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Copyright © 2016 Danny Mullen. All rights reserved. Don’t reproduce this shit without permission. Violators will be molested and beaten after being fastened to a tree.
Author’s Note
All events depicted actually occurred. Some names/incriminating details have been changed to protect careers, romantic relationships, and the general ability of those involved to hold their heads up high.
Location: Orangevale, California
Age: 23
Era: Post-college Home
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
–Pink Floyd, “Time,” key: F-sharp minor
From The Dark Side of the Moon (1973; Rob Cristgau’s opinion: “Taken too seriously, but not without its charm.”)
* * *
Tor Tarantula, my long-time neighbor, fancies himself a kind of guardian of the plant and animal life on this planet.
He keeps gardens. He has little dreadlocks in his hair. He makes smoking devices from bamboo sticks he finds in open fields. When we were younger, he had this giant pig that he’d go out and personally wake up at 6 a.m. every morning. His reason for doing so? To quote “make sure she began the day peacefully.”
And about five minutes ago, when I pulled up next to an overflowing trashcan in some nearby upscale neighborhood, and implored him to roll down the window and grab it, the trashcan, so that I could then get the car up to maybe 50 or 60 mph, and then presumably he could keep the can balanced and rolling on its wheels until we found a worthy target (mailbox, parked car), at which point he would release said trashcan, and we could all watch and be real amused by the impact...not only did he not do it; he started just plain freaking out about it in the back seat.
– This-and-that threat the trash would pose to such-and-such wildlife.
– The absolute 100% chance of it seeping into and causing irrevocable damage to our creeks and streams.
That’s another thing: his obsession with water conservation.
Once, at my parents’ cabin in the mountains, I almost reduced him to tears by failing to operate the kitchen sink in a prudent fashion.
You know that thing where you’re real dehydrated the morning after a drinking binge, where you chug three or four cupfuls of water back to back, the whole time just letting the faucet run? Pretty standard hangover behavior, right?
Nuh-uh. No. Not on Tor’s watch.
Tor Tarantula, Knight of Poseidon – who hadn’t moved since 3 a.m. the night before, and whose BAC probably still warranted a hospital visit – was off the couch and across the room before I finished drinking the second cup. Once there he began pawing desperately at the faucet, yelling about “wastefulness” in the same confused, possessive, whiney tone that I’m sure you’d get from homeless people if you tried separating them from their shopping carts.
Which makes me wonder what Tor’d think about the Shower Trick.
See, ever since graduating college and moving back home with my parents this summer, jerking off with the shower running has – to be quite frank with you – become probably my #1 method of passing time.
The name “Shower Trick” is a little misleading, though. I don’t beat off in there. That would require leg muscle. And balance. And plus all the expensive lotion I use would just get washed away.
No. I leave the shower running, is all.
Why do I do this?
It’s so, when my parents go Xing back and forth with perked ears through the hallway, listening for any trace of grunting, or the telltale smack of skin on skin…they hear only the whine of pipes, the patter of water.
I’m sure they imagine me, their only son, who is now technically a grown adult, doing mature, innocent, hygienic things in there.
But the truth?
Truth is, 9 times out of 10 I’m splayed across the edge of the sink – tongue out, beating myself into submission. Not even anywhere near the fucking shower. While gallon upon gallon of perfectly good water flows unused down the drain.
What would Tor say about the fact that, this summer alone, the amount of liquid I’ve wasted in this fashion could likely fill an orca habitat at Sea World?
How would he take the news that the water is always somewhere just below “molten lava” on the temperature spectrum, just because I think the steam really sets the mood?
Would it be the end of our friendship? The cold truth about how many afternoons I’ve spent chipping away at local reservoirs with locked-out knees and a pulsating fist?
I don’t know. But the point is, all this – Tor’s haircut, his love of animal life, and the throbbing erection he has for environmental justice – all this is why I experience a bit of…I don’t know. I guess you could call it “cognitive dissonance” when, now, back in the car, while we pass by some high school kid with his high school girlfriend on the side of the road – both of them leaned up against a Honda Civic, making out and stuff – Tor takes the basketball he stole from Dave and Buster’s a little while ago, leans out the window, and just fucking creams this kid with it.
I experience some cognitive dissonance while watching this.
“Tor! HOLY FUCK.” I’m all over the gas pedal now in the name of escape.
“Ha, fuck yeah!” he says, throwing up an unseen and totally needless middle finger at the kid through the rear window. “Did you see me nail that piece of shit?”
More than “see,” I was moved by what I heard. There was this sickening UHMFF noise as the ball evacuated the kid’s lungs.
“But what the fuck, Tor!?! You wouldn’t do the trash thing – and, and, but this?!!”
