Dickless

It could have happened to anyone. It probably does happen to more people than who'll ever admit it. It probably happens to people who travel all the time. There is surely some sort of traveling insurance you can buy to give you peace of mind if it ever happens to you. I bet it happened often to those traveling salesmen who went from city to city selling whatever it is they sold for all those years. Traveling dick salesmen might have lost theirs, but lucky for them they had a bag full of display dicks to replace their own, if need be. New state-of-the-art models that vibrated and buzzed and twirled and maybe that lit up like a carnival. One with ridges or bumps like pickles (not to be confused with herpes).  

I noticed about four days later when I thought to use it. I had a date that night and she called ahead to remind me to bring my dick because she felt a certain way. She said it about as casually as one might request someone to bring their umbrella because it might rain, but it is the seventies, after all, so I had to get with the times. People trade sex organs like kids trade baseball cards. I didn't want to be terribly old-fashioned. That is when I noticed it was gone, so I canceled the date and she went out with someone else who was more careful than me. Some guy who all his life took good care of his dick like they teach you in elementary school and Boy Scouts. There is a merit badge you get for being a good steward of your dick. I never got that badge. 

I left it in Pittsburgh, I was fairly sure. I was there for an Elvis concert and stayed in a suburban hotel on the cheap. I wish I had stayed downtown, but I never do. I always say that next time I will, but I don't. So I end up driving to the suburbs to some Holiday Inn or AAA motor lodge with a pool at the end of the night. It is safer, I think. There are more people like me there. A lot full of station wagons and Plymouths. There is a continental breakfast and different amenities, plus there is less traffic and it is easier to get back on the highway. There aren't half-naked hookers running up and down the halls on rollerskates, or loud traffic out the window. There isn't Cubano runners running coke and sawing people in half with chainsaws in the next room. Blaring car horns and anarchy. 

Crazy people live in cities. The cities are what causes them to go mad. Maybe it's the pollution. Or the dirty water. Or the fact that the sewers are full of a millions of turds every day. No one's septic system is that damn good. Not good enough to handle all that. It's all just laying there beneath the streets in those pipes. In the city's clay bowels. And when it gets hot, those toxins emanate up and through that porous asphalt. 

I was sure I left it there, however, I wasn't positive. I couldn't recall removing it and sitting it down anywhere specific in the hotel, but one takes liberties when they are in a hotel and it is easy to misplace such a thing in a strange room. A person loses his sense of routine in a foreign element. Pittsburgh was only three hours away, so confidently I drove back to retrieve it and all while I thought of how careless I had been my whole life with my dick. Then I thought of how I had lost my dick numerous times before, but how I quickly found it. Or when I was a kid, how my mother found it for me. And driving, I smiled remembering all those times, assuring myself that this was going to end up as another one of those times. Then I thought about the time it was stolen by my ex-girlfriend and held for ransom because she said she loved me and she didn't want me to insert it into anyone else's vagina. I remember her fondly. I didn't press charges. 

I explained my situation at the front desk at the hotel, but they were no help. No one had turned in a dick to lost and found, is all they'd tell me. They even showed me the box that was full of a few sock hats, a wallett, a scarf, a zippo lighter, a book (The Catcher in the Rye), and a very nice leather glove. It didn't help that it was a woman at the front desk. They just don't understand just as men don't understand periods. Perhaps the cleaning lady took it, I thought, accusing Esmerelda in my mind of thieving my dick. Then being judicious, I considered that she might have confused it for a tip. Maybe I left it on the pillow where she had left chocolates for me as a greeting. Ques sera, sera. What a lousy tip that was. She got the shit end of the stick, if you ask me. An unmanned dick. 

My dick was nothing special. It wasn't particularly big or wonderful in any way. Nothing to write home about, really. Someone once told me it was perfect, though. We fit like a glove. Someone else said it was attractive — like the Steve McQueen of dicks. It could model, if it wanted to. It couldn't do porn, but it could star in a movie or do advertisments for dick creams, if there was such a thing. But no one ever said it was large or particularly talented. No one tried to steal it, other than the one crazy ex, and only to be vengeful. It couldn't perform in a circus, or anything. It couldn't play NBA basketball. 

