Dryback

Enjoy this free chapter with a selection from the novel’s soundtrack due out December 15th, 2025 from New Ritual Records:

CHAPTER ONE:

Dryback is a term I coined for American-born Mexicans who are wholly disconnected from their culture. Coomer is online slang for someone who masturbates compulsively, hoping the next nut will erase the total failure of their existence. I’m both. The subway car I’m riding, a Manhattan-bound L, shakes as it rounds a tight corner. My face twitches as I try not to reach for my phone. I stare at the open book in my hands, praying its ink will bleed into a John Currin print I jerked off to once. The words don’t budge, so I pull the device from my jacket and hold it face-level to bypass the lock screen. I tap the Chrome icon, and a white page reading “No Internet” greets me. I exhale. Urge sated, I slide it back into my breast pocket.

For weeks, I’ve been forcing myself to read on the train ride to work. This stab at weaning myself off mindlessly scrolling the net consisted of staring at a slim volume of Carver short stories and struggling through a page or two before my stop. Most mornings, I’d put my phone in airplane mode to wrangle my focus before swiping onto the subway platform. Despite my reformed habits, the hieroglyphic sprawl of the timeline spilled into my inner world.

In lieu of reading, I’m trying to ignore the feedback loop building behind the bridge of my nose. I press my thumb between my brows to dull the oscillating whirr. The headache isn’t entirely unwelcome; it’s a distraction from thinking about the lack of attachment in my life. While I’ve had sex, loved, and been loved by women amid long-term relationships, my situation was shifting as I neared forty. It’d been years since I last fucked, and in that time, I’d accepted the drought would likely extend indefinitely. My days of sharing experiences and forming ideas among society were over. Reflecting on what led me here filled the rare moments I wasn’t scrolling. Introspection was all I had left since life inexplicably stopped happening to me.

There was little comfort in my romantic past. The mental souvenirs I used to cope had been swirled into the deluge of useless digital ones. Even reveries of sex from my youth were framed by the user interface of Xvideos while I commented, “very nice. girl’s name?” under them. That they felt no more real than a clip from SpankBang as year four of my sexual dry spell approached didn’t bother me. There wasn’t a sense of anger or frustration at my reclassification as an involuntary celibate. Those sentiments were a thing of the past, replaced by a soothing, all-encompassing apathy. The train’s automated voice announced my stop.

I walked up the subway steps, wincing against the brightness and chill of the day. I took my phone out of airplane mode, and the haptic response from a rush of push notifications coalesced into an extended drone against my palm like a call to prayer. I answered it, bowing my head towards my screen for the duration of my walk.

***

The roll-up security grille of the wine shop I work at slid into place while images of my fingers getting mangled in its mechanism flashed in my mind. I turned the alarm off, then took a moment to appreciate the temporary liminal space that would transform into a blank commercial area at the flick of a switch. Dust floated in the thin beams of light that spilled around the blinds we used to keep UV rays off the juice. I checked the time: fifteen minutes until open. I left the lights off to keep early birds out and started counting the register.

The balance sheet’s done in pink ink, a sure sign my co-worker Lina closed. The woman’s twenty-six and still dotting the “I” in her name with a heart. Her handwriting style is so feminine I’m positive I could jerk off to a written summary of the Haditha massacre in it.

After the count, I have enough time to get a glass down. The preamp that powers the shop’s speakers turns on with a satisfying click, and my phone connects to it via Bluetooth. I put on a reissue of a ’70s private press yacht rock album the streaming algo suggests for me based on my previous listening habits.

I walked into the stockroom that doubled as our employee lounge and saw several bottles on the folding table we used as a catchall. Wine reps routinely left them for my manager, Mel, to go through in hopes that she’d order a few cases. Most never made it past the staff. I could count on them being here most days, and it was one of the biggest perks of the job. Mel was adamant that we be familiar with the product, so drinking wasn’t frowned upon during work hours. Intake-wise, I pushed past the boundaries of what was acceptable, but they didn’t pay me enough to be sober. I pulled the cork on a cab franc, poured a healthy amount into a stemless glass, and inhaled. Forest floor. Kalamata olives. I checked the schedule to see if Lina was working later to give me something to look at. No, only me and Eduardo tonight. I headed to the sales floor, unlocked the door, and flipped the lights on.

***

The shop mercifully opened at noon. I’d lived an entire life before my shift started, sacred pre-work hours spent staring at my phone. This morning, I’d stalked the socials of a woman I rang up the previous night, a Species-era Natasha Henstridge dupe spilling out of a Nike Pro set. She’d come in after class let out at the Pilates studio next door. I hadn’t dared break eye contact while scanning and bagging her purchase. The entire lineup was women, and their collective stare waited for me to confirm I was a deviant so they could comfortably ignore me. Neither side got what they wanted, and forced pleasantries were exchanged until I cleared the queue.

When I plugged the name on the woman’s Amex into Instagram, I expected years of pics showcasing her sexual availability. Instead, I saw thousands of conservatively-styled posts covering food, nature, family, friends, and work. A decade back on her carefully curated grid, and about to give up finding anything usable, I opened a carousel of ten pics from a 2017 Cabo vacation. The first image, an ocean shot, cleverly hid nine slides that looked like a Hegre.com beach editorial shot by David Hamilton.

