flakes, and milk. Hearing Carol's bunny slippers shuffling across the patio, I returned the pills to the bottle and slid it back behind the oats.

We passed the evening with little more than the idle conversation two long-married people fall into with such comfortable ease; the television providing wallpaper in the background. She was already in bed when I slipped under the covers, having watched the 11 o'clock news with the sound on mute.

It was ridiculous, I finally convinced myself, to be angry with her or with Dink for that matter, but the creeping fear that I carried from those few minutes in the country club parking lot stood on my chest, staring hard into my eyes. I'd been taking pills for my cholesterol, everyone in my family does or did while they were alive. You want to eat that ribeye steak with mashed potatoes and butter? Take the pills. Dink's been writing me a scrip for them for as long as I've known him. I long ago reconciled myself to where I accepted this as a lifelong requirement even though I saw it as a scary mile marker on my personal highway. Trust me, if I get an upset stomach or something's banging around in my head, I won't hesitate to hit the medicine cabinet to solve temporary problems. However, here we were talking about my fifth wheel, a pleasure tool that I can legally carry through an airport sensor, the one appendage that I'd sacrifice a finger or toe to save. But according to Dink, it might not ever work properly again without artificial assistance.

I remembered when I gave up my contact lenses for bifocals, when I got my first dental implant, how Dink said my hearing was bad, but not bad enough for hearing aids... yet. This was different; this was an important part of my body that might have actually failed. This was one of the fatal mile markers if I was to take my dad's words as the gospel.

I gave some thought to seeing another doctor, to get the proverbial second opinion, but that made less sense each time I thought about it. If the lead sled dog in the Urology department gave you his diagnosis, there weren't enough odds to overturn it to justify angering both Dink and Carol by asking someone else.

There was the slim possibility that Dink was screwing with my head. There had never been any real animosity between us, but he'd come to see me as some sort of less than intelligent sibling who constantly required direction lest his sister end up on the welfare rolls. I was still into day-trading when Carol and I married. Somewhat successful, as all stock junkies are from time to time, I had put together a sizeable portfolio for a bachelor but not enough to carry a family from a downtown apartment to a house in the suburbs.

We moved, at his insistence, a year after the wedding, a month after Carol announced at Thanksgiving dinner that it wasn't just one baby, but twins. Dink co-signed the mortgage and the loan on the mini-van nine months later. If it hadn't been for a less than scrupulous developer, the land deal in Florida would have wiped the slate clean, but luck was not on my side it seemed.

The girls' college educations were Dink's idea. I would have been just as happy to have them attend a local school or find husbands, but with the exception of Carol, everyone in the Dinkleton bloodline held at least one diploma from an ivy league university. His nieces would carry on that tradition, money be damned.

On occasion, Dink's lack of patience with me exposed a mean streak - his way of teaching me a lesson. Twice he'd let me spend a night in the drunk tank following a pair of bar fights that I'd won but not had the wherewithal to leave before the police arrived. His refusal to cover one of my margin calls cost us a vacation several years ago; a sore spot that Carol continues to poke when she gets irritated.

Yet overall, Dink has been professional when it comes to our health, so I had no reason to doubt him on the issue of my erection. The fear of this and what other problems might be lurking inside my body gave rise to a plan to have a full physical. I made a mental note to schedule an appointment in the morning. I almost got out of bed to read a copy of my Will, safely stored in a fireproof vault in my office, but some voice inside my head said, stop it already and I forced my eyes closed.

I ate eggs for breakfast the following morning and again the day after that. The third day was Saturday and at my suggestion, we went out for breakfast at the Pancake House. According to Dink, the pills were now flushed from my system, but I needed to guarantee their elimination in order to prove to myself that my life was indeed taking a turn for the worse. On the way home from breakfast, Carol suggested we stop and buy groceries. At the far end of the cereal aisle, I grabbed two boxes of granola and dropped them in the shopping cart.

"You're not buying corn flakes and raisins?" she asked, sliding the boxes to the rear of the cart.

