by Chris Stuck
Where my feet usually resided were two watermelon-size testicles sitting cozily in nests of hair. I moved what used to feel like my feet, and the testicles moved. This was, needless to say, fucking freaky. Testicles should never be that big. They really aren’t appealing. Yet when I looked up and saw my reflection, almost without meaning to, I elongated and stood taller. Instead of being sickened, I was momentarily impressed at how majestic I looked. I stuck out my chest.
But my spiritual boner lasted only a minute. I was fifty-five. I usually needed pills to keep it up. I vomited. I shriveled. I fell to the floor. Reality set in. I wasn’t a man having some weird wet dream. I was a walking, talking reproductive organ. How would I live? How many problems would this pose? Would anyone even notice? I looked back at the mirror and tilted my head like a dumb dog. I bathed in the shock of how sad I looked, how sad a penis looks, even when it’s twelve times its normal size.
Naturally, I began to scream.
* * *
Here’s the ironic part: my name is Dick. No, really, it is. If it weren’t true, it would be too much. In my early twenties, way before all this, people started calling me Dick without my having to ask. My full name is Richard Dickerson, so it was probably going to happen anyway.
I could’ve insisted on being called Rick or Richie or Rich or the Rickster, if I was white, but Dick always sounded better. It was another irony. A Black guy named Dick. The jokes just wrote themselves. It set me apart, though, which was something I liked. Naturally, one develops a persona to fit one’s name. I was with many women, many, many women, and a couple of men, just to try it out. I wasn’t that well endowed, though I wasn’t exactly little. During a three-month period in my midtwenties, when I was feeling especially inadequate, I used all sorts of ointments and pumps and stretchers to elongate myself. Now, yet another irony, I wasn’t just elongated. I was in a penis suit. I could’ve been a sign waver for a sex shop. Penises R Us. The Penis Pavilion. Get it up and come on in!
Of course, one’s first instinct is to blame oneself. I deserved it. I’ve been bawdy. I’ve squeezed buttocks without asking. I’ve been investigated. At one time in my life, I was fine with my reputation. I basked in my wide ray of light no matter how many lawsuits came at me. It was part and parcel of my success. Dick Dickerson, Double D, opinionated OG tech entrepreneur–virile Black man. Yet, that day, when all this was new, I may have thought for the slightest moment that one of my misdeeds had finally popped back up and put a hex on me.
* * *
When one becomes a penis, one’s first thought is to consult a doctor. It only makes sense. But what does one wear when one goes out in public as a penis, especially for the first time? I donned some sweatpants, somehow getting my testes through the pant legs. I layered from there, a sweatshirt, a trench coat, and a fedora. I figured a scarf and sunglasses wouldn’t hurt either. I thought of a business suit, but a business suit on a six-foot penis would’ve looked ridiculous. I looked down at my balls, my new feet, and realized I didn’t need shoes anymore. None would fit.
I called my driver, Jamison, whom I paid to be at the ready at all times. I descended sixty floors in my private elevator to the garage. As I got in his town car, he said, “Dick, as usual, you look quite erect this morning.” I’d given him the name Jamison. He was white. Not that it was related, but he made a lot of dick jokes, I think to please me. That day, unsurprisingly, I wasn’t feeling it.
He put the car in gear and was just about to take off, but then he glanced at me through the rearview mirror. He put his arm over the seat, turned around, and looked right at me. “Dick, you okay? You look a little—I don’t know—inflamed. You sick or something?”
“Bad shellfish,” I said.
“Ooof. So we’re going to the doc, then?”
I slapped him on the shoulder, as though spurring a horse. “Yes, my good man. Hurry.”
* * *
Friends though we were, I didn’t have much confidence in Irv Goodenough. I never did. My former college roommate had always been an underachiever and, I suspected, a closeted dope smoker. I visited him for two reasons: (1) to keep the man in business and (2) to prove Mimi, one of my exes, wrong. She seemed to think I didn’t have a giving bone in my body, but I had Goodenough. He was my cause, my proof. However, I quickly realized that going to him for answers was probably a mistake.
