Dear Master
I write to you as the most reviled of all your organs, objurgated and calumniated since the inception of copulation and constantly blamed for misdeeds which I freely admit to perpetrating – but always on your instructions. Anything I have ever done has been instigated by you.
There I would be pendant and somnolent and occasionally out of commission when suddenly you would shout ‘tenshun!’ and I would be obliged to spring instantly into action.
I was ever ready because eternal vigilance was my motto since I first became aware of your extraordinary and ungovernable proclivity towards the opposite sex.
Now that you have moved on into the years one would expect a katabolism or some slight contraction in the carnal drive. If anything, alas! you would seem to be more inclined than ever before towards sexual debauchery and would motivate me around the clock if you could bring yourself to stay awake that long.
God grant a silver bed in Heaven to your sainted, paternal grandmother; it was she who said that the body should be seven days dead before the penis would fully subside and even then she contended there were isolated cases where this much-maligned organ was seen to be still the outstanding feature in resurrected cadavers which had been interred months before. If this is true the cadaver was no cadaver. Rather was it a body in a state of suspended animation. An old wives’ tale I dare say but it shows that no female in her right mind would ever place the least trust, dead or alive, in the organ of organs, as I once heard it called by the captious old midwife who first brought you into the world.
It was she who said that ninety-nine out of every hundred males should be castrated at birth and the one percent isolated but sumptuously cossetted solely for the purpose of perpetuating the human species, ‘For,’ said she, ‘of all the attachments of the trunk it is the one which is to be trusted least.’
How wrongfully labelled have we penises always been. The old woman, for all her knowledge of the world, should have laid the blame for all my exploits fairly and squarely at your door.
I once heard an itinerant evangelist suggest at a street corner in the city of Dublin that there was nothing so profound as a common erection.
The truth is that there is nothing less profound for the pump in question, the pump of life, is the most uncomplicated adjunct of the entire human system, so whenever we hear a person say that he or she has read or heard something profound what it really means is that they are more mystified after experiencing this so-called profundity than they were before.
The point I would ram home – you’ll find the expression endearing I’m sure! – is that I am simply your puppet and that I have no influence whatsoever over my destiny.
There are people who say that excessive drinking brings out the worst in me. What they should be saying is that it brings out the worst in you and that you are capable of submitting me to the most extreme excesses after a sustained bout of intemperance. You would place my very existence in jeopardy such is your lack of restraint and distortion of outlook after an alcoholic shaughraun.
You take the whip to conscience and oust him from his watchtower whenever it suits your vile purpose.
Conscience, poor creature, is a head-shaker and a tut-tutter rather than a dictator. It is you who dictates to and manipulates poor Mister Conscience until he is more of a yes-man than an honest witness for that which prosecutes on behalf of the Creator.
I remember just before your first fall cut you irretrievably adrift from lovely Lily Lieloly, you were at that manky stage in your debauch-filled career when a choice had to be made between your continuing virginity and your likely defilement.
I had fondly hoped that because Lily Lieloly was also a virgin you would preserve me for that glorious union when you and Lily would consummate your betrothal and bring everlasting joy to both your hearts.
Virginity is, unfortunately, something of a souvenir, often priceless to its owner but frequently worthless on the open market.
You held yours in so little regard that you unashamedly and heedlessly disposed of it at the first available opportunity. Even after that first disappointing encounter I had hoped that your unsatisfactory initiation into the sorry rite of illicit deflowering would signal your return to the road of righteousness.
It was not to be and in no time at all you had exhausted the last reserves of local harlots and accommodating amateurs. Soon you were to become a familiar figure in the iniquitous dens of nearby cities until you were rendered temporarily hors de combat by a four-feet-eleven masseuse who, for a few extra quid, provided you with what she termed the full treatment as advertised in the jargon of the trade, on a charge sheet which hung between framed photographs of the late John F. Kennedy and Pope John the twenty-third.
It was Sir Alexander Fleming, through the medium of his miraculous penicillin, who must be praised and thanked for your speedy recovery. You were to indulge your weakness at colossal expense of both the physical and financial kind before finally succumbing to the wiles and monies of the oldish and plainish heiress, Miss Penelope Fitzfeckid.
There followed several years of marital harmony, during which time Penelope presented you with two daughters and a bouncing boy.
Then one day you called me up unexpectedly for active service far from the home front. It was the evening of some rugby international at Twickenham.
There you were one minute carousing and chorusing with your cronies and the next in the rear seat of a taxi heading for one of those haunts where you once excelled yourself, or so you believed, in those rakish days before marriage.
