Giggling Into the Pillow Page 2

  Finding stuff lying around out there wasn't at all unusual. Our roads had only a passing acquaintance with anything horizontal or level, and anyone new or foolish enough to come through at any speed more blinding than 10 mph was just begging to lose his truck's contents, his engine mounts, his back teeth, and his kidneys. Toolboxes, tires, old appliances, car parts, dead animals, nearly dead animals, shoes, bed frames, even the odd novelty, but, to date, none quite as novel as this. I started the water boiling as Teres came in to chop tomatoes. “Nope,” I said. “We've got all the dicks we need.”

  “Hello the house!” The front door slammed open and our roommate Dave made his presence known. He strode into the kitchen and tossed the muddy dildo in question onto the counter like an Italian salami. “Found you a replacement,” he said. It looked disturbingly real, apart from the size and the suction cup on the base. It had testicles.

  “Thanks, we were just wondering when you were gonna come by and fling a muddy marital aid at us.”

  “I know, that's why I hurried. What's for supper?”

  “Spaghetti. Why did you bring this here?”

  “Ha! Who else's would it be? You didn't lose it?”

  “No, I try and keep better care of my genitalia, and I don't think Teres is shopping around.”

  Dave turned to face Teresa, who was ignoring both of us and our new unit magnificently. “Really? Not interested in trading up? It's all you could ask for, and it's machine-washable.” He picked it up and began to poke it past her cheek, but she raised her right hand and showed him the kitchen knife she was holding.

  “I told you when you moved in: anything you poke at me will get cut off,” she said, and smiled sweetly over her shoulder. “Now go wash your pee-pee and get ready for dinner.”

  Kim and Phen, our remaining dinner guests/usual cohorts, showed up together just as the bell for the bread dinged. Kim wasn't currently seeing anybody and had decided that the best place to not see anybody was over at our house where she could complain about whom it was she wasn’t seeing. It also got her away from her perfect, white-bread, ideal relationship parents who continued to assure her that the right man would come along Any Day Now. Phen was one of our occasional friends -- he occasionally stopped by, I don't mean he was only occasionally a friend -- but was always up for free food and movies. We had laid in a supply of testosterone-dripping cinema for us to watch while Teres and Kim harangued the entire male race (I was, fortunately, exempt from that category on an honorary basis; Dave and Phen were on probation) and its constant refusal to recognize true beauty and grace when it saw it, i.e. Kim. I dumped the pasta into the strainer and ran some water over it while Teres took the pot of sauce to the table. “Hey,” she called. “Come on back, we're ready!” A pause, and then, “Ack! Dave!”

  I joined her, carrying the pasta and a plate of bread, and saw what stopped her. Dave had set the table with an elegant place setting for each of us and a grouping of flowers shoved together in the center. In the middle of the sad and lopsided floral arrangement was the dildo, pointing straight up and clearing the tops of the flowers by almost seven inches.

  At least he'd washed it first.

  Kim and Phen walked into the dining room and stopped dead, with puzzled and amused expressions. Phen broke first. “We having cocktails?”

  We explained during dinner. I don't know if you've ever noticed this before, but it is very difficult to ignore a 10” penis, especially when you have to look past it to see your dinner companions. This is not a problem I'm accustomed to dealing with, and while Dave was well known to be packing more than his fair share he still seemed nonplussed.

  It didn't help matters that it was so very realistic. The penis, not the dinner companions. I couldn't help imagining an extremely pissed off man strapped to the underside of our table, scrabbling desperately at the table leaf clamps.

  Teres gestured at it with her fork. “How in the world did it get out there?” I shrugged.

  Dave said, “Got me. When I saw it I thought some poor fool had been running around naked and drowned in the mud. Before I picked it up I spent some time poking around trying to find a better handle to pull him out with.”

  “Maybe a jealous lover found it and threw it out,” Kim said.