He sat on a short stool. From the exam table, with that thin paper crinkling under me, I looked down at his bald spot as he seemed to skim my chart instead of actually read it. He had bedhead. He needed a haircut and a shave. I said, “Irv, here is where you look up at me and prescribe a remedy. Now, let’s have it.”
But all Goodenough could do was yawn. “It’s not fatal. At least that’s something.”
My impatience may have gotten the better of me. I told him to stop fucking around or I’d rescind my monthly stipend. He didn’t look like he cared for that. He checked his watch and sighed so deeply he seemed to think of me as a burden. But I was his friend and benefactor. Besides, I thought it was understood that he was one of my yes-men. I’d asked him to see me at late notice, sure, but what were friends and benefactors and paid yes-men for?
“Listen,” he said. “Dick, I’ve never seen anything like this, okay? But your health is fine. You have all your organs. Your heart is pumping. Your brain is working the way it’s always worked. I mean, Jesus Christ, you have arms! Let’s count our blessings here.” Goodenough, with his ineffectual, pudgy face, to his credit, tried to soften the blow with a delicately placed aphorism. “Maybe you should just learn to live with this. Be a better Dick.”
For some reason, everyone thought I didn’t like myself. I loved myself, extremely. How did they think I’d gotten so far? As I left, I realized I’d been misunderstood my entire life.
* * *
When one lives as a penis for a week or so, one quickly realizes that being a dick is harder than it looks. Let’s keep it real. I wasn’t just a dick. I was a Black dick. Given this country’s history with undermining Black masculinity, I was sure I was being treated even worse because of my skin color. I was certain there was some white dick gallivanting around somewhere, probably in California or Utah, living his life free of scrutiny. Meanwhile, I was in New York. I couldn’t go anywhere without being ogled or sneered at or accosted, especially by big burly white women. They often cornered me as I came out of a movie or Jamison’s car. They felt me up. They kicked me in the balls, stood on them even. Then they socked me right in the nose and ran away, but not before saying my presence had offended them. “Why don’t you just kill yourself?” they said. “You know, this is all karmic retribution,” they also said. They started picketing outside my skyscraper.
I know I was a dick and everything, but even I thought that was a bit harsh. I mean, damn, I didn’t even know them. I tried to file a police complaint once, but the cop at the precinct desk just said, “Look at you. You were asking for it.”
I continued trudging through life. Very few were sympathetic to my situation, but for some reason, a friendly tribe of older Upper West Side lesbians took up my cause for a week or two. To this day, I’m not sure why. They said they understood me, the disembodied penis. I was the symbol of masculinity, Black masculinity no less. It was imperative that I use my station in life for good and not evil. They created Instagram and Facebook accounts on my behalf. I had an illness, they said. Or was it a disfigurement? No one could really say for sure. They were so kind. Though I was already loaded, they set up a PleaseFundMe. They cooked me and Jamison dinner once, too. Vegan. I choked down some of their homemade probiotic hooch. On the way home, Jamison and I had to stop at White Castle.
Their message stuck with me, though. I was an anomaly on the gender–sex continuum. “Be out,” they said. “Wave your freak flag high. There may be others out there. Stand up for them.” On the way out, however, they did say that the gay mafia was very real. They would filet me like a tuna if I abused their trust. So, I took their advice. I st
ood. I pitched my tent. I did a few TV and print interviews. All the headlines were really punny. “Man Becomes Penis but Doesn’t Have the Balls to Hang Out.” Stuff like that. I was ridiculed even more. No one took me seriously, not even men. They were actually my worst tormentors. I got death threats from a bunch of hillbillies. Inevitably, the porn industry came a-calling, and I figured it was a good time to hire security and withdraw from public life.
Goodenough referred me to other doctors, good doctors, penis specialists, at my behest. I hoped something as simple as a penis reduction would remedy the situation, but they said, no, that’s not how that worked. It would be drastic plastic surgery. I would have to be taken apart and rebuilt. I overheard one of them say they should speak with the federal government about my body, that I should be studied. Naturally, I ran the hell out of the exam room, still in my paper gown. I found my way down a back stairwell and jumped into Jamison’s waiting town car, my bare ass kissed by the cold winter air.
