Why Are We Naked Again II

These are the penises I saw today.

Small, nestled in turtleneck of skin atop testicles like a mother bird guarding speckled eggs.
Uncircumcised, gray-haired, patient, wise.
Wagging, confident, querulous.
Purple.
An admirably glossy-headed & thickly venous truncheon beneath military crewcut.
Jiggly, excitable, peaking from a poof of tawny hair. It could have auditioned for Godspell.
A dark rose, a rich purplish brown one.
Spotted.
Sad & kind. Like a penis doing an imitation of a lapdog.
One that was all tip.
Wizened, outraged, tired.
The guy-I-ate-dinner -with's.
My father's.
One like a pig's snout.
Like a clown flower.
One with skin like Ronald Reagan's.
A burn victim's.
One obstructed by a thick kilt of fat.
Semi-erect. I swear.
Something like an abnormally large nipple.
Something I like to call The Jimmy Durante resting on what looks like a goitrous turkey neck.
One that had a certain sass--I don't know.
Black-knobbed golfballwashers that looked, without any great stretch of the imagination or even need of one, obviously penile.

I could go on. There were breasts, too. But all male. Tight protuberant bellies, aged men big with child it seemed. As if they could birth Gluttedness. Many thousands of pounds of male flesh. Innumerable many-tiered blubber-structures in motion. In glacial, labored motion. So much massy maleness, malformed & unembarrassed. So much rippling gelatinous bulk. Fold upon fold of thick velvety human meat.

Each obese septuagenarian golfer in the men's locker room at White Beeches country club made me think of the bowhead whale recently caught off the coast of Alaska with the head of a bomb lance from 1890 embedded in its neck. How could they have survived this long? Like monsters from the deep. I expected to see them pull kelp from their teeth, emit soothing high-pitched noises. Vomit plankton.

But what's most remarkable is how many of their penises I saw in 1 day.

I play golf once a year. My father's an avid golfer. It's his form of pastoral relief. Every year he invites me to a bankers' tournament. All the uppercrusts from the banks of north Jersey are invited. I am an indifferent player--in both senses: uninterested & unremarkable. My only virtue is my really unbelievably mammoth drive. It's really almost Oedipal, the pleasure I take in my superiority over these other men in this vein.

Now, bankers don't play fair. Obviously. In anything. Including golf. Especially golf. Today they played something called a "shamble."

A shamble is a game of golf in which a 4-some uses the position of the best drive as the position of all of the players' 2nd shots.

It's taken me 3 years to figure out why Dad keeps inviting me. All the old guys hit the ball about 100 yards or so. Then I step up to the tee, unshaven, inappropriately dressed, dirty, with rusty clubs that are too small for me, & I blast my drive about 270 or 280 yards. Every time. I can't explain whence this virtue springs. It's something like my aristeia. So the old boys take their 2nd shots from where my ball has landed and then wipe the floor with me, my short game (id est, everything after the drive) being nonexistent. I like it though. For once in my life, I'm a ringer. And being used isn't so bad if there's steak dinner involved afterwards. A FREE steak dinner.

Ironically, on the hole on which there is the longest drive competition, for which there is a prize of $500 & also for which I am, by common consensus, A Lock, I have the misfortune finally to obtain some sunblock to protect my raw & scaling skin & make an attempt to save what little of it I have left. The lubricant causes the golf club to slip from my hands as I am hitting the ball. The club lands in a tree & my ball bounces a piddling 7 yards. Driving competition inexplicably lost. Later, I find out that Herb Shunkey, porcine, heavy-breasted, almost dwarfish Herb Shunkey, has won with a godawful 143-yard drive.

Herb. Shunkey. That's a man's name.

But the penises. Rich men walk around men's rooms in country clubs for as long as possible without any covering whatsoever. They have towels but usually these don't fit around their waists, so they toss them over their shoulders or around their necks. If they do drape themselves with towels, it's only as a tease. It's like watching a magician whipping away the black sheet to reveal the fluttering dove perched on his index finger.

They shower with the curtains drawn.
They converse about the weather, al fresco.
They shave. Comb their hair. WAX their MUSTACHES. (I saw 2 men with handlebar mustaches that required ample, attentive waxing.)
They massage ointments into their thighs and calves. Powder their balls and armpits. Brush their fucking teeth.

CLOTHE YOURSELVES, HEATHENS!

Like any amateur though responsible cultural anthropologist, I took note of several curiosities that will no doubt be of extreme interest to anyone who fans in their breasts the flame of an abiding love for humanity. These are the curiosities attached to the behavior of rich men in private intercourse with other rich men.

First, The Unselfconscious Exposure of One's Dong. The human dong is generally charged with all sorts of dong-meanings. It pulsates with significance. It symbolizes X, Y, or Z in regular human society. But it symbolizes absolutely nothing in this context. It is entirely evacuated of any significance. It is a dumb piece of flesh the meaning or Being (Dasein) of which cannot be disclosed either through language or any of other form of symbolic interaction. Self-consciousness and shame seem to have been expunged, banished from the bright-green pastoral premises. Either that, or the phalloi are supersaturated with meaning. Meaning is derived not from the material reality of the phalloi themselves but from the true ground (Der Grund) of their Being (Dasein)--id est, their money. So then the traipsing around naked is something like the phenomenon of beer muscles. Each penis is equally intimidating, no matter the actual, measurable size of the thing (Das Ding).

Second, The Banning of Money. I arrive at the golf course. I need sunblock because I have the skin pigment of The Cure. I suggest to my father that I BUY some sunblock in the pro-shop. Answer: You can't BUY anything here. What if I give him MONEY, I ask. ESPECIALLY if you give him money, he says. You are all knowing, I say, tell me more. You must SIGN for it, he says. I say, But isn't MONEY a SIGN. He says, Indeed, but here only one's SIGNATURE allows for commerce. This is easier than giving the man money, I say. My father says, No it is more complicated, actually. You need to give them money in order for your money to be no good here, he says. Thus you cannot sign for anything. I feel like a balloon is inflating in my sinuses. I decide to let the question go. Before my head bursts. Later, I try to tip the nice woman who's driving around a golf cart full of ice cold beer. I am reprimanded. I don't understand this. I give the woman the money anyway, when no one is looking. She tells me that she cannot accept this money. That my money is no good here. I am distressed. She takes the money. I am relieved. I realize on the next hole that, by accident, I gave the woman 10 fucking whole American dollars.

Three, The Weather Discourses. After a long day of FREE golf and NO sunblock or ANY other items that might be purchased by cold hard cash, the men gather together over steaks and talk of their day of FREE golf and, more importantly, of the weather. The weather is crucial. The weather is drama. The weather is meaning. The weather keeps relationships afloat. It is both literal and figurative atmosphere. It allows men to breathe.

Four, The Exchange of Gifts. When the weather has been exhausted as a topic (for the time being), they move on to The Exchange of Gifts. Gifts are donated by the various banks. There are DVD players, TVs, golf clubs, clothing, gift certificates. There are enough gifts for exactly two-thirds of the participants. The Exchange of Gifts goes on for 2 hours.

Needless to say, despite the overwhelming odds, I win nothing.