  “Maybe a plane carrying badly-needed sex toys to Alabama took a hit and scattered penises all over the South,” said Phen, who was trying to maneuver the last piece of bread to his plate without anyone noticing, which resulted, as it usually did, with all of us watching patiently until he succeeded. “Maybe it grew naturally.”

  “They usually do,” I said. “But that doesn't explain this one. I wonder if someone's out there now looking for it.”

  “I'd think so,” Kim said. “It's a nice one.” She looked around at us. “As they go, I mean.”

  Dave chuckled. “If I lost my 10” dick I know I'd be upset.”

  “Yeah, you'd only have four inches left,” Phen said. “Whatcha gonna do with it?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it makes a fetching centerpiece, but it doesn't really fit the tone of your dining room.”

  “We'll probably toss it,” I said, looking at Teres. She gave me a small but definite nod. I've known Teres' opinions about sex toys for a very long time now, and they are as follows: if she was already in a state of high excitement and I slipped one out from under a pillow, she'd embrace it (and me) wholeheartedly, or whatever. But in the cold light of day they carried the same erotic charge for her as raw liver. Less, possibly, since she was better at seeing culinary potentials than sexual ones.

  “You oughta try and find the owner,” Phen said. “I'm sure this costs a few bucks. Kim? Whatcha think?”

  She blushed and punched him in the shoulder. “How would I know? Geez, guys, like I've got all this stuff memorized. Just because I'm single you think I'm the local authority on masturbatory devices, people call me up for consultation?”

  We waited.

  “Fuck all of you. It's a 'Salty Cinnamon' Cyberskin Superstud, 10”, caucasian, $69.95 retail. But I only know it because I saw it in a catalog and I liked the name, all right?”

  Teres nudged Kim's shoulder. “Do you want it?”

  Kim dropped her fork and put both hands flat on the table. “Hell, no! I've bought pre-owned cars, second-hand clothing, and a used dog, but I wouldn't take a used dildo even if you bleached it first. I mean, ewww. I’m pretty sure I know exactly where it's been, so I know where it ain't going.” She reached out and plucked the penis from its home and peered at it. “But it can't have been out there long,” she said. “Cyberskin feels great, but I don't think it weathers well. This still looks new.”

  The sight of Kim holding a massive schlong up to her face was causing some disturbing and surprising effects on my own equipment, so I turned away to look across the table at Phen, who was now fully visible to me for the first time tonight. “So, what? Put up notices? 'Found, one dildo, answers to “Buzz”'?”

  He shrugged. “Either that or stake out the road and look for someone driving by very slowly, with a worried look on her face.”

  “Or his face.”

  “Or his face.”

  Kim was still inspecting the wang in question, one hand cupping the balls and one hand firmly grasping the thick shaft. It would have been fiercely erotic had she not been sighting along the length with the screwed-tight expression of someone choosing a pool cue. “I think someone out there is very sad right now.”

  We set it aside and went on with our plans of watching the Lord of the Rings DVDs, but disembodied dick jokes became the theme of the evening. We speculated on which one of Gandalf's wands was the more powerful, and whether or not Frodo could have used it as a pike. After the night wound down and we had chanted all the different versions of “one dick shall rule them all, and in the darkness fuck them,” Kim and Phen left and the rest of us collapsed in the living room amidst the Cheeto bags and empty Coke cans.

  The dildo was stuck to the television screen by t
he suction cup on its base and was currently turning David Brinkley into a unicorn.

  “So what are we going to do with George, there?” I asked.

  “George?”

  “I need a name, I can't just deal with a nameless dick.”

  Dave started laughing. “Puts you one up on Kim, then,” he said.

  Teres glared at him. “That was rude. George it is, then. So what are we going to do with it?”

  I couldn't help it. “Let's sleep on it,” I said.

  The kids were getting dropped off home the next morning, so we brought George upstairs and laid him, reverently, on a pillow. Well away from the bed.

