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The Penis Diaries by Lori Gottlieb |
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 Illustrations by Steven Okazaki |
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I
saw my first penis
on a Beverly Hills side street while walking to 4th grade homeroom with
my friend Susan Savitsky. Up ahead, a man leaned casually against a
Mercedes, holding a briefcase and wearing a dress shirt, blazer, and
tie. It was like one of those Highlights for Children "What's missing
from this picture?" exercises. The man seemed perfectly normal
from afar, but upon closer inspection, we realized - Whoa, he's missing
his pants! I saw my next penis in 5th grade, this time because my own body had begun changing down there. The instant my first pubic hair sprouted, my mother rushed me to the local library and that night I lay in bed reading What's Happening to Me? When I finished the girl-to-woman part, I flipped to a page featuring five illustrations of naked boys, ranging from 8 to 18 years old. The taller they got, the longer and thicker their penises; the hairier their groins, the more bloated their balls. Utterly repulsed, I closed the book and returned it to the library the very next morning. In 6th grade, I saw my first peer-group penis. At a Boy-Girl party, relegated to a coat closet with Danny Diamond after accidentally spinning the empty Coke bottle in each other's direction, I refused to kiss him. "Ah, go suck my wiener!" Danny replied. "Make me!" I volleyed back. "Fine!" he said. And then, to my horror, Danny unzipped his Levi's and whipped out his penis. Remembering the flasher's12-incher, I prepared to scream, but when I looked down, I began laughing instead. "It's like a scrawny little worm!" I giggled, trying not to stare at his limp appendage. "Suck me," Danny repeated, issuing what I thought was just an expression, like "Shut up," or "Screw you." I didn't know it meant anything. "And besides," he added, referring to my 75-pound frame, "you're the scrawny little worm." "Suck me!" I retorted, mimicking Danny. Now it was Danny's turn to laugh. "I can't suck you," he explained. "You have nothing to suck." "Whaddaya mean I have nothing to…" Suddenly it all made sense. I imagined sucking on Danny's scrawny little worm, and that's when I let loose a blood-curdling scream: "EWWWWW!!!" I decided to take a break from penises. Grades 7-9: the penis-less years. In 10th grade, I woke up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water and ran into my father, wearing only his underwear and a T-shirt. Climbing up the staircase, he had on tight white briefs through which I could clearly see the outline of his penis. "What are you doing up?" he asked, a deer caught in the headlights. "Just thirsty," I replied, trying to look anywhere but there. "Well, don't stay up too late," my father mumbled, blushing and hurrying away. "I won't," I smiled stiffly, moving down the stairs. As soon as I heard my father's bedroom door click closed, I ran back upstairs and puked. "Doesn't that feel good?" Spike cooed into my ear, pushing harder against my pool-soaked panties. "I guess," I replied moronically, then I made him drive me home. But Spike was right: it felt very good, so good that the next night, back at boarding school, I let preppy Warren from Connecticut who'd had a crush on me all summer slide two fingers up my crotch. I guided his hand back and forth like I'd secretly done with my own two fingers while lying in bed late at night. Taken aback by his good fortune, Warren didn't even attempt to replace his fingers with his penis before saying goodnight. The same thing happened on our next three "dates," but when Warren asked me on a fourth, I said no. After Spike Schwartz, I wanted a penis, not fingers, flowers, or a burger at Friendly's. Warren had blown it, and not just with me. He got kicked out the following week when Amanda, an Upper East Side W.A.S.P., claimed that Warren had tried to rape her with his fingers. The week I returned home from summer boarding school, exactly one month before the first day of 11th grade, I met Doug, the most popular incoming senior in his district, star of the track, soccer and tennis teams simultaneously. Living two towns away, he had no idea what a Math Team/Yearbook Geek I really was. Doug and I were a perfect match: He wanted to get laid, and I wanted to feel a penis unencumbered by swim trunks. Until, of course, I actually felt one. No matter what I did - brush against, blow on, caress, lick, suck, kiss - Doug's penis instantly turned into an erupting volcano of cum. I loved his penis, but the cum part I could do without. The thick, sticky, white liquid smelled funny, tasted sour, and worst of all, was "evidence" left on my twin bed's sheets that could only get me in trouble. To