Tor’s still chuckling and looking out the back window. “What, the overflowed can? Yeah, fuck that shit.” A few beats pass. “Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
I glare at him through the rearview mirror. “Never mind. Let’s just get the fuck away from here.” Then I make a hard right onto the multi-laned Sierra College Boulevard. Heading, just as a precaution, for the border (and accompanying safety) of our home city of Orangevale.
* * *
How the night degenerated into this adolescent-style mischief fest is still semi mysterious to me.
Things at least began respectably, I’d say, when I volunteered to serve as Designated Driver for what appeared to be, by most calculations, a low profile trip to Dave and Buster’s.
I drove around town in my mom’s sedan picking up the following crew: Tor Tarantula, Bladewing the Risen, and a guy so unimportant to this story that we’ll just call him #4; each of them already in various stages of intoxication.
And even after these guys spent maybe a solid hour boozing at the D&B’s bar…things still progressed for a while in a manner I’d call “socially acceptable.” They may have been a little overzealous in pursuing the like two female patrons in the arcade (it’s Tuesday night), and something of a racket was raised during our four-way air hockey game, but you know – these are standard scenes at D&B’s, I’m sure.
If I had to pinpoint the first real signs of erosion in our group’s composure, I’d point to when Tor, shitfaced, began slithering around beneath the scrolling-backboard-free-throw-shooting-game thing, looking for lost basketballs. Or when I, bored, began offering our pregnant bartender 100 USD to take a shot.
I thought this – the shot thing – was real funny, and not actually a bad offer (what’s one drink going to do?) and, like, give me a break – as if babies born out of wedlock to Dave and Buster’s employees have much of a chance anyway. However, the bar manager and the security guy were not stoked. Especially when Bladewing the Risen and #4 caught wind of the challenge, and set to work egging the woman on in increasingly loud and hostile voices.
Speaking of pregnant people: it was around this same time that an oblivious Tor Tarantula rounded a row of arcade games with two giant, perfectly spherical bulges beneath his shirt. And as the unofficial guardian here, taking inventory, I just kinda had to be like check please and usher everyone toward the door.
“Where is that second ball, by the way?” this is me now, a few lights down on Sierra College Boulevard.
“Yeah, Tor,” says Bladewing the Risen. “I saw you walk out with two. Let’s bust the other one out and, uh, you know” he moves his hands around, searching for words, “reload the cannon.”
“But will Danny be Ok with that?” says #4, in a tone that suggests I’m a pussy. He’s riding shotgun. “I mean, you were fucking tripping out when he hit that kid.”
“It’s not that I’m, whatever, philosophically opposed to pelting people with things out of moving cars,” explaining myself, “it’s just that Tor here is host to a few… gaping character inconsistencies, is all.”
Tor says, “I don’t know what you guys are talking about. I only stole one basketball.”
“Well, either way, I’m pretty down to go around throwing more shit at people,” says Bladewing the Risen. “What about that box of oranges your mom has in the trunk? I saw oranges. Maybe we should like – ”
But in a flash, I’m tuned out of all the in-car jabbering.
See, near where Sierra College Boulevard approaches our neighborhood, there’s this big, rolling hill that’s about a quarter mile from bottom to top on either side. And in the rearview mirror now, I spy a pair of headlights cresting it, and then descending in a way I deem to be suspiciously fast.
“Danny, did you hear that?” Bladewing again. “Let’s pull over.”
“Isn’t that maybe overkill though?” says Tor. “To throw, like, a full box of oranges at someone?”
Bladewing turns his head, narrows his eyes. “No, you fucking moron – single oranges. One at a time.”
There’s a decent sized pause before Tor says, “Oh.”
He and Bladewing begin busting up, high-fiving each other.
“Ok, sorry to interrupt, guys,” me, “but, uh, maybe take a look out the back?”
By the time everyone’s heads have spun 180, the car I’ve been eyeing is about a football field’s length away, and closing in quick. It’s pretty clear that whoever’s piloting the thing views the posted 45 mph speed limit as a suggestion rather than hard and fast law.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “What’s that line they always use for situations like this in action movies and Star Wars? (1977; Rotten Tomatoes: 93%.) ‘We’ve got company’? That's it, right?”
Within seconds, the Honda Civic is on us – parallel in the second lane, honking and swerving and flashing its high beams.
Then its passenger window comes down and there he is: the world’s most pissed off high schooler. Most recent victim of inflatable sporting good drive-by assault.
Just on impulse, chuckling to myself, I give him the finger.
He returns the gesture, plus starts blasting his horn, pointing at the road up ahead. His girlfriend, shotgun, doesn’t look overjoyed about being tangled up in this mess.
Other people who don’t seem overjoyed: my passengers.
It’s strange. Despite all Bladewing’s big talk about oranges and pedestrians, and despite Tor’s fairly ruthless strike with the D&B’s basketball, both of them, Tor and Bladewing, have seemingly metamorphosed into a pair of 5th grade girls in the back seat.
“DANNY, DANNY – SPEED UP, DUDE! DRIVE! DRIVE!”
