Last night Anna North and I went to a restaurant for a Japanese penis party. “I plan to eat as much dick as I can,” I IMed a friend before leaving. “Okay,” he replied. “I’m gonna…go to the gym.”
The event was being held in celebration of Japan’s Kawasaki Penis Festival, an annual festival/fertility party. Sadly, there was not that much dick available. Who knows what possessed the restaurant that was hosting the weiner shindig to schedule the festivities for April Fools’ Day, instead of some more likely date, like Valentine’s Day, or Prostate Awareness Month, or international Gay Pride Week. “NO STRINGS ATTACHED!” read the press release, which had promised a “P*enis Festival” (“Please pardon the asterisk, but as you can imagine, we’ve been having a problem with spam filters!”) replete with “Kelly Cutrone’s People’s Revolution…proving [sic] special celebrity guest stars,” free condoms, and that all-important step that predates the usage of many a complimentary prophylactic: Free drinks. It was a fucking penis party. A bunch of boners. A plethora of phalluses. A conclave of knobs. A Johnson junction. We were told there’d be cock. How could we not go?
The first dick-shaped treat tasted, well, like a banana wrapped in pastry, served with chocolate ice cream testicles. The pubic hair was represented by dill, which, we all agreed, was just weird. We availed ourselves of free prosecco, and hoped that we might attract some other penis-snacks. Instead, we attracted a photographer, who hit on my Polish friend Zosia. When he sidled up to her on the banquette and complained of boredom, she turned to him and said, “Really. My father, he always say, ‘Zosia, only unintelligent people are ever bored.'” I remarked that in French, the verb “to bore” always takes the reflexive case. Je m’ennuie: I bore myself. The photographer frowned and slunk away.
Castrating feminists that we are, our talk turned to lady parts. Hormonal birth control, the pros (no babies, finally achieving that B-cup) and cons (migraines, zits). How long we’d been on it, how many yeast infections Ortho Tri-Cyclen, that great BC equalizer, had given us, whether that appreciable drop in libido was attributable to the pill or the dude. “I just got an IUD,” I announced. “Ooh, how is that?” asked Anna. “Do you have worse cramps, or are they better than before?” I confessed I did not know; it hasn’t been a full month yet since the insertion.
“And how was that?”
I gulped. “It was like the doctor was throwing darts at my uterus.”
(Seriously, it involves this thing called a uterine sound — a dipstick for the womb. They jam a clamp through your cervix and then poke you with a stick to I guess determine how big an IUD you need. The doctor warned me to exhale just before she did it, but I still fucking yelped. Nonetheless, if all goes well, as a result I shall be baby-free for ten years. And I bet giving birth hurts a lot fucking more. One word: Episiotomy.)
We stole another phallic foodstuff from the next table over, then quickly realized why it had been abandoned — fish cake in the shape of a dick, floating in some kind of white sauce, with seaweed pubes is a dish that’s neither appetizing nor flavorful. And it looked like a penis in a pool of its own sperm.
Jen palmed the condoms and headed for the exit, pleading another engagement. The photographer made a second pass, but Zosia shrugged him off again. We talked about circumcision for a long time, and the manifold humiliations of Victoria’s Secret, and Sex and the City. What had we learned at the penis party? Perhaps that the best dick is the one you come home to. Or, no, scratch that — what we had established is that external genitalia isn’t exactly a sufficient organizing principal for a successful banquet. Also, that getting drunk with your friends is really awesome. Although I left with a strange craving for something more filling. Like a sausage.