A recent feminist writer from Texas says she thinks the penis is very much like a banana. She has, she says, seen quite a few in her time. Not as many, I guess, as most women doctors. Rick’s wife Dahlia got bored after the first 25, of course they weren’t humping, they were patients, general examinations or something like that. Cocks are sort of amazing, but there isn’t a lot of room for individualism. Cocks are not as individual as men’s feet, for example, or their shoulders; or women’s backs or their buttocks; faces generally take the individualism title, although several times in my life I’ve met a person who looked almost exactly like someone I knew. Hey, I said, you’ve got Robert’s face, I wonder where Robert is right now and what is he doing? The comment about seeing quite a few, basically a lift from the dozens of Frank Harris types with their comments about
seeing quite a few puds, okay, and men sort of like these comments sometimes, more or less; gets a brief laugh from the audience. The laugh allows her to move on without really saying very much about her own image. I thought her image was in the direction of A woman and Arnold Banana. Hard-ons look pretty much alike also, I think, depending on the light, and some guys are a little bigger. But what’s interesting about cock, apart from all the names for it, and sure, black guys have chocolate-coloured cocks and Indian guys must have reddish-olive and so on, is the variety of perhaps 20 or 25 different stages of tumescence. They are in that sense a bit like weathervanes plugged in with a special current to what’s happening at any time, even in sleep, in the male body. Banana is a nice conceit, a wonderful colour: but that would leave out the most female part of cock, that almost blatantly pink bland glans penis. Mine has a small pale brown circle about the size of a piece of confetti, relax, it’s a birthmark. The first guy I ever slept with was fondling it and then he looked up with a disingenuous expression on his handsome face, and he said, You didn’t tell me you got married this afternoon, you’ve got a confetti mark. Hey, that’s funny; hello, Ned, how the hell are you?