I’d tucked the front of my briefs under my sack, but one glance at my lifeless cock, and I knew nothing was going to happen. This has been happening lately, and I haven’t nailed down why. The answer wasn’t as easy as the flagging testosterone levels of a late-thirties male. I’d been spared that humiliation so far, which I attributed to my Latino genetics. The problem, unfortunately, was located in more spiritual and emotional realms. I opened a story highlight bubble at the top of the woman’s profile documenting a recent birthday. My brow furrowed while I did the math on how old she was in the Cabo pics until the sum coaxed a rush of blood into my shaft. A morning like any other.

***

The rolling cart I pushed wobbled under the weight of clinking glass as I stocked each section by country, region, and style. Cali. Washington State. Sweden. The United Kingdom. Eastern Europe. Sparkling. Biodynamic, Sustainable, and whatever else fell under the nebulous umbrella of Natural Wine. It’d been difficult to get any French and Italian product in lately. We kept some on hand but stored it off the floor unless someone asked. Drinkers under thirty barely registered that the countries were missing.

After I swept and mopped, I was free to scroll infinite ass online until the evening rush. Behind the register, I caught my tired reflection in my phone’s darkened screen. The search for material that could arouse my desire, dulled by years of overstimulation, had become a chore. I missed the days when clicking a link to a Mega folder or similar offshore hosting site would change my week. Those were rare ever since porn’s pivot towards AI, deepfakes, and streamers.

I scrolled through lifeless, overlit livestreams as my routine of cycling through the usual forums and apps began. A lot of the attraction came from projecting my desire onto a performer. That was more difficult now that they were so open about selling. The new breed of online sex workers didn’t satisfy because they overlooked what was so alluring about porn and femininity and had become genderless salespeople. I wasn’t interested in the relatable best friend archetype that’d taken hold of the profession and missed when fatherless and molested were popular character traits. Under the bright glare of a ring light, there was nothing for me to grab onto. Younger gens, brain damaged from being raised by iPads, didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

The type of porn I grew up with is gone. Or, at least, it’s harder to access. Every gen goes through this as standards and practices change. I came up with the lo-fi, handheld digicam shot productions of the aughts. It was impossible to tell when the material, amateur or pro, featured incest, non-consensual performers, hidden cameras, or trafficked women. Those conditions are the allure now, but I never considered them then. Most of that was removed from the net after years of lawsuits and strong-arming by credit card companies. None of it registered as immoral until they replaced it with the hi-def, over-lit, often solo, verified stuff that followed. The juxtaposition, I’ll admit, was jarring.

The play counts on those old videos were astronomical. Game 1 of any NBA Finals and World Series combined only managed two-thirds the viewership of a 360p clip of a poverty-stricken Euro-orc banging out his questionably of age slave(daughter?) in a decrepit apartment. That type of viewership must have driven big money insane. They couldn’t show a Miller Light tall boy sliding into teen pussy during commercial breaks, so they adapted and found a way to profit without resorting to explicit P-in-V action: use algorithms to hook everyone and their families on creating and consuming soft-core, then sell the data—the Coomerfication of America. My youth wasn’t even that long ago, yet I never could have imagined living in a time where every mother, daughter, sister, and wife was implying hole online for a foreign conglomerate.

***

My buzz was tapering off when Eduardo walked in thirty minutes late. I hadn’t moved in the last four hours, and my eyes hurt from staring at my screen. I stretched, trying to regain human status while he feigned clocking in on the work computer.

“I got you,” I said.

I’ve clocked him in on time for years, no matter how late he’s been. It was less a gesture of kindness and more me not wanting to get to know someone new if he got laid off.

“My man. What’s open in the back?”

“Cab franc. Top me off while you’re at it.”

I handed him my glass, then watched him walk into the stockroom. His gait, low-slung and confident, announced something primal and defiant that whipped up feelings of inadequacy in me. I considered myself better than Eduardo due to my knowledge of film, art, music, and appreciation of nature, yet I still harbored jealousy towards him. He’s a legit Latino who grew up in New York and could easily navigate the trappings of our shared heritage. Even though I was born in the south, steeped in reminders of our motherland, my sheltered upbringing had crippled any chance at a deeper kinship with my Mexican brothers and sisters. It hadn’t bothered me in my youth, but as the social contract I grew up with lost relevance, I felt like I’d missed out on an important cultural lifeline.

***

Ed and I wound the night down over a bottle of Zweigelt an attractive wine rep had dropped off for Mel. Eduardo turned his phone to me while I refreshed my glass. His screen played a video showing the wine rep kneeling, nude, and oiled on a gym mat, encircled by a group of men wearing only sneakers. Ed laughed as one of them grunted and shot the first of many ropes that would eventually coat her face.