“YEAH! C’MON MAN – DO IT! JUST PASS HIM A-AND FUCKING DUCK OUT ON YOUR PARENTS’ STREET AFTERWARDS.”
It’s embarrassing, really. From all their high-pitch screaming and flailing, you’d think the kid had an assault rifle pointed at us through his window.
Not to mention their advice is dog shit.
Speed up? Outrun him? Apply pedal to metal and go swerving around the street?
No. Terrible ideas.
“Ok, Ok, everybody just calm down now,” I tell my passengers.
See, as far as car chases go, I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t my first frolic in the Forbidden Forest. To say I’ve pissed off a few motorists in my time is like saying Picasso, during his life, produced one or two or maybe three paintings.
I sharpened my fangs in this sport at a young age, people. To give you an idea, back in my early high school career, weekend nights began more often than not in the parking lot of some Wal-Mart: pooling bills and change, deciding who would be schmuck to go in and make the eyebrow-raising purchase of four cartons of eggs at 10 p.m. (usually me). Then speeding off into the night in someone’s mom’s minivan, looking for moving targets. The highest ranking in the crew claiming shotgun; the lowest relegated to the position of tail gunner (again, usually me).
(Speaking of high school and tail gunning…I was expelled from Casa Roble Fundamental about a week into my sophomore year for an incident that involved (1) an airsoft gun, (2) the back seat of my buddy’s mom’s white minivan, and (3) an unsuspecting cheerleader waiting curbside for a ride home. Though I concede this was a poor exercise in judgment, I’m still bitter, and relations between the school and me have been strained ever since.)
But anyway. The point is, during this period, I couldn’t help but learn a thing or two about shaking off pursuing cars – if only from constant observation and practice.
So I can now confidently tell you this: flooring it and trying to duck out on a side road is a total sucker play; both ineffective and dangerous. A real veteran of drive-by mischief knows that the correct move is almost just the opposite…
Back on Sierra College, with High School Kid still revving up and swerving around in the lane next to us, I, without saying a word to anybody, give him a dainty little wave before firmly applying the brakes.
Bringing us to a complete stop. Right there in the middle of our lane.
Predictably, everybody in my car goes fucking ape shit over this.
“DANNY! FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?! NO!
“DANNY NO, NO, FUCKING DRIVE, DRIVE, YOU ASSHOLE! NOW! C’MON! GET US THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!
Bladewing the Risen even has nerve enough to make a grab for the steering wheel, which I view as an act of mutiny, and punish accordingly with a firm swat to the wrist.
I do get their discomfort, though. What amounts to finding a parking spot in the middle of the street isn’t strictly speaking “safe,” and won’t likely be described as such in any Driver’s Ed handbooks.
But here’s the deal: as far as safety goes, what you’re doing – stopping – is like swimming with floaties on compared what your pursuer is now going to have to do if he really wants to continue the beef:
– Come after you in reverse, against the flow of traffic.
Ignoring all the shouting, I flip on my emergency lights, stay put.
And the Civic, because it was doing the whole macho thing in the lane next to us (count on this: pursuing drivers will almost always pull up broadside to give you the finger and yell and just generally let you know how TO'd they are)… since it was doing all that, it goes flying past us, and doesn’t realize what I’m up to until it’s some six or seven basketball hoops in distance up the road. Then it begins to slow before, very hesitantly, it also comes to a stop.
I can just about see the confusion radiating off the vehicle. Pure WTF? vibes from the brake lights.
“C’mon c’mon c’mon,” I’m muttering to myself, scanning the rearview mirror for approaching cars.
None yet. A little worrying. Even one or two at this point would force the Civic up the road.
“DANNY! FUCKING DRIVE!” yells somebody. “I’M BEGGING YOU. PULL PAST AND – !”
“Shut, up.” Me, raising a hand for silence. “You guys are such fucking amateurs. You really think a high-speed chase is the right idea here? With some rich Roseville kid who’s probably got, what, two birthdays and some Christmas money under the hood?”
The Civic seems to be at a complete loss as far as what comes next. It honks its horn a couple times, but in a pathetic way. Just an attempt to maintain some type of aggression.
“Danny, just listen, dude. I really think we should – ”
Bladewing falls silent.
We all watch as the Civic begins rolling toward us in reverse – slowly at first, then picking up speed.
“Huh," I say. "Well this hasn’t happened before.”
End teaser. Sorry if that was annoying
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The Kock Krisis (Read Here)
Copyright © 2016 Danny Mullen. All rights reserved. Don’t reproduce this shit without permission. Violators will be sodomized.
In the moments after finding out that the girl I’d been seeing on-and-off for two years had at one point in her life banged a black dude with a giant cock, I was not, shall we say, “hyped.”
She and I were sprawled out on the bed in my MGM Las Vegas hotel room
It was four in the morning. Memorial Day Weekend. The window providing a twinkling view of the pre-dawn strip. Both of us just in from a night of partying.