  The next morning I came down to breakfast to find Teresa sitting on the living room floor, making a sign. I leaned over her head enough to read it.

  Found: Very PERSONAL Item on B Street. Please call or contact us to identify.

  “Very nice,” I said. “Suggestive without being too embarrassing, just like our wedding pictures.”

  “I thought so.”

  “I think you chickened out by not including an artist's conception.”

  We posted the signs, all the while looking about furtively in case the Religious Right was hiding in the bushes, ready to leap out and arrest us for trafficking in penises. It was an odd feeling, skulking about in the daylight like that.

  “You know no one's gonna have the nerve to call, don't you?” I said.

  Teres asked, “Would you call?”

  “Of course.”

  “So do you want to pass up the chance to meet someone as twisted as you?”

  Our public service done for the week, we headed back to the house, confident we'd be throwing George out within a few days.

  By 10:30 that morning we had 32 calls.

  We had to resort to scheduling visits throughout the day Sunday and quickly filled the 10 am to 5 pm slots with only a very few gaps. “We can use those for sort of an open viewing,” Teres said. She seemed to be enjoying this, so rather than bitch about our lost Sunday I relaxed to the inevitable and suggested we cater it.

  First thing was to arrange for the whereabouts of our boys. They're good lads, and very savvy about the ways of life, but despite our open attitude and sincere appreciation for honesty in parent-child relationships we still didn't feel completely comfortable having them present as we invited a series of forlorn sex maniacs into the house to inspect a massive false penis, if only because rushed explanations would have been unfair to all concerned. Arrangements were made to ship them off to Phen's place to play with his daughter, hopefully in a reasonably sex-toy-free environment.

  Kim was contacted to stand by as a consultant, in case she was required as an expert witness. She came over Saturday night and the three of us spent an enjoyable evening trying to decide on appropriate food to serve. Hot dogs or bratwurst seemed gauche, but barbecue was too messy. Teresa suggested tacos, as sort of a counterpoint, while I leaned towards cheese logs combined with cheese balls for an overall effect. We finally settled on fried chicken and chips to be the most neutral food and the most likely to stay edible all day.

  The rest of the night was used to set the stage.

  The Sunday sun rose proud and true, flinging its rays through our windows to see what it could see, which was a heavy-duty construction-size doohickey of the male persuasion lying in state on its velvet pillow and surrounded by flowers and ribbons. No word on how the sun felt about that. The rest of the table had been cleared and polished and provided an elegant setting for viewing.

  “Shouldn't we have velvet ropes set up,” Teres asked. “in case there's a line?”

  “No need,” I said. “I think you could see George from space.”

  About five minutes before ten the first appointment showed up. We were nervous; it was one thing to laugh about this, but what kind of people were we inviting into our home? Not that owning a sex toy equated to perversity (or, more to the point, not that perversity was a problem in our household), but we weren't sure what sort of person would face the embarrassment rather than just buy a new one. Either these would be people amazing in their mental stability and remarkably comfortable in themselves, or…

  Or, like our first supplicants, they were too whacked out to care.

  James and Martha (no last name offered) weren't quite dead ringers for the people in the American Gothic painting, but only because they weren't dressed as well. They were so nervous it put us at ease, if that makes sense, and they seemed relieved that we weren't out to blackmail them or take pictures. According to James, their missing device was something they had bought through a catalog after 46 years of increasingly boring sex. Turned out that battery-operated vibration was just what both of them needed and now not only were they at it night and day, they had developed a seething rivalry (and a serious dildo jones).

  “James here needed it for his prostate, you know,” Martha confided in us, lowering her eyes. “And since I insisted on boiling it after he did that, you know, before I'd touch it, it got so we'd both try to make sure we were the first one to get to it in the morning. In just a few weeks we were fighting over it night and day, hiding it on each other and calling each other the most dreadful names.”

  James hung his head as well. “I'm ashamed to admit it, but I once left it in me for three days so she couldn't get it. Wasn't easy driving the truck like that, let me tell you.”

