Wendy laced her boots back on, ran her fingers through her hair, and followed Penny down the hall.
Penny stopped just in front of Juan’s hospital room. “He’s going to be partly paralyzed for the next few days until he can teach his new spinal cord what it’s supposed to do. He’ll have to be in physical therapy for several weeks before he can function more or less normally. In the meantime, he’ll need your help to learn how to use his new body.”
Penny pressed a small plastic package into Wendy’s hand and ushered her into the room. “Think of it as a new honeymoon. I’ll make sure you lovebirds aren’t disturbed for the next few hours.”
Penny closed the door behind Wendy. Wendy heard the click of the lock. She lifted her hand and looked at the package her friend had given her. Condoms.
Smiling, Wendy approached her husband’s hospital bed. A completely strange body lay there, hairless and skin still shiny as all fresh tank-grown bodies were. The new body was smaller, younger and thinner than Juan’s old body, his fingers long and elegant. He wore only a thin hospital gown and an ID bracelet around his wrist. There was a small bandaid on the back of his hand where they’d reinserted his microchip.
“How are you feeling, honey?” she asked.
The man turned his head toward her but did not otherwise move. “I feel so weird,” he said. His voice was softer and mellower than Juan’s. “This body feels completely wrong in a thousand little ways. I can’t get over how my teeth feel; I keep running my tongue over them. And…I can’t move much below my neck. That’s got me a little freaked out.”
“Penny said all that’s normal. And you’ll only have to live with it for a couple of years. In the meantime, it’s time for your first physical therapy session.” Smirking, she held up the condoms.
“Ah, I see our mission was successful after all, Comrade,” he said. “But I don’t know that I can…”
“We’ll see about that,” she smiled.
Wendy set the condoms on the foot of the bed. She started to dance, doing a slow striptease for her husband. When she was completely naked, her nipples hardening in the cold hospital air, she saw that Juan had made a tent of his hospital gown.
“Looks like you’re gonna do just fine,” she said. She crawled up onto the bed and pushed the gown up around his chest.
“But how am I down there…?” he asked, looking worried.
She smiled and gave him a long, slow kiss.
“Like I said,” she replied, “You’re gonna do just fine.”
Camp Songs: Innocent Fun or Diabolical Brainwashing Plot?
PICTURE, IF you will, a road trip to attend New Year’s Eve festivities in Philadelphia. It was late at night, and it was my turn to drive. Our car was stuffed to the brim with goth chicks. I thought everyone else was asleep. I couldn’t reach the CD case. So, to keep myself awake, I started singing the first thing that popped into my head:
I’ve got something in my pocket
That belongs across my face
I keep it very close at hand
In a most convenient place
I’m sure you couldn’t guess it
If you guessed a long, long while
So I’ll take it out and put it on
It’s a great big Brownie smile!
“You’ve got what in your pocket?” Drea asked, cracking one mascaraed eyelid and peering at me.
“A smile?” I replied.
She started giggling. “Substitute ‘ball gag’ or ‘throbbing cock’ and you’ve got one of the filthiest songs known to humanity. Where did you learn that?”
“Summer scout camp,” I said. “It’s the ‘Smile Song’; every Girl Scout knows it.”
She broke into louder peals of laughter that awakened the rest of the car, and she was eager to share the joke. The meme spread amongst my friends:
“Is that a great big Brownie smile in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
Part of me was appalled at the treatment this sweet little childhood song was getting at the hands of my barbaric goth friends. But I soon realized that the kink in that song was built-in: it never sounds innocent when it’s coming from the lips of an adult.
Girl Scout songs are a kind of indoctrination; they’re supposed to be a fun way of teaching little girls positive values and good citizenship. But did they have a subtext that was teaching us something quite different?
I started thinking about all the other camp songs that were firmly wedged in my memory. And then I remembered Rhino.
