Standing naked in front of the floor-length mirror, I turned around and looked back to stare at my buttocks. They had a nice shape — quite round, a bit oblong toward the bottom — and I wiggled them back and a forth a bit, as if I was trying to shake off some water. I was disappointed to see that the smoothness they had at 13 had been replaced with a fine layer of hair, a progression up from my legs that I had been unable to stop or slow. I pretended my butt was a drum and gave it a few quick slaps: pat-a-pat-a-pat, PAT.

I was in my roommate’s uncle’s home in Houston, TX, where my friends and I had stopped on our road trip to New Orleans during Spring Break. As a very successful energy executive, Uncle Dave had built himself a staggeringly large and beautiful house, complete with a wine cellar, a theater and even a dojo in which the fourth-degree black belt practiced Aikido. He had also built separate bathrooms for himself and his wife, and it was in his that I was standing nude.

I had undressed to take a shower, something I knew would benefit not only myself, but everyone around me. After 30 hours of non-stop driving with four other guys in the car, my skin was caked with sweat, grime and the stench of my fellow travelers’ unrepentant flatulence. As I stepped into the shower, I admired its walls of fine dark stone, streaked with veins of shimmering gold. It was quite large — about five feet by five feet square — and when I closed its clear glass door behind me, I noticed how tall it was, easily 16 or 17 feet high. It echoed.

My problem was that I didn’t know how to turn it on. There were nine knobs sticking out of the wall, which were about eight more than what I was used to working with. I turned one at random, and was suddenly deluged with warm water. Five feet directly above me was a giant showerhead, about a foot in diameter, from which water was pouring out, as if from a waterfall. This was the shower head of my dreams, not to be confused with the one involving Natalie Portman. Instead of covering only one side of my body, leaving the other cold and needy, this covered all of me with perfectly pressured, hot water. It felt lovely.

It was when I started turning the other knobs that I realized that each corresponded to its own showerhead. I asked myself, nine showerheads? I looked around guiltily, then turned on all of them, leaving the waterfall still pouring. One stream was aimed at my chest, another at my back, and six, inexplicably, pointed to my special zone. It felt like being in a hurricane of pleasure. My friendly parts were being handled in ways no woman ever had, and like Columbus, water was discovering areas theretofore unknown.

When I thought my ecstasy could climb no higher, I noticed a panel on the wall featuring several unlabeled buttons. I pressed one at random, and the panel lit up. “ON,” it said. For a minute, nothing happened, but then I noticed a small spout in the far bottom corner of the shower, from which hot clouds of steam were billowing. It turned out that the shower was also a steam room, and within a few minutes it was impossible to see anything, as I was enveloped in the steam’s thick, white opacity.

As I stood in the cloud of hot indulgence with water streaming onto me from every angle, I started to cry. To want nothing more than a warm shower before experiencing its superlative was more than I could handle. I didn’t deserve it. It was too much.

A knock on the door meant dinner was ready, so I turned off all the faucets and stepped out. I toweled myself off and reflected upon the fact that I had just been crying alone in the shower. Yeah, I told myself, but with an ass like mine how could Natalie Portman ever resist? And with that, I put on my nice polo shirt and headed off to steaks of Kobe beef and fine Italian wine.