Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  After my failure in Soho I fell in love with a girl called Helen.

  I had no alternative.

  Squat in me somewhere sat that cold creature, my mother’s gift, and the only possible resolution of my contradictory feelings was an extreme romanticism. Love elevated coupling, the beast with two backs, into the union of souls. As many a cynic has observed, romantic love is the result of unsatisfied desire and my romanticism was Provençal in its intensity.

  Helen attended the local girls’ grammar school and every day after school we sat on a corner on our bicycles, talking. I wrote poems to her. And although I saw her every day, I wrote her letters. One poem I wrote to her was modelled on a poem called “Helen” by H. D.

  Hers ran something like:

  All Greece hates

  the still eyes in the white face,

  the lustre as of olives

  Something, something

  and the white hands

  or it might have been “pale hands.” Such is fame that I’ve never been able to find the poem since.

  My version, with a fine disregard of history, ran:

  All Greece loves

  the dark eyes

  in the white face

  “My eyes aren’t dark,” she said when I gave her the poem.

  “I know,” I said, “but I’m writing it as if you’re Helen of Troy.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Helen thought Tony was nice and handsome but wasn’t he a bit wild? I agreed that he was. Didn’t I think that smoking made people’s breath smell? I agreed that it probably did. Wasn’t beer rather a working class sort of drink and weren’t Tony and I too young to go in the back parlour of the Quadrant? For two years I suffered indignities such as escorting her shopping on Saturday morning; for two years I trotted attendance on her like a small dog in the wake of a large bitch who is coming into heat but not yet ready and who encourages the entourage but snaps at too bold an advance.

  Our sexual relationship had a curiously ritual quality; sexual favours were doled out in measured and mutually understood amounts, like a recipe.

  On walks, endless walks, hands were held.

  After the weekly meetings of the Methodist Youth Club when I’d walked her home, kissing was permitted for a few minutes.

  During a party, if she were in a good mood, a breast might be fondled for a limited amount of time.

  On three or four occasions I put my hand under her skirt some three inches above the knee, at which point she would say,

  “We mustn’t get carried away.”

  Her lips, to which I wrote poems, were thick and rather squashy, and she wore a lot of lipstick and perfume and powder so that kissing her was a sort of meal in itself.

  Every Thursday after the youth club meeting, I walked her home along tree-lined streets, stopping in the shadows just before her house to kiss her for the statutory five or ten minutes. This always gave me an erection like an iron bar. Then she always said:

  “Goodness! Just look at the time!”

  And then my erection and I would limp homewards until we reached a front garden far enough away from a street light and, braced there on trembling legs, I would wank in an agony of relief onto laurel, lilac, or hydrangea.

  The leader of the youth club, a man in his thirties called Ernest Langley, an enthusiast and ping-pong player of note, was mad keen to organize an expedition to London to hear Billy Graham, who was at that time saving England. I didn’t want to go but Helen did, so we went.

  The whole experience filled me with rage. Massed choirs in white and black sang soft hymns and a smooth man played meretricious trombone solos. Helen thought he was wonderful; I agreed that he was. I would have liked to grip him by the neck and shake him fiercely while forcing him to listen to Jack Teagarden playing “A Hundred Years from Today” or “Stars Fell on Alabama.”

  In spite of myself, I was quite looking forward to Billy Graham himself; I enjoyed a good speech or performance, whatever the subject. But even he was dismal. His timing was fair only, his gestures wooden, his brandishing of the Bible almost comic. He was too handsome; his suit too well cut. Evangelists need something of the maniac about them to be convincing. One could have imagined Billy Graham making hamburgers on the barbecue and feeding them to a gang of ill-mannered American kids who called him “Pop.” One could not imagine Calvin, Wesley, Luther, Knox, or Savonarola being called “Pop,” nor could one imagine them making hamburgers. Feeding kids onto a barbecue, yes; hamburgers, no.

  Helen sang and prayed and cried a little; from time to time she gave my hand a tiny squeeze; at the end she went down to the front to be saved. I stayed where I was and waited for her; we agreed we had shared a wonderful experience. I agreed that the choir was indeed heavenly and that the trombone man was extraordinarily gifted. I secured the back seat in the coach. Ernest Langley led the coach in a few uplifting hymns as we rolled through London, but it was late and as we settled to the long drive back to Croydon the overhead lights in the coach, one after another, were dimmed.

  Helen was amazingly ardent. She gave me open-mouthed kisses usually reserved for the most special occasions. Emboldened, I sought a breast. Two buttons were somehow undone; feast after famine. As we slowed down to roll through Penge, I put my hand under her skirt and reached the statutory point, when, unmistakably, her thighs relaxed, softened, opened.

  My wrist was bent at a painful angle and my finger trapped beneath some unyielding elastic and then somehow—miraculously—I felt dampness and pubic hair.

  My mouth and throat were dry. Over the top of her head I stared at my dim reflection in the window of the coach. “I will never forget this moment,” I said to my hammering heart. “We are just out of Penge and are now on the road to Beckenham just passing the Beckenham Public Library and I am sitting in seat number forty-two of a Wondertour Coach and I am touching pubic hair.”