Rhino was the nickname of one of the counselors at one of the camps I attended. She was, in retrospect, butch as fuck. After a long day of horseback riding, this is the song she taught us all under her buzzcut supervision:
I know a Weenie Man
He owns a weenie stand
He sells most everything
From hot dogs on down!
Someday I’ll be his wife
His lit-tle weenie wife
Hot Dog, I love that Weenie Ma-a-an!
Weenie Man!
Weenie Man!
Yaaaaay Weenie Man!
God only knows what this song did to our tender, impressionable young minds. True, I know of no girls who actually took the exhortation to marry a hot dog vendor or bratwurst meister to heart. But one can only shudder to imagine these blossoming girls casting secret glances at the virile vendors slapping meat into the soft buns, growing flushed from the smell of grilling mystery meat and weenie steam, their hearts a-flutter and their loins a-quiver as they step up to the counter and say, “I’d like a footlong, please.”
Because this song will lead to the worst sorts of carnal desires. Desires that will spawn unspeakable fetishes involving relish and hot mustard. And they won’t be satisfied with just hot dogs, oh no. Because once a young woman gets a taste for sausage, she’ll inevitably try bulging kielbasas and hard salamis behind the Elk Lodge. She’ll want to move to Germany. Or worse, she’ll move into the blood sausage demimonde, start wearing black and smoking cloves and be lost to decent society forever.
But those little songs weren’t just preparing us for a life of kink. Some songs were filled with nihilism and raw violence. Consider “The Window Song,” in which almost any nursery rhyme or children’s song can be turned into a seemingly-gleeful chant about rampant defenestration:
Mary had a little lamb,
Whose fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went
She threw it out the window!
The window, the window!
The second-story window!
High low, low high
Throw it out the window!
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Threw him out the window!
The window, the window
The second-story window!
High low, low high
Throw him out the window!
It’s raining, it’s pouring,
The old man is snoring,
Got out of bed
And bumped his head
And threw it out the window!
The window, the window
The second-story window!
High low, low high
Throw it out the window!
Note the repetition of the song, and the repeated exhortation to “Throw it out the window.” Seems almost like brainwashing, doesn’t it? I suspect — but cannot yet prove — that our camp counselors were really part of a diabolical black operations plot to secretly convert young girls into assassin moles, ready to commit the worst violence upon hearing just the right bars of music.
Imagine: legions of upstanding American women could be Nymphomaniacal Puppets of Death in the hands of the dark forces controlling our government. I can see the newspaper reports now:
“I don’t know why I seduced the Armenian ambassador and threw him out the window,” sobbed Judy Baker, a registered nurse now held
without bond at the local jail while she awaits transfer to federal facilities. “I was giving him a sponge bath, when…when, I don’t know. I think there was music. I couldn’t control myself. Does anyone have a hot dog?”
Why I Can’t Stay Out of My Husband’s Pants
I REMEMBER the first time I got into my husband’s pants.
That morning, all my work-suitable pants had problems: a stray red sock had bled on one in the wash, another pair had shrunk, and a third was fraying around the hem.
My kingdom for a lousy pair of khakis, I thought.
Then I spied with my little eye a pair of crisp olive-drab khakis hanging on his side of the closet. I touched them. The material was soft and substantial, and smelled faintly of his cologne. If I wore them, I’d think of him all day. Would they fit? I pulled them off their hanger. The zipper was strong, much sturdier than the zips on my own women’s trousers.
I pulled on his pants, and I faintly heard an angelic chorus somewhere down the block. His pants fit, fit better than many of my own clothes. Better yet, they were even rather flattering; the material was thick enough to not show off my every last figure flaw.
And, oh, the pockets! Deep, capacious pockets! I could keep all my hopes and dreams in pockets like those.
My husband came in from his morning shower, toweling off his hair.
“Can I borrow your pants today?” I asked.
“Ew, but you’ll get girl cooties all over them!”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “So where did you get these? I want them. I want your pants.”
