H e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n

MARC OLMSTED

PUMP

Around 1971, I’d spent the summer drawing an autobiographical cartoon for an

underground comic my new friend artist R. (Rory) Hayes said he was putting out. He

eventually nixed my comic, but anyway, in one panel, I had pictured myself jacking off

and spurting a load and had drawn a big grotesque veiny cock like I’d see R. Crumb and S.

Clay Wilson do. The girl I was sleeping with, an older girl, said “That’s not your cock,

Marc.” Uh-oh.

So over the years we guys hear about it – it makes a difference, it doesn’t make a

difference, over and over…like pulling petals from a flower loves me loves me not though

it felt like wings from a fly.

In my own case, I was a little guy, 5 foot six, so if you slept with me you weren’t

expecting the wang of death and some just expressed relief that it was average. Sometimes

I got better than average, but let’s get down to basics - at its hardest it’s 6 ½

inches and I could never quite figure how to measure the girth, but that was decent, a

good fistful…

Alas, I was a grower not a shower and it was not impressive flaccid, generally hiding like a

turtle…looking good when I took off my pants in the bathroom mirror but immediately

retracting in the air – I obviously needed some tropical wet clime for it to dangle

attractively.

Of course, porn made me realize what a big cock was. Over the years, it seemed an 8

incher would do the trick, not too big for the smaller women, hopefully – big enough to be

a contender, at least in the hetero world…

Eventually I read about the pump in “Ask Isadora”, a sex column in the Bay Guardian

long since retired, probably because Isadora had no business giving anyone advice. But

she seemed convinced the pump worked, though later she was more evasive.

The pump, in all its variations, in case you don’t know, is a cylindrical plastic chamber

with some manner of squeeze bulb to create a vacuum. You get a hard-on, insert your

dick and pump away. It starts to look like a purple cucumber. Impressive it is, Yoda

might say. But then he was green and warty, so perhaps a poor judge.

Imagine using one of these and then you see it as a joke in the first Austin Powers movie,

1997. The international man of mystery had one with a British flag on it. My friend

Peter knew I was using one and asked “How did that feel?” seeing it in the movie. Eh.

Could be vorse. I knew if the thing worked, there’d be a line around the block for it.

The first one I tried was queer friend Thom’s. He’d bought it as a kind of sex toy –

although how this was a toy will remain for others to explain. It was quite cheap,

probably would break easily over [repeated] usage. But I saw how it worked and decided

to sink some dough into Dr. Joel Kaplan’s superdick machine. He had ads everywhere.

No it wasn’t called the superdick machine but you get the idea. As I recall, it was

something like $200, and this was 10 years ago. It actually was considerably better

looking that Thom’s. It looked like some sort of transparent Brita water filter – not

really – but that level of sleek plastic tech. Those giant test tubes that aliens put you in.

After you pumped up your wang you were supposed to put on Dr. Joel’s cock ring and

keep it erect like that. I always had trouble with cock rings, never seemed to be able to

get the supertightness they required, which I gather was nearly as tight as a rubberband

holding the Sunday paper. The idea of holding your swollen purple dick with a

rubberband was somewhat unnerving, but not nearly as unnerving as the occasional

“problem” the pump had, which caused a sort of bubblegum bubble of flesh to form out

of your foreskin. THAT was unnerving. Thankfully, it went down quickly, although I

can cut to the chase and say the only lasting effect the pump had was to stretch my

foreskin – which was already a slight cuff of flesh left by the gentile equivalent of an

apparently drunken moil. So I probably doubled that cuff of flesh, unrolled that cuff as it

had been rolled. Still, it was not like I had one of those snoods like an uncut European,

more like a lipstick holder for the lipstick cockend itself. In short, a total waste.

To this day I still hear of all kinds of pseudoscience about getting a bigger dick. There are

hints of dangerous but effective plastic surgeries, to say nothing of ridiculous pills and

other devices that, once bitten, twice shy and now married, I never gave any credence to.

What can I tell you? Nearly 54, you stop giving much of a rat’s ass about such things.

Such are the comforts of old age, of which there are few.

In the documentary Zoo, we learn about how “Mr. Hands” died from a literal horse cock

up his ass. He’d done it quite a bit, but this time, like Catherine the Great, it went a little

wrong. (On line, I actually saw footage of him taking that python up his butt, a magic

trick topped only by the visceral grunt he gave when it sank completely into him) I

dunno, it somehow says something about never getting enough, when enough, in some

many ways, means when you’re dead.

[Originally published in NHS 2008, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs08/Marc_Olmsted.htm.]