Maybe you'll get nothing but nylon socks this year for Christmas. Maybe Santa will get lodged in your chimney and you'll have to yank the bastard out by his ankles while reindeer peck through your roof. Maybe you'll draw the weekend shift as an elf at Sam's Club. But no matter how bad your story of holiday misery, my friend, I've got you beat. Last year, on Christmas, I broke my cock. Although, to be a bit more precise, I didn't break it by myself -- my girlfriend helped.

The actual medical term is penile fracture. There's no bone in your boner, so there's really nothing to break. It's usually referred to as the eggplant deformity because, well, let's put it this way: When I was on the phone trying to describe my predicament to a nurse, I compared my cock to an eggplant, and she instantly knew what I'd done. Then she told me to get to the hospital right away.

My girlfriend Susan and I live in the Central District of Seattle in a comfortable three-bedroom house. We met at the peak of the dot-com craze, when it looked as if I'd be able to retire young on stock options. Yeah, right. That was before I had any idea what a stock market bubble was. The ensuing five years have been rough, as my paper wealth turned into actual debt, and during periods of disagreement the only thing we've had to look forward to is shagging each other's brains out.

Susan's mother was visiting us from Sacramento for the holidays, which certainly put a crimp in our humping. We'd already opened presents, and when her mother went out to see a friend, I gave Susan a lustful look she knows well. In reply I got the "Can it wait until I clean the kitchen?" look. But my look won out, and soon we were upstairs in bed.

I could make up some bullshit here, maybe rave about a position we invented that catapulted us to new erotic heights, but that's not how it happened. We were enjoying a relatively sleepy shag, missionary position, and I tried to get a little deeper inside her. We both heard it. Pop.

Like the sound of a single bubble on a sheet of bubble wrap bursting. Not very loud but, given what we were doing, also not an appropriate noise. "What was that?" Susan asked. A split second after I heard it I began to feel it. "I think something's wrong," I said. "I think something is really wrong."

Gingerly I reached down and pulled out my cock. It was a lot bigger than it had ever been before. And trust me, I'm not bragging. The right side was grossly distended and purple because it was filling with blood, while the left side was trying to shrink back down. In my hand I had half a hard-on. I'd never seen anything like it before, even during my 10 years as singer of That Petrol Emotion, a London-based rock band that toured the world, was hailed by Rolling Stone as the best new foreign group and made five critically acclaimed albums.

I'd never been overly modest -- hell, I used to wear spandex bicycling shorts onstage, which incited one British publication to dub me "the most shaggable man in pop."

Right now I wasn't even the most shaggable man in the Central District. Susan jumped out of bed and Googled broken penis while I said "fuck" repeatedly and slipped deeper into shock, holding the crooked stick between my legs. It looked like an erect penis but bent and bruised and pointing at the ground.

We knew we needed a hospital, but before I could get dressed I first had to let go of my fractured cock. I was afraid to do that -- the ugly thing weighed a ton. Working with one hand, I pulled on my loosest boxers and a pair of oversize sweatpants. Then, fearfully, I unhanded myself and found that as long as I was careful I could walk around as if I had a load in my pants. In my neighborhood I'd fit in just fine.

The woman in charge of intake at the emergency room asked what my problem was. "Well, it's slightly embarrassing," I began. "Oh, we've seen it all," she said. Okay, then. "I think I broke my penis." Let's see them use that kind of dialogue on Grey's Anatomy.