“I got them at Target…they were $18.”
“So UNFAIR!” I wailed. “These are made better than chick pants! And way cheaper! And they fit better!”
“Huh.” He scrutinized my rear. “Yeah, they look better on you than they do on me. Weird. ‘Cause you’re built all girly and stuff.”
“Well, not so girly,” I sighed. “It’s been a while since I’ve even been able to fit into a size 14, and all the interesting clothes stop there. It’s like us big girls aren’t supposed to ever buy clothes. And most of the stuff in the Women’s section is all nasty synthetics and fits about as nicely as a gunny sack. And let’s face it, oh-so-low jeans just don’t look good if you’re not built like a 16-year-old.”
I was warming to my rant. “And have you ever noticed how they stick the Women’s section right by the Petites? It’s like they’re taunting us: ‘Neener, neener, look at all the cool stuff you could buy if you weren’t such a great big cow!’”
“I think you’ve got a persecution complex,” he said.
“You try finding decent clothes in the Women’s section sometime,” I replied.
He shook his head. “Those polyester florals frighten me. Maybe you should just buy guy pants.”
“But that would make me a transvestite, wouldn’t it? I mean, I’d still have to try stuff on. We’re in Ohio! I’ll be shunned as a freak. I’m not trying to push the gender envelope; I just want clothes that will fit.”
He paused. “Well, we’ve established that you can get in my pants. So, I’ll buy the clothes, and you can be my little pants bandit, my little trouser rustler…” He dropped his towel and backed me up against the bed.
“Your Jean Genie?” I asked, just as he was about to kiss me.
He winced. “I’ll be glad when this 70s fad has died out.”
The Dickification of the American Female
THERE ARE eight million dicks in the Naked City. And chicks are some of them. Here are two of their stories.
Cassandra’s Story
It all started when I was twelve, and saw Blade Runner down at the mall. It completely blew my mind, and so I ran right out to Waldenbooks to look for the novelization.
I had no idea who this Dick person was. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a lot different than the movie…and the more I read it, the more I realized it was even cooler.
I got The Man in the High Castle next, and after that Confessions of a Crap Artist. By the time I was 16 I started on The VALIS Trilogy.
I started to seriously question the nature of reality and memory, and I began to distrust the government. When all the other girls were reading Seventeen and writing fan letters to the Backstreet Boys, I was reading the Philip K. Dick Society newsletter and engaging in intermittent correspondence with Tim Powers.
When it came time to go to college, I enrolled at Cal State Fullerton, just so I’d have the chance to read all his personal papers. I was a total dickhead.
Right now I’m working on my PhD at Stanford and doing experiments on the nature of time. If I can build the machine, maybe I can go back and save him…and then he will be mine, all mine.
Randi’s Story
I used to think that having a pussy was pretty cool. G-spots rock, plain and simple. And being able to have a baby and create a whole new human life — how awesome is that? And if you aren’t the baby type, you can keep your pot stash in there; if you wrap it up good and wear enough Chanel No. 5, the drug dogs are none the wiser.
Umm. Forget what I said about the stash — that’s just an example. My point is, the pussy is handier than most people realize.
And if you’re turned on, nobody has to know, right? That’s why guys don’t wear skirts, you know, except for Scotsmen and they’ve got a sporran to hide behind and keep their dignity intact.
But then I started camping with my boyfriend, and damn, the first time you gotta go pee in the mountains when it’s freezing outside, you really wish you had that dick. Then, of course, I met that hippie chick in Sonoma who showed me how to pee standing up. All you gotta do is get one of those hollow medicine spoons and cut the end off and press the spoon end against your bits — instant pee tube! No frozen butt on the mountaintop! And you can do it without; you just gotta learn to pull your lips up with your fingers and practice in the shower for a while, and you can get pretty good aim. I even learned how to write my name in the snow! It freaked my old boyfriend out something fierce, but then I figured it’s better to have a pussy than be one so I dumped him.
