Peter Johnson

Guy Talk

My son asks, What does it mean when you’re watching TV and your dick gets hard? Change the channel, I say, and when you speak to me, call your dick a penis. Though I never did. We had more names for our penises than the Greeks had for gods: pecker, dink, swanzola.... You’ve heard them, seen the boys laughing behind the sand dunes lost in their fathers’ dirty magazines. What fascination! How they simultaneously run and grip themselves while filling the air with soccer balls. How, as adults, these same boys display and measure their members on a specially designed cutting board, so that afterwards, a pecker-order decided, they can speak honestly with each other. If just for a moment.