  And then I realized that Helen was crying. In an immediate access of guilt I retrieved my hand. She was not sobbing; tears just rolled down her cheeks.

  What was the matter? What had I done?

  Nothing. Stop. Don’t talk to me.

  But as we approached Croydon all became brokenly clear. The beautiful service, and feeling so wonderful, she’d been carried away. She’d never done such a thing. I was the first. It was awful. Billy Graham, Jesus, sin, salvation.

  I assured her with complete sincerity that I believed she’d never done such a thing before; I assured her that of course I would not think any the worse of her; I declared my love for her to be undying.

  But when I awoke in the morning, stretched in sunlight, punched up the pillow and stared at the familiar dressing table and the thumbtack print of the Yellow Chair, I felt a giddy lightness inside me, a swelling, the bobbing of clustered balloons, a freedom I hadn’t felt since I’d met her.

  No hank of hair owned me. It was only with the slightest twinge of guilt that I realized Helen and I were finished. The spell was broken. For two years I’d been chained by a wisp of hair, two years of servitude and indignities.

  I worked up an anger against myself to still the little nag of guilt.

  I, who was destined for great things, I, whom the Muse had claimed, had squandered two years of my valuable life on a girl with fat lips, on a girl who probably thought Ezra Pound was a kind of cake, on a girl who had been genuinely moved by Billy Graham’s trombonist.

  By the time I got up I felt so good humoured that, instead of my usual coffee, I condescended to eat one of my mother’s gargantuan breakfasts.

  * * *

  The photographs left us largely silent. In most were two women and a man. One of the women was almost plump, with a crease of fat at the waist, the other was scrawny. The man had a very large organ. The photographs illustrated all the possible positions for sexual intercourse and the modes of oral stimulation. The pictures had
a curiously formal quality as the three performers were wearing black domino masks.

  Tony had borrowed the photographs from an older boy we’d met at the record shop.

  We didn’t say much to each other as we studied them; they were somehow not erotic. Their effect was deadening.

  I kept returning to one particular picture; it disturbed me profoundly. A mattress lay on the floor. On the mattress, side by side, lay the two women. At the extreme edge of the picture was a toecap, a shoe belonging perhaps to the man holding the spotlight above the scene. One woman held in her hand a long animal’s horn, the tip of which she was inserting into the other woman’s vagina. The animal’s horn was about two and a half feet long and spiral in form, the horn perhaps of some kind of antelope. The face of the woman into whom this was being inserted was partially obscured by the domino mask but she seemed to be smiling.

  PART TWO

  The vision of Bobby naked remained important long after those years of early childhood. I must confess that, during boyhood and youth, I suffered from what “sexologists” call feelings of “penile inadequacy.”

  I had seen Bobby’s naked, shivering form, the repulsive whiteness of those parts of his body not covered with hair. Features, build, pelt, Bobby resembled one of those “artist’s impressions” of prehistoric man. His scrotum was the size of half a large grapefruit and his member equine.

  I’ve heard it said that the cretinous are always vastly endowed in compensation, as it were, for their lack of mental development. Whether this is an old wives’ tale or not I do not know.

  Cleland makes use of the belief in Fanny Hill.

  Louise, desiring to substantiate or disprove the notion, seduces an idiot flower seller:

  A waistband that I unskewer’d, and a rag of shirt that I removed, and which could not have covered a quarter of it, revealed the whole of the idiot’s standard of distinction, erect, in full pride and display: but such a one! it was positively of so tremendous a size, that prepared as we were to see something extraordinary, it still out of measure, surpass’d our expectation, and astonish’d even me, who had not been used to trade in trifles. In fine, it might have answered very well the making a show of; its enormous head seemed, in hue and size, not unlike a common sheep’s heart; then you might have troll’d dice securely along the broad back of it; the length of it too was prodigious . . .

  Many men suffer from the secret fear that they are sexually inadequate, that other men’s penises are bigger than theirs. I don’t know where this belief comes from but it’s a common anxiety. Possibly it stems from the child’s impression of his father’s organ—an instrument which compared to his own must seem impossibly vast. And the matter seems so important perhaps because of the early identification of “self” with penis.

  Wash yourself.

  Dry yourself.

  That I chanced to see Bobby naked gave me a poor start in life and I suppose, on reflection, that anxiety has been the constant in my sexual career.

  I had thought that particular anxiety stilled long ago, an anxiety of my boyhood and youth, an absurdity that marriage and fatherhood enabled me to smile over. But the other day my youngest daughter, who has the unpleasant habit of trailing me about the house from room to room, crept into the bathroom as I was urinating. She stood and watched. Then she said in a congratulatory tone,

  “You can make it come out of your finger!”

  I shared this latest cuteness with my wife and we laughed together over it. But later, I found myself, not brooding exactly, but thinking upon it.

  Finger?

  Finger!

  I read of somewhere, or was told about, saw perhaps—or did I imagine this?—I am not being coherent. I believe there exists a monograph by Sir Richard Burton on the nature of penises. As frequently happens to me, I find I can’t distinguish between real and imagined events. A story told me or a story I’ve invented often becomes more real than an event I know to have occurred. And increasingly, I find myself doubting even those certainties.