You were recognised at once and rapturously received by the never-ageing Madame who, according to herself, had spent the intervening years wondering and worrying about your sustained exile from her buxom charges, all of who had now been replaced by younger and more agile exponents of the high and ancient art of copulation.
There were times during that long weekend when I feared for our survival but miraculously you managed to escape visitation from the wide variety of painful diseases which were then rampant in that particular parlour.
We were not to be so lucky on a later occasion which I will also never forget for another reason, this being that you put me to work when I was no longer capable and made me the butt of your paramour’s vulgar wit – and not one word in defence out of you to whom I have given decades of incomparable service. Instead you laughed loud and long.
You once remarked to a crony that I had betrayed you. Your exact words were:
‘I might have been a chap of infinite morality, a veritable paragon had I not been let down by the most contumacious pudenda!’
I heard you announce another time, in an effort to justify a short-lived affair with a local matron:
‘What a wonderful fellow I would be but for this baggage of reproduction which demoralises my every thought and deed.’
Who knows better than yourself, my dear master, that it was nothing but your own interfemoral phantasising which was the paramount contribution in all our efforts. It has been said that I have no conscience and for once they speak the truth about me, for it is you who possesses the conscience and I can take some satisfaction from the fact that it keeps you awake nights.
However, it is true to say that your conscience takes leave of absence whenever I am called up to illicitly execute your iniquitous behests. Afterwards, when your conscience returns, I am sickened by the excess remorse in which you wallow, remorse, I might add, of little duration.
I will not cite other acts which I was obliged to perform on your behalf but I must mention your habit of urinating into your shoes whilst in your cups and indeed leaving your bed after a night consuming gallons of beer and advancing to the head of the stairs where you would set a minor cascade into motion. There must have been at least a hundred bed-wettings after your beer sessions. Indeed in your drunken stupors you have peed into purses, flowerpots, frying pans, pianos and wastepaper baskets, everywhere in fact but into the numerous chamber pots which your long-suffering spouse would so thoughtfully and strategically arrange at the precise places where you had emptied yourself before.
Often on your way home from pub crawls you would do it against dustbins and doorways, telephone and electricity poles, shop windows and sacrosanct monuments. No place was sacred when the urge beset you. Worst of all was that pre-wedding night when by some perverted mischance you located your mother’s wedding bonnet and filled its upturned crown with a froth-covered outflow which would have done justice to a Shergar or a Nijinsky!
There was a time you did it through the keyhole of a watchful neighbour and very nearly deprived the poor creature of a vision already impaired from exposure to constant draughts and rain-squalls. There was the time you attempted to do it against the trousers of a custodian of the peace and had to exert all your influences to keep the matter out of the courts.
I will never forget the night you were caught red-handed doing it into a flowerpot in the window of the local bully boy. The kick which he implanted fairly and squarely on me and the remainder of your apparatus left me unwell for days. I have often asked myself how is it that man will persist in aiming knees, boots and fists at that part of the anatomy which has given him the most pleasure. It is one of the more intriguing aspects of man’s mental infirmity.
If I were asked to recall the most outrageous statement you ever made I would suggest that it was that which referred to me as follows:
‘A man with an enthusiastic penis,’ you said, ‘is the servant of a headstrong master!’
One of your cronies insisted that you deserved the title of philosopher after such a perceptive declaration whereas if the truth were told it was about as philosophical an inanity as the nocturnal braying of a wandering jackass. Too well you know that I was never your master. You and you alone are responsible for my every action and my survival for when you go I will have to go with you, and when you decay I will decay too. But for the miracle of penicillin I would have long since capitulated to the overpowering influences of your many silent and most unwelcome visitors, chief amongst whom are those age-old invaders – clap, syphilis and pox. Monday morning blues was your way of referring to the first of this terrible trio, and what a brave face you would put on when you would whisper to the discreet apothecary in his dispensary that you required a small jar of mercurial ointment often so unpharmaceutically referred to by the loathsome name of ‘blue butter’. I refuse to recall the occasions and the wenches responsible for these visitations for I would not have it on my conscience that I scandalised the gentle reader with the more lurid details of your awesome sex life.
I am at a loss as to how I should conclude. Should I beg you to moderate your lifestyle, make representations to your better nature or ask you to turn to religion as a safeguard against eternal damnation? It would not matter one whit how I might address you since, as far as I am concerned, you have always seen to it that I will remain the most capricious of organs so that no trust whatsoever may be reposed in poor me!
Faithfully
Your Penis