Memoirs, Ink

Changing Names

by Jim Gish

 

 

 

 

 

I was six years old,  standing in a public restroom with my father when he named his sex organ. Until then I never knew it had a name.

"My tommy itches," he said, smiling over at me.

After that, I always called my own organ Tommy.

Then my cousin Wendall told me it was called Pecker. I liked that better because it made it sound like some crazy little bird. The only person I knew named Tommy was a kid in the back of my first grade call named Tommy Renfro who always had snot running out of his nose , plus he had a really nasty looking sore on one ear. I much preferred that my male member be a Pecker rather than a Tommy, so I changed names right then and there.

It didn't bother my father because it was the 1950's in Western Kentucky, and you didn't have a lot of opportunity to discuss the names you called your sex organ. It wasn't something you just brought up over fried chicken in between Jesus coming back and Aunt Lily May's goiter swelling up. So we were safe on that score.

Wendall told me that he knew guys who took out their peckers and compared sizes at the high school behind the Ag building. That was fascinating information for a six year old, but it didn't have much value. The only time the boys in the first grade saw each other's pecker was when we tried to see who could pee the highest on the bathroom wall. Nate Scarborough always won because he had failed first grade twice so his angle was much higher than the rest of ours.

My male organ was Pecker to me for most of elementary, and then in the sixth grade, a new kid named Richard Keever moved in from somewhere in Idaho. He was living with Mr  and Mrs Wiggins who ran the local grocery store because his real mother was murdered by his real father , who then killed himself. Richard Keever was even bigger than Nate Scarborough, and he told us sixth grade boys some amazing things which made us think that Richard Keever was sent to us from Idaho  to spread the truth.

"You can light a fart with a match," Richard Keever said as we sat out under the big tree beside the baseball field.

"Wow!" Nate Scarborough said with reverence as though he intended to go straight home from school and look for a match.

The rest of us were skeptical.  Timmy Finkbine said that if you could do that, it should be somewhere in the Bible. Richard Keever laughed like a loon.

"You stupid little shit, you think they put the good stuff in the Bible?"

Timmy Finkbine said that he did think they put the good stuff in the Bible because that was where he read about Heaven.

Richard Keever gave him one of those dead on stares which seemed to imply that Timmy Finkbine was a raving lunatic.

Timmy stuttered a little, but he was a good Baptist boy, and he plunged on.

"The Bible said that heaven has streets of gold, and we get to live with Jesus and play harps and see all our dead relatives."

Five or six of us nodded because even though we didn't have the courage of our convictions, that was exactly what we thought, too.

"You know how to play a harp?" Richard Keever asked Timmy.

"No, but in heaven, I will," Timmy said.

"You ever listened to anybody play a harp?" Richard Keever asked.

Timmy shook his head.

"I have, you dildo," Richard Keever said, " At my old school, some old broad came in and played a harp for thirty minutes. It drove us all fucking ape shit. You want to go fucking ape shit for eternity while a million people sit around playing harps. That sounds like Hell to me."

We looked from Richard Keever to Timmy Finkbine and then back again. Our faith was a little shaken. We had never really thought about it that way. Sitting beside the still waters on golden streets and playing harps with my Grandpa had always seemed like something you should want.

"As for the dead relatives," Richard Keever went on, "you think there is a chance I want to see my old lady who spent every waking hour of my life telling me that I was a piss ant. Or my old man who was such a psycho that he killed my old lady. What am I going to say to them. 'Thanks for a fucking wonderful life. Let's hang out together for the next six million years.'"

Timmy Finkbine looked like he was ready to cry. It was a somber little group that trooped back into the classroom, our religious foundations in shambles as we recongregated to recite the leading exports of Uraguay.

Richard Keever told us other amazing and wonderful things, among them that our Pecker was really called a Dong. I was intrigued by this revelation because I assumed that my organ would be a Pecker to me for the rest of my life, but that every afternoon, I was standing at the urinal with Bobby Keats, and out of the blue, I said, "I think I have got a chigger on my Dong."

