I'm shopping for dick pills. Why? For the children.

My wife and I are talking about starting a family. And my dick isn't the diamond-cutter it once was. Even if we do have spawn, I'm probably going to be so tired raising the little poop bucket that I'll need dick pills to rock it hard to make her a sibling.

That's how life is. When you're finally old enough to responsibly care for a kid, you're past the age where it's effortless to make one.

That’s how my wife and I ended up at the sex shop around the corner from where we live. We wanted some help.

We passed the ball gags and butt plugs. We avoided the jerk-off booths, despite the salesman's generous pitch that "There's no loads hanging from the ceiling in there." We were on a mission to find the perfect dick pill — the kind of thing you often find hanging behind the counter at gas stations. We wanted to start our family with it. I had heard good things about Rhino, Blue Wolf and V20Max.

"Dick pills," I croaked to the manager.

Now, some men know and love cars. Some, computers. This man was all about dick pills.

"Oooo, boy, I got some good ones!" he said. "I got ones that'll keep you hard for four days, and give you some light hallucinations along with them, like a light mushrooms trip."

Wha? Get a boner and get lifted? It was like he'd been reading my diary.

"Bam. Instant hard-on. Longer, stronger, faster, last longer. The wind blows the wrong way and you're just like BWANNG! She's getting out of the shower she's in trouble. Hahahaha."

Ignoring him for a second and dreaming of a weekend that would be like Pink Floyd at the Playboy Mansion, my wife and I gravitated toward the Vegas Style Triple Maximum Premium and the Royal Master. The clerk seemed like he was having an orgasm himself just talking about it. He even had opinions about which pills work better for Hispanics which for whites. Black Panther pills, he said, work better for black guys.

"What if I have a black guy sized penis?" I asked.

"Won't work," he said. He paused. "Trust me, I know."

The idea of different dick pills for different races seems obviously totally false — penises work the same no matter what color they are. But I checked it out, and while it's 99 percent guaranteed to be a steaming pile of horseshit, it's not absurd — hospitals do treat blood pressure differently in black people than in white people, and getting an erection is a matter of getting blood pressure in the penis, so who the fuck knows. Maybe the guy was halfway to a Mildly Racist Nobel Prize.

We got back to talking about tripping.

"This one here [Vegas Style] has damiana leaf. It's a leaf from the same tree that they make DMT from the bark of," he said. "It great for erections and makes you hallucinate."

My phone confirmed what he was saying. Damiana is known as a sex herb. Mexican natives drank it as an aphrodisiac, and a scientific study said it revs up girls' fuck life when they take it. And damiana is, indeed, a mind-altering plant that some claim feels like cannabis — although the consensus online is that you have to smoke it for it to work.

According to him, there was a lot of overlap between tripping and boning. The Royal Master had avena sativa, which he said was like cannabis sativa. Avena sativa, cannabis sativa! Dope! "You're gonna be seeing trails and your girl is gonna come like she's climbing a wall or falling off a cliff, like OOOOOOO!!!" he said, mimicking an opera singer hitting the high note. My wife shot me a sidelong look.

Avena sativa is actually the latin name for oats. And so while that might make you call bullshit on the information — who gets a boner eating Cheerios? — there is ancient wisdom linking the stalks of the oat plant to sexual health, including the phrase "sow your wild oats," but the science behind that is sketchy.

Some of the other dick pills had downsides, he said, including ones that "gave me the sweats and the shits, and that's no fun when you're all horny." That caught my attention.

I was getting frustrated trying to chose one, let alone believe any of them work at all, because these this was important! A human life might be created because of these dick pills. So I searched for help online. But there wasn't a lot of help. There's little science to back any of the claims these products make up, and the reviews for them online are too all over the place to make an educated decision. The Vegas Style pill gets reviews saying both "not working" and "best product ever." The Royal Master reviews go from "makes my back hurt" to "all a lie" to "hard and huge." ExtenZe, another pill I looked into, seemed to give people "flu-like symptoms" that included chills and a rash.

What was a hopeful wannabe-daddy supposed to think?

I turned to my wife, who is, conveniently, a doctor.

"Yohimbe," my wife read on the ingredients of the Royal Master we brought home. "They pulled some drugs off the market that had this stuff in it."

Ah, the ancient wisdom of a medical professional. Turns out she was right — yohimbe, the pill's main ingredient, is made from African tree bark and is banned in two countries. The American government even warns about it and people sue each other over it.

It was becoming overwhelmingly clear that there were too many unknowns with these porn store dick pills for me to feel comfortable procreating with them. For example: how much damiana is in these things? How long do you trip for? Will I get diarrhea? My wife said the pills probably weren't going to do me in, but why risk it?

Other sex pills do seem to have a stronger chance of really working. One called V20Max contains epimedium, also known as horny goat weed, which science backs up as a chub-maker. The reviews for V20Max online were glowing. "One pill 2 days hard as a rock," said one reviewer on Amazon. "Girlfriend begs for mercy. Gotta love it."

Some sex store dick pills are pretty much guaranteed to work, since they're mostly expired Viagra. Lang Yi Hao — with a Blue Wolf on the package — contains sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, although it’s expired and less than full clinical strength. And while the FDA may see that as a problem, you can see that as an opportunity.

I'd have ordered that one right away, but I have a drawer full of generic Viagra I bought in a Mexican pharmacy on spring break once.

This is the road my wife and I eventually went down — we dropped the herbal pills with their weird, FDA-unapproved side effects and went straight to the hard stuff, which we ironically already had. No medicine of any kind I've ever tried works as magically on my physical body as Viagra. Your boner is on a string. You bounce back after coming within 10 minutes. Hello fatherhood.

And that was the end of our search for the perfect dick pill. As long as I don't develop heart problems, it'll probably be our go-to. For all I know, we'll be pregnant with quintuplets soon. And our family can start. And dick pills will have had a lot to do with it … although not the kind you buy from a guy at a sex store who tells you he shits every time he gets a boner on ExtenZe.