And given that this was the first time I’d been alone with her in…20 days? a month?…and given that I'd recently developed Serious Feelings…you could say things were getting feisty here. Fast.
There was, after all, a reason I forfeited the extra $200 for my own room instead of staying with friends. A reason not unrelated to she and I living on opposite ends of California, and all the physical limitations associated with that. She was all mine now, though…in my filthy paws at last…
But then:
“I guess if I had to watch you have sex with another guy,” I was saying during pre-coital chitchat, joking around, “I’d want it to be like porn. Less romantic that way. More funny. You know–blazing lights, fat slob of a director in the room, black dude with a fat cock.”
I reached for my beer on the night stand, thinking: heh.
She sniggered here, held up a single finger. “One black guy. I’ve had sex with one black guy before.”
I froze. “Black guy? Sex?”
“Yeah. While I was in Paris.”
Dread. Dread began spilling into my head like water into a sinking ship. This wasn’t how this conversation was supposed to go at all.
“Did he…did he have a…big cock?” I don’t know why I asked this. If I could go back in time, I never would have asked this.
She sniggered again. “God yes. It was so big it like wasn’t even good. It barely fit.”
I glanced downward.
My boner?
Forget about it. As if a pig farmer had walked down there with a shotgun and slaughtered it. Dead limp in ten seconds.
“Well, uh…I guess…I guess that’s a black dude for you. Though I think maybe scientifically it’s been proven that, um, across the board”–I had no idea what the fuck I was saying here; this was total auto pilot–“on average, all races are about the same? ‘Cause there’s–”
“No,” she cut me off, laughing condescendingly, all but patting me on the head. “Sorry, white guys, but I have a lot friends who’ve hooked up with black dudes too. They’ve definitely got you beat.”
I stuttered a few times: nothing.
Then, for reasons I’ve not yet been able to deduce, she went ahead and added: “Yeah, it was weird. He made me dinner, and then afterwards he rounded the table and came at me and we just started fucking.”
There was a good 5 seconds of silence here.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, rolling off the bed.
In the bathroom, feeling dizzy, I placed a hand against the mirror for support.
Then I passed maybe a full minute looking myself in the eyes, slowly shaking my head.
Fuck.
My gaze eventually wandered down the mirror to my groin region.
Now, I’ve always had a general understanding of where I stood in terms of dick size, if only from gauging reaction to it among the general population.
And make no mistake: my population sample is large. It, my dick, has been presented to a pretty much unknowable number of coeds in shadowy bedrooms. Has been pulled out and waved around drunkenly on countless balconies and residential streets across America.
The verdict?
Bad.
Or, rather, not very good.
Throughout its career, my cock has inspired awe in the hearts and minds of precisely nobody. At best, it’ll pass without comment. At worst, its presentation is met with ridicule. For anyone to start making remarks like “big” and “barely fit,” you’d have to balance a film canister on the tip of this thing, and then secure that film canister using half a roll of duct tape.
Which, all of a sudden, I began to view as very bad news indeed.
Why? Because, still in the bathroom, still staring at my own genitals, a connection was made. A hazy memory from earlier in the night came flashing back into focus:
“Did you know 50-cent is in Vegas right now?” said my kind-of-girlfriend, both of us in some hotel hallway before going out. “That’s, like, all my friends have been talking about.”
“Ah,” said I. “Old 50, huh? Pretty cool, I guess.”
“Yeah. He was at the club I was at last night, and I was super excited.” A pause. “I’d fuck 50-cent.”
Now, granted, in the moment I’d had no problem with this.
Every girl would fuck 50, if shove came to push. He’s famous, he’s rich. The man starred in his own film, for fuck’s sake (Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ 2005; Rotten Tomatoes: 16%). You’d be stupid not to bang him.
But now, still zoning out against the mirror, the grim connection crept up and sunk its fangs: Fucked black dude in Paris…wants to fuck 50-cent pretty bad…is this all about cock size? A big dick obsession?
I glanced down at my dick one more time–again sighing, again thinking: fuck. Then I prodded it with a finger, to see if this sex thing out in the bedroom was still going to happen or what.
It happened, somehow. And actually ended up being quite good (for me, that is: a distinction my mind couldn’t help making).
Only problem was, the whole time, like 25% of my brain functioned as a projection booth, playing out two different scenes on repeat.
The first featured the black guy in Paris as some rapper type. “Shawty, wut you drank’n?”–that was his pick-up line.
It worked. And in the fantasy he swooped my kind-of-girlfriend out the club and back to his pad, where he then proceeded to harpoon her for upwards of two hours on a couch.
In the second fantasy, he was some suave, muscular, well-dressed, gentlemanly black dude. Teaching her French, cooking her a five-star caliber meal, demonstrating an encyclopedic knowledge of French wine and cheese. And then harpooning her for upwards of two hours on a couch.