The pee thing aside, it wasn’t until I started reading Freud that I really got on the dick trip. I mean, here’s this doctor with all these women coming to him with stories of molestation and societal oppression…and he goes and decides they’re all crazy and have penis envy instead.
At first I was thinking, “Man, this Freud dude is such a dick for dismissing their abuse and thinking it was all about them wanting the Mad Powah of the High Holy Man Meat.”
But then I realized, for him to ignore all their stories…the cock must be pretty compelling, you know? He must have thought that his dick was just the most wicked thing ever.
And so I started noticing the inherent coolness of the almighty cock…and I began to seriously respect the cock, though sometimes not the guy it happened to be attached to.
I decided I wanted my own dick. First I got a functional red rubber number from the local fetish shop — I felt like Mick Jagger strutting around my bedroom with that thing strapped to my hips. So I went back and got this mighty 15-incher — you could hit homers with that baby. I felt like John Wayne and Sammy Sosa all rolled up into one petite package.
But wearing those rods under my clothes…well, I do have some sense of ladylike discretion. So I bought a couple of soft, wibbly pack-and-play numbers that wouldn’t show under my dresses. I could be a chick with a dick all day long! I felt powerful and confident.
But as time went on, and I got passed over for promotion after promotion at work, I realized it wasn’t enough to have the dick…you have to be the dick.
So I started extending my dick. I started smoking cigars, and I bought a cell phone with an extra-long antenna. I saved my money and bought a Hummer that I ram through every traffic opening I can find on the freeway. I use my cell phone as much as possible, antenna up, and talk loudly so that people know I’m more important than they are.
Am I a complete dick? I don’t think so, but I try ha
rder every day.
Menstruation For Men
IT’S HARD to properly imagine an uncomfortable, aggravating biological condition that affects organs you simply don’t have. It’s probably as hard for your average guy to imagine what it would be like to menstruate as it is for the average gal to imagine what it’s like to suffer from a fractured penis.
Pain is part of the human condition, and we can all relate to plain ol’ pain. It’s the particulars that get real fuzzy real quick, especially for something that creates such a sticky mess of symptoms as menstruation.
So. We’ll have to use the organs at hand for this descriptive exercise. If you have a penis, and want to know what menstruation might be like for your girlfriend, sister, or mom, read on!
Start by imagining that your urethra is quite a bit larger than it is now. Now, imagine that you have a magical prostate gland that holds back urine but does nothing to hold back blood and tissue.
Yes, that’s right, boys…you’re going to be bleeding through your dick for the next several days! This is fun already, isn’t it?
Now, imagine that, overnight, a mass roughly the size of a ping-pong ball or a hen’s egg has grown inside your bladder. This mass is free-floating, and has a hard surface much like that of a cheese grater. On the third day or so, your hormones will work another feat of magic and the mass will rapidly shrink down to a size you can easily pass.
Because this mass has taken up much of the normal volume of your bladder, you have to pee more often than usual. Sometimes, a lot more than usual. And while it’s bouncing around in there, it starts to grate off the inner lining of your bladder. Painful!
So when you’re not having to run to the bathroom to pee, you’re bleeding. You have to wear a pad, sometimes two if you’re bleeding quite a lot. They chafe the inside of your thighs and your balls, and sometimes your pubic hair gets caught in the adhesive backing.
You decide that pads suck, so you stick a cotton wad in your urethra to stop the blood. It can chafe quite a lot if there’s not much blood flowing when you put it in, and if often chafes coming back out if you have to remove it to pee.
If you’re lucky, you can’t feel the wad in there, even if you get an erection, but if you have a smaller penis, you almost always feel it. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but when you sit down you’re aware that you’ve got a foreign object lodged in your dick, and it’s not an awesome sensation. Also, it seems to make the cramping from the little landmine in your bladder worse.
Lucy A. Snyder - Sparks and Shadows Page 3
