Domino

“You know what I never seen in a porno before?”

“Hmm?” I replied from the backseat, scrolling through my Twitter feed. To say I was even half-interested in what my Uber driver was going to tell me would have been an exaggeration.

“A guy with a heart in his dick.”

I looked up. Our eyes locked in the rearview mirror, and although I wanted to look away, I could not. “What do you mean?”

“I never seen a guy with a heart in his dick,” he repeated in his New York City Dominican accent.

The ride was about to get weird. If I really wanted to, I could have stopped the conversation right there with a polite smile, nod, and look back down at my phone, and we would have continued the drive in silence. But what the fuck did he mean by a “heart in his dick?” Did he mean someone who fucks with passion? Or someone whose heart, the organ, was actually inside of his penis? I repeated my question, this time leaning forward, trying to crinkle my freshly Botoxed forehead.

He answered me again with his initial question. “You ever seen a guy with a heart in his dick?”

“I seriously don’t know what you mean,” I fake laughed. “I guess no, I haven’t.”

“I have a heart shape implanted in my dick,” he said casually.

“Tell me everything,” I replied.

It was something that always happened to me—getting overly friendly with the driver. Although, can I really say it was happening to me when I was such a willing participant? It usually started with them, saying something along the lines of “Where’ve I seen you before?” to which I would reply with the truth, that they had seen me sucking dick on the Internet. They’d have a million questions, and since porn is a subject I’m generally happy to talk about, before I knew it, I was ten minutes deep into a conversation I wished I hadn’t started in the first place.

That day, I was taking an Uber cab from a meeting in midtown to my cousin’s house in Brooklyn. We were still on the West Side Highway heading down to the bridge, and I knew that in this traffic, there was a good twenty minutes ahead of us. This meant I had twenty minutes to see my Uber driver’s penis without giving the impression I was coming on to him.

“I can’t believe you never seen one,” he started. “I did it myself.”

Instantly I was flooded with questions to ask, including the standard who, what, when, where, why, but I decided to start with “How?”

“I did it when I was in jail, all the guys do it.”

This was getting even better.

“Hold on,” I stopped him. “Why were you in jail?” For a moment I wondered if that was too personal of a question, but I quickly reminded myself that we were talking about his penis.

“It wasn’t for nothing I actually did,” he started. It never is, I thought. Everything I knew about criminals, I had learned on television.

“It was for stealin’ cars, but I didn’t do it. It’s a long story. Anyway, so what you do is you take a domino—you know? Like the piece from the game?”

I nodded my head.

“You shave it down to a little ball, and you implant that in your dick. You gotta be careful though, ’cause if you get an infection, you get into trouble.”

I laughed. “Wait, in jail they punish you for getting infections?”

“Nah,” he shook his head at my naivety. “Cause you not supposed to have tools and shit to shave a domino into a ball.”

“Oh. But I thought you had a heart.”

“Yeah, the first time I had a ball.”

“How many times have you done it?”

“Every time I went to jail.”

“How many times have you been to jail?” I laughed. I wondered if this was only funny to me. He didn’t smile.

“Like, three times,” he answered.

“Were you ever guilty?” I asked.

“No.”

I had a feeling he would say that.

I sat quietly for a minute. Was this a conversation I really wanted to continue? This man was not only a criminal, but (at least) a three-time criminal. Yes, he claimed he was innocent, but that was probably a bad thing. What if he saw my interest as sexual? Was my interest sexual?

“So like, how do you do it?” I continued, ignoring my best judgment.

“You really wanna know?” he smiled. It should have creeped me out, but it didn’t. “So you know where the extra skin is?”

“You mean the foreskin?” I asked, noting that a man who didn’t know the word foreskin had earlier needed confirmation that I knew what a domino was.

“Yeah,” he nodded.

I thought back to the Dominican guys I had fucked. Were they circumcised? I couldn’t remember.

He continued, “So you know when you pull it back, you slice it right there. Then you lift the skin up and push the implant in.”

“What if you don’t have a foreskin?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“What do you slice it with?”

“That’s the tricky part. Sometimes you can steal a razor. But sometimes you gotta do it with a piece of plastic you sharpened, and that’s difficult.”