Anyway. She left the room around 10 am on Sunday morning to catch her flight home. (Wearing my sweatshirt over her dress. She insisted on this, thinking it would dissuade any would-be judgment-passers down in the hotel lobby. A sweatshirt I’ve yet to get back, by the way, and which–let’s face it–is probably going to be taken out back and burned the moment this thing is published.)
She was gone. But me…I still had another 24 hours left to go in Vegas.
24 hours in which I was less a present, enthusiastic, Vegas party animal and more just a hollow human crust drifting through the city.
Like, for example, the pool party at Mandalay Bay.
While most of the time I was technically doing things like dancing and drinking and splashing around with friends, mentally I was far away. Back in the hotel room at the MGM, getting the news. Or in that sinister Parisian apartment that my imagination had built and furnished, watching chest-tightening things take place on the couch.
The sunglasses I had on came in handy.
Twice or thrice, I found myself rooted in place on the pool deck, head cocked toward a large group of African-American males, my gaze fixed immovably at crotch level. Not knowing how I got there, or for how long I’d been standing around staring. Then having to shake out my head, think happy thoughts, resume partying…
But the fear remained: did all these guys have bigger dicks than me? Like, every single one?
Earlier, I dismissed my claim that all races are on the whole roughly equal with regard to penis size as rambling. But I do have some evidence to support this.
A black guy with whom I used to train martial arts, for example, had a legendarily small penis.
Small for any race. So small and so well publicized (a big ladies’ man, he was) that it was more or less the talk of Sacramento from circa 2008 to circa 2009. Virtually any girl you asked in any club could tell you about it, or at least point you to some friend who could. It was such common knowledge at our gym that even like the 12-year-olds in the after-school jiu-jitsu program knew about it. The fucking maintenance guy would talk about it during his lunch break. It might have been the second piece of gym-related information a new person received upon finalizing their membership, right after the schedule.
But it’s true…
Ever since this one afro-penile outlier, the anecdotal evidence I’ve collected from women has, admittedly, been pretty unanimous: black dudes tend to have tremendous slabs of meat dangling between their legs.
And so now, thinking about this, back in Vegas, walking around the pool, I was seized by crippling anxiety when looking at any man whose skin color was darker than, say, a cardboard box. Just terrified. Imagining him with a cock the size of a largemouth bass. Then imagining my kind-of-girlfriend having some sort of extrasensory ability to detect this, and hungrily inviting Bass Dick to go ahead and rip her to shreds on some nearby couch.
The trip, which already had flaming engines, which had already begun its sickening plummet towards earth–it officially became my Worst Vegas Trip Ever just after midnight in XS nightclub. Listen to this shit.
Well, first of all, I’ll say that I was actually having a good time early on. My good buddy Consonant Tift and I had roped in a group of girls (who were on the whole pretty thumbs up) to party with us/make us look cool. Also, we’d kinda docked at this booth occupied by a bunch of dentists or something, and they were reasonably generous with their booze.
I remember at one point swimming through the crowd toward the bathroom, smiling a bit, thinking things may after all at least for tonight be Ok, when the featured D.J., David Guetta (a real European bastard), said something to this effect over the sound system:
“I have very special announcement for you all! I like to welcome somebody to join me on stage…”
Interest piqued, I stopped walking, got up on tip-toe, looked over the crowd, narrowed my eyes.
“Ladies and Gentleman…” he lowered the mike a bit, chuckled. Then: “Please welcome, 50-CENT!”
“Oh my God,” I growled.
“Oh my GOD!” squealed a group of girls behind me, rushing the stage.
50 came bounding out–huge fucking grin, throwing up his hands, inducing mass hysteria in the crowd.
I just spun around and left. Walked out of the club solo without saying anything to anybody. Then I went back to the hotel room, where I put on an Elliot Smith record, drank myself sloppy, and anxiously felt up my dick until passing out. The whole time thinking: fuck.
My psychological condition, I confess, failed to improve upon returning home to San Francisco.
And probably the worst part about my first day or two home was this absurd, bad television-style string of coincidences that kept following me around, haunting me. The unannounced guest appearance of Curtis Jackson at XS–fucked up as it was–proved to be just the beginning.
Take for example my first night back.
In bed, teeth brushed, wanting just peace & sleep, I opened my laptop to resume the film I’d been watching before leaving for Vegas: Taxi Driver (1976; Rotten Tomatoes: 98%).
I was still out of my head at this point. Under that kind of what-is-my-life-and-what’s-the-point raincloud that follows you around after any big Bender Weekend. So, you know. I would have been in a delicate state anyway–even without all the black dicks. Even without what was rapidly shaping up to be my own full-blown personal Kock Krisis.
And which scene did I happen to be right smack in the middle of? What was the first thing to come flying out of my laptop and lay a beating on my already crippled psyche in wide-screen, digitally remastered, iTunes-quality HD?