“Nice. Real or fake?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

***

An hour later, I locked the shop’s door from the inside and pulled the blinds down. Eduardo peaced half an hour early, so I had the place to myself. I cranked Tamia’s “So Into You” through the shop’s speakers and poured another glass before starting the count.

***

My drunk thoughts reeled while I walked in the blinding cold toward the subway. Despite my efforts to dull myself to the world with porn and alcohol, I couldn’t ignore that something was missing. There was no texture to my days, nothing to hold onto while I slipped toward a perfectly optimized void with zero resistance. I needed to connect to something soon or…nothing. I would likely accept spiritual defeat and rot.

I stood on the subway platform, thinking about a toned, lycra-clad ass I’d seen through the window of a fitness club moments earlier. It was easy to forget there was a hideous world out there, and I was grateful the narrow neck of the city I operated in mirrored my search history for the most part.

The lights of the L bent around the dark tunnel. I took a seat in the packed car, and the convoy lurched forward. I’d left my book at work, and my battery had died mid-scroll while waiting for the train. No phone left me with the unpleasant options of engaging with my thoughts and surroundings. I took a quick inventory of the people swaying in unison with me as we barreled through the tunnel toward my neighborhood. Nothing of note, the usual ultra-scrubbed crowd of 20-40 somethings.

At the next stop, a young couple sat beside me. The girl was taut and fuckable, a glossy show pony in a black puffer, leggings, and Asics. The guy was unmistakably fucking above his weight. While he adhered to the trappings of the influencer caste he aspired to, there was no mistake that he was in the fake-it portion of his make-it path. Couples with such a wide disparity in attractiveness used to signal that something was right in the world, but those days were over. He likely compensated by taking and editing hundreds of photos and shooting hours of video for her social media daily; essentially, a business entity disguised as a relationship. There’d been little resistance to the idea culturally. It was a natural extension of the lifestyle branding that engulfed every part of society for the past twenty years. I like to think I wouldn’t enter a media intern-type partnership, but who knows what lows I would sink to for tight, bald pussy at this point.

Three years ago, a spiritual influencer named Erin briefly considered me for a director of photography boyfriend position. She’d grown a decent following online for her self-developed practice of “Load Reading.” A type of divination where she claimed to read someone’s life, energy, and future based on the pattern of semen splatter in relation to the navel after pulling out. The consistency and amount expelled figured in somehow. She made a few thousand a month telling people their spouse was cheating, or they were about to get a raise by interpreting their cum shot pics.

We had nothing in common, but she’d overheard me explaining Rudolf Steiner’s rules of biodynamic agriculture to a customer at the shop and thought I was of a similar spiritual mindset. After our first night together, she realized her mistake, but our sexual chemistry bought me a month of stilted conversation and incredible sex. The last time we fucked, she asked if she could do my reading for her fans on live. I declined, and she looked down at my cum on her stomach with disgust before rubbing it between her fingers and consulting the Gods. After a moment, she opened her eyes and told me with a straight face that my load would have produced a retarded child. I’d committed the cardinal sin of withholding content and was swiftly excommunicated from the church of nubile influencer pussy.

The couple discussed something they were looking at on her phone. I couldn’t make out her words, but I saw the guy nod wearily in the reflection of the window across from me. Passengers glanced up from their phones when the conversation got heated. I considered switching cars to avoid watching the poor guy get eviscerated, but curiosity kept me bound to my seat. I felt for the kid. Scarcity mindset had turned a whole generation of women into demons, and this was likely a daily occurrence for him. The train pulled to a stop, its doors opening with a hiss. I watched him search the floor for an answer while the car emptied. I’d been there, and no reply was coming from the norament rubber flooring today. When we began moving again, track noise obscured most of what was being said between them, diffusing the situation momentarily.

“I’m tired of it! Take a pill and fuck me on cam or get out of my apartment!”

The collective hurt for the guy became palpable, and I regretted not switching at the previous stop. “Give me your phone,” she demanded.

He handed it over. The girl stood on her platform Crocs, adorned with Cash App and Venmo jibbitz, and walked to the ED advertisement displayed above the train’s door. This was too brutal. With any luck, the train would jerk and send her head through the glass. No dice. She lifted her partner’s phone to the ad and scanned its QR code. A pleasant chime emitted from the device, alerting everyone within earshot that the guy was subscribed to receive dick meds the next day after a brief consultation with an online physician. The car ground to a halt, and the couple got off. I watched a few riders in my section put their phones down, no doubt moved to briefly consider the terror of the current cultural climate.

Gens Z and A were primarily in the content creation business, and it was a cutthroat market. While cruel, the girl had a point. If she wanted a roof over her head, she needed to fuck on cam. Her gen spent its critical formative years inside, waiting for the moment they could enter the online flesh trade. Most were Godless sociopaths, but it was difficult not to feel empathy for them. The empire had crumbled long before they were born. Forged in the aftermath, they were better equipped to deal with it than I was. They had to be. Their parents had edited and filtered their pics since grade school, so their brains were in self-preservation mode from the jump. I envied their numbness to the circumstances of modern living. Everywhere I looked brought me pain if I let it, and the ability to remember anything before it was like this felt like a curse.