SQUASH AND MY PENIS (PART 2.6)

Previously: Squash and My Penis (Part 2.1), (Part 2.2), (Part 2.3), (part 2.4), (part 2.5)

No problem. I go to the grocery store. I’m 12 or so now. I try to look nonchalant as I scan the produce aisle.

It is immediately apparent that nervous, red-faced 12-year-olds are outstandingly rare in the supermarket. Unlike in the Malaysian corner store, the staffers in the Safeway look intrusively curious. Whistling, affecting a gosh-golly-look-at-the-time expression, I flee.

Plan B: “Mom! Can I come grocery shopping?”

The German accent, “Ja. Sure. Vat for?” I don’t remember my excuse. I’m sure she didn’t buy it. I’m sure she was suspicious. But I went, and was as alert as possible in the produce section. I looked high and low. Nothing. Because you see, Safeway invariably marketed zucchini as “Italian Squash”. Probably still does. I probably looked right at it. I kept going. I found nothing.

But the gardeners among you have seen the inevitable conclusion of my search coming from a mile away. The inevitable conclusion of my story. Seen it coming because you know about zucchini; you know that the size of a harvestable zucchini is a matter of choice. They’re not like apples or oranges or bananas, which reach an average size for their variety when they are ripe. Zucchini ranges in size. Zucchini size is not a factor in zucchini function. The range of zucchini sizes that might be considered “normal” is vast. From the size of your pinky finger they are ready to eat. The ones in supermarkets tend to be harvested, roughly, at the size of adult male erect penises. The ones grown by amateur gardeners, like our neighbour, Mrs. Peters, could grow to the size of your thigh, from kneecap to hip. Which was the size of the one on our kitchen table one fine summer morning a few days later.

The whole entire size of your thigh, from kneecap to hip.

“What’s that?” I had asked, just before taking on a very large mouthful of orange juice.

My mother said, “That? Mrs. Peters brought it over.

“It’s a zucchini.”

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SQUASH AND MY PENIS (PART 2.5)

Previously: Squash and My Penis (Part 2.1), (Part 2.2), (Part 2.3), (part 2.4)

I couldn’t even grab it and read the article. I was working in secret. I was paranoid. I was suspicious. It was all I could do to come up with an excuse for the great gasp of horror that I let fly when I saw those words on the cover. We bypassed the articles to look at the naked ladies, as always. I saw nothing. My heart was reeling. I pretended to be impressed by the pictures while I plotted to steal the issue from my friend. The opportunity never came, and before I got another chance, his mother found his stash under the mattress and threw it out and grounded him for three weeks.

But the cover inspired me nevertheless. It made it clear to me that Penthouse, alone of the entire grownup world around me, was willing to tackle openly, in print even, the issue of penis size. I had already intuited that there was something bolder, something more dangerously raw about the magazine. I had to start reading it.

At first I stole it from the local corner store, tucking it into my pants. By this time I was in grade six, and suitably emboldened. Then, too guilty to carry on, I started riding my bike to a smaller, weirder corner store in another neighbourhood, one where people who knew me would never go, and I started buying it. I inadvertently kick-started my lifelong magazine addiction by always picking up a few non-pornographic titles between which to casually sandwich the issue of Penthouse. I would present the stack insouciantly to the bemused Malaysian proprietor, who pretended everything was hunky dory.

I was reading the Forum column like a talmudic scholar. And it was all there. The Suntanning Girl in the Courtyard of the Bachelor Apartment Building. The Foxy Babysitter. The Lonely Sophomore Boy in the Midwestern College Dorm Laundry Room. The Speeding California Girl Pulled Over by the Lone Cop. The Single Neighbour Lady with the Swimming Pool. The University Girls Basketball Team in the Showers with the Hole in the Wall. The Drywaller’s Client who Serves Lemonade. The Window Washer. The Twins. The Girlfriend’s Wacky Cousin who Came Over for the Weekend. The Time in the Hot Tub.

And the penises! His rock-hard 7-inch penis throbbed! I pulled out my hard 8-inch penis! All over my stiff 9-inch penis! My husband’s erect 10-inch penis! My oh-so-hard 11-inch penis! Stared at my rising 12-inch penis! Even to a wide-eyed, panting, hormonal pre-teen under the covers with a flashlight, the formulae were ham-fisted. Within a few issues it was clear to me that the numbers, indeed the entire contents, of Penthouse Forum were not to be trusted.

Nevertheless, I, uh, pressed on with Penthouse. Well. I continued to look elsewhere, of course, but I kept up with Penthouse. Just in case.

It paid off one day. In Forum. In the story of The Woman Whose Army Husband Went Away. She was lonely for him. Like really lonely. And she’s in the supermarket produce section and she sees a zucchini and it’s the exact shape and size of his erect penis.

Hello.