It was the scene where De Niro is driving the vaguely-Jewish guy around to stake out his, the vaguely-Jewish guy’s, wife, while she conducts herself in a most unfaithful fashion with a neighborhood black man.
I groaned, rolled over face down in anguish, thinking: are you fucking kidding me?
Then I thought: the Jewish character's cock deficiency—that's gotta be the root of this affair.
Maybe five minutes elapsed like this before I mustered the energy to roll over again and switch films. I settled on Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002; Rotten Tomatoes: 96%) just because I was reasonably certain there are no black people in there, other than orcs.
Bad insecurity. Paranoia even worse. It got so bad that, the next day, I couldn’t help feeling that San Francisco itself had somehow turned against me, become an agent in this whole affair.
Though the weather had been stellar for months, a fog moved suddenly into the city, creating an atmosphere of menace and general depression.
On my way to work, a gang of boombox-wielding youths followed me onto the subway, flooding the air with rap music as I tried to read peacefully from a book. The text became a blur. The angry voices of huge-cocked black men were all I could focus on.
And upon surfacing in downtown SF: more rap. Blaring from every bus stop and street corner. On my skateboard, I began pushing faster, keeping my eyes up. Not wanting to see who was playing the music, not wanting at all to add their dicks into this whole equation.
But what did this–looking up–get me?
Skyscrapers. Buildings that I’d never given a second glance were now mocking me with their size and general shape.
During my shift that night–a fashionable restaurant downtown being my employer–I was, quite frankly, a mess. Serotonin-depleted. On edge. Serving the rich, white clientele base with all the precision and charm of a concussed chimpanzee. Squandering large blocks of on-the-clock time in the single-occupancy bathroom, self-consciously checking out my dick from all angles in the mirror.
So there’s this homeless man who hangs out around our restaurant. He’s about 70 years old and cane-equipped, and so hunched over that it takes him maybe two hours to traverse your average city block. Skin color: black.
Well, after work, 11:30 pm, while making my way through the by then deserted city streets, this guy materialized in the mouth of an alleyway.
“Ay, man, any change tonight, man?” quoth the black guy.
I shrugged, unzipped the backpack pocket I use for miscellaneous items. It generally contains a loot of a few bucks in coins.
But while grabbing and withdrawing what felt like a Sacagawea gold dollar, two other items tumbled out: a stick of Burt’s Bees lip balm and a Trojan Ultra-Ribbed condom.
Any guesses as to which item–coin, balm, prophylactic–tickled this guy’s fancy?
He descended on the condom like some kind of demonic vulture. It was instantaneous. I’ve walked past the dude daily for almost a year now, and this was hands down the fastest I’ve ever seen him move.
“Ay! Thanks, man! I’m-a be needing this,” he said, and scuttled backwards into the darkness. Leaving me frozen on the spot with my eyes out of focus, the unwanted gold dollar still held out in my hand.
Afterwards, I went home and tried beating off to black porn, thinking it might help me make peace with the whole situation.
No. Not even kind of. It was so untherapeutic it wasn’t even funny.
The first video I clicked was one where this white, upper middle class father figure watched in severe psychic pain as his daughter was violated by a visor-wearing black. Protesting ceaselessly to quote please stop fucking my daughter unquote, while the black dude, of course, refused to comply, just laughed, kept thrusting, and countered with verbal abuse.
Then what did I do?
I spent upwards of 30-minutes desperately scanning Youjizz.com. Looking for a black dude with a cock not smaller than mine, but even just in the same, like, township. One that couldn’t simply entomb my erect penis like one of those multi-layered Russian egg doll things.
No luck. But then it struck me that the few black men who are roaming the earth with regulation sized dicks probably aren’t real eager to hop on camera and flaunt them. It carries with it, I imagine, the same stigma as like an Iroquois Indian that can’t fish. And just as this Indian would’ve probably, I don’t know, faked a sinus infection or knee injury upon learning of a forthcoming expedition involving rivers, a black man of average size, when naked, probably prefers to keep a 50-yard buffer zone between himself and anything that even faintly resembles a camera.
I digress a bit. But still. The last word of that paragraph is important: camera.
See, while foraging for a black penis of normal dimensions on YouJizz, it hit me that it was all in the camera work. The camera was responsible for making all these cocks look so mighty. And thus it followed that, with proper lighting and videography, I could achieve the same effect with my penis.
This led to an interesting few days, to say the least. I won’t go into too much detail here, except to say that there’s now like a gigabyte worth of footage of my erect cock in my iPhone. Minute long clips where I’m just circling around the thing in a totally silent room, with a t-shirt draped over the lamp. Footage that required something like a 20% deletion of my music library in order to capture, and which ended up not making my dick look bigger really at all.
And this, dear reader, is where my personal Kock Krisis really grew claws.
