Ode to Dicks
As words go, dick covers more ground than penis. And it does not appear right before penitence in the dictionary. I don’t feel penitent for the penises of my life (Say “penitent penis” twelve times fast.). But I dick around with dicks. Dicks are many things. You can be a dick. Just slam a glass door in someone’s face. “Dick” can be your nickname (“Tricky Dicky”). And if you chase rapists, murderers, and thieves, you are a “Dick,” short for detective. If you “dick” someone, that means you penetrated them, as anyone who spends time with twentysomething men knows well: “I dicked him so hard that he screamed.”
Most of the time, dick refers to that skin-clothed protuberance hanging between the thighs. For what is a dick? It is not one thing. It is dynamic, shifting. An apparatus. Dicks were meant to move, to grow, to swing. Go to a male locker room at 3 pm, and you will see dicks of varied lengths and firmness. Cold dicks are small and shriveled. If the dick is uncircumcised (“uncut”), the head sinks back into the foreskin, a blushing pansy. Grip an erect dick, and it feels soft yet firm, a spring-roll. Even the veins could be sliced mint and noodle. I love a good spring-roll with soy sauce, pungent and salty.
A dick is not just a dick! It encompasses the ball-sack sagging beneath the shaft. Polite company call it the scrotum and testes. In high school, the basketball boys humiliated a bucktoothed bench-warmer. The runt of the pack. I’ll call him Marvin. “Marvin has three testes! Three!” the boys jeered from the basketball court, shooting their ball down the mesh net. Three testes? This seemed an ambiguous put-down. Three testes either makes you a freak of nature, something rising from the mists of Chernobyl. Or you are the Head Honcho, the Alpha, the Big Guy rollin’ with the Big Boyz (cue picture of monkey with melon-sized balls). The balls are also where we produce the semen (cum). With three balls, you could produce 50% more of this delectable ambrosia. Sticky dicky dew.
At 27 years old, the balls are a familiar thing to me, but not the main thing. They’re the person you greet on the way to the office — the janitor, mailman, or bagel boy (“I’d like some cream cheese, please”). Someone to make small-talk with. Someone to work on, around. Scrotum feel like a twine net filled with two foam balls (Remember gym class?). Lean in and take a whiff. Yeasty, no? I would use Nabokov’s “biscuity odor,” if he hadn’t already thought it up (Fuck you, Nabokov!). I guess I’ll just have to settle for “fleshy fragrance.” No. “Doughy stench”? Ew. No. That’s even worse. An insult to carbohydrates. Tell me if you think of it. Just go to a sauna full of men. Bring a notebook.
Grip the dick-shaft and blood rushes to the head, red as a Washington apple. A sticky, wet substance drips out of the slit — translucent and sweet. This is the part to be savored. The scent will linger on the tip of your tongue for two days. If the dick is uncut, be careful to pull back slowly. Treat it as you would a person who had just decided lifted a veil they had worn all they life. They might be apprehensive about peeking behind the curtain. Show some cultural relativism. Don’t be an Orientalist. If you have done this even once, you might not leave the bedroom or park bench without bruises of your own. Hit the shaft a few times against your cheek. Tap tap tap. Put some life into it! If you have a beard, you might want to wash it. Or you might not: the dick-scent lingers. Be a Lady Macbeth: I have given suck/And know how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. Wrap your mouth around the head. Taste it. Inhale it as you would a glass of Cabernet. But pull your lips over your teeth. Alas! A dick is not corn on the cob.
If you are Jewish or Muslim, or your parents are just plain OCD, you do not have to clean your foreskin because you do not have one. Jews have theirs snipped off when they’re 8 days old, a bris, and it was in Union Square that I met some activists who thought this was genital mutilation. Perhaps. But us Jews are proud of our cut shafts. Perhaps too proud. “As for Ishmael,” God tells Abraham, “I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.” To make this great nation, Abraham had to snip Ishmael’s little willy. Snip, snip. A cut dick is a thing of beauty. But it’s also the basis of a “great nation.” Think about that the next time you savor one. The blood and soil of nation, of Zionism, of Israel, carries itself along the fleshy ridge running down the dick-head.
Embrace the funk of life, and you embrace so much more. The meek. The weak. The sick. Precarious life. The Subaltern. The lives that oligarchs want to dispose of to Make Cities Clean Again. Many straight people (and some gays) think sex is precious, sacrosanct, between two people. You know — families. And even “sex positivity” strips fucking of its erotic force, sex tips administered in the tasteless jargon of medical discourse. But sex is only sacred insofar as it’s dirty. Lips on sweat. Salt n’ grime. Stink. Fuck purity. I prefer the stench of dick. Take what you love inside. Surrender yourself to it all, the trail ‘round the head. The scent, the taste. Empty your man.
St. Augustine knew a thing or two about dick. In his Confessions, he goes to the sauna with his dad, Patricius Aurelius (His dad, not his daddy). Augustine is sixteen, having returned home from school for some r&r. ‘Gusty was a horny boy, and he writes that “the thorn bushes of lust grew rank about my head” and “when my father saw me one day at the baths and perceived that I was becoming a man, and was showing the signs of adolescence, he joyfully told my mother about it as if already looking forward to grandchildren.” Forget the double entendre of lust that grows “rank” about the “head.” Everyone knows that uncut dick smells fishy beneath the foreskin. The funk! But is this moment not royally fucked up? Imagine you’re back from university. You’re sitting with Dad at the Y. He points to your schlong: “Look, son! You’re so much bigger now (grips your shoulder). And look at that peach-fuzz! I’ll FaceTime mom. You know how long she’s been waiting for this.”
There are many things I could discuss with my parents. Not this. Dicks are a site of taboo. And in these times, when we turn our private lives inside-out like a fashion statement, there are still crevices we conceal from each other. And this is for the best. Shame is important, even now. Not only because it keeps us in line — docile boys. But because it preserves the erotic. And what is the erotic? That thing we cannot see, the space between the words, darkness. Silence tasty as death.