hide this evidence, Doug suggested that he explode inside of me. And to hide my revulsion for his cum, I suggested that we use condoms. With my parents in Europe, Doug prepared a romantic candlelit dinner, gallantly carried me into my girly-wallpapered bedroom, slipped on a condom, and within seconds, he was inside me. Within a few more seconds, his volcano exploded. "What were you thinking about?" Doug asked afterward, knowing it had been my first time. I told him I'd been thinking, "There's a penis inside me" over and over in what sounded like an echo chamber. "What about you?" I asked. "I tried thinking about baseball," he smiled, "but I guess it didn't work." So he took out another condom and we tried again. This time, I let myself savor the sensations - the pulsing, throbbing, thrusting, shaking - and right after I came, I actually purred, in a sultry voice far more Veronica Lake than my own high-pitched Moon Unit Zappa "Valley Girl" twang: "You have an amazing cock." I didn't know where I'd heard the word "cock" before. All I knew was, if Doug's thingy could make me shiver like that inside, it was much more than a mere penis. From now on, I decided, I'm calling it a cock. In 11th grade I studied AP American History, AP Chemistry, AP French, Advanced Pre-Calculus, Honors English, and The Topography of Doug's Penis. I learned to love the taste, smell, and consistency of cum. I eagerly swallowed it and smeared it on my breasts and face. I wrote messages with it on my inner thighs. I poured it into an ice tray and sucked on cum cubes. I did a photo essay of cum spurting out of Doug's cock. I analyzed its chemical composition in science lab, wrote a paper on its literary allusions for English, and found evidence of Kennedy White House infidelity via cum stains for American History. That year, I got straight A's. In my second week of 12th grade, Doug, now a college freshman, informed me that he was joining a fraternity. "I'm becoming a Sigma Chi," he boasted. He forgot to mention that he was also becoming a semi-impotent alcoholic and pot-head. I saw his penis a lot that year, but I never called it a cock. I saw my first uncircumsized penis the summer after 12th grade, while trekking through southern France. But I never felt it inside because it belonged to Michel, who didn't speak a word of English, and I only knew classroom French. So when Michel whipped out his crinkled mass of foreskin, I asked if he had a rubber. He thought I was asking if he had a tire. Meantime, he kept giving me the "thumbs up" sign. When he finally figured out that I was using pneu (tire) to mean rubber; and I caught on that puce (thumb) was slang for condom, the moment had lost its, well, flow. Which was fine with me. Frankly, his lumpy load of foreskin creeped me out. At Yale, penises were confidence-builders. Forget the feminist rhetoric of self-empowerment - I couldn't believe how empowering penises could be. I had the power to make them grow big with a single flick of my tongue, the casual exposure of a bra strap, or a nipple poking through cashmere in the wintry cold. I could make a guy's brain turn to mush and his lower body spasm involuntarily simply by brushing my hair against his shoulder during lecture. Of all the things I learned in college, the most fascinating was how whispering the word "pussy" into a guy's ear could make his cock shoot up like a crane. The first penis I saw in the working world belonged to a junior literary agent at ICM. We fucked in his office, except when his live-in girlfriend, a model from Texas, was in New York or London or Paris for one of her shows. Alex looked like a walking penis - long and skinny, with delicate skin and a large head - so his actual penis seemed more like a Mini Me, rather than a separate sexual organ. I'd seen enough penises by now to know my cock type, and Alex's Richard Belzer-esque model didn't fit the bill. Still, I was thrilled by the illicitness of the affair, the danger each time we had sex. One night, when his girlfriend was modeling swimwear in Milan, Alex took me to his apartment and after he ate my clothes off, he asked me to give him a blow job. Pondering his protracted, pencil-thin penis, I declined. Alex then made the most ludicrous offer I'd ever heard: a blow job for a ride home. No how, no way, I said. It was 2 a.m., and I didn't have my wallet, so I asked to borrow cab fare. His reply: No blow job, no cab fare. No deal, I insisted. Then I borrowed a quarter from his doorman, called a cab, paid the cabbie at my apartment, and expensed the whole sordid trip to Paramount, where I was working at the time. On the receipt I wrote: agent negotiations. My next boyfriend -- a real boyfriend, a boyfriend who wanted to marry me -- had the most fabulous penis I'd ever seen. It wasn't a GQ penis, or a porn-star