Forced to accept that I stacked up about as well with black dudes as a Golden Retriever would stack up against a great white shark in a sea battle, the next mission was simply to convince myself that my dick fell within the realm of normal. Like, white guy normal. Convince myself I could even satisfy women in skirmishes that were strictly penile/vaginal.
The week that followed has a hazy, dream-like quality to it in my memory, even though I was making a concerted effort to be precise, scientific.
Phase One: Research
–Passing whole nights at my desk in my bedroom: buried in online message boards, chasing academic studies…or, when inspiration failed, simply trolling the mine field that is Google Images. A wet finger held skyward, trying to deduce where I stood in terms of <, =, or > average.
Phase Two: Setting up the Experiment
–Finding myself in line at a CVS pharmacy cradling a fresh bottle of Aveeno, a ruler, and nothing else.
Phase Three: Execution
–Finding myself with a severely bruised pelvic bone after spending 20 minutes jamming that ruler into the base of my cock with all bodily might. Flexing hard. Trying to squeeze every last fucking millimeter into my Official Cock Size Measurement.
Phase Four: Scientifically, Objectively Recording Results
–Measuring for a week straight. Throwing out the low (but not the high) score. Averaging them. Thinking better of it. Keeping just the high score and calling it a day.
But the Kock Krisis, previously only clawed, sprouted wings and fangs and a spiked tail after the Internet delivered this little bit of trivia to my lap: girth is equally, if not more, important than length.
Girth! Thickness! A whole new dimension to contend with!
I wasn’t prepared for this one bit. I felt like a cyclist who’d trained his whole life for the Tour when–nope. French officials have just announced that the thing is now in fact a triathlon. Learn how to run and swim.
What a load of cat shit. And let’s not even talk about my battles with the cursed Girth Test. (The Girth Test: can you fit your erect penis into a toilet paper roll? If no: pass. If yes: fail.) Like I said, I’m not going to talk much about this, except to say that at one point there were about three empty rolls and a quarter mile of unused, ripped up toilet paper in my wastebasket, and that I didn’t get out of bed or turn the lights on afterward for roughly seven hours.
Ok. So if what I’ve written so far is any indicator, things didn’t end up going, um, “swimmingly” with the kind-of-girlfriend in question. Like so many before me, I got jealous/clingy/insecure in the way guys can get jealous/clingy/insecure after receiving a detailed account of a lover’s rendezvous with an ex-lover. Especially when that account is even remotely positive. Double especially when the ex-lover’s dick sounds less like a penis and more like a serpent belonging to the constrictor family.
And make no mistake: this dude’s cock size was, in the end, my sole objection.
It seems like most white guys I talk to have their fingers either secretly or openly crossed that the woman they’re seeing hasn’t slept with a black guy, and that she has zero interest in doing so in the future. In the weeks after the Vegas trip, a little experiment I liked to do was to go up to friends and people in bars and go: “Ok, you either find out your girlfriend has fucked a black dude, or been tag-teamed by two white dudes: which is worse?”
Good ol’ color-blind arithmetic says two simultaneous dicks should never be preferable to one. But most guys, when I presented this scenario, were just totally stumped.
Why? Is it a xenophobia thing? I’m tempted to say there’s some ancient, tribal, Us vs. Them explanation here, but if that’s the case, then how come we feel, like, less than a quarter as threatened/tripped out when we see a hot white girl with an Asian or an Indian or a Mexican dude versus a guy who’s black?
While technically I can only speak for myself, after a long mental sorting out process–during which I often sounded pretty racist, wondered if I was pretty racist–I began more and more to suspect this: black men are threatening to us white guys because we know that women like black men–and black men, as far as we can tell, put us to collective shame on the battlefield of cock.
Which then got me to thinking: how many anti-black racists, if their racism were put through a sieve, would be left afterward clutching just this one insecurity? The fear of a lover or a kind-of-girlfriend getting all but fucked out of her mind and physical existence on some couch by a throbbing, mammoth, black cock?
* * *
A few weeks ago, I managed to lure a Stanford swimmer girl home from my favorite San Francisco bar.
Some time had passed since the lower points of the Krisis here, and while I was nowhere near 100% in terms of Kock Konfidence, I was recovering. Feeling a bit bolder with each passing day.
Anyway. Stanford Girl had just pulled out/begun playing with my appendage, and I, through narrowed eyes, was pointing a finger at her, egging her on with comments such as “Yeah, jerk it, baby,” and “You want that fucking cock inside you?”
She continued fondling me silently for a few moments, contemplating something, before finally looking up and saying: “Yours is so much more…manageable than the other guys I hook up with.”
Dizziness.
A ringing in my ears.
I almost stumbled backwards against my bookshelf. Huge hallucinated cocks belonging to these “other guys” were suddenly floating across my vision. All the patches, all the stitches I’d managed to apply to my ego over the past couple of months–there they went. Ripped up and dangling from just this one sentence.