* * *
When one encounters a significant life change, such as becoming a penis, one inevitably tries to take shelter in the arms of a lover. Mimi, my old standby, my mean old lady friend, was there for me, at least at first. She pretended to understand and care. We hadn’t seen each other in years. She suddenly wanted to reconnect. It was odd, but I went with it. In the past, she’d been terribly vindictive. I thought I was beginning to see her good side again. Yet something just didn’t feel right. Whenever I offered to meet in public, she had excuses. Somehow, we always ended up at her place instead. I even had to take the back stairs.
When one becomes a penis, say after the sixth or seventh month, one starts to realize how much we all love penises. They’re everywhere in civilization and nature, and we don’t even realize it. Cucumbers, bananas, guns, the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
“Tell me those aren’t dicks,” I said.
“Yes, you”—Mimi pointed at me—“are everywhere, and we”—she pointed at herself—“don’t realize it.”
She was a lawyer. She was always fucking correcting people. I’d forgotten about that.
“Huh?” I took off my fedora, but she winced so I put it back on. Most people couldn’t handle the sight of my head.
“You’re a penis now. Us humans don’t realize you phallic-shaped beings are everywhere.”
“Phallic-shaped beings?” I said. “Do you not regard me as a human being? I’m a human penis, not some donkey dick.”
Her hesitance to agree should’ve been a clue she may have had hidden motives.
After a particularly trying week of death threats and the usual interview requests, Jamison dropped me off at her building. She said she’d make me dinner, kielbasa and sauerkraut. It wasn’t until my second glass of wine that I began to feel different, impaired. Mimi sat across her dining table from me, smirking, as though waiting for me to suddenly capsize. Her old varicose-veined legs were crossed elegantly, her ugly, hammertoed foot bobbing up and down like a warning sign. I looked at my wineglass.
“You poisoned me, didn’t you, you goddamn weirdo?”
“‘Poison’ is a harsh word. I prefer ‘drugged.’ But don’t worry. You won’t die or anything.”
“What’ll happen, then?”
She shrugged. “Why ask? You won’t remember anyway.” She waved. “Nighty night.” The room went sideways.
When I awakened, I was tied up on her bed. The fireplace was going. I turned and she was lying next to me, done up in lingerie, smoking a cigarette. She seemed spent. She was panting. I was really dehydrated but at the same time I was covered in nice-smelling oils. Something had been done to me. Though I was all lubed, I was painfully chaffed in other areas, delicate areas.
“You took advantage of me, you witch.”
I looked to my left. There was film equipment, tripods and shit, set up across the room, pointing right at us. I could see myself on a flat-screen monitor.
“What the fuck?” I started to scream for help.
But she shushed me. “Remember the night we met?” She sat up and stubbed out her ciggie.
It was at some party twenty years before. “Vaguely,” I said.
“What about after? When I went home with you?”
I thought about it. I said, “Oh, is that what this is all about?” I was about to say that men did that kind of thing back then. But even as I thought it, it didn’t make me sound very good. “So, you’re taking revenge on me now? Why?”
“Because you’re a penis now, you asshole. Just the sight of you infuriates me. Don’t you have any remorse?”
“For what?” I said. “Slipping you a mickey or for now being a penis?”
“Both, dickhead.”
My mind was just beginning to travel back to that night. Had it really been that bad? She took all kinds of pills back then. What was the difference if it was me giving them to her? I hadn’t even done anything but spill her onto the bed and pass out next to her. I’d drunk too much. I couldn’t get it up anyway.
It was as if she could hear my thoughts. She smacked me across the face. “You just said all that out loud, stupid.” It must’ve been the roofie she’d given me. She mashed the button of a remote with her thumb and stopped filming. She untied me. “Get the hell out. We’re through. You’re lucky I don’t call the cops.”