When I went into the sex shop, there was no dildo that was like it. They were all bigger — the ones I saw anyway. They had all the bells and whistles and could do practically anything (with batteries, of course). They were superior to my dick in every way other than that my dick was real flesh and blood and it could make a baby if push came to shove. If the fate of the world relied upon it — if God commanded me to impregnate someone so that he could come back in the form of that baby and run around Earth for a while until crazy people killed him for being too good — my dick could do that. Sure it could. 

Even dickless, I get excited over abstract things. I am so full of hope that it practically comes out of my ears. I am so full of hope and love that nothing in the world can get me down. You could take my dick, my arms, my legs and leave me as a stub and there I'd be somewhere, expecting something great to happen. Expecting the love of my life to walk into the room and just pick me up like a sack of potatoes and take me home to our happily ever after.

Maybe it rolled under the bed or fell between the dresser and the TV stand. Or maybe I put it in the night table drawer by the Bible. I went ahead and rented the same room for the night. The person at the front desk expressed no emotion about me losing my dick. No sympathy at all. Not a single, "I hope you find it, sir." I gathered from her reaction that this sort of thing happens all the time. Men come back from wherever with the same story and there is probably a company policy that if the room is vacant to let them back in to look for their dick. There is probably a lost dick training course for the concierge and the cleaning ladies. But my dick was no where to be found. 

"¿Encontraste mi polla por casualidad?" I asked Esmerelda. 

She must have thought my Spanish was bad. Or maybe people just don't misplace their dicks in Mexico. Maybe Mexicans are more careful. I lounged beside the pool and wondered what I would do. I watched a family swimming and a mother looked at me and smiled. The moon was full and the pool water sparkled like all the universe was in it. I didn't get in. I was tanning. I was afraid my trunks would stick to my dickless torso and I'd look like a Ken doll. I was listening to the mother encourage her children. After a while, she came and sat beside me and asked me where I was from. Ohio, I replied with a smile. She acted as though that was interesting and then said they were from Virgina and were in Pittsburgh to visit her late husband's family. She said he died in Vietnam. His name was Richard Daniels. She said it as though I might have heard of him. 

"I lost Dick in 1972," she sighed as she gazed at her three kids playing in the pool. 

"I'm sorry to hear that —"

"June. My name's June," she smiled and shook my hand eagerly. She smelled of coconut oil, chlorine and melancholy. She was a very attractive woman. She looked like a young Ava Gardner. I read a magazine while she sat in a nearby chair and watched her kids play. In a few hours she got up and said goodbye in such a way that she wanted me to say something that I didn't know how to say. She wanted me to be her Dick, but frankly I was dickless. 

"Goodbye," I said. "Have a safe trip home, Mrs. Daniels."

"You, too," she replied before she suddenly started to sob.  

"Are you okay?"

"I inadvertently said 'you, too' again. Dick was shot down in a U2 spy plane over Laus. It's been a few years now, but — I don't know that I will ever be normal again."

"I'm very sorry, June. I hope you find comfort and happiness — somehow."

"They didn't have anything left of his body," she blurted out in tears. "Nothing but his —"

"His?" 

She paused looking at the children who were squealing and splashing away in the pool. They were ever-resilient and impervious to prolonged grief in their youth. 

"His penis. I keep it in a box on the mantle. A nice wood box with his name engraved on it. It was all burnt up. But it's something, anyway."

"It is something," I agreed. I wanted to give her a hug, but I didn't. I patted her on the back as she leaned forward in her chair and asked if I would rub oil on her back. And so I did. Then she said thank you and a little while later I went back to my room with my hands smelling of oil and the beautiful widow. I didn't know what else to say. I was useless. 

I suppose it can be said about many things, but I never realized how much I missed my dick until I lost it. I drove home the next day and I swear that women must know and conspire to play a cruel trick on anyone who loses theirs because suddenly three different women I thought to be attractive and relatively unattainable for me, women who had brushed me aside as though I was leftover beef stew, called me within a day of each other for a date. Sure, a guy can go on a date without a dick, but if things get intimate quickly, what then? I'd have to explain. Or, suddenly, I'm a lesbian like in all those swanky men's magazines. Suddenly, we are two pairs of scissors connected at the bush. My tongue is tired just thinking of it. 