Granted: Stanford…athlete girl…likely spends a lot of time around…you know. It’s no secret that a decent percentage of the dudes staffing Stanford’s football and basketball squads aren’t exactly pale in the skin department.
But still.
Manageable! So much more!
The weird thing is I’m pretty sure she sincerely meant this as a compliment, but at the same time it was like thanks.
Compliment or no, the whole run-in had me once again pretty fucked up. The week that followed was hellish. The following weekend will likely go down forever as one of the low points in my life.
Yes. A few days slipped by and then there we were again: another San Francisco Saturday night. Another brassy, dim, elbow-to-elbow affair in some bar. One called the Tipsy Pig, if I remember correctly.
What was ol’ Danny boy up to, you ask? Well, tremendously drunk, head once again spinning with questions about my own sexual potency, I was marching up and down the length of the bar with my jeans unbuttoned, thinking: fuck online research. Time to get to the bottom of this thing–for good.
It worked like this: first I’d approach a group of girls and engage them in some standard issue cutesy bar chitchat. Then, if after, say, 15 seconds, I picked up on any non-judgmental vibes–any at all–I’d steer the conversation violently toward the topic of penis size.
Next?
You guessed it. A quick peek in either direction to make sure security didn’t have the drop on me, and then bang: out it came. My dick. Right there in the bar. (I know this probably seems ironic, given the insecurity and the Kock Krisis and all. But exposing myself is a habit about on par with cracking my knuckles at this point in my life: not even conscious most the time, and not going away any time soon.)
The first group of girls scattered instantly, shrieking as they went. The second group was a little more polite about things, but followed roughly the same blueprint (i.e. immediate dispersal).
As I’m sure you can imagine, I took these reactions tremendously personally. They prompted a long, medicinal sit-down on a bar stool that ended up costing me just over $40, and that, afterward, made talking and thinking straight very formidable tasks indeed.
And I think this sit-down can help explain why, when I finally worked up the nerve to approach group #3, there wasn’t even a preface, really. Just a few mumbled words and then all of a sudden I had my pants down, brandishing my cock.
But did these girls flee?
Did they mock me?
Did they throw a drink in my face?
No.
“Oh. Wow. A penis,” said one of them. And then, casually, as if asking what I did for work, she added: “So fill me in–why are you getting naked?”
God bless these women. They were, for the most part, awesome.
I’m saying “women” now instead of “girls,” by the way, because that, I discovered, was exactly what they were. All of them were in their mid-thirties, and all but one were married. They had kids, too, and thus all the easygoingness and tough-to-offend-ness you’d expect from people who have at one point or another had to produce human life from an apricot-sized bodily hole.
Fill me in, she said?
Oh. For around five minutes, I laid it on ‘em. Slurring quite a bit, yes, but still managing to hit all major plot points: Vegas, the black guy, the Krisis, the Girth Test, all the dick footage swimming around in my iPhone, and also the relapse I was now in the midst of thanks to a certain coed from Stanford University. Producing my cock at various times throughout the tale as a visual aid.
Like I said: most of these women were awesome–nodding in the all right places, making sympathetic noises, not even flinching when my dick made its appearances.
The only problem was this one brunette in the group who, about midway through, started rolling her eyes at me. She did it once more as I was wrapping things up, and it was so blatant and borderline hostile this time that I was driven to ask, meekly, “Is there…something wrong?”
“I don’t know if there’s anything wrong,” she fired back. “You’re just sort of pathetic, is all.”
I blinked a few times, processing this.
She went on. “I mean, check yourself out. You’re going around a bar right now showing your dick to strangers, asking them to tell you it’s Ok. It’s like you’re a little, insecure…high school…girl or something.”
Wide eyed now, beginning to panic, I began glancing around pleadingly at the other women in the circle.
More from the brunette: “Your dick looks normal to me, dude. And even if it wasn’t, here’s a little piece of advice–hopefully you can pass it along to your friends. It’s the clit you guys need to think about. The clit. Start learning about that, maybe, instead of worrying about an inch or two that probably makes–I’m willing to bet–no difference in the first place.”
And it was in the days and weeks after hearing this that I began to consider the faint possibility that maybe I’m a fucking idiot.
Did you not hate that?
If not, you might not hate Home either. It's my newest mini-book, it can be read on your phone, computer, or Kindle (instructions below), and it's the most popular thing I've written so far.
Click the link to check it out on Amazon
http://amzn.to/2d9C7De
Read it on your Phone, Computer, or Kindle.
For the non-Kindled among you, just click the READ ON ANY DEVICE button that you'll see underneath the cover art after clicking the link.
From there:
(1) Enter your phone number (for mobile reading) or email address (for laptop or desktop)
(2) Download the app Amazon sends you
(3) Use the app to search "Danny Mullen." Home will pop up.
Thanks for reading.
–Danny