My young brain, already capable of running complex calculations, of synthesizing multiple factors and extracting new truths, seizes upon this. She is in the supermarket produce section and sees a zucchini the exact shape and size of his erect penis.

Job interviewers are trained to ask experiential questions when digging for the truth in candidates. Ask someone if they read a lot of books and they’ll say yes. Ask them how many books they read a year, and one will say, “oh, lots; 100,” and another will say, “oh, lots; 10.” It’s harder to lie about applied facts than it is about the purely theoretical. I knew none of this then, but instinctively I became convinced that in this one sentence in a Forum letter there was a key to the normal size of the erect male penis.

For one thing, she buys the thing and goes home and, uh, uses it. Which was weird enough that, when placed against the imaginary matrix upon which I had mapped the formulae of Forum stories, suggested that the vegetable wouldn’t have been chosen for its exaggerated size. The more bizarre the sexual circumstance in the stories, the tighter the staff writers attempted to hold to realistic everyday details. The protagonist in this highly unusual story had an intimate liaison with a vegetable, and I felt certain that the vegetable chosen would closely resemble the real thing in a desperate attempt to provide vérité.

Second, I saw that here was a detail that I could hold on to. Fruits and vegetables varied in size, yes, but they varied in size the way real bodies in real life did. There was no vague vast acceptance of a “normal” range size for an apple or an orange or a banana. No. One could instinctively see whether an apple or an orange or a banana was roughly the normal size. Or, conversely, whether it was freakishly small, withered and pathetic.

Ergo, the normal adult male erect penis was, roughly, the size of the normal supermarket zucchini. Now I just had to find out what a zucchini was.

To be continued. Look, we're sorry. We know it's rambling. It's almost done. Really.

Squash and My Penis (Part One) is way back here.

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SQUASH AND MY PENIS (PART 2.4)

Previously: Squash and My Penis (Part 2.1), (Part 2.2), (Part 2.3)

It was unclear whether the other boys were fooled by the shabby smokescreen the adults were putting up. Most, I knew, weren’t smart enough or were too trusting of adults to suspect a set-up. But it was right there. I immediately decided I had to know the truth; was my penis small? And I knew I would have to work in secret, because if people knew I was making inquiries, they might suspect that it was small. And then I would be weeded out.

But work in secret how? How would I find out how big a penis should be? Over the next few weeks, it became evident that the answer would not come easily. It dawned on me that in my world, one never saw penises, which clearly supported my paranoid theories. I mean, even in the fleshy world of the Playboy and Penthouse magazines that my friends spirited from their fathers’ drawers, there were pictures of women completely naked, and occasionally pictures of naked men consorting with them, but never, never the penises. Never. Even more ominously, there were occasional mentions of penises in the more grown-up science fiction, adventure and gangster novels that my friends and I were then starting to read, but never any mention of the size of them.

Well, except once. In Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Sonny Corleone’s dick is described as being the size of the arm of a baby holding an apple. I was shaken by the description, but I methodically, scientifically ruled the evidence inconclusive. The book said that his was an unusually big penis, and so how much bigger than average was “unusually big”? Then there was the problem of how old and how big the imaginary baby would be.

I pressed on. I read anything I could that looked like it might include penises. I even spent agonizingly guilty fleeting moments glancing at the crotches of adult males. Even though this was the 70s, the decade of tight trousers, there often seemed to be little to learn there.

Months passed. I spoke to no one of my fears. I lived a dual life. I pretended to be normal, but I spent all my spare time hunting for hard evidence about penis size. I find nothing. I was not dumb. I knew that there was no way the entire adult world could have organized a conspiracy to keep the norms of penis size quiet. Surely somebody would talk. Which was even more ominous, because it forced me to conclude that there was an intense social taboo about the topic. And a taboo was even worse than a conspiracy.

At times I felt I was crazy. Was nobody else worried about this? Were the other boys only hiding their fears the way I was? Or were their penises so big that to worry would be preposterous? And if so, how did they know? How big would that be? I told myself to forget it, that in spite of the evidence, there was no conspiracy. There was no taboo. There would be no weeding.

Then, one day, on the cover of one of those friends’ fathers’ Penthouse magazines, flagging one of the stories within, I saw the words that confirmed my fears.

“The Agony of Living With a Small Penis.”


To be continued

Squash and My Penis (Part One) is way back here.

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SQUASH AND MY PENIS (PART 2.3)

Previously: Squash and My Penis (Part 2.1),

Squash and My Penis (Part 2.2)

And so. The book. There was a detailed medical diagram of what’s inside a boy’s testicles. There was a long list of the parts of the male reproductive organs. There was a complete account of the precise function of each part. There was a complex chemical analysis of the components of semen. There was an electron microscope photo of sperm trying to penetrate the wall of an egg.

And then there was a paragraph that said penis size varies. That said penis size is not a factor in penis function. That said the range of penis sizes that would fit under the realm of “normal” is vast. That said worries about penis size were, in the majority of cases, completely unfounded.