I nodded in agreement—it did, in fact, sound difficult. “Do a lot of guys do it?”

“It’s a Dominican thing,” he answered. “Most guys do the ball one. They call it a ‘pearl.’ But I got a heart.”

“Why did you change yours?”

“Most guys, you do a pearl for every year you’re locked up.”

“Wait, why?” I interrupted. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked this yet.

“Cause you in jail! What else are you gonna do?”

I thought of all of the things I would do in jail before implanting a domino piece in my genitals.

“So it’s ’cause you’re bored?”

“Nah,” he laughed. “Well that too. But now when you get out, the girls love it,” he smiled.

When he said that, I realized I couldn’t believe I had never come across a man with this so-called pearl in his penis. I was from New York City. I had fucked numerous Dominicans. Surely, a couple of them had been in jail and were daring enough to cut their own dicks open?

“Ahh,” I nodded. “I see. So it’s to make sex better.”

“Ex-aa-ctly. And when’s a better time to do it? You ain’t doing shit else anyway.”

“Perr-fect,” I matched his tone. “’Cause you’re not fucking any girls anyway, you have plenty of time to heal.” I saw the logic now. “But what about jerking off? Can you do that?”

He shook his head. “Nah, you can’t touch it. Like I said, you get in trouble if you get an infection, ’cause then they know. It ain’t worth it.”

“That would be a really stupid way to get in trouble,” I agreed. I remembered the time I had pierced my belly button in secret from my parents, and only when it got infected was the jig up.

We rode in silence as we each thought our own thoughts. I wondered if he was thinking I was going to hit on him. Or maybe he thought I already was. How was I going to see his dick? I’d have to climb into the front seat. The last time I sat up front in a cab, I ended up getting kicked out in the middle of nowhere at 4:00 a.m., scared out of my mind. I was a teen, and I had sat in the passenger seat so the driver and I could smoke a joint together. He had grabbed my pussy, and I froze. I vowed to always sit in the back seat from then on.

“So you said you had a heart now,” I remembered aloud. “Why’d you change it?”

“’Cause when I was fucking girls and they saw it, they got weirded out.”

I wondered which was weirder, a pearl or a heart. “Why were they weirded out?”

“I’d tell them what it was, and they didn’t believe me.”

“Oooh, like they thought it was a growth or a disease?” I pictured myself fucking a guy for the first time, pulling his dick out of his pants, and seeing a pearl-sized bump on his shaft. I had to agree, I would be suspicious.

“Yeah. So I made it a heart. It’s cute, you know. Girls love it.”

Unless it was in reference to a baby or a puppy, it turned me off when guys used the word “cute.” That’s not to say I was turned on at any point in this conversation—but if he had even had a slight chance before, it was completely gone now. Somehow, this was exactly what I had needed to ask to see it.

“Do you like have a picture of it or something?” I intentionally said this with a straight face so he wouldn’t mistake it for flirting.

“Yeah, I got one on my phone. Just let me find it.” He dug into his pockets.

“Isn’t it right there?” I pointed to the iPhone on his dashboard.

“Nah, that’s the Uber one. You can’t take photos on it.”

I was learning so much today.

Leaning back, I waited for him to find the photo on his phone. I was being a very irresponsible passenger—asking him to look in his phone while he was driving. I hoped this wouldn’t affect my average customer rating. So far, I had 4.8 out of five stars. I wondered how many more Uber rides I would have to take with a five rating in order to achieve a 4.9 average. This was something I had given up on solving many times—I’m not the kind of Asian who is good at math.

“Here it is, it’s not totally hard though,” he apologized and passed the phone back to me.

There it was. A semi-hard uncircumcised penis with something vaguely shaped like a heart in the middle of the shaft. As much as I wanted to find it cute, as he had promised, I could not. I passed the phone back. “That’s crazy!” I said in my best fake-enthused voice, and leaned back into my seat.

We drove the remaining few minutes in silence. I didn’t know what more I could say now that I had seen his dick. He was probably thinking the same.

As I got out of the car, I opened up the Uber app on my phone to give him the five-star rating he deserved. On his profile, I saw that his name was Luis.

I hoped he gave me five stars too.