I, dickless, hang my head in shame. I hadn't used it for any other purpose than to direct piss for a while, but suddenly I wanted to use it on one of those women because they were attractive and it was the seventies and sex seemed like it could fix things in my life. It was being sold to me by a devious little man in my brain in an infomercial who kept yelling, "But wait, there's more!" 

One of those women was a thin blonde who I knew from college who looked a lot like some actress in a TV show I can never remember. I wanted to wallop someone with it. I wanted to go spelunking. To drill for oil. To bury my bone. But I was powerless. I was ineffectual and worthless. I suppose I could go on the dates and if the moment arose, I could pretend I had morals. Pretend that I was a better man than to seek sex on the first date. Buy myself some time to find it. Use fingers. Hit a triple. 

I was out of luck. Maybe when I was back in Pitsburgh I should have gone to the arena where I had seen Elvis to see if they had a lost and found. Maybe when I was dancing it shake rattled and rolled right off of me. Maybe it fell down my pant leg and into a curb and some rat picked it up and had himself a dick. Maybe he is carrying it in his mouth and joking around to all his rat friends. Faking an English accent and saying he is "avin emself a bit of the old spotted dick, eh, govnuh." That little scurvy sonofabitch. I don't know how rats do it. How they live that kind of thing down. All the shit that they eat. How they don't get ridiculed by their mates about eating garbage and dicks. 

When I got home, I watched a news special on TV about Watergate. About Richard Nixon going to all kinds of lengths to spy on Democrats when he knew he was going to win the election by a landslide. I still don't understand it. Then there he is, walking across the White House lawn boarding that helicopter, turning and flashing those victory signs. Tricky Dick — who messed everything up for himself like I messed everything up for myself. By being careless. Maybe my dick went away like that and I didn't even know it. It resigned in disgrace, embroiled in some controversy. Maybe it boarded a helicopter and turned around and did the same thing. Flashed those victory signs in the face of overwhelming scrutiny and merciless ridicule. I have a feeling there is more to that story than I will ever know. Then I fell asleep out of boredom.

I woke up and got dressed and decided to go for a drink in a bar I used to go to often but that I hadn't been to in a while. Things have always held such promise for me initially, but then they run their course like inkpens that run out of ink. Bars are this way. Jobs are this way. Women are this way. Maybe it was a defect on my part, I considered. I don't know. Maybe I was like my mother in a way. My mother who changed the furniture around nearly once a week. 

As soon as I walked into the bar there was Tony Bennett. Of course, it wasn't the real Tony Bennett. I realized he was standing on a stool and it was a local guy named Sal Macioci who happened to be Tony Bennett's midget doppelganger and who had trained his voice to sound just like Tony Bennett's. He was popular around town and did a lot of weddings and frequently sung in upscale bars such as this one. He went by "Tiny" Bennett.  There was an article in the newspaper not so long ago that said he got to meet Tony Bennett. There was a picture of them and everything. The resemblance was uncanny and they were born within two years of each other, in the same month.

Tiny Bennett was singing his heart out in this bar where I once fell in love with a beautiful woman who also frequented it. I hadn't been there in quite a while and I wasn't sure that she was still there or not. Everytime I was near her, I was stricken with a feeling that I hadn't ever had before. A very simple and unspoken feeling that existed in the moment that I was near to her. A feeling that radiated and throbbed. A feeling that made me feel and think that something in this world exists I had never known to exist. More than the obvious. More than what is known or can be proven in any way. I knew that she was someone with whom things would never run their course. Someone I could spend a lifetime loving and sharing moments that I wouldn't otherwise have.