I gathered up my clothes. “I’m lucky?” I was almost out the door when I asked if it wouldn’t be too much trouble for me to buy the footage from her and for her to sign an NDA. We could put all this behind us. “What do you think?” Her answer was to pull a hot poker from the fireplace and wave it around like it was a fencing foil. I took that as a no.
* * *
When one becomes a penis, one eventually has an existential crisis. It’s inevitable. I often overheard people say they wondered what it was like to be me. “Think of the orgasms,” they said. “He’s probably coming all the time.” What everyone failed to remember was that, as a disembodied penis, I was without agency. There were no hips to thrust me. No large hand to manipulate me. I was essentially a loaded gun always waiting to be fired.
My life was a sham. Total success hadn’t prepared me for life being a total tease. What was the use of being a large penis if I couldn’t at least pleasure myself? I wasn’t even connected to a body. What was the point of my life? I was just there, hanging. I fell into a funk. I wanted to be left in my lair.
It took some creative legal web-spinning, but I evicted everyone in my building. I kept it all to myself. I didn’t shut myself in. I just didn’t go anywhere for a while. I started a garden on the roof. I raised cattle in the underground garage. Other than having Jamison, I became totally self-sufficient. I believed I could find my own cure, so I assembled a large computer that took up one whole floor of my building. I went back to my old programming days. Into one end, I fed it code like branches into a wood chipper. Into the other, I spooned in real-world scenarios and AI protocols so that it could understand our world and perhaps spit out what had exactly happened to me.
While the computer chewed on data for days at a time, I surfed the internet for days on end. I became obsessed. Evidently, there had been more than a thousand ways to refer to the penis since the beginning of records. One of my favorites dated back to 1720. The Love Dart. I read scientific articles about how much men loved their penises. The verdict in every story I read was: a lot.
Jamison often took pity on me. Once a week, he stopped by with some Nathan’s hot dogs and a hard drive of movies. They all happened to be those Hollywood special effects films. As we watched, I slowly realized I had the origin story of a superhero. Penis Man. The Incredible Boner. I don’t know. I should’ve been fashioning a caped garment, figuring out whom to save and whom to fight, coming up with a superhero logo, trademarking it. But I realized I didn’t really have any superpowers other than making people run away in shock or run at me in anger.
Naturally, I fell off the wagon. I started taking my pills again, just to feel better. It was only one or two at first
. After a week, I was swallowing them by the handful. By the time I was grinding them up and snorting them, occasionally injecting them into my eyeballs, I knew I had a problem. I couldn’t move without them. I couldn’t function. I had no boing-boing anymore.
By the grace of God, I was able to impose my own sort of rehab. Jamison made sure my dealer, Goodenough, would never darken my door again. I fought the withdrawals for a few weeks, but I finally made it out clean and sober on the other side.
* * *
It would’ve been nice to have emerged from my drug stupor to find my mainframe had finally churned out an answer to my horrendous question. But while I was detoxing, the massive hard drive crashed. Jamison regretfully informed me that my supercomputer would boot up only in safe mode. Otherwise, he said, it was the blue screen of death. He patted my shoulder and told me I should probably give up hope. I moved on.
I disassembled the computer and sold it for parts. Weirdly, I found solace in the art world. Most of my life had been spent finding unequivocal answers to previously unanswered technological questions, which I would then turn into commerce. In art, I discovered, there were no right or wrong answers. Shit, there were no answers at all. There were just questions of humanity, feelings and shit, empathy and commiseration. Artists had no idea what commerce even was. Having the rug of my previous reality pulled out from under me, I could suddenly understand this form of expression. I went to MoMA and the Whitney and studied sculptures and paintings and installations. I watched performance art, which for once didn’t totally baffle me. I attended film festivals, always coming in and finding a seat right as the lights went down and the curtain went up. Since I had nothing better to do, I started keeping a journal, writing about each play or exhibition I saw. I started wearing a beret, with the occasional monocle. I sent my reviews out and eventually became a critic for a few websites. I can’t say which. I reviewed films and books and plays. I developed a reputation as a hard but fair reviewer. Though I wasn’t too good for a nice hatchet job.