penis, but to me it was nothing short of gorgeous: perfect length, width, texture. I especially loved its distinguishing mark just under the frenulum - a single dark mole, not cancerous-looking, but sexy in a Cindy Crawford kind of way. I licked that mole so often I worried I might lick it off entirely, but instead it simply glistened more, as if my saliva were gem polish, and his mole were made of lapis. On the rebound, I had a one-night stand with Doug, my former high school boyfriend. No longer an impotent alcoholic but a successful hotelier, he managed to get it up 6 times in one night. The smell of his cum had a Proustian effect, reminding me of our blissful sexual escapades from 11th grade. Two weeks later, however, I missed my period, and I hated his cum with a vengeance. The first penis I touched in a movie theatre belonged to a friend who had a not-so-secret crush on me. I grabbed for some popcorn, which I thought lay in his lap, but he'd placed it on the floor, so I accidentally groped his penis instead. For some reason, I couldn't stop. He came during the scene in Silence of the Lambs when Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling is trapped in a pitch-dark room with Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter. We can hear him breathing, but we can't see him. Blinded, Clarice turns this way and that, then - suddenly - Hannibal the Cannibal is there! The audience screamed, and so did my friend. After that, I loved touching penises in public. The beach, a courtyard, a hiking trail, the Observatory, a dressing room at the Gap. But all that effort became tiring after a while, like going out for pizza when you can have it delivered instead. Why not enjoy a penis in the comfort of your own home? When I moved in with my next boyfriend, we decided to get a dog and name him Ralph Cramden from "The Honeymooners." I lobbied for Alice instead, saying that I wanted a female Dalmatian because the males were too high-strung. This wasn't entirely true, but I didn't know how to explain why dog penises alarm me the way mimes do. The night before I moved out from the place I shared with this man I'd thought I might marry, we lay together side-by-side, locked in an embrace borne of real-time nostalgia, his cock resting inside me, an intimate umbilical cord connecting us one last time as we slept. He finally came at sunrise, and then he went -- to Vegas -- while movers transported my belongings to my new single-person apartment. Unpacking, I found the boxers I'd given him a year before, white Calvin's custom monogrammed with a cartoon cock in a red cape emblazoned with a Supercock "S." I remembered handing the design template to the snooty Armani-clad saleswoman at the Melrose Avenue monogram store, and how she'd masked her utter horror with cheerful professionalism and a plastic smile. The next week, when I gave my boyfriend the Supercock boxers, he laughed and said, "You probably say this about all the cocks belonging to guys you're in love with." "Uh-uh," I asserted, "Your cock's the best." "Nah, it's all contextual," he insisted modestly, but he wore those boxers constantly. So when my now ex-boyfriend returned from Vegas, I called to see if he wanted the boxers back. "Nah, it's all contextual," he said sadly. Picturing his cock, I realized he was right. Goodwill refused the Supercock boxers, so I used them as a dish rag until they disintegrated -- like our fantasy of a bohemian marriage, pancakes on Sunday mornings, camping with the kids, and happily-ever-after -- into nothingness. In a pre-med anatomy class I took after leaving the film business, I was asked to trace a live penis. "The penis," my professor intoned, can be retracted to reveal a scar, the presence of which indicates the closing of an undifferentiated vagina." This was the same professor who liked to sing renditions of "Thanks for the Mammaries" and "Put Your Head on My Deltoids." By the next morning, he continued, those of the male persuasion were to go home, find a mirror and locate the aforementioned scar. The rest of us -- those with differentiated vaginas -- were supposed to find the scar on "a volunteer." Then, with colored pencils, we were to trace exactly what we observed, and turn it in for a lab grade. Thirty points. After class, I approached the board for clarification. "Excuse me, um, Dr. T.?" I asked. "You want the women to find a picture of the scar in a medical text and draw that, right?" Dr. T. stared me down. "People," he bellowed in a deep voice that always reached the very last row of the lecture hall, "are not textbook drawings. Tell me, Miss Gottlieb, what will you do as a doctor when a person, and not a textbook, walks into your office?" I tried explaining that the person walking into my office would be given a blue-and-white gown when told to