Bobby was a year younger than me, and he wanted to know what a Dong was. When I told him that it was sort of like a Pecker, he was even further confused. After a little questioning, I found out that Bobby Keats called his sex organ his Willie. I laughed like a loon. Who ever heard of calling it a Willie. Bobby maintained that Willie was actually pretty masculine and was taught to him by his Uncle who was a heavy machine operator. Bobby's father run off and left the family when Bobby was two, and so up until his organ became Willie, Bobby timidly told me that he had previously called it his Wee Wee.

We both agreed that Willie was better than Wee Wee, but after a little persuasion, Bobby was converted to Dong. I had him practice it a few times.

"I hope that dog don't bite off my Dong," he said. "If I lose my Dong, I will have to hang out with Dudley Dillman."

Dudley Dillman was a "sissy" in the fourth grade who wore pink shirts and played with the girls. It was universally conceded that Dudley did not have a Willie or a Dong or a Pecker. Richard Keever told us that Dudley probably "squats when he pees" and we laughed heartily at that, although I am not sure we understood why it was funny.

Our education at the hands of Richard Keever ended mid way through the year when Richard Keever was found creeping along the rafters over the girl's restroom and watching girls while they went to the bathroom. The reason that he was found was because he slipped and fell through the fiberglass tile ceiling, landing right in front of Miss Winstead, our fourth grade teacher. According to her version which swept through the school like a whirlwind, Richard Keever did not have on his trousers, and his Dong was in his hand.

Richard Keever's uncle, Mr. Wiggins, came to school to take Richard Keever home. The word which reached us through our parents was that Richard Keever was sent to a home for wayward boys.  This proved to be a severe lesson for us in the matter of Peckers and Dongs. Some people now reverted to Pecker now that Richard Keever was gone, reasoning that anything connected to Richard Keever was unclean in the eyes of the Lord.  But I was a contrarian, and I stuck with Dong and sometimes lay awake at night in my bed, reviewing the wisdom of the world according to Richard Keever. 

Whenever his name was mentioned, my sister rolled her eyes and called him a "perv." My mother said that she thought he had Satan in his heart. Privately, my father told me that Richard Keever had diseased brain cells and that we were lucky that he had not passed his disease on to me and my classmates.

When I asked what made Richard Keever's brain cells dark and diseased, my father leaned toward me in the privacy of our car and said one word.

"Masturbation," he whispered in a sinister manner.

"What is masturbation?" I whispered.

He sat up straight in his seat and shook his head a little.

"I will tell you all about it when you are older, but I can tell you that it means playing with your Tommy too much."

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I wanted to ask more questions, but suddenly, there seemed so much to learn and I was a little overwhelmed.  I felt a little sorry for my father who called his Dong a Tommy, but he was a good kind man, and maybe someday he would learn.

"Are you praying?" he asked, fearful I could tell that I was thinking of masturbation.

"Yes," I told him.

"Good," he replied. "There is no such thing as too much prayer."

But I didn't hear him. I was thinking of Richard Keever somewhere in a prison , learning more secrets about his Dong.  Maybe he would drop me a postcard, I thought, and that consoled me a little. Maybe he knew even better names now. Since I had a friend whose brother had been in jail, and he said with some authority that everyone there called his Dong a Johnson.

So my penis was a Dong until I got to the summer between my freshman and sophomore year.  That was when I went to a church camp and heard the Reverend Leroy Williams preach. I went down the aisle afterward and got reconverted, admitted all my sins and felt my soul cleansed.

When I got back home and started to school, I did not talk about Dongs or Peckers or even Willies. I was a soldier in the army of the Lord, and we mostly spoke to each other about Moral Rearmament and maintaining our purity.  I did learn that Masturbation was "spilling your seed onto the ground" like Onan. I feared the wrath of God and the fires of Hell "where the worm burneth not and the fire is not quenched."

My Dong never became a Johnson, and twenty years later, when my five year old boy touched his penis as he was taking a bath and asked what it was, I looked at him solemnly and said,"That is your Tommy."