Early Lessons in the Classical Language. Chapter 6
A little prick
Fire Damaged
Already at twelve he worried about the size of his prick. His uncle had hauled him to a run-down hot springs resort about sixty miles from the ranch. While his uncle took the mud baths he played in the swimming pool. Later, in the shower area, he was sitting on a low stool self-consciously hiding his private parts as he rinsed off. An old man came out of one of the shower stalls. He was naked, about twenty feet away. The penis was amazingly small, no bigger than his. He had always figured it was a matter of time, that as he grew, it would too. But here was evidence for an opposite scenario. It might never get big. The worm of fear entered and buried itself deep in his mental substratum. He tried to compensate by becoming super-macho. But there was always a pants-down moment, and the embarrassing truth would out.
Nevertheless, Taipei’s ladies of pleasure had gone a long way toward absolving his sin, whatever it was, that had led him to be born with a little prick. He was pleasantly surprised one day as he was whipping along on his bicycle to the whorehouse district to suddenly recall that for quite a while now he had forgotten all about it. Doubts would rise anew, especially when he got back to Montana, but it was a joy to note the worries had fled. Many specifics, changes in circumstances and points of view, would play a role and require investigation and prolonged reflection, but it was an encouraging start. Now he knew demons could be dispelled, fears could be brushed aside, and state of mind was the key. The flat lack of worry felt natural, unfeigned. He carried away the lesson that it was possible to transcend entrenched states of mind and if briefly, then maybe someday for good. This glimpse of freedom was intimately bound to where he was, inside Taipei circa 1959, and it became one of the ingredients of an enchanting love potion that would addict him forever, compelling him to return again and again to the world of kanji culture and to continually experiment with modifications—additions and gentle removals—to this secret philter that rendered him subservient to his lifelong muse.
He paid no heed to the thought that ‘America’ could do something similar to foreigners until his days of physical travels began to fade away and he had more time to ponder things. During his youth he thought those foreigners were simply ignorant or deluded which is exactly what many of them thought about his addiction to, dream of, enchantment with his muse. With travel, as with many things, the window of opportunity is narrower than it seems at the time, it is best done when young. Otherwise, all that is left from a trip is bragging rights and perhaps a few stories of how horrible or wonderful things were.
He would go so far as to think that an aging tourist could find himself dead center in the cultural core of a foreign culture, be fed a stew of the twenty most profound insights it had to offer mankind, be waited on by the most beautiful and graceful servants it was able to produce, and end up with nothing but indigestion and an old man’s memory that, when recited aloud, would not be believed. This tourist might as well have dreamt it. He might as well have spent the fifteen thou he saved over twelve years for the trip on a dancing girl once a week for a year or so, for all the good his long-anticipated trip did him.
Thinking how his embarrassing secret had not been a problem at all when it came to Sue, he decided to celebrate by getting a picture of the two of them in a photography studio he noticed six or seven blocks from her whorehouse. Mellon had a Rolleiflex 3.5, but he said if his dad caught him near a whorehouse or with a whore, he’d cancel his allowance and ground him until the next school year. He decided he wouldn’t even ask Mellon, but he thought how swell it would be to have a camera like that, to take pictures of his fellow teenagers of the fifties, comrades in ‘arms’ from the other side of the mountains that inscribed the northern, southern and western horizons on the ranch where he was raised.
He set up a “date” with Sue for a few days later, told her about his plan to get their picture taken so she could have a change of clothes in her bag, and added up the amount for the ‘all night’ rate for the date, the price of the photos, and for pedicabs. It would wipe out more than half his monthly allowance. Well, if push came to shove, Mellon could probably loan him a couple dollars.
That was the last time he saw Sue. The photos would be the only ones he had of her or any of the working girls he met or slept with on his first trip to Taiwan. And he wouldn’t see Mellon until they met unexpectedly three years later at the Far East and Slavic Languages Department in Thompson Hall at the University of Washington in Seattle where they were both freshmen.