  Teres glanced back towards the table, then at James. Her eyes got very wide.

  I stood up and, with some trepidation, offered my hands to both of them. “Would you like to see if this is yours?”

  Martha sat, clutching her handbag. “I, I don't know.” She looked up at her husband. “We were getting to hate one another. I don't know that we should have it anymore. I remember locking myself in the bathroom for a whole week last Christmas and I just can’t stand it.”

  “She's right,” James said, and touched her hair affectionately. “We've lost something in our marriage, and I think we need to work on getting it back. The sex was great, though.” He kneeled before her and took her hands. “C'mon, Martha. Let's go get it and leave these good people alone. We can deal with this ourselves.”

  She nodded once, bravely, and then they walked over to look at George. There was a long pause. Martha crossed herself.

  Finally James said, “Nope, that ain't ours. We lost ours while we were fighting in the truck during our weekly battery run. Looked for it for hours with no luck, but that one I think we woulda seen, easy.”

  “Does that one vibrate?” Martha asked, a bit fearfully.

  10:30 brought us Gail, a 19-year-old girl who entered our house, nodded at us, looked at it, shook her head, and left without saying a single word. She was blushing bright enough to set off smoke alarms.

  Our 11:00 was a timid little man in a cheap suit who introduced himself as “John.” “I like to look like I'm, you know, packing, when I go out,” he said. “I slip a little extra something in my pants leg and hit the town.”

  He admitted that George did not belong to him. I could tell; if he wore George he'd have no room for his leg.

  Kim stayed quiet until he started to leave, and then her curiosity kicked her sense in the head and spoke up. “Excuse me,” she said, “I don't want to pry, but why do you do that? I mean, what good does it do to pick someone up on the basis of something that's gonna drop off as soon as you drop your pants? Doesn't that kind of break the mood?”

  “John” smiled nervously. “I don't really know,” he said. “It hasn't worked yet.”

  Before he left he insisted we put him on a list to claim it if nobody else did.

  11:30 brought a good-looking gay couple, both named Steve. “It's pretty handy, actually,” the blond Steve said, laughing. “I can yell my own name out without sounding narcissistic.”

  One of them (I forget which) had been bringing a new present home for the other and lost it somewhere along the way.

  “You know how you see something in the store and you just have to see
it in your lover?” We agreed that we did. “Well, this was just perfect. Perfect shape, perfect size, perfect.”

  The one we had, however, was not.

  “Nope,” said Steve. “It was much bigger than that.” The other Steve smiled sadly, and they finished their drinks and left.

  We left noon open to have lunch, but some unannounced hopefuls showed up anyway and kept us busy. One 9-year-old boy who had stolen his mom's “massager” had lost it while showing his friends (apparently, in a perfectly sensible move, they had decided to see if they could get it stuck in a tree) and now had to find it fast, was particularly devastated that this wasn't it. He tried to talk us into giving it to him anyway, in the hopes that she'd like it better and not kill him, but we told him we needed parental permission before we handed a 10” lifelike dildo to a minor. We’re just the old-fashioned type, we are.

  A 6'2” man in full leather and chain biker regalia hefted it experimentally but finally pronounced it wrong. A lady Teres recognized as one of our younger son's grade school teachers crept quietly in, shook hands with everybody, and then burst into tears when she saw it. A gentleman arrived and announced several times that it wasn't his; he was there on behalf of his client who had described it to him perfectly. One woman that would best be described as “trailer-trash” stormed in with a big book under her arm, looked at the thing, opened her book, and compared the dildo to the hundreds of pictures she had carefully arranged in order of size and function. It wasn't hers, but I couldn't imagine why not. A small group of elderly ladies, still in their church clothes, milled nervously around the front door until one of them was shoved by the rest into coming in to look.

  “It's not ours, girls!” she called out the door as she left. “This one's white!”