disrobe, but that my male friends might react differently to shedding their boxers and having their genitals traced with colored pencils. That didn't go over too well. "Then please enlighten your so-called friends, Miss Gottlieb, that they will be helping out in the name of science," my professor replied before turning his back and erasing the left anterior testis off the board. Call me a prude, but I never earned those 30 points. A penis makes men say strange things. It makes them ask you to Talk Dirty. It makes them say things like, "I'm gonna lick up your leg then fuck your pussy with my tongue" or "Stick it up my ass!" or "Suck on my tea bags!" which I later learned was slang for hairy balls, not Celestial Seasonings chamomile. Sometimes a penis makes men say things they don't really mean: "I love you," "I want to marry you," "You're so beautiful," "Only if you want to, baby." "I'm gonna fuck you so hard that your brain will explode!" my boyfriend exclaimed the night before I took the MCAT. Pressing his dick against my upper thigh, he thought fucking would relax me, but I couldn't afford an exploded brain that night. I wanted to get into Stanford Med. "How about you just fuck me," I offered, "and keep my brain intact?" I saw my first dead penis at Stanford Medical School, while dissecting a 91-year-old's cadaver in gross anatomy. It was leathery and stiff and smelled of formaldehyde, but when I sliced it down the middle with a sharp blade, its cross-section revealed a kaleidoscopic network of arteries, veins, and nerves resplendent in florescent blues, reds, purples and yellows. I tried to imagine where this penis had been, what vaginas and mouths and anuses it had felt during its long lifetime. I picked up the cadaver's cold, wrinkled hands, and pictured them jerking the organ off, but having no sense of the magic that lay inside. This penis's innards were mesmerizing, like a stunning piece of art. Playing with my boyfriend's penis that night, it made me sad to think that its full beauty wouldn't be seen until it died. A penis can turn men into wardrobe consultants. Dress up as a biker chick, they'll say. Dress up like a maid, a school girl, a nun. One guy asked me to dress up as a cop. "How?" I asked. "Do you have a uniform, or a badge I can pin to my bra?" "No," he grinned, reaching behind his headboard for shiny pair of handcuffs with large restraints attached. "Just these." A penis can turn men into directors. "Pretend you're a virgin," a guy whispered once. I tried acting timid and coy and scared and excited all at once. "No, no," he directed, "act innocent. You're a virgin." Short of stitching up my hymen, I didn't know how to play that role. "Okay," he finally sighed in frustration. "Pretend you're a slut instead." A penis can turn men into pigs. "Why are men so into threesomes?" I asked a guy friend after listening to Howard Stern wax orgasmic over two strippers on his morning radio show. "It's the vaginas," my friend explained. "The more the merrier." "What about multiple penises?" I asked. "That would be gross," he said, making a face. I wanted to know what the difference was - isn't a threesome a threesome? "Men don't like other penises," he clarified. "And you think women like other vaginas?" I challenged. "Hmm," he said, "I never really thought about it." The biggest penis I ever saw was a 12-foot tall replica in a hand job instructional video entitled, An Intimate Guide to Male Genital Massage. Resembling a phallic Washington Monument, the penis served as the set for the film's narrator, a feather-haired gay man in a white tux who liked to reach up and touch various areas as he seductively explained how to manually stimulate "the phallic temple," AKA "the magic wand." Actors "Matt" and "Steve," intercut with the narration, proceeded to demonstrate various hand techniques on each other's impressive shlongs. All the techniques sounded like either drinks at Jamba Juice ("orange squeeze") or flavors of Haagen Dazs ("rocky road," "marshmallow delight"). Testing these techniques on my boyfriend, I began salivating profusely, which did nothing for the hand jobs, but did wonders for a good ol' blow job. "My boyfriend says he needs extra large condoms," I told my best friend, Zip. I wondered if it was possible to have a penis so large that regular condoms - the ones that fit 99% of penises worldwide - wouldn't work. Was there such a thing as penile elephantitis? "The Uber Condom Claim," Zip laughed. "My last boyfriend said the same thing, but frankly, I didn't think he needed 'em." I didn't think my boyfriend needed 'em either. I mean, he had a nice cock, but c'mon. Plus I had a huge box of extra-thin, super-sensitive ribbed Trojans that I didn't want to waste. Did he really have to use the Maxis? I associated the name not with virility, but with