There was a great deal of reassurance that penis size is unimportant, and absolutely nothing about what size a penis should be.

I was mortified. I had never seen such institutionalized denial before, but I instinctively knew what it meant; penis size was obviously the single most critical factor in determining the futures of young boys. Boys who had small penises were clearly ruined. Small-penised boys were doomed to be denied some kind of approval from the world that had to do with sex and sweat and destiny. The boys with small penises would be left behind, weeded out in some way and passed over, and that passing over would be so tragic, so horrible that all grownups and the entire school system had automatically come to the conclusion that we boys must never be told the truth. And nobody was ever going to tell us what the correct size was.

I had never thought about my penis size. Now I could think of nothing else.


To be continued.

*Squash and My Penis (Part 1) is back here.

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SQUASH AND MY PENIS (PART 2.2)

Squash and My Penis (Part 2.1) is here.

In my day, penises were a great mystery. And the mighty, beating heart of the mystery was size.

All of this happened back before the internet. Today your average young person could call up literally millions of photographs of penises in minutes. Kids today have total access to a constant flood of every kind of information. Boys these days? Well, it’s probably not even an issue any more. One of those charming unsung artifacts of a world that’s gone missing; a hidden casualty of the information age. Boys today have probably seen more dinks by the time they’re 15 than Madonna has seen in her lifetime. That’s a lot. But when I was young, it was almost impossible to see a penis other than one’s own.

And so imagine the adolescent 1977 city of Calgary, Alberta, where construction cranes jut into the downtown sky as the booming oil industry erects its towers, pulling the city up from its prairie-town innocence. I’m what, 10? 11? I’m sitting in a classroom in Capitol Hill Elementary School, little blonde head bent to my book along with the rest of the boys in the room. We’ve been separated from the girls today, and had to get special permissions signed by our parents; it’s sex ed day for the grade five boys. We’ve been shown a ludicrous mid-sixties film featuring a crew-cut boy whose armpits sweat a great deal as he calls a girl to ask for his first date, impressing upon us that sweat, creepily, will be a major component of our coming sexually mature adulthoods.

The rapid mechanical clattering of a film projector in the back of a darkened classroom. The blowing hum of a fan that cools a film projector motor. The analog flickering of a tungsten projection bulb. Kids these days don’t get that. That’s all gone.

There are two teachers conducting the class, a man and a woman. They are, to us, adults who knew everything there is to know about sex. They were probably, you know, 23 years old. They had handed out the book and told us to read the section on the penis.

The Penis.

I am reading along with the other boys. Outside, the sky is blue and the fuzzy pollen of the poplar trees floats on the sweet breeze. I can hear the faraway noise of younger kids outside playing dodgeball for gym class in the schoolyard. I can hear the peculiar drone of the janitor buffing the tiles down the hall with one of those pushed rotary buffers. The school smells like an elementary school. This is the last moment of my childhood in which I will be perfectly happy about my penis.


To be continued.

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SQUASH AND MY PENIS (PART 2.1)*

The first thing you need to know is that we never had zucchini in the house that I grew up in. My parents live there still, in that same house in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Some kids got moved around a lot. Not me. I’d read with envy the stories in books of kids arriving in new schools, new towns, new lives, starting over, and extrapolate from there the mobile histories of the kids who came to my classes halfway through the year. Alien kids. New kids. I was never a new kid.

I lived in that house for the first 21 years of my life, and I think it marked me. The relentless stability. It was hardly the best preparation for the high-velocity fluidity of modern life. I think I’m always looking for it now. I keep jobs longer, I stay in apartments longer and I cling to behaviours longer than a lot of people I know. I don’t mean to, but stability is imprinted on me.

Anyway, my parents had particular tastes. Like yours. Like you. There are some foods that just never appear in your kitchen. Think about it. Foods you don’t like or foods the people you live with don’t like. Foods that your own parents never ate, and you never got the hang of. Certain types of meat or varieties of vegetable or brands of canned foods that you pass by in the supermarket. Zucchini just never appeared in their kitchen. They still don’t eat the stuff, as far as I know.


To be continued.

*Squash and My Penis (Part 1) is back here.

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THIS WEEK AT MANGO PUDDING BLUES

Starting tomorrow, we’ll be posting Squash and My Penis (Part 2), being an epic of teeny tiny proportions that will be serialized, à la Charles Dickens, say, or Armistead Maupin, over the coming week. Not because it particularly calls to be serialized, but because we are concerned about your attention span, and because we are too lazy to write it all in one shot. It will be maybe four or five parts. No more than six. Ah, but don’t let that throw you. It’s not long. We reiterate; teeny tiny proportions.

In preparation, keen readers may reacquaint themselves today with Squash and My Penis (Part 1), which is not really related to Squash and My Penis (Part 2), except inasmuch as it’s thematically related, being about both my penis and squash.

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