  You remember. . . says my wife. But I don’t. And I say to her, Didn’t we. . . ? and she says, We never have been there.

  I’ve always admired Sir Richard Burton, admired that hawk-like face in the portrait by Lord Leighton. Master of thirty-five languages and their dialects, poet, translator, soldier, diplomat, explorer—such a book would be typical of his mind and interests.

  This book (I don’t pretend to know its title) suggests that there are two basic and distinct kinds of penis—one which, when detumescent, is small but grows proportionately very large when erect, and one which, when detumescent, is relatively large and grows proportionately very little when erect. The first kind of organ is, according to Burton, typical of Caucasian peoples, the second typical of African, Semitic, and Hamitic peoples.

  (The most interesting part of the research of Masters and Johnson was a confirmation of Burton’s thesis, though their findings were not, I think, linked to race. They reported that the longer the limp penis the less its length increases in erection. They noted the case of a three and a half inch limp penis which in erection increased by one hundred and twenty percent!)

  It would be a simple matter to discover whether the book exists or not, but I’m no longer curious. I am persuaded that it does. I can see it quite clearly. A folio bound in red morocco illustrated with page after page of steel engravings of penises drooping from left to right, root to tip, and then, in comparison, standing right to left. And a commentary in Burton’s rather ponderous prose.

  It was, of course, privately printed.

  I’ve always taken a guilty pleasure in John Cleland. The following passage appeals to me.

  Curious then, and eager to unfold so alarming a mystery, playing, as it were, with his buttons, which were bursting ripe from the active force within, those of his waistband and fore-flap flew open at a touch, when out IT started; and now, disengag’d from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the plaything of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant. Its prodigious size made me shrink again; yet I could not, without pleasure, behold, and even ventur’d to feel, such a length, such a breadth of animated ivory! perfectly well turn’d and fashion’d, the proud stiffness of which distended its skin, whose smooth polish and velvet softness might vie with that of the most delicate of our sex, and whose exquisite whiteness was not a little set off by a sprout of black curling hair round the root, through the jetty sprigs of which the fair skin shew’d as in a fine evening you may have remarked the clear light aether through the branchwork of distant trees over-topping the summit of a hill; then the broad and blueish-casted incarnate of the head, and blue serpentines of its veins, altogether compos’d the most striking assemblage of figures and colours in nature. In short, it stood an object of terror and delight.

  My wife says she thinks they look silly.

  Modern research and scientific method claim to have established beyond doubt that the average male organ, fully erect, is approximately six inches in length. (All measurements taken along the upperside of the penis from the pubic bone to tip.) It is further claimed that the average circumference is one and five-eighth inches. (All measurements taken one inch below the rim.)

  I, personally, don’t believe a word of this.

  One of the first such studies was carried out in 1947 by the prominent sexologist Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson. He claimed the average size of the adult male penis, fully erect, to be within the range of five and one-half to six and one-half inches. He claimed the largest erect organ measured to date (i.e. 1947) to be thirteen and three-quarter inches in length and seven inches in circumference. He noted that many erect penises fell within the ten-to-twelve inch range.

  The more recent studies of Dr. William H. Masters and Mrs. Virginia E. Johnson tend to confirm these finding
s.

  Averages are, however, notorious.

  Let us think logically.

  Masters and Johnson measured “several hundred” penises; it is not enough. Let us imagine that they measured five hundred. Is it not possible that, by chance, they measured a majority of small ones? Or large ones? What would have happened to their average had they measured another two hundred, all of which, by chance, fell within the ten-to-twelve inch range? Or, by chance, in the two and one-half to four inch range?

  These authorities are also disquietingly silent on the following point—were these all Caucasian organs?

  And when they use the words “fully erect” can we, in fact, be sure that these penises were fully erect? Nervousness—indeed the very atmosphere of a clinic or hospital can produce profound physical reactions. Might not the very act of having one’s penis measured inhibit full erection?

  (This is no frivolous objection to the validity of the data. Doctors often find it necessary to test blood pressure two or three times because nervousness in patients produces inaccurate readings. I am reminded, also, of the time, during the first year of my marriage, when I had to undergo a fertility test. The instruction card stated that I must drink no liquids the night before, refrain from sexual expression, arise at 7 A.M. and produce a sperm sample that was to be delivered to the hospital no later than 8 A.M.

  I arose at 7 A.M., still bleary with sleep, and stood in the bathroom trying to think of something erotic. All I could think of was breakfast. Eventually, however, I succeeded and stoppered the test tube I had been given. After a hasty cup of coffee, I rushed the sample to the Montreal General by taxi and handed it to the technician. He held the tube up to the light and said,

  “Is this all?”

  This suggests, I think, the point I’m trying to make.)

  And then again, we might ask ourselves what, precisely, Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson means when he claims thirteen and three-quarter inches “as the largest erect organ measured to date.” Surely, he can mean only “seen and measured by him.” Why should we not assume organs in the nation greater in length and vaster in circumference not seen by Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson? How did he locate this specimen? Was an appeal made for the exceptionally endowed to come forward? And if so, where? Learned journals, after all, have a limited circulation.