cramps and menstrual blood. "Humor him," Zip advised. "If you say his condoms are too small, he'll say your jeans are too big. Everyone's happy with their little white lies." I'm cuddling and watching a video with a guy on a first date, and when it's time for him to go home, I notice that he has an enormous hard-on poking through his pants. Unaware, he's gathering his wallet, change, keys, and Altoids off my dining room table. I haven't seen a fully clothed hard-on since high school. Back then, they used to annoy me, but now, more than a decade later, I can't stop staring at it in amazement. It's the most erotic sight I've seen in ages. "Is it weird seeing a new penis?" a guy asks the first time we have sex. "Depends on the penis," I reply, but later I realize that's not true. It's always incredibly exciting seeing a new penis, like unwrapping a gift on your birthday. Between boyfriends, I derive vicarious pleasure from hearing about my friend's lusty affair with a guy named Richard. Out of bed, though, he mistreats her, and I urge her to break it off. "He's a dick," I say. That's even his name." Lately, I've been calling Richard "Dick" to his face, but he takes it as an endearment rather than an insult. He's also narcissistic. "He may be a dick," my friend rationalizes, "but, man, he's sure got a great one." Maybe the nice guys are right: Women just like Dicks. "I'll never see a new penis again," my friend declares on a hike two months before her wedding. During her yearlong courtship with her now fiance, she reported having unbelievably hot sex. But now that they're engaged, she worries about variety. Won't it get old, she sighs? I assure her it won't, but who am I to say, Miss Decided Not to Get Married Twice? I wonder what my friend must feel like, knowing it's the last penis she'll ever see, touch, taste, suck, bite, fondle, fuck. It's the penis from which her children may come. It's the penis she'll feel in her butt crack while spooning each night. It's the penis that will stain the boxers she'll find in the hamper. I can't stop thinking about it after our hike. In bed with my boyfriend, I begin to wonder not just Is he The One? but Is his The Cock? Disturbed by this notion, I start seeing penises everywhere - bulges through khakis, trousers, sweatpants, bike shorts, 501's. I fantasize about the medley of sizes, widths, ridges and birth marks that potentially lie beneath. I imagine how some might feel inside my mouth and pussy, between my breasts. "Don’t confuse sex with love," my mother had warned me back in high school, and now my closest married friend says the same thing. I know what they mean: Sex is transient but love is permanent. That night, as my boyfriend's cock dances lovingly inside my pussy, I think they're wrong: sex is love. Sex and love aren't separate, but as connected as penis and pussy, heart and soul. Or maybe I'm just confusing sex and love again. "Were you ever told not confuse sex with love?" I ask a male a friend who's happily married. "Yeah," he says, "but we phrased it differently: 'Don't think with your dick.'" I'm writing in my journal at the local coffee house when I see some friends walk in. One is crying a little, and I ask what's wrong. Turns out her boyfriend has been lying to her about their relationship. While talking about marriage with her, he's been telling others that their relationship won't last. Ouch. Women comfort each other with war stories, and now the tales begin. One friend offers up a guy who was so possessive he routinely called on her cell phone and asked what her dinner companion was wearing to verify she was out with her girlfriend and not cheating on him. I talk about a guy who couldn't commit until after we broke up, then hounded me for over a year, even when I had a new boyfriend, saying he'd made a mistake. Another friend tells of a guy who'd never pay for her, but would take out ten people at dinner, just to show how generous he was. Someone else tells of a guy who needed verbal praise for his penis or he couldn't get it up. "You should write your next book about these schmucks," my crying friend tells me. It wouldn't be preachy or whiny, but a hilarious comedy, a feminist social satire." "Valley of the Dicks," I joke, trying to lighten the mood, but then I say I won't write that book, I'll just keep it in my journals. "The Penis Diaries," she laughs, pointing at my spiral. "Yeah," another friend adds. "All women should keep them. Because then when we finally find The One, we can take out these diaries and reminisce about all the dicks we had to kiss along the way." Here are my diaries. Now, where is The One? ................................................................................................
© 2002. Lori Gottlieb. All rights reserved. | |
© MMI. Farallon Films. All rights reserved.