April 19, 2009
The Chronicles of Testaclese: Chapter Seven

Posted at 8:41 pm, in: The Chronicles of Testaclese
Tags: Chapter Seven

Here it is, your weekly edition of The Chronicles of Testaclese.

Chapter Seven: Introduction

I interviewed a group of men between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five. These interviews were the most poignant of all, possibly because many of the men had never had a penis interview before. Unfortunately, most of the men in this age group had very little conscious relationship to their penises. I felt terribly lucky to have grown up in the masculinist era. Once man who was seventy-two had never even seen his penis. He had only touched himself when he was washing in the shower, or going to the bathroom, but never with conscious intention. He had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two he went into therapy, and with the encouragement of his therapist, he went home one afternoon by himself, lit some candles, took a bath, played some comforting music, and discovered his penis. He said it took him over an hour, because he was arthritic by then, but when he finally found his penis, he said, he cried. This monologue is for him.

Chapter Seven: The Flood

Down there? I haven’t been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with Eisenhower. No, no, it’s a cellar down there. It’s very damp, clammy. You don’t want to go down there. Trust me. You’d get sick. Suffocating. Very nauseating. The smell of the clamminess and the mildew and everything. Whew! Smells unbearable. Gets in your clothes.
No, there was no accident down there. It didn’t blow up or catch fire or anything. It wasn’t so dramatic. I mean…well, never mind. No. Never mind. I can’t talk to you about this. What’s a smart boy like you going around talking to old men about their down-theirs for? We didn’t do this kind of thing when I was a boy. What? Jesus, okay.
There was this girl, Amy Smith. She was cute—well, I thought so. And tall, like me, and I really liked her. She asked me out for a date in her car….
I can’t tell you this. I can’t do this, talk about down there. You just don’t know it’s there. Like the cellar. There’s rumbles down there sometimes. You can hear the pipes, and things get caught there, little animals and things, and it gets sticky, and sometimes people have to come and plug up the leaks. Otherwise, the door stays closed. You forget about it. I mean, it’s part of the house, but you don’t see it or think about it. It has to be there, though, ‘cause every house needs a cellar. Otherwise the bedroom would be in the basement.
Oh, Amy, Amy Smith. Right. Amy was very good-looking. She was a catch. That’s what we called it in my day. We were in her car, a new white Chevy BelAir. I remember thinking that my legs were too long for the seat. I have long legs. They were bumping up against the dashboard. I was looking at my big kneecaps when she just kissed me in this surprisingly “Take me by control like they do in the movies” kind of way. And I got excited, so excited, and, well, there was a flood down there. I couldn’t control it. It was like this force of passion, this river of life just flooded out of me, right through my boxers, right onto the car seat of her new white Chevy BelAir. It wasn’t pee and it was sticky and smelly—well, frankly, I didn’t really smell anything at all, but she said, Amy said, that it smelled like sour mild and it was staining her car seat. I tried to wipe the flood off my shorts. They were a new yellow sporty pair of short and they looked so ugly with the flood on it. Amy drove me home and she never, never said another word and when I got out and closed her door, I closed the whole store. Locked it. Never opened for business again. I dated some after that, but the idea of flooding made me too nervous. I never even got close again.
I used to have dreams, crazy dreams. Oh, they’re dopey. Why? Rosanne Barr. I don’t’ know why. She never did much for me in life, but in my dreams…it was always Rosanne and I. Roseanne and I. Rosanne and I. We’d be out. Roseanne and I. It was some restaurant like the kind you see in Atlantic City, all big with chandeliers and stuff and thousands or waiters with vests on. Rosanne would give me this orchid boutonnière. I’d pin it to my blazer. We’d laugh. We were always laughing, Rosanne and I. Eat shrimp cocktail. Huge shrimp, fabulous shrimp. We’d laugh more. We were very happy together. Then she’d look into my eyes and pull me to her in the middle of the restaurant—and, just as she was about to kiss me, the room would start to shake, pigeons would fly out from under the table—I don’t know what those pigeons were doing there—and the flood would come straight from down there. It would pour out of me. It would pour and pour. There would be fish inside it, and little boats, and the whole restaurant would fill with water, and Rosanne would be standing knee-deep in the flood, stuck to the floor, looking horribly disappointed in me that I’d done it again, horrified as she watched her friends, like Madonna and the like, swim past us in their tuxedos and evening gowns.
I don’t have those dreams anymore. Not since they took away just about everything connected with down there. Moved out the whole works. The doctor thought he was being funny. He told me if you don’t use it, you lose it. But really I found out it was cancer. Everything around it had to go. Who needs it anyway? Right? Highly overrated. I love the dog shows. I sell antiques.
What would it wear? What kind of question is that? What would it wear? It would wear a big sign: “Closed Due to Flooding.”
What would it say? I told you. It’s not like that. It’s not like a person who speaks. It stopped being a thing that talked a long time ago. It’s a place. A place you don’t go. It’s closed up, under the house. It’s down there. You happy? You made me talk—you got it out of me. You got an old lady to talk about her down-there. You feel better now? [Turns away, turns back.]
You know, actually, you’re the first person I have ever talked to about this, and I feel a little better.