And there she was, sitting at the end of the bar as beautiful as ever. Like a cherry floating in a cocktail. Dressed in all black. And as I did everytime that I saw her, I fell in love. Silently but to myself. I talked to her as I had before, but this time it was much more than it had ever been. I wanted to tell her how I felt, but it seemed outrageously bold. And as we talked, Tiny Bennett sung with his patent-leather size two shoes firmly planted upon the bar stool, "I left my heart — in San Francisco..."

I was reminded immediately of the obvious. Tony and Tiny Bennett had apparently been as careless with their hearts as I had been with my dick. The bar TV, which was muted in respect for Tiny Bennett, was going on and on about Watergate and every so often Tricky Dick's picture would appear on the screen and he was flashing those audacious V's and getting on that helicopter that took him back to Yorba Linda like a dog that just shit on the carpet, again and again. Then someone at the bar would grimace or gnash their teeth and mutter, "That crooked sonofabitch" as though Tricky Dick broke into Watergate to catch glimpses of their wife showering. Or to steal something of theirs. It was so bizarelly personal to some people, but it all felt fake to me as though it was orchestrated. 

Betty was her name. Betty. I wasn't sure if it was short for something, but she scooted closer to me and I offered to buy her a drink. She smiled and accepted as people applauded Tiny Bennett who was really on a roll tonight. He was singing a Sinatra song now. "Come Fly With Me." Betty looked as beautiful as ever and I realized that she was perhaps too beautiful. Or too young for me. But it didn't stop me from dreaming. It didn't stop me from wishing I had my dick so that it could get erect as we danced and she exhaled into my ear. As I was intoxicated upon her scent. But instead, only my heart fluttered. I was as worthelss as a plastic Ken doll. 

But then, as the evening progressed, it occured to me that it wasn't so. It was my dick that got in the way of true romance and without it, I could feel true feelings that weren't predicated upon sexual desire — the overwhelming one being to stuff her golden gizzard. Betty was the most beautiful woman in the bar, but she was also the most interesting. She was the most intelligent and deep, and she was a writer, though out of practice, she admitted. We drank the night away, though not excessively, and we found a table in the corner and fell in love over the flickering green glow of a hurricane lamp. 

"You're far more interesting than I ever thought," she laughed. 

"And you are far more beautiful than one can simply ever see."

It was the perfect moment. Then a strange look overcame her as Tiny Bennett sang an encore of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" at someone's request. Some absurd large lady in a loud purple dress who hadn't heard him sing it earlier because she just got there. She profusely apologized, but Tiny Bennett excused her and lapped it up like a true performer. 

"Now for the elephant in the room," Betty announced. 

"The what?" I asked. 

She smiled. "You're fortunate that I believe in romance and passion. Any other girl might have been — well, I don't know — a little freaked out."

I still had no idea what she was saying. But then she smiled at me and reached down and unfastened her black purse and the memory slowly returned. 

She pulled out a cardboard candlebox that I had seen before that might have once been in my possession. I stared at the box and she looked at me and smiled. 

"Imagine my surprise when I opened the mail and there it was with a very lovely note and a ribbon around it." She pulled out the note and opened it as though to read it. I realized then that, without any solicitation, I had sent my dick to her. One drunken night in what seemed then like a grand romantic gesture, I sent it to Betty saying something to the effect that it was terribly useless without her. 

Good God. She started to read the letter with a wry smile upon her lips, but I cut her short. 

"Please, no," I begged. 

"But it's — pure poetry!" she went on playfully.

"I was very drunk." 

"That's no defense!" she laughed. 

"It may be a terrible defense, but it is a defense nonetheless. And it's the only one I got." 

"Well, I think you ought to have it back. I hope that you may need it." She slid the box around the green hurricane lamp and across the table. And there it was in front of me. Like a body in a miniature cardboard casket. My old amigo.

Tiny Bennett, still on his stool, sung the beautiful tune, "Just in Time," as though on cue, as though he knew exactly what was happening at our table. He flicked his stubby little fingers to the rythm of the song. Then he climbed down from his stool and made his way through the bar to sing to everyone personally. 

Like 007, I took my dick out of the box and affixed it to myself under the table. Then Betty and I shared a dance that lasted for an eternity, and I was dickless no more. Tiny Bennett would sing at our wedding a few months later.