The Naughty Bits by Jack Murnighan Read Free Book Online Page B

who sat nude—unbelievable!—on the edge of the bed; buried my face in her, so excruciatingly startled was I; pulled her down with me, that electrifying skin against mine; and mirabile dictu! at the sheer enormous lust of it I did indeed explode, so wholly that I was certain liver, spleen, guts, lungs, heart, head, and all had blown from me, and I lay a hollow shell without sense or strength.
    Damned dream, to leave me helpless! I was choked with desire, and with fury at my impotency. Jane was terribly nervous; after the first approach, to make which must have required all her courage, she collapsed on her back beside me and scarcely dared open her eyes.
    The room was dazzlingly bright! I was so shocked by the unexpectedness of it that I very nearly wept. Incredible smooth, tight, perfect skin! I pressed my face into her; I couldn’t leave her untouched for the barest sliver of an instant. I quiver even now, twenty-two years later, to write of it, and why my poor heart failed to burst I’m unable even to wonder.
    Well, it was no use, and if I’d had a knife handy then, I’d have unmanned myself. I fell beside her, maddened at my impotency and mortified at the mess I’d made. That, it turned out, was the right thing to do: my self-castigation renewed Jane’s courage, gave her the upper hand again.
    “Don’t curse yourself, Toddy,” she soothed, and kissed me— sweetness!—and stroked my face.
    “No use,” I muttered into her breast.
    “We’ll see,” she said lightly, entirely self-possessed now that I seemed shy again: I resolved to behave timidly for the rest of my life. “Don’t worry about it, honey; I can fix it.”
    “No you can’t,” I moaned, as strickenly as I could.
    “Yes I can,” she whispered, kissing my ear and sitting up beside me.
    Merciful heavens, reader! If you must marry, marry from Ruxton and Gibson Island, I charge you! Such a magnificent, subtle, versatile, imaginative, athletic, informed, delightful, exuberant mistress no man ever had, I swear.

from A Moveable Feast
     
    ERNEST HEMINGWAY
    Penis size: a topic for the ages. Few will go to the grave not having discussed it, though only two opinions seem to have emerged: bigger is better, or it’s not. Maybe it’s not that surprising —other equally binary topics have merited similar scrutiny (Does God exist?)—but I for one remain fascinated with our fascination. Breasts, though seeming to have considerable size-based cultural import, don’t elicit the same mystery. Although many or most women obsess about the size of their breasts, there is little or no ambiguity to the matter. They get ranked with cup size, they can be pushed up or bound back or surgically augmented, but it’s pretty much a scientific process. Not so with penises, apparently. I myself have gone through the gamut of perceptions of my Johnson: it’s little, it’s big, it’s normal, it’s weird, I don’t really know, I couldn’t care less, I couldn’t care more. As the apparatus itself never really changed, these opinions obviously have more to do with my sense of self and my relationship to my own sexuality than anything you could measure in inches. To that extent, then, the penis for a man might less be the fleshy appurtenance dangling between his legs and more a consolidation of his sexuality as a whole. No wonder we worry.
    Commonplace as penis questioning is, it, like pooping, does not have a strong literary history. The exceptions are noted: Joyce advanced modern literature by putting Bloom on the can; Hemingway advanced modern biography by making public Scott Fitzgerald’s concerns about his ability to satisfy women. I can’t say that I list Hemingway among my favorite authors; his baby-step sentences never jazzed me the way those of more self-conscious stylists do. But, old Hem loosens his belt a little bit when he’s writing autobiographically, even permitting himself the odd comma. And nowhere is he funnier than in A Moveable Feast, the