"No. Your brother suggested this stuff to help my digestion."

She shrugged. "High fat content."

I made one of those cartoon smiles. "I take pills."

Carol got into one of her "snuggle moods" Saturday evening, thanks to a nice Chianti, and we watched the first half hour of some romantic comedy she'd rented on pay-per-view with her head in my lap. I thought for a few minutes, during a scene that would bring any healthy male's organ to attention, that my closest friend was responding in kind, but the enchilada and refried beans I'd eaten for dinner laid waste to any romantic inclination. She made some joke about having enough gas to fill the Hindenburg and we ended up laughing so hard that she rolled off the couch and smacked her elbow on the coffee table as she fell.

I helped her into the bedroom, tears still streaming down her face, half in pain, the other half from laughter and she collapsed onto the bed. I made a mad dash to the bathroom where I drank an Alka Seltzer before the tablets had fully dissolved and plopped down on the toilet seat.

She was under the covers when I returned, her clothes in a pile on the floor next to her side of the bed. "Take off those filthy sweatpants and hop in here," she ordered, flinging back the covers for my convenience. As I slid onto the bed, naked, I reached over to turn off the light on my nightstand, but Carol grabbed my arm and pulled me down toward her.

Her kiss was hot, sloppy, and deep. There was no mistaking her arousal. I did my best to respond in kind, but my mind was between my legs and not hers at that moment. Part of my brain was focused on "what if?" the rest of it on "why me?" and for what seemed like a horribly long minute, the only reaction coming from my body was the continued rumbling in my stomach.

I was about to roll away from her, to run to the kitchen and swallow the whole bottle of pills, but then, just like cooling taffy I began to harden. A smile filled my face as my flag unfurled, coming to attention as though a stiff wind had rippled through its fibers.

"Ah ha!" I shouted, pumping my fist in the air. "You thought I'd lost it, didn't you?"

"What are you talking about?" she asked, yanking the covers over her naked body.

"I don't need the damn pills, Carol." I leapt from the bed, grasping my tool as though it was a spear. "Look."

"I've seen bigger." She winked at me.

"Yes, but this one is mine!" I shouted and began to strut around the bedroom like a rooster in a henhouse. "And no pills. Three days, no pills."

"What pills?" she asked again, "What the hell has got into you, Victor?"

"Dink's pills, the ones he gave you for my 'problem'."

She looked at me with her head tipped to one side and then it hit her. "The ones in the kitchen?"

I nodded.

"You took some of them?" she asked, her eyebrows raised in amazement.

"Not for the past three days. No raisins for me, honey. This is a natural hard-on." I held my hands over my head and danced around the room. "Corn flakes and raisins, corn flakes and raisins." I chanted the words, pointing at her with both hands. "No more raisins for me!"

Carol sat up in the bed, pulling the blanket with her. "I'm going to ask you one more time, what are you talking about?"

"Dink told me about the pills, how you were probably putting them in my breakfast cereal." Stopping at her side of the bed, I stood with my hands on my hips. "Go ahead, deny it."

She wrapped the covers around herself and sat up on the edge of the bed, facing me. "I never put anything in your damn corn flakes."

"Never?"

"Never." Shaking her head slowly several times, the woman I'd spent the last thirty years with reached out and took my hands. "My brother told me the pills would probably work, but not to put too much faith in them. He said that whatever was preventing you from getting an erection was definitely not a physical problem, that it was all probably in your head. He said most of it was probably due to stress. Remember, you were in the midst of changing jobs, the girls had just gone away to college, you had a million things on your mind. I didn't want to fool with Mother Nature and just decided to let things run their course."

I looked down at man's pride. "This is real? All natural?"

She nodded. "No external chemistry, sweetheart."

I took several steps back from her. "So, no pills?" I smiled. "And no problem?"

She lay back down, kicking the covers to the foot of the bed, a grin worthy of the Cheshire cat spreading across her face. "Not